Wayne D's Blog

TSN has published their live streaming schedule for the 2010 PGA Championship from Whistling Straits and the good news for Canadian golf fans is that TSN offering online live streaming coverage of the marquee groups staring at 9 a.m. on Friday and 11 am on Saturday and Sunday. Coverage of the Par 3 holes starts at 1 pm on Friday, and 11 am on Saturday and Sunday. All times are Eastern. It's a shame that the only major golf tournament we didn't get live streaming of was the Canadian Open. Streams can be accessed at http://www2.tsn.ca/live/golf/PGAChampionship2010/

Come on TSN next year we want live streaming of the Canadian Open in addition to your coverage of the Masters, British Open and US Open. Not everyone cane get to a TV especially during the Thursday and Friday rounds. We Canadians deserve live streaming of our national golf championship. Still no update on whether those suspicious live golf streaming sites are legitimate or not.

Live streaming information and links for the 2012 Canadian Open can be found at http://wdawe.com/index.php/live-sports-streaming-in-canada?blog=1

(updated July 22nd 4:20) http://www.veetle.com/index.php/channel/view#489e78e9b8936 is offering free live streaming of the Golf Channels coverage of the 2010 Canadian Open. Thanks to the guys at http://www.torontogolfnuts.com/showthread.php?p=636106 for pointing the way.

It looked like Canadian golf fans are out of luck when it comes to live streaming of the 2010 RBC Canadian Open from St. Georges in Toronto.

I checked TSN's broadcast schedule and there in no mention of live streaming of this year's Canadian Open. That really sucks, come on TSN, why no live streaming of our own tournament? A quick Google search and all I found was ads for Watchlivegolf.com which I mentioned in http://wdawe.com/index.php/british-open-live-streaming-in-canada?blog=1 and other suspicious looking live golf streaming sites. No one has provided my with any information that would reduce my suspicion that Watchlivegolf.com may be a scam. There is also no mention of live streaming on http://www.pgatour.com/.

I couldn't find any mention of live streaming outside Canada so my usual advice to use a service like http://hotspotshield.com/ (free) or www.witopia.net (paid) to access foreign golf streams doesn't even apply.

If I find out any new information I'll update this post so check back tomorrow and Saturday.

After showing this completed video to people I know the most common response has been "My furnace filter doesn't look like your furnace filter". The hardest part of shooting this video was cleaning up the basement so that I had a nice clean background for the shooting. My film makers creed is "If it isn't in the shot it isn't there". Shooting angles and positions were carefully selected to prevent you from seeing how messy my basement is around the furnace. Luckily the furnace area of my basement is alrge enough that I could get back far enough to get a nicely composed shot.

It has been my custom that after I completed a video for www.howcast.com I write a blog post about the trials and tribulations of my latest shot. In the past that has included missing footage, lighting problems and various software issues. I am happy to report that the technical production process on my latest video other than one minor editing misstep that was caught by the able producers at Howcast. Now that I have mastered the mechanical shooting and editing process I want to work on the artistic side of the process, making the video more dynamic and interesting, mixing up the shots and angles. In this video I am particularly happy with how the water shots turned out. I'm still trying to decide what my next video will be, unfortunately my star actor fractured his arm in a schoolyard water balloon battle and is unavailable for the next 6 weeks,

I had been getting a bit depressed lately. No one has been commenting on my blog posts even though I get more than 500 visitors a week. I know that lots of people don't comment on blogs but nothing?

When I was poking around setting up www.imetwayne.com I realized that there was no "add comment" link at the end of the posts. I checked that comments were enabled. I was mystified. While I was poking around I logged out of the blog admin interface and was horrified to find that there was no "Leave a comment" link on my main blog here either. No wonder I haven't been getting any blog comments. Instead there was a stark "Comments are not allowed from anonymous visitors." at the end of each post. Ever since I installed the b2evolution Turing Test plugin to artfully quiz commenters to ensure they weren't bots I had enabled anonymous comments. I know that comments worked fine at least until the beginning of January 2010, because I had some.

After some Googling and poking around in the nooks and crannies of b2evolution I found that the "Allow anonymous comments" checkbox was not selected in the basic antispam plugin on the plugins tab of Global Settings. I can only surmise that somewhere along the line one of the upgrades I did to the b2evolution software turned that setting off. I've learned my lesson, I'll be checking the blog after upgrades when I am logged out of the admin interface.

Feel free to comment, now that you can.

When creating the deliverables for my latest Howcast.com video I couldn't remember the settings I used last time to export the high quality masters I needed. Cinelerra suggested these presets for the use pipe command line:

ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -target dvd -ilme -ildct -hq -f mpeg2video %

but when I used them I received the following error message.

int YUVStream::write_frame(utint8_t**): write_frame() failed: system error (failed/write)

after some fiddling and Googeling I realized that the error message meant that ffmpeg wasn't returning any frames and the culprit was the -hq which isn't supported by my version of ffmpeg. I also had to change the -ilme -ildct to -flags +ilme+ildct and remove the -target dvd to keep ffmpeg from rescaling the video from it's native size giving me a pipe command line of:

ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -flags +ilme+ildct -f mpeg2video %

Which gave a video that looked ok when played with ffplay but which had a purple bar across the top when played with mplayer. After a bit more fiddling I came up with the following pipe command line which gives good quality video that plays on both video players.

ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -qmax 2 -f mov -vcodec mpeg2video %

I hope this alleviates your frustration when trying to use the YUV4MPEGSTREAM Rendering Option in Cinelerra.