Wayne D's Blog

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.

The very gracious Howcast producers had their work cut out for them on my latest video How To Make Pound Cake. For the first time I decided to both shoot and star in a Howcast video because my normal star isn't much of a baker. That was a bad idea, I spent so much time getting the recipe done that I didn't pay enough attention to the camera work, I lost one of my lights between the preparing and the cutting making the editing of the video much more challenging. Oh and I also forgot to mention that I ran out of tape half way through the shooting and missed some footage that would have been helpful during editing. This happened because my rookie camera operator wasn't paying close enough attention to the viewfinder while I was making the recipe. As usual the ever patient and helpful Howcast producers suggested how I could make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and the even with my jaded eye the end result looks pretty good. I spent some time watching other How To Pound Cake videos on Youtube and I think my video is clear, concise and helpful. The end result also tasted quite good. For my next video I decided to shoot something a little less involved, How To Clean a Furnace Filter. Watch this space for the finished video in a couple of weeks. If you missed my other Howcast videos you can find them here.

I have decided to terminate The Great Linux Experiment. There has bee some back and forth with my sister in law who runs a dual boot Linux/Windows system on what constitutes a successful experiment. For me to consider the experiment a success dual boot is not an option. Either Linux can replace Windows without the user feeling deprived or it can't. Now before you start accusing me of being a Microsoft shill remember that my primary computer runs Linux, Centos 5 to be precise, but I have always had the option of using the Windows computer in the house when Linux couldn't cut it.

What made me decide to terminate the experiment and fix up the Windows XP partition on the computer? I wanted to find out when CTV, the Canadian Olypic broadcaster was going to show the Women's downhill race that took place this afternoon. CTV.ca has a broadcast schedule on their website but it needs on Silverlight. Unfortunately even the latest version preview version of Moonlight, the Linux Silverlight implementation cant handle it. I feel deprived, I need to have a working version of Windows in the house for the times when Linux can't cut it. The reality is that if you want to run Linux exclusively you have to be prepared to accept compromises and sometimes do without. I'm not prepared to do that so Windows will soon be back in the house.

Day two presented one solvable problem and one insoluble problem. The solvable one was importing my wife's Firefox bookmarks from Windows into Linux. After a bit of research it was simply a matter of replacing the places.sqlite file in her .mozilla/firefox/"long funny name".default directory with the file from Windows Drive:/Documents and Settings/XXXXXX/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/"long funny name".default.

The insoluble problem, at least so far, is the inability to watch CTV's Olympic streaming because they are using Silverlight, Microsoft's Adobe Flash replacement. The Linux Silverlight project Mono put out a special preview release of their version 3.0 Moonlight product which unfortunately did not work for me.