Tag: video Posts

I thought I’d mix it up a bit and post something a little different. This is a cute little video that was shot at the Vancouver Aquarium a few years ago. Consequently, it has become one of the most watched videos on YouTube of all time. This one version has been viewed over ten million times. [easyvideo video=”http://www.youtube.com/v/epUk3T2Kfno&hl=en&fs=1″] This entry was written for Blogathon 2008, and in support of the Union Gospel Mission charity. If you’d like to donate to the cause, please visit the blogathon donation page and fill out the form near the middle. You can also follow the blogathon RSS feed for this site by clicking here.

So, this is a fairly basic question. Lately, some people have been installing little rick roll blockers, thinking that it somehow protects them from being rick rolled simply because the video no longer plays. My take on that is that it’s basically a form of cheating, and that if you clicked the link, you were rick rolled. But let’s see what my knowledgeable readers have to say. Chime in below: [poll=12]

Good news is I’m fairly happy with the outcome, especially with the branding part of it. Plus transcoding only took about 3 or 4 minutes. I signed up for a Pro Account on a month by month basis for this upcoming weekend. It gives me priority transcoding and the ability to automatically generate iPod specific versions at the same time. The only question left is weather to shoot at 320×240 or 640×480. If I were at home, I’d just shoot 640×480, but the files end up rather large, and if I’m limited to a crappy hotel connection, might prefer speed over quality. Plus, 320×240 is basically iPod/iPhone resolution, so the conversion is easier (it’s going on 15 minutes trying to convert my 640×480 into an iPhone version). I’ll have to think about this one some more. Here’s an embed link which should (in theory) bring up an iPhone media player. […]

I wanted to pen this entry really quick before bed. A few days ago, one of the main encryption keys for the HD-DVD platform was leaked, apparently by an insider within the video industry. Basically, having this key will allow anyone with access to the hardware the full ability to decode and decrypt every HD-DVD that has been manufactured so far. Oops. The key, which amounts to no more than a 128 bit string, has been circling the internet, pulling a string of cease and desist orders along with it. Many a webowner has tried to publish the key online, only to be given a legal letter demanding they take it down. How in the world you can assume ownership of a unique sequence of numbers is beyond me, but apparently that’s what they are attempting to do. Many users on Digg.com have created top stories with the HD-DVD key […]

I’ve had a few requests lately from people asking if I could send them a copy of my master’s thesis. So in the interest of saving time, I’m throwing it up here in case anyone wants to download it and read themselves to sleep. My research was primarily in the area of high definition video compression, specifically on a new codec called H.264 that is used in the new HD DVD formats such as Blue-Ray and HD-DVD. I proposed a novel scheme to combine concurrently broadcoast MPEG-2 standard definition (SD) streams with H.264 spatial difference information to create a HD broadcast stream at a reduced bitrate. So, here it is. Enjoy.

A few months ago, I wrote a flickr plugin for wordpress that integrated with a few different image galleries including Lightbox and Greybox. As last count, 126 different blogs were using the crossroads plugin to show their flickr images in their posts. While updating my blog theme last night, I realized one of the current problems I have with most of the themes I downloaded. Typically, a theme will present the full content of a few blog entries on the main page. A few of the “cooler” themes I’ve seen only show one post on the main page, which is sort of a neat idea if you don’t write very often, but on blogs with multiple entries per day, it becomes easy for readers to miss posts. A more common approach I’ve seen on blogs is to show the latest entry in full and also show a few other entries […]