Archive for August 2005
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| Aug 25th, 2005, 11:17am Good Morning !
I was also unsuccessfully using a new audio codec called ACM. DO NOT USE IT, only use Mp3 audio coding ! ACM directly modifies the video for added compression which can thoroughly screw up any good absolute k/sec audio/video work you are doing. . . .
Cause as you know my Dad has very bad Parkinson's, and well, I want him to get better without DBS (deep brain stimulation) which basically involves drilling a hole in the head, attaching wires (no I am not kidding) and well, stimulating the brain. Are we this backwards in science that we can see no other alternative to solving this problem ? . . . I am now finding out that for "important" downloads, you can no longer just download it. You must sign up to register, to say who you are, what you plan to do with the software you download, and how long you plan to keep it before registering. And yes, most software can now no longer be registered. Attempting to do so contacts the internet which in turn says that the software has been upgraded (yah right), you must download the new version which in turn (often) removes whatever "Freeware" features you had, and then no longer allows you to register it for constant use. No, you must pay a rental fee on it per month if you plan to use it, and the new "upgraded" program force-checks to ensure you are on the internet.
It is with
thinking like this that severely encourages me not
to release source codes to any of my projects, either now
or in the future, no matter how difficult or easy it
might be to work with. I - hope - that in the future,
those authors who do state that their program is
Freeware, that, in optionally and additionally releasing
their sourcecode, they open themselves up to severe
exploitation and overtaking by corrupt programmers that
are not as good at programming as they are but are
considerably more greedy. I will all ways have my
Freeware for use, unlimited usage at that, not being
tricky and refusing to run past a certain date or year,
nor requiring an "upgrade" after a period of
time. Any software I write if it runs then (and lucky you for
getting any of my programs to run right the first
time ! . . . I could not successfully find any movie or television scripts of The Rifleman, but I did find memoirs and recollections penned by the man himself. Please enjoy 4 primary episodes of Lucas McCain (Chuck Connors) as The Rifleman in this prepared readable script.
Click Click
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| Aug
12th, 2005, 11:27am This is a quick update. |
| Aug 18th, 2005, 7:08am Good Morning ! I apologize for getting this out so late. I've been developing MPEG-1 interleave tables and movie filters most of the morning for directly modifying movie files (*.avi) compressing them to a very high level, a new MPEG-1. I have been
interested in video encoding movies to audio CDs that
play in DVD players for some time now. This is not an
exact science; it only plays in DVD players that are
capable of also playing Mp3 files, and the quality is
highly dependent on how good the compression you can get
for an MPEG-1 which by USUAL (VHS quality) is no more than 50
minutes. The original author is KVCD and you can see
their site by clicking Their technique is, well, not bad, to say the least, but they are using complex ways of interleaving the video so you do not see so many "jaggies" as usual. The videos in all cases wind up worse quality than VHS, especially if they are over 90 minutes for the mere fact the "filters" made by others do naught but either sharpen or blur the video. Also their technique is "unpredictable." They are basing it strongly upon the ability to "seek/guess" where an image changes and if a movie has a lot of action, well, it encodes over 730megs which means, you sigh, re-encode at 5% less (another 3+ hours) and wish hopefully then it will fit. Having now understood fully what they are doing, I have gone on to write my own video interleave table and have gone so far as to write my own graphic filter to clean up movies as wells. My technique does not use the "seek/guess" and uses a forced k/sec rate based solely on the length of the film I am encoding so you use exactly the entire CD every single time; no guesswork. My custom
filter written in GFABasic sharpens the sharp and blurs the
blurry. It directly modifies the movie looking at the
difference between each pixel so objects like furniture
in the background definitely look blurry but people
talking, walking, or fighting are very vivid and sharp.
High action scenes look great as well as slow talking
films. Results ? A 4-hour movie I prepared looks near DVD quality after unpacking it completely and repacking it over a period of 6-hours in conversion (while I worked on my GBA project in the background), fitting as a single MPEG-1 on a CD at 730megs. I will be making animated menus in the future so you can select multiple movies to choose from, making of, and specials, but that is in the future. I have made a nice little animated intro I am putting on all my video encodes. I will post the compressed MPEG-1 here next week for all of you to see. No, I am not publishing this program or releasing the source, no I am not interested in any company wanting it for a commercial venture of any kind. NO, I AM NOT SELLING THE VIDEOS I RENDER NOR WOULD I - EVER. I am just
tinkering and encoding movies on CDs for my friends and
neighbors who have DVD players for the simple fact I can't
afford blank DVDs nor have the time or resources to
work with them. . . . Well, I am very excited about the promise of a new RPGMaker that the one I am working for GBA presents. Not only is it compact, but will have an on-board on-hands editor that lets you change any of the variables in the system. Anything from map editor variables, player data, system switches, etc. ! In this, you can start coding or hacking at the map/world/player data long before I get around to writing the menus or wizards to access that area.
Because of the way SRAM is handled and for maximum efficiency, it does seem like I will be limiting any variable name in the system up to 8 characters and their contents, also only up to 8 characters. While there is a limit of only 133 Sprite Messenger commands at this time, I will be shifting memory to allow for more in the future. Some of the
major differences between this RPGMaker and current 1.
Up to 4 players in a game/world party What must you know to use this ? 1.
Either use a GBA emulator or have a >=8meg Flashcard
for GBA ready Some of these limitations are for the reason that in this version, you can change the image for any or all of the following with an included on-board hands-on editor: 1.
All 64 16x16 pixel Tiles The remaining 64k SRAM space I have allocated for: 1.
16 maps sized 25x25 cels, storing 3 bytes per map cel Some of the 1187 (projected 200-300 count) Sprite Messenger Lines will be used to store map, system, player, and world data. I have up to
8megs of true *.GBA filesize space so I will fill it with
as much high-quality compressed audio and music as I can
find or render myself. To post your
Feedback, and/or recommendations/suggestions, you can
join the . . . Your Screenplay for this week:
Blake's 7 - Dawn Of The Gods Long after the production of Doctor Who, a new British science-fiction series took the airwaves called Blake's 7. A group of intergalactic outlaws traveling the galaxy in a hi-jacked alien super-powered star vessel running away from the law and Federation and their adventures. This then is their story ... Click Click
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| Aug 11th, 2005, 11:08am Good afternoon !
No,
seriously, I am. I have stopped coding GBA This may seem simple, but it's not. I need to have the ability for any script to call any other script, I.E.: <<Critter
Definition>> - name "Goblin" Okay, now
you can see in a ridiculously SHORT amount of time how
difficult it will be to have everything scripted. While
this is more-than-likely terribly desired by you
incredibly talented Worldbuilders out there (you know who you are
! Note that this critter can make use of single-use items like POTION, and that POTION in itself must be a script all to itself: <<Item
Definition>> "Potion" The tilde "~" represents NEAR a value. Roughly 75%-125% of the suggested value. So, I
propose it to you, the adept Worldbuilders. I have some ideas to automate some of the most complex aspects of Scriptbuilding in the Sprite Messenger which will tremendously simplify the scripts (easier template than listed above), but I must work it out on paper for some time now to determine the best and easiest way to approach this puzzle. . . . UPDATED: 08/12/05
. . . A bit of
information about coding videos.
If you just want to yank out the main movie or copy menus/movies exactly, the freeware DVDShrink is a good alternative to TMPGENC's commercial package. If you are going to make your own videos on CDs that play in DVD players, may I recommend that you bring up the WIZARD in standard TMPGENC for VideoCD, when you get to the button with advanced, click it, unlock rate/sec, change rate/sec for audio to 64k/sec, then return back and change the final file size to 730megs. By doing so, it will automatically compute the kilobits rate/sec in the above window. COPY that number to notepad or remember it, exit out of the wizard, return back to your template, and put in that value for the constant bitrate/sec. As for NOISE REDUCTION on the image, I have found if you take the # of minutes in the video and divide by 2.4 you get a good value in the range of 0-100 where a 4-hour video dithers the most. Naturally set 100% on SOFTEN BLOCK NOISE in the Quantize Matrix tab no matter what the video is or size of it. . . . Your Screenplay for this week:
Erik The Viking Done
in the style of Monty-Python, this not-so-serious viking
is out to loot, pillage, and rape. Well, not quite that
last one because he comes across ONE pretty young woman
who wants to get raped, and then blames him for
being inadequate in that respect. And thus our story
begins. Click Click
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| Aug 4th, 2005, 6:56pm Well it seems fall is
upon us and things are finally starting to cool down. Yesterday
was a red air day. This refers
to how bad or good the ozone layer is. . . . I have
abandoned KVCD and written my own MPEG-1
interleave table from scratch ! I am very pleased with
the results. Not only is it considerably faster but there
are zero Jaggies. Jaggies refer to the blocks
or squares you see in a video when the camera has come to
rest. It looks awful, like a badly compressed JPEG
picture, and now there aren't any. . . . My REAL
Mother, Rachel, called me a few days ago. I have not
heard from my REAL Mother for over 20 years. Rachel .. Only with a great many therapy later have I started to acknowledge the real world and not hold on so tightly to the fantasy world she said existed. It is - long ago, I wrote her some Email yesterday and I'm going to leave it at that until she writes back. . . . Your Screenplay for this week:
BUFFY The Vampire Slayer Your
not-so-average tale of teenagers and vampires. Unlike
other teenagers who go running and screaming away, Buffy
has come to kick some serious vampire butt. Using her
karate moves and female physique, she saves the world for
all of us. (isn't that nice ?) Click Click
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It has been a very strange week, very
busy, and quite a bit both to be done and that was done. 
's birthday
is this week, so I got her 36 eps of the Rifleman, a Western B&W
series that we both share a common interest in, amongst
other things.
I have found out a bit more about
Stem-Cell Research. A bill was passed recently that
allowed the harvesting (government-supported) of them which can
now easily be extracted from something as simple as a
single hair follicle or skin sample. No embryos need ever
be involved now. Huzzah !
Lor' have we gotten so bad at
stealing other works that it's not enough for people to
charge money for Freeware they didn't write (by requiring payment
for maintaining the site to download it from !?) they now (with the help of the
donated source-code) claim it entirely as their own after
modifying a single line and recompiling it to ease their
conscience, and charge a monthly fee for the use of what
once was eternal never-needing registration Freeware ??
) then it will and should always run in
the future as well ...
forum in
the development of GBA 
)
I am drawing a blank ..
), the fact remains on how difficult
it will be to define anything.
Briefly, I haven't heard from my real
Mom in over 20 years, well, she sent me 3 letters now.
Not to go into great detail, I take my meds daily like I
should, she doesn't, so there is a difference of opinion
on many things. I hope she doesn't pay me a surprise
visit ! 
For custom authoring DVDs, I have
found TMPGENC's
DVD Author v1.6 to be very good ! Not only can you
import videos from other DVDs raw or from DVD images off
your HD, but can import MPEGs as well. It has an
easy-to-use interface, allows you to make DVDs with full
chapter ability, animated menus, and intelligent hiearchy
layout for the menus themselves including custom
fonts/images/backdrops/buttons and interface.
