We managed to do so much Handbraking that we are running out of storage space – which is a big deal since I have half of a terabyte on my main desktop reserved for h.264 files and am using a bit of space over on my other desktop as well.  I have to start moving files out to the Netgear SC-101 SAN drives now.  We have an additional one terabyte there but access to it is painfully slow and less reliable so we don’t want to store anything there that we want to access anytime soon or that we are worried about losing.  Our plan is, after we get a house, to install a large server dedicated to our media archives that will have lightning fast access to everything all in one spot.  We are hoping to be able to install around eight to twelve terabytes there  as that is pretty likely to be what we will need in the short term to power our AppleTV(s).

I kicked off the download of OpenSuse 11.0 this morning.  It is still early and people are trying hard to get their own copies so the downloads are pretty slow but at least I have it running.  Maybe by tomorrow I can try an installation.  I am doing the download over BitTorrent which isn’t the fastest way to get it, yet, but at least I am contributing to making the system faster so that other people can get it that much more quickly.

My work day was pretty long.  I started at ten after seven this morning and my deployments were not completed until almost eight in the evening.  We ordered in Chinese for dinner from Golden City.  They ran out of tofu so there was only enough to make Dominica’s dinner but not mine.  So I had vegetable fried rice and extra spring rolls and cheese wontons which was a bad idea as it gave me a tummy ache which would get me up in the middle of the night for quite a while.

We watched more Third Rock from the Sun tonight.  I also started work on a neat little Ruby command line application that makes doing a large number of Handbrake jobs easier.  I call it HandBrake Helper.  The design is to have folders into which you can drop files to be processed by HandBrake.  Each folder has a configuration file in it telling HandBrake what settings should be used for files in that folder.  Then you just place your files to be converted into the appropriate folder and kick off HandBrake Helper and it automatically processes your files for you and cleans up after itself.  I just started work on it this evening but had enough done that it is now running the HandBrake jobs on my Linux machines.  I was able to kick it off before going to bed so that it would work through the night for me.  Using HandBrake Helper makes doing conversions much more convenient and it keeps track of my preferred settings so that I don’t have to enter them every time hoping that I don’t get them wrong.

Tomorrow Dominica and I are going in to Manhattan around eleven in the morning to meet up with Nathan, Tammy, Bob, Lisa, Eric and other friends from Ithaca at Planet Hollywood for lunch.  Then it is on to see Mary Poppins on Broadway at a matinée.

Bahrain on our usual Saturday morning deployments. This is really an extension of the Friday night deployments.

I had other, non-deployment, work to be done as well for the office. Never a free weekend for me. I am really looking forward to my four day vacation at the end of the month. What a change that will be!

Dominica slept in this morning. She was pretty tired after staying up so late working on her homework and assignments last night. This is going to be a really long weekend for her as she attempts to complete her final project by Sunday night so that she doesn’t have to take an incomplete in her class. This is her last class for the summer as she is taking the semester off. She is really looking forward to the break.

I worked from before eight in the morning until three thirty on work for the office. I took time off for lunch in there but there was quite a bit of work to be done. It is amazing how much work ends up needing to be done on the weekends.

Another Amazon shipment arrived today. Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals: Fasta Pasta 1 arrived today along with the web design classic title “The Zen of CSS Design” which I am looking forward to reading.

I did coordinate another day of Handbrake compression work. Boy do I work these computers hard. All day and all night they work at maximum capacity. No one can convince me that we have reached the age of unlimited storage and processing power. I need orders of magnitude more storage and processing power than are commonly available today. It will be many years before systems prepared to handle my workload are commonly available and the workload that I will have at that time will be much greater than what I have now. I am taxing my overall system I/O, network capacity, drive I/O and CPU. It’s really amazing.

Most of my afternoon and evening were spent either working on some certification consulting work that I am doing which is extremely intensive or a little bit of my homework that is due this weekend. Mostly that is going to be handled tomorrow as I need to coordinate with my project partner. Doing team based work for online classes that are only ten weeks long is quite difficult. We don’t have enough time to really set up good collaboration tools and get into a routine. We work together a handful of times and have to do all of our work based off of that.

We went to bed around midnight.

Today was a day at home.  Oreo stayed home with me which was nice.  The weather has been a little colder since our “early summer” spell that we had there for a few days.

It was a heavy work day.  I was exhausted after having pushed through until three in the morning last night.  So I was home because I needed a chance to do some catchup on my sleep.  Oreo was very surprised when we didn’t have to get out of bed this morning until later than usual.  But no complaints from Mr. Snuggles.

When Dominica got home we got food from the deli downstairs and just watched a little What I Like About You before she went to bed and I stayed up late working on one project or another.  I have been really busy this week.

Today was a very heavy Handbrake day.  I have managed to get all three workstations in the living room able to pretty easily do continuous compression work so I am making a serious dent in the physical to virtual collection conversion process.

We got a new shipment in from Amazon this afternoon.  The final two seasons of The Cosby Show, and the first season of The Love Boat and two classic movies: Move Over Darling and A Summer Place.

Unless otherwise stated I do my conversions to the .mp4 MPEG4 container and extension using h.264 for the video and AAC for the audio. My intent is to have videos that play with excellent quality with consideration to storage requirements on my first generation AppleTV and on VLC. I am not concerned with compression time. I always use two pass compression and do not select “turbo first pass.”  I always use the “H.264 (x264)” codec option considering the target devices that I intend to use.

Update: I have since added a Sony Platstation 3 (PS3) to my output targets and am now using Handbrake 0.9.3 which is needed to support the PS3 due to codec limitations.  I am using this settings for AppleTV, PS3 and VLC for desktop use.

Anamorphic Cinema Content from 480p Source (such as DVD)

Bitrate: 2,500Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48 & AC3 Pass-Through
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On
Keep Aspect Ratio: On
Detelecine: VBR
Container: .m4v (Needed for AppleTV support of dual audio.)

Wide Screen HDTV Content from 480p Source

Bitrate: 2,200Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48 & AC3 Pass-Through
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On
Keep Aspect Ratio: On
Container: .m4v

Newer American Television NTSC (1990s Sitcoms)

Bitrate: 1,800Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 160Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: On

Traditional American Television (1980s Sitcoms)

Bitrate: 1,600Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 128Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak

Old British Television (1980s Britcoms)

Bitrate: 1,200Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 112Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slow
Denoise: Weak

Cartoons

Bitrate: 400Kb/s
AAC Stereo: 112Kb/s – 48
Deinterlace: Slowest
Denoise: Weak
Deblock: Off
Decomb: On

Hopefully this collection of settings will provide you with a starting point in getting the most out of Handbrake. At this time I am currently using Handbrake 0.93 and getting great results from the x.264 encoder. For computer based playback I highly recommend the use of VLC over QuickTime as its playback is much smoother.

We were both up on the early side today. We had to go out to Military Park a few times today so that Dominica could take some GPS measurements for her “GPS and the New Geography” course. She is really getting into the class. It turns out to have been a really good choice for her.

I went down to the deli in our building to pick up breakfast. We ate and watched an episode of Family Ties and then Dominica went off to work on her homework. I decided to take a nap as my migraine was pretty bad and I was not going to be able to get any work done unless I was feeling better. I lay in bed with my eyes covered listening to the News from Lake Wobegon on my iPod for an hour or more. I didn’t really sleep but I felt a bit better after that.

For years I have used the word moreso always believing that that was the standard spelling. Apparently “more so” is more common. However it would appear that the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary – considered the standard for the language) includes it. So I am going to keep right on using it. Possibly even moreso.

This afternoon was spent almost exclusively doing homework for Min and the term paper for me.  I found the topic very challenging but I am hopeful that I have come up with a decent paper.  It is hard to do a paper for a class that you have not done a paper for previously because you are never sure of the expectations and by the time that you know it is too late.

Dominica had to go out to Military Park three times to take her GPS readings and she had to do a lot of mapping with Google Maps.  But the work that she is doing is really interesting and I think that she is learning a lot about GPS and Web 2.0 technologies.  This course that she is taking appears to be relatively writing intensive and seems to really push a lot of though provoking topics.  I think that Dominica is getting a lot out of it.  More than just the value that appears to exist on the surface.  This seems to be one of those highly valuable liberal courses that people talk about but rarely get to take.  So I am excited for her.  It is a lot of work, and she seems to have to work harder for this, her “easy” class than she has to do for most of her advanced standing classes.

My evening was also busy with page-outs to the office.  I was pages several times and had to keep my email on all day to deal with things as they came in addition to the tiny “check out” work that has to be done on Sunday afternoons.  That only takes a few minutes but I did spend a bit of time on conference calls and talking to the support teams at the call center.  Nothing disastrous or stressful.  But a lot of hand-holding and double checking things.  It was a pretty busy Sunday night.

I wanted to go to bed early tonight but Dominica and I did homework until after eleven thirty and after all of that work neither of us was ready to fall asleep yet.  So I decided, since I kept getting paged anyway, to just wait out until midnight logged in to the office watching my email (my “on call” shift ends at midnight when the normal overnight shift begins) and then we would watch an episode of Family Ties so that we can get off to sleep.

Dominica did manage to sneak in some more Christy today.  She finished the television series either last night or this morning and today she managed to watch the first two made to television movies and to start the third.

I did get a chance to learn a bit more about using Handbrake today to do MPEG2 to h.264 conversions.  There is a new version of Handbrake out that is a big improvement over the last (.9.2 now instead of .9.1.)  I am getting the hang of making some good quality compressions.  I have so far discovered in my first test that I can compress a standard size MPEG2 compressed television episode of approximately one gigabyte to less than one third of its original size while actually improving the quality through high quality deinterlacing and deblocking algorithms.  And acceptable quality compressions can be made at closer to one tenth the original size.  I am really impressed with h.264.  I am surprised that there has not been a movement to use h.264 on the DVD carrier media as a stop-gap before BluRay.  A DVD carrying h.264 could carry twice as much content, roughly, as current Video DVDs.  That means that you could have average length movies at extremely high quality or have a single DVD contain ten or fifteen television episodes at the same quality as the originals.

Tomorrow is my birthday.  I have been thirty-two years old for the last three minutes as I write this.  Time for bed.  I can’t stay up late.  I am not as young as I used to be (like when I started today’s post.)