Once again, I’m here not so much to post some grand new thing I thought up, but to simplify what it took me a week’s googling, experimenting, and the like to figure out. How the heck do you encode an HD H.264 file so it plays back smoothly on your Transformer and looks good at the same time? (No, not the prime, the old-skool Tegra 2 version)

Step 1: Download Handbrake and install it.
Step 2: Select your source. This can be a decrypted Blu-Ray rip, an EyeTV recording, or just about any video file.
Step 3: Give it a name, and select a MP4 File using H.264 (x264) with a Constant Quality RF setting of 21. You can choose 20 if you like for a higher-quality encode, but that might push you over 4GB on some movies, which will break your files on Android.

Step 4: Make sure your audio file is set to AAC (Core Audio). Setting this to MP3 royally screws up playback, I have no idea why.

Step 5: Copy the advanced settings in the picture below.

Step 6: Click the “Picture Settings” button and use “Custom” to crop your video if necessary (eg. if recorded off TV it may have bars/jagged margins). Crop and resize down to 720P (1280×720). You can leave Detelecine and Decomb on their default settings.

That’s it! Your screen can’t display full HD content, and your hardware won’t handle it anyways, so don’t go any higher than 720p. If you have Honeycomb (3.1 or later) installed on your Transformer, Gallery should play these well. Otherwise, DicePlayer is a great Hardware-accelerated player, which as of now you can’t buy since their checkout account has been suspended (not sure why).

So Mr. MG Seigler over at TechCrunch thinks he’s avant-garde for deciding to quit emailing for a month. His reasoning has something to do with it being a waste of time. And the idea came from…wait for it…some Tweeting. Yes, Twitter, that endless fount of useless information.

I’m not here to rail on Mr. Seigler though, other than to point out that Facebook and Twitter will either a) destroy our society, or b) die, just like MySpace. Why’s this? Because both Facebook and Twitter are founded on the premise that you can easily make your thoughts, opinions, and (private?) pictures instantly available to a whole host of people who don’t really care about you.

I tried Twitter, and it was a complete waste of time, and endless roll of pointless drivel (“enjoying some jameson on the couch, sit up unable to follow along with my own timeline”) and links to articles I don’t care to read (and don’t have time to read). Mr. Seigler is annoyed at the time spent sifting through and reading endless emails, and yet he’s thrilled at the usefulness of Twitter because the President used it once? Sanity, please. (The link tries to make a point about how you, too, can be heard, by mentioning that the Pres answered a handful out of 169,395 Tweeted questions?)

Let me break it down for you: life is not about spewing your opinions to the unwashed masses (yet, how hypocritical it is for me to blog this…). It’s about relationships–with God and mankind. You don’t maintain any sort of real relationship facebook stalking someone. You don’t know others and be known by them in 140 characters or less. All you do is waste time, wishing you lived someone else’s life or trying to re-write yours by hooking up with old flames. In the process, you work less, live less, and get fatter sitting in front of your computer.

To be fair, we could say the same thing about many other popular things such as Netflix instant streaming, except Netflix lacks the narcissism of Twitter and Facebook. If you’re constantly updating your status, let me just tell it to you straight: NOBODY CARES. If they DO care at all, it’s because of how well they already know you offline, in the real world, or because your dietary habits are really the most important thing in their life (which is either really sad or really scary). Log off and pick up the phone (txting doesn’t count). Better yet, go grab a coffee with someone. Even better yet, have them over for dinner.

So here’s your choices, America: become so self-involved that society self-destructs, or realize what’s important in life and go build yourself into a self-strengthening community.

Quit wasting your life and start sharing it. Spend some time with God. Spend some time with the people He’s put in your life.

Thankfully, many of you already figured this out.

(You can skip the prologue if you’re not interested in the customer service story!)

For Christmas 2008 I received an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV tuner from my wife. Getting it set up properly was a nightmare, but I finally did it. Tech support wasn’t a help, and my own computer geekiness and a little extra free time over Christmas break was all I had to rely on. Turns out that it might have just been a defective tuner.

So when I recently moved and found more problems tuning channels, I had enough. I contact EyeTV’s support for a possible RMA (despite being out of warranty) and referenced the original support ticket I had created over a year and a half ago. I braced myself for a long fight….and got a huge surprise.

They sent me a cordial apology and a promise to replace my tuner. Just like that! Talk about stellar customer service.

 
If that weren’t good enough…here’s what I think about the tuner:

It tunes channels well. With QAM support since 2008, you can pull in free HD signals over just about any cable connection, or free HD channels from over-the-air sources. If you’ve got ultra-cheap basic analog cable still, it will pull that in too. Perhaps where it most shines is the integration with the EyeTV software.

EyeTV since version 3 has been awesome. It’s simple to pause, rewind, record, convert, and burn TV shows and movies. You can also grab an app and extend support to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Get yourself the free comskipper plugin and it will automatically remove commercials from your recordings. Download cyTV and you can stream your live TV to another computer on your network, or even across the web! (Think of it as a poor man’s slingbox)

I won’t run through all the features, but retailing at $80, EyeTV 3 is a tremendous value-add to buying the EyeTV Hybrid. Consider the great customer service mentioned above, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!

I set up a new blog today over at eustaceclarence.com to provide easy updates on my first kid, and it got me thinking: thankfully, the personal blogging craze has largely died.

To wit: of the 5 links in my blogroll as of the time of this writing, the last updates were written:

1. October 31, 2007
2. March 29, 2010 (Previous before that was Jan 2, 2009)
3. September 27, 2009
4. July 22, 2009
5. …and one blog is no longer available on the internet

All of these blogs were written by guys involved with technology at a higher-than-average level: they could all probably tell you what AJAX is, and why IE6 is the bane of all that is internet. Yet, like 99.9% of people who started blogging in the last 5 years, none of them blog anymore.

Why? Because no one has time to write (much less write well), and for those that do…nobody cares. The only posts on this blog than anyone reads are the ones written on how to fix annoying computer problems, not the ones about my thoughts on the latest political whatnot. The only personal blog I read anymore is my sister-in-law’s, because she puts up great pictures of her kids all the time. (Ideally, Eustace will get similar treatment from me).

What it really boils down to though is that no one has enough time for all of that. Myspace died when everyone realized that the cacaphony of colors, spam, ads, and random musings available there was an utter waste of time. Twitter’s in vogue, but I’m pretty sure most people use it for a month or two before they realize that, too, is a completely ridiculous way to waste every spare minute of peace and quiet you might stumble upon during your day. I’m moving on.

I think Facebook is the big thing with the best chance, but I’m hearing a lot of people who are sick of it and despise the time they waste on it (me included)–it’s an addiction though, like a crackberry, and will likely last a few years before the next big thing comes along. It’s darn handy for planning class reunions or the like, but for doing anything else worthwhile? Not so much.

Sooner or later we’ll all melt down from the stress and insanity that comes from being plugged into too many people, too many streams of info, and too many responsibilities 24/7. As for me, I’m just hoping that a move back to the Dakotas/Minnesota might bring a few more years of sanity…

For an actually well-thought perspective on this over-saturation phenomena, you could read the paper I wrote on it for a class I took (Like Butter Spread Over Too Much Bread: Multiphrenia in America 10 pages, .pdf)…or you could just ADHD your way back to your Twitter feed and forget I mentioned it (though, kudos for lasting this long if you made it to the end of my post!)

Compression

• Compression typically looks for patterns and stores references to them. So, imagine you’re storing the following text which is 151 characters long:
  

  He went to the store.  She bought a car.  He went to the bank.  She bought a plane.  He bought a turtle.

• To compress that, you might replace repeating patterns with a number. Our new text can be stored with references and a “key”, and now it’s 135 characters long:
  

  \1 store. Sh\2 car. \1 bank. Sh\2 plane. H\2 turtle.[1=He went to the, 2=e bought a]

• When uncompressing the data, you replace the numbers with those patterns again:
  

  He went to the store. She bought a car. He went to thebank. She bought a plane. He bought a turtle.

• Every time a repeating chunk of data shows up, you just store a reference to the original definition, which is shorter and thus saves space. (In this case, it saves you a total of 16 characters, or 10%.) Compression is actually a bit more mathematically complex than this, but that’s the basic concept. What’s important to know is that the more repeated strings you find, the more savings you get.

Lossy Compression

• .jpg files use something called “lossy” compression, which means that in order to find more repeated strings it will smooth out some of the data. (For music, .mp3 files also use “lossy” compression)
• Imagine the string 123456123456123456124456 If you used our old method, you’d only save 2 characters, or 8%:
  \1\1\1124456[1=123456]

• If you could afford to change one number in the last set (4>3) you would then have the same pattern repeated four times, making compression more efficient (6 characters, 25%). However, you would lose 4% of the data (1 character out of 24.)
  

  \1\1\1\1[1=123456]

• As you can see, the more data you’re willing to lose, the more you can artificially create repeating patterns, and the more space you can save.

How much compression to use?

• When you’re saving a .jpg, you set the compression level to tell the computer how much of the file you’re willing to “lose” in order to get smaller file sizes. The lower the number, the more data you lose. If you look at highly-compressed .jpg images you’ll see blotchy places called “compression artifacts” that are the result of the computer changing data in the file to make it match patterns better.
• For most web design, I typically set compression at 79 or 80. For smaller thumbnails where compression artifacts are less visible, I’ll often drop down to 75 to save more space. Any higher than 80 and your images get really big really fast for little quality difference. Any lower than 75 and images start to look really bad.
• Important: Recompressing images might amplify the effect. Let’s say you compress an image at 80, and lose 20% of the data in the file. If you open the image again, make a small change, and recompress it again at 80, you might lose up to 20% again, leaving you with 64% of your original file. Ouch! When editing images, you should always start from an uncompressed, high-resolution image file if at all possible.

Other file formats

• Sometimes, different types of compression save more space with less quality loss.
  • JPEG: best for images with lots of complexity and colors. Usually photos are best compressed as .jpg files.
  • PNG 8: images with text, straight lines, and few different colors. Graphic design elements are often best compressed as PNG 8 files.
  • GIF: similar to PNG 8, except not as efficient in most cases. Usually, unless .png files are not supported, you should save images as PNG 8 instead of .gif
  • There are other image formats, but these are the most common. .gif files support simple transparencies, and PNG 8 and PNG 32 can handle more complex transparencies.

How to do in Fireworks

• In Fireworks, use the “Optimize” panel to set the compression TYPE and Settings (screenshot). For .jpg files, usually all you want to adjust is the “Quality” setting: again, for web you will usually set it at around 75 for thumbnails and 79 for other site images.
• When you have this set, use the File > Export command. This will save the file with your selected compression setting AND it will use minimal metadata, which can also bloat the size of your files. If you use “Save As…” it will save all your meta data and might mess up your compression settings.

Using 4-Up

• Also in Fireworks, click the 4-Up button near the top of your editor. This will show you how the image will actually look once it’s been exported.
• Click on each box and set different compression settings in each one. This was you can compare what each setting would look like as well as what the final image size will be. You can often make a better decision based on this. (screenshot)

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