Naturally, we do transcode a lot of movies here. This involves handling large directories that is moved to different file systems and going through different sub-processes (such as extracting/demuxing audio and video streams; injecting audio, video and subtitles into new containers; quality control; re queue etc.

Operations are performed upon large batches that hence needs to be moved between directories and/or physical units.

Overall, the process is now pretty streamlined. There is just one thing that freaks me out.

Say for example that I have to move 100 movies, each a sub directory with 10+ GB of data. This can take a long time, so often I do this before I leave the office expecting the process to be finished when I come back the morning after.

Guess what? Often the process has stopped while copying the first movie, displaying a confirmation dialog: "Are you sure you want to move the system file Thumbs.db?".

What the hell? What would you think I'd want to answer?

There is at least three design flaws here:

• The files is meaningless for the user, so just copy it will you!
• Event if you refuse to do anything without bothering the user, please at least copy the rest of the files while waiting for the decision!
• Windows Explorer has been behaving like this since forever. Soon I'll be switching to OSX just out of irritation.

Attaching an icon of the beloved file for your pleasure.

I'll get back to write another post after carefully sitting by and watching when the computer copies some files.

/Adam

Comments (1)

• Comment by: Andreas32, 2010-05-16 21:45

  In OS X, you could do a Find for "thumbs.db" and then drag them all to the trash in one fell swoop.

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We've understood that some users experience a problem downloading their movies with our browser-based P2P client (and other clients for that matter). Not all of them where from Israel.

So, we've implemented an automatic fallback to http download. The browser will prompt the user to save the file directly. This will be triggered if the download is going too slow during more than a minute. We hope that this will help you customers dependent upon restrictive ISPs...

Cheers

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Full (or true) HD is beautiful to watch, but really demanding for your computer. Unless you use an application that takes full advantage of your computers hardware - hardware acceleration - such as video card and/or the CPU's multimedia capabilities, you'll need a pretty powerful computer to render full HD without flickering. The major operating systems built-in players such as QuickTime for OSX and Media Player for Windows will in most cases have full HW-acceleration on their respective platform. Most open source players won't!

Most Windows users, will probably be able to play 1080p if the file is a wmv-file (encoded with any Microsoft supported codec such as VC-1 or older WMV-codecs), but not mpeg4. As we consider mpeg4 to be a better standard in most other aspects, we use this format as often as possible. Is this bad news for windows users? Not necessarily. There are three resolutions to this problem:

• You're lucky enough to have windows 7 installed on your computer with the latest version (12) of Windows Media Player, you'll also have full support and HW-acceleration for mpeg4 files encoded with h264.
• You have a powerful computer that think that HW-acceleration is for wimps, and just renders the video smoothly without whining. If Windows media player won't play the movie at all try one of the open source alternatives, for example VLC Player.
• If you have tried the full HD-version of an Ameibo movie and it fails miserably, contact us and we will create a lower resolution example for you!

Conversely, most OSX user will be able to play mpeg4 1080p-files just fine with QuickTime Player. You're in other words better of than Windows users this time! Consider this as a compensation for not being able to play our copy protected material (DRM)...

Also, there are some advanced set-top-boxes that can play HD-material without complaining. Example of this is TViX, Popcorn Hour. Although I think it does, I'm not sure if PS4 supports mpeg4 files...

/Adam AKA Col. Jessep

Comments (1)

• Comment by: Gladys, 2010-03-05 05:53

  Hello
  
  My name is Gladys,i saw your profile today and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you the more,and if you dont mind i will like you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address(missgladys30@yahoo.com) believe we can move from here!I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.Gladys.(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter even our age difrent because i have something very IMPORTANT to tell you,but love matters alot in life) please contact me with this e-mail address (missgladys30@yahoo.com)

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We've noticed for quite a while how that many of our israeli customers are having difficulties downloading our movies. Movies bought at Ameibo are downloaded to the customer via the BitTorrent protocol. The protocol have several technical advantages such as high availability, robustness and simplicity. Moreover, it allows the Ameibo customers to actually get paid for uploading data to other paying customers.

Now, official news sources at Ynet state that two out of the three major Israeli ISP's are using deep package inspection to actually block p2p traffic. This is supposedly done in order to prevent piracy software and media piracy. The only problem with this is that there is nothing illegal with the protocol (here: BitTorrent) itself, and many perfectly legal services are using it to distribute fully legitimate data!

Fortunately, as a backup method of downloading, you can choose to download each movie as a podcast from within iTunes.

So, all you potential Israeli customers out there: you need not despair! Only drawback for you is that you cannot earn money by sharing it to other customers.

Happy podcasting!
/Adam

Comments (2)

• Comment by: torrent_fan, 2009-12-24 00:22

  Here is another article on blocking or slowing bittorrent traffic: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/comcast-throws-16-million-at-p2p-throttling-settlement.ars

• Comment by: conspirator, 2009-12-17 20:48

  I bet you it is the Israeli secret service inspecting every packet.

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SRT, SubRip Transcript

SRT is the simplest format imaginable. This is probably why it's is so widespread. It's hard to fail, and syncing can be made almost by hand. It does not contain any formatting metadata such as location on screen, text color or font size. Some players however, supports rendering of html-like formatting. So lightweight formatting may be done, such as <i>italic</i> or <b>bold</b>

It's really just a simple text file with each caption frame described by three or four lines. Each of these groups are separated by two consecutive line feeds:

1. The caption number
2. Display from time -> Display until time
3. Upper caption row
4. Lower caption row (if present)

SAMI, Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange

SAMI is a little more complex. It's a kind of html derivative, where you can have (almost) full control over the text formatting. the document has to have a head where the styles are defined, and a body where all <sync>-tags are present. Each sync tag may contain one or more paragraphs that will be displayed depending on it's class (/language).

All good so far. The downsides are:

1. The sync tag only have a start time. To make a caption disappear, you have to add another sync tag after the first one, only containing a non-breaking space (&nbsp;)! Moreover, there seems to be a bug in MS MediaPlayer that makes it sometime ignore these space tags. The result is that now and then during a movie you will have a line of text displaying during long sections with no speech. Irritating.
2. The font-size is specified in pixels, which makes the text relatively small on a high-res TV and correspondingly larger on a small lo-res TV/PC-monitor
3. Versions of WMP older than 11, creates a black area at the bottom of the screen where the subtitles gets displayed. The area above is left for the actual video. This meant that full-frame 16:9-movie on a 16:9 monitor did not play in full screen! Luckily, this has been improved, and the text now hovers over the movie, if needed.



3GPP Timed Text

Contrary to SAMI, the formatting of the text is altogether relative to the entire scene. This means that if a letter is described to fill half of the frame, half of the frame will be filled, no matter the resolution of the device. Good thinking! The format is binary (althoug NOT image/raster-based!) and rather complex, but also easily converted to and from SRT with the excellent application mp4box. Understandably, there is no reasonable short way of describong the actual file syntax.



That's all about subs for now...


Comments (2)

• Comment by: adam, 2009-12-05 21:46

  Re: gondorx
  Yes, we've automated this process. If you're interested in the code, please contact me at our contact page:
  http://www.ameibo.com/contact.php
  Rgds /Adam
  

• Comment by: gondorx, 2009-12-05 18:15

  What about 890? Do you know how to translate an 890 file to, for example, srt?

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http://www.ameibo.com/blog/adam/comparing-text-based-subtitle-formats

Category Video Tech