Jörg Reuter

Everyone, please update your bookmarks, as the Czech, French, German and Portuguese versions of WikiFur have been removed from the Wikia site and are exclusively available at the new location from now on. The French version will follow in a couple of hours.

Many thanks to Wikia for the previous hosting and support, and thank you timduru for providing the new hosting.

And here's the solution to my small puzzle. It has something to do with rods, indeed. In fact, it is my first attempt at building a should support for large video camera. It all starts with purchasing materials (notably, aluminium profiles, screws, bolts rivets and tools):



( Building the support )

The final assembly, with the additional plate in place:



Still missing are a shoulder pad, and the counter-weights to compensate for the weight of the camera. Holding 3 kg of camera at half-arm length is quite strenuous in the long run. The construction (with the correct counter weight) could easily support a Betacam camera, but unfortunately the frame is too wide for my significantly smaller camera. I'll probably build a smaller version of this support, but only after some experience with this version. For a first-time project it turned out quite well, I think.

The current status of a little project I'm working on, done today while waiting for updates on a Hot Issue support call:



I don't know if this will work out in the end, if it does I'll post the result here. If it doesn't you probably won't hear anything about it again. ;-)

Apropos Wahlen. Die Piratenpartei (ja, der Name ist etwas albern. Das, worum es ihnen geht, ganz und gar nicht) benötigt noch Unterstützerunterschriften für die Zulassung zur deutschen Bundestagswahl. Wohlgemerkt, es geht darum ob sie überhaupt auf dem Wahlzettel stehen. Dies ist keine Wahlempfehlung, es muss nun wirklich jeder selbst wissen, wo er sein Kreuz im Herbst macht. Ich sage auch nicht, was ich dann wähle, kann ich noch gar nicht. Aber es ist wichtig die Wahl überhaupt zu haben.

After six years of operation, the battery of my 15" PowerBook G4 died. Admittedly, this is an amazing lifespan for a lithium rechargeable battery, but I think I'm not going to replace it. The only (non-Apple) battery packs I'd trust to not set my flat on fire start at 96 Euros. The wireless card started acting up recently, the hardware clock battery has been empty for two years (a non-standard type, soldered to a PCB, which itself is glued to the frame) and to be honest, six years are quite a lifetime for a laptop computer. My netbook, worth 10% the price I paid for the PowerBook, is faster than it. I'll retire the laptop to operate as an Internet terminal while I'm editing videos. For the rest of the year the netbook will be my travel companion even for trips where I'd rather carry a large laptop.

It's a pity: the PowerBook's TFT display is still the best I ever had.

With the vacation video being finished I finally have time for other things again. Like writing a summary of the last couple of weeks.

Mephit Mini Con was quite nice again. I filmed a lot to get familiar with the new video camera. Five hours of footage, I'm just glad that bigbluefox is editing it, not me. The widescreen format takes some extra time to get used to.



What I was missing were the cosy nights at the fire place. It rained on Friday, the whole place was damp. Worse, the firewood was more suitable for an oven than for an open fire. It created heat, it glowed, but it only burned when blown at with a hairdryer. The Big Blue Dance was fun as always, though the attendance was a bit low. Maybe because half of the usual party crowd wasn't able to get a ticket to MMC.

Talking about videotaping, the old camera died just in time directly after I purchased the new one.

The cleaning lady in the office destroyed my headphones with the vacuum cleaner. Granted, those headphones were not expensive, and accidents do happen. However, I would have preferred if she had left me a note with an explanation. She apologized the day later, and I already purchased a new pair. But still...

Along with the new (cheap) headphones for the office I ordered a pair of beyerdynamic DT 660 for home. My DT 431 needs new pads, but I'd have to pay the same amount for them as I paid for the phones years ago. The cable was getting very short, too, as I had to replace the plug numerous times. Time to retire them.

The DT 660 arrived today, and my first impression was ohr-gastisch (ear-gasmic). The second impression still is. Wow, just amazing.

I beg to differ. But once you understand how it works, it is not hard to automate most of the annoying time consuming steps.

So I have this DVD Video compliant MPEG stream, but I'd like to have some menu. First of all, forget all the graphical frontends to dvdauthor. "Q" DVD Author sure looks nice and you can easily create rather complex menu structures, but it crashes often and there is no manual (just a bunch of more or less helpful tutorials.) It didn't fit my requirements, at least I wasn't able to define different pictures for highlighted and selected menu entries. You can define differently coloured borders or semi-transparent masks to overlay a picture, but I wanted to have a white icon turning yellow on highlight and grey on select.



I've also tried kdvdauth, gdvdauthor, and several more that were not able to properly design a menu the way I wanted it to behave. Okay, let's dig up one of the numerous tutorials from the lazyweb and do it manually.

Unfortunately, most of the tutorials don't explain why something is done a certain way. The first thing you need to know is that DVD menus are just regular MPEG audio/video tracks with subtitles, glued together with a rather simple scripting engine during authoring. That means that you just need to convert your background image to a video, encode audio, create two subtitle tracks containing the button overlays (one for highlighted buttons, one for selected, or clicked, buttons), and multiplex everything. Very simple, but with some limitations: the video has to be shorter than 30 seconds, it must have an audio substream (can be silence, though) and the button layer graphics can only have four colours at a time, including the background colour, as they are implemented as subtitle graphics.

Did I mention that it is crucial to understand that highlighting/selectable elements, also called buttons, are in fact subtitles? Okay, so here's the config file for spumux, a subtitle generator and mulitplexer:

<subpictures>
<stream>
<spu force="yes"
        start="00:00:00.00"
        select="mask-selected.png"
        highlight="mask-highlighted.png"
        autooutline="infer"
        autoorder="rows"/>
</stream>
</subpictures>

Our mask layer images are mask-selected.png and mask-highlighted.png. These contain all the buttons, spumux will automatically try to detect their position and geometry and enumerate them. You tell dvdauthor what these do later.

Now comes the part that needs more thought. I have a video with 34 chapters and up to six chapters per menu. This results in 6 chapter menus, not counting the main menu. The chapter menus look like this:



It's a major PITA to align all the icons for each slide just by calculating their position, ( thus I did it with The Gimp, multiple layers and a bash script. )

With The Gimp and a few lines of bash script it really becomes easy to design and author menus for video DVDs. But don't ask how long it took to actually research everything.

Finally, create a configuration file for dvdauthor (see one of those other tutorials for how to do it) and author the DVD.

In case you wondered why I didn't update my LJ for several weeks (and rarely said something on Twitter, either): I was busy editing last year's vacation video. I won't link it here, it is mostly personal stuff and the quality of the footage is rather poor, but it was a nice exercise to learn editing. As Kdenlive still isn't suitable for such a large project (but progressing quite well currently,) I had to resort to a non-free editing solution. Adobe Premiere Elements did the job amazingly well, at least I didn't miss any feature of the professional version. Granted, as a 32 bit application it runs out of memory quite often with such a comparatively large project, but I've seen much worse behaviour of much more expensive software. The movie had more than 700 774 clips on the time line in the end, and runs for 94 minutes.



The built-in DVD menu generator is not so useful: You can only slightly modify the pre-defined templates, unless you peek around a bit in the file system and discover that those are actually multi-layered Photoshop project files. I purchased the bundle with Photoshop Elements, thus I was able to modify a template a bit more, however opposed to Premiere Elements, Photoshop Elements is lacking some crucial features like guard lines (you can see but not create or move them) and some effects aren't directly accessible (you can "copy" them from some existing project, though.) I ended up installing The Gimp on the Vista system for the other graphics needed.

PRE's built-in export modules for DVDs and H.264 are broken. This is one frame from the DVD
generated by PRE:



The (animated) caption is wrong, here's a close-up:



The vertical black line next to the blue box is in any export via the "distribute" menu. A DV video export does not have this artifact:



What now? Well, reboot to my usual openSUSE Linux desktop, grab some multimedia conversion tools from Packman and convert the DV file with ffmpeg. Et voila:



Unfortunately, FFmpeg is currently a bit too restrictive regarding DV AVI files generated by Windows. I get literally thousands of messages like AC EOB marker is absent pos=64. This is being tracked as issue 1060 by the FFmpeg issue tracker, but not resolved yet. Don't think that MPlayer's mencoder would do any better: it relies on FFmpeg for reading DV files. Additionally, it crashes before it could finish conversion. What now? Extracting video and audio with tcdecode from the transcode package does work, but I wasn't able to multiplex the streams again, as the current version of ffmpeg seems to ignore -itsoffset and transcode insists on re-encoding the whole video...

A colleague mentioned Avidemux a while ago, and indeed: it is able to rebuild the stream without re-encoding its content. It also is able to encode to other formats, so I had some well encoded MP4 files very quickly. And it can even create MPEG2 streams suitable for DVD authoring! Or so I thought. Well, the lavc encoder sure has excellent compression, and it looked very well on the computer screen. However, my DVD player didn't like the stream at all. Apparently, it swapped the half-pictures, despite using the correct options. Mplayer and vlc don't care about it (in fact, they don't even recognize that something is wrong), so I had to rebuild the track again with FFmpeg after I was done with the menus and mastered the first DVD. Ugh. Hint: use single pass encoding to check whether it works at all, and afterwards recreate the stream with two-pass encoding. But don't fix the chapter entry points before you've created the final stream, as the start of the GOPs will change and FFmpeg cannot place GOP starts at pre-defined times.

To be continued...

Tchibo currently offers a reprint of Jupp Darchinger's book Wirtschaftswunder. It contains a selection of his photographs from the German post-war era to 1967. Though Darchinger is mainly known for his portraits of German politicians and as a political photo journalist for Die Zeit and Spiegel, I can better relate to the more general topics of his earlier work, which is covered by this book. I absolutely adore his style, nobody takes photos like these anymore. Unique composition, good instinct for catching the right moment, perfect lighting. Some pictures leave me standing agape. Photo journalism at its best.

I've successfully updated my machine located at the data centre from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.1 via a remote SSH connection and "zypper dup" yesterday. Contrary to my previous experiences with online upgrades, only minor obstacles were encountered:

• Jabberd, the only package from OBS, got rebuilt between downloading the meta data and the package itself


• Zypper somehow got confused by blank characters in repo locations midway through the update (simply restarting zypper helped)


• I had to copy back my manually edited postfix configuration as it was replaced by the generic one from the RPM


• Tomcat6 startup scripts missing JAVA_HOME

Just two hours of work (mainly observing zypper working and checking functionality), no serious breakage, no trip to the data centre, no manual update of half of the packages. I'm truly impressed.

thank you for disabling my editor login again without a warning because I didn't do any edit to the German "Furry und Wertiere" category for the last three months. I appreciate your strict following of your rules from the late 90s when there were plenty privately produced websites with interesting information popping up every day. Alas, this was never the case for German language information and todays' kids have a Facebook and MySpace profile page, but certainly no own web page. Worse, every company on this planet has its own representation on the web already, and it seldom has any notable content. A couple of years ago I would have recommended to change your mode of operation, but from todays' point of view I'd rather recommend to pull the plug altogether. Everyone is using Google anyway. Not that you'd care, but I hereby declare my resignation as the editor of "World: Deutsch: Gesellschaft: Subkulturen: Furries und Wertiere".

If anyone wants to take over as an editor of that category, feel free to apply. Not much work besides occasionally checking the list for dead links and periodically doing some fake edits to not let the account expire.

One difference between openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 really bugged me: even though I enabled Wake on LAN (WOL) on eth0, the driver would switch off the transceiver on suspend to RAM. After some investigation I found that the atl1e driver has the "wakeup" flag for power management set to "disabled", regardless what I set with ethtool. After enabling it with "echo enabled >/sys/class/net/eth0/device/power/wakeup", WOL works again. As a quick workaround I created a file /etc/udev/rules.d/78-enablewol.rules with the following udev rules:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ENV{INTERFACE}!="eth*", GOTO="skip_wol"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo enabled >/sys/class/net/$env{INTERFACE}/device/power/wakeup' "
LABEL="skip_wol"

Edit: Forgot that redirections aren't implemented in udev. Sigh.

NB: Of course you also need to actually turn on WOL. Either by setting "ETHTOOL_OPTIONS='wol g' " in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0.cfg if you are using "traditional" network setup with ifup/ifdown, or by adding

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/sbin/ethtool -s $env{INTERFACE} wol g"

to above udev rules.

My old video camera died. Luckily, I bought a new and better one some weeks ago. But it is still a sobering experience to see 200-odd Euros worth of electronics turning into a useless brick shortly after warranty runs out. Even though the correct voltage can be measured at the test points, the camera doesn't do anything. No tape operation, no display, nothing.

...but what?

this entry is for you. ;-)

I'm now on Twitter.

I just pulled the hotel reservation confirmation for FC 2010 out of my spam folder. Spam Assassin says:

Content analysis details: (6.0 points, 5.0 required)

pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
3.0 FROM_DOMAIN_NOVOWEL From: domain has series of non-vowel letters
1.1 HTML_TAG_BALANCE_BODY BODY: HTML has unbalanced "body" tags
0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
1.9 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts

The domain name of the sender is pkghlrss.com...

Bis heute. Idioten.

...but I can.

Created by Train Horns

WARNING: turn down the volume if you try it, if you can hear it it is terribly loud.

(via loriana)

Two words: HOLY SH*T!

The registration for Eurofurence 15 will open at

1235239200

Due to current time demands of our day jobs and the fact that our accountant was unavailable for most of January, we're basically one month late. We are very sorry for the delay, but things like that can happen if you run such a big event with a staff of volunteers who also happen to have a life. :) Also, by popular demand, we have promised to announce registration and allow staff members to register one week ahead of time, which effectively delays the public opening by one week. Staff Registration will begin on February 15th. Instructions for staff members will be posted in the staff-only section of the forum.