Put simply, Vint Cerf has said that the internet is NOT the root of all evil in today’s world. Instead, it is merely a reflection of the state of society in these troubled times. Without sick or misguided people who want to read or watch sites that contain dubious content, the pages would not be created.
As an example, he argued against the Tory’s latest plea for some new support, in which they tried to suggest sites like YouTube should restrict content based on a viewer’s age. I think the best quote was “When you have a problem in the mirror you do not fix the mirror, you fix that which is reflected in the mirror.” Anyway, I believe he puts his case well, click here to listen to the interview originally broadcast back in Britain on Radio 4.

OK, as you may have read from earlier posts, I have been experimenting trying to find the best way to encode videos to ensure high quality clips on YouTube. So far things have not gone well. I have ascertained that I do need de-interlace the raw DV video from my camcorder. I have tried different ways of resizing from 720×576 to 320×240, including clipping, adding letter box strips, changing the aspect ratio, all to no avail - the video quality is still far worse than previous videos I’ve uploaded. I have tried both DivX and Xvid codecs, with medium to high bit rates, but I always seem to end up with quality that would look bad coming from an old mobile phone.
For now, I shall continue posting the videos as they stand. If someone has an idea about how to achieve better results, let me know. Similarly, if someone would like to have a copy of these, let me know which interests you, and we’ll sort something out…

First we have a short clip of the lasers being tested during the 7th Act at the Astana Day concert. Why have I included it? Watch out for a video taken later in the night, that shows just how impressive the laser show was As a small techy point, although the square and X don’t appear contiguous, to the naked eye, they were solid…

Here we have The 8th act singing in Russian…

Lastly (at least for this post), we have Alex, Ira and Ira’s Mum after the 8th act…

Thought I’d post a link to a YouTube clip whilst I wait to see if the new resizing method results in a much needed improvement in quality.
Anyway, click here to see the bright young future of America…
Although she has obviously been coached to include South Africa and ‘the’ Iraq in any of her answers. Unfortunately she seems to unable to answer the question regarding how 1 in 5 Americans can’t locate their own country on a map of the world, let alone subtly slip in the required references. I have seen better quality videos of the beauty contest, but the one linked to has helpful subtitles

Perhaps a more accurate post title would have been ‘Stupid, impatient Chris’…
Last night I finished uploading all 29 videos to YouTube from the Astana Day celebrations, specifically the concert held in the evening that Ira, AlexC, Ira’s Mum and I all went to.
BEFORE uploading dozens of videos that you’ve resized & re-encoded, in fact before the editing, resizing and recoding, use ONE video as a test. Do not assume all will be ok. My main problem is that I did not exactly follow the advice I gave to Alex’s brother (see the For Alex’s Bro - DV Video Transfer And YouTube post). For some reason, I decided that sticking to the aspect ratio was important, and ended up with a 300×240 pixel video set. Once uploaded to YouTube, they of course bludgeoned it into a 320×240 file. This led to an outstanding loss of quality…. Cue one day of work lost.
Lesson learnt… hopefully, plus it also forced me to learn how to save filter and codec settings to force me to use the correct settings in the future when using DV footage with YouTube. I’ve also got around to figuring out how to queue up jobs in VirtualDub. That way I can mark out the sections from each raw video I want to encode into smaller files, in one go, then leave VirtualDub to encode them all in one batch.
I hasten to add I am now testing one video to ensure the different approach (I’ve ended up adding narrow black vertical borders to ensure the resized video mantains the aspect ratio, and doesn’t crop off any video from the top and bottom), before re-encoding all the videos and uploading.
Next on the ‘To Do’ list is to figure out an easy way to accomplish 2-pass encoding without repeating the same steps 29 times over, and also find the sweet point in terms of encoding quality, beyond which YouTube will discard extra detail.

Live and learn…

Here are the next batch of videos. These were still filmed in the early evening, with a couple of people who sing in Kazakh, and one in English. The last of the three features a woman singing in what looks like a nightie. I am sure the men in the audience were only attentive due to her vocal talents though

I had a quick search around YouTube, and couldn’t find other videos of the concert. In case you haven’t checked out the link I provided in the other post, the concert was to celebrate the President’s birthday, and also Astana being the capital of Kazakhstan. (Ten years ago, I believe, it was still Almaty).

I have finished cutting the raw video into select scenes, and compressing it down into a more manageable size. Once YouTube servers return to a more normal speed, it shouldn’t take me too long to finish uploading all the files. The first batch are from when AlexC was here, and we went to the Astana Day Concert. See the two posts here and here for a little more background information, and some pictures from the evening. Anyway, here is the first batch…

Arrrgh, not sure what has gone wrong there. The quality is pretty awful, which is strange, as the original DV video looked fine, the compressed 300×240 also looked fine. Well hopefully it is good enough to give you an idea.

Today I decided to finally get around to catching up with all the background work on this blog. That meant going through my plugins one at a time, upgrading them to the most recent version, and then checking nothing had been broken by this process. Readers of this blog should not notice any difference really, other than a few tweaks here and there, as well a small increase in speed of loading. Sadly, my collection of King plugins have not yet been updated to work with WP2.2.x, so this blog will remain at 2.1.3 until I find an alternative, or someone comes up with a viable and easily implemented hack - too much of this site’s design relies on me being easily able to display certain widgets on certain pages, and blocking them on others.

Luckily there are only a few days left in this month, as I have just broken the 2Gb mark on bandwidth, for the first time; this blog is limited to 2.5Gb/month, so as long as I don’t receive a sudden rush of visitors, and the search engine spiders don’t all suddenly decide to crawl the site 24/7, all should be fine. When this site was started a little over a year ago, I had a limit of 250Mb per month, and apart from when I hosted videos (I now use YouTube), I didn’t often get close to the limit…

I have also updated the listing of all the search terms this site is/was #1 for on Google. If such facts interest you, then click on the I Got Lucky link at the top of each page. I’ve also tried to re-order them into basic groups by subject, rather than just sticking the newest results in at the bottom.

Not the forum that I have already linked to over on my links page. This is referring to the coffeeshop over in Amsterdam. It is run by a couple of Americans, and although quite small, is a favourite amongst the American tourists especially. I hope to grab a picture of it in just over a months time, but for now, check out the YouTube video by Blueberry…

I have been watching all her videos as I wait for the big opps to drop for PPP’s 1K Tuesday promotion again, hoping to pick up a little more information regarding which coffeeshops are worth finding, and which to avoid.
Finally, we have a video of the apartment they stayed in for Queens Day this year. I think it is about a dozen buildings away from where ChrisD, AlexC and I will be staying. Obviously there is no guarantee that our place will be as nice, but the view out the window should be quite similar, so I’m happy

I noticed my latest upload to YouTube (see here) received a comment - “why did? u post this?”

I tried to answer within YouTube’s comment system, but my response was more than the maximum 500 characters allowed. So, I’ve pointed ’snipermant’ in the direction of the post instead.

“I’m assuming that is a genuine question?

The reason for that video being uploaded is as follows :-

I was born in Britain and lived there for 27 years.
I now live in Kazakhstan. My blog (the clue is in my user name ;] ChrisMerriman.com is on life in Kazakhstan.)
When I find a reference to Kazakhstan in the media, especially one that ISN’T connected to the Borat character, I post it on my blog.
Rather than upload the video to my server directly, I upload them to YouTube, and then embed the video in a post. For example, if you click the Links: 2 just below the video at YouTube, you can see it is embedded in post 1441 .
I hope that answers your question.

If however you simply asked because you expected to find a funny clip, and want to complain (I’ve checked your previous comments on other videos, and I’m starting to think this is perhaps the more likely situation), please ignore the polite explanation above, and substitute it for this version :-
Because I wanted to…”

Re. your camcorder and achieving the best results on YouTube.
I have made this post in case I ever need to pass on these instructions to someone else - rather than trying to remember it all and re-type it, I can just pass them the url to this post…

Anyway, you mentioned you use Nero 7, my example involves Nero Vision Express from Nero 6. If you can not find the equivalent functions or options in your version, drop me a line and I will try and sort it

Onto the steps

Continue to use whichever program you are most comfortable with to transfer the the video from your camcorder to your computer’s hard drive, via the FireWire cable.

However, when selecting the file format and other related options, you want the resolution to be the same as the original (probably in the region of 720 x 576)
You also do NOT want ANY compression to be used at this point - this should be the last step in the process. Why? Because each time you use a codec to encode video data into a smaller file size, you will obviously be losing some quality. You want to leave this stage until the very end. If you do not see an option for DV or DV-AVI in your current program, try changing the options for the video codec used to NONE or NO COMPRESSION or FULL FRAMES

At this point, you should now have a reasonably large AVI file on your hard drive somewhere. Just double check that the resolution has not been changed at all, and that no codec was used. (GSpot is quite good for that, Alex has all the programs you need on a DVD we burned whilst she was over here.)

Now how you cut up the video is your choice. I personally like to use VirtualDub (again grab a copy of Alex’s DVD for it), as it is no frills, and has not crashed on me, unlike Nero’s programs. There are other options, such as Pinnacle’s Studio, or even, if completely desperate Windows Movie Maker 2. However you choose to cut the video so only the scenes you need remain, now is the time to choose a new resolution and which codec to use, unless you intend to insert text and/or use fades / dissolves / wipes etc. between scenes within the video. If this is the case, place those, THEN proceed to the next step.

For uploading to YouTube you want to choose the closest resolution to 320 x 240 as you can, and I personally would recommend using either the DivX or xVid codec. Both xVid and DivX have settings for bitrates (basically how much quality you desire), please see the end of this post for further detail.
When it comes to the audio side of things, if you do not require high fidelity, 96KBit/sec, mono should suffice. Anything that involves content other than spoken word may need a higher bit rate, and if the music is not just background, or the video involves movement from one side to the other, stereo may make more sense obviously.

If you want to keep an archive of the video, you can either burn the original, uncompressed AVI to a DVD, OR save a 720 x 576 DivX/xVid in the same way you did for the YouTube version. Just make sure you are working with the original at this point - if you encode the 320 x 240 video file to 720 x 576, you will not have a higher quality video, just a larger file-sized one. Always work with original data, when you can.

So why bother with all this if you are just uploading it to YouTube? Although they can convert the video for you automatically, their results will rarely match the quality you can achieve by processing these stages yourself. You may need to experiment a little to find a good balance between time & effort used and quality of results achieved, and also, as previously mentioned, between the codec bitrate settings used and the end result. As a purely arbitrary example, if selecting a quality level of 9 results in a 54 megabyte file, when no extra detail is discernible, when compared to a video produced when a quality level of 8 is used, it makes no sense to waste hard drive space, CPU time taken & bandwidth in transferring the file over the internet. Which reminds me, I think xVid has a sliding scale, the default is 4, 7 or 8 should be more than enough for YouTube, anyway it operates in the same way as specifying a bit rate would.

I hope some of this helps, let me know if I’ve missed something, or parts are not clear.