I’ve decided to host my own videos now in my Gallery: Videos
The reasoning for this… well, let me just show you my usage for last month:
Bandwidth Usage:
Total Provided: 1314 GB ($1/GB over)
Total Used So Far: 5.432 GB
Disk Usage:
Total Provided: 26640.000 MB ($0.10 / MB over)
3 Day Avg: 1851.572 MB
So last month, I used less than 1% of the provided bandwidth and I’m currently using ~7% of my alloted disk space. So I thought, instead of getting my account locked on YouTube again or having videos on PutFile get deleted after 6 months of inactivity, I thought I’d just host my own videos given I have so much unused space and bandwidth.
Gallery does support videos (movies) which is nice, so I began transferring my movies onto Gallery. However, I hit 2 problems:
- Thumbnails weren’t being created for my .wmv files
- Gallery wouldn’t recognize .mov as movie files (GalleryMovieItem)
I was actually okay with the thumbnails not being generated as I know most of my videos were encoded with WMV9 and it is a ‘proprietary’ codec, but what was funny was that .mov files were recognized as application/quicktime and as a movie before I uploaded, but after I uploaded, it was placed into the GalleryUnknownItem category. This was really mind boggling as I started to trace through the Gallery code and went through my database trying to find the problem. The ability to downlaod the movie was still there (there was a “Download unknown” link), but I wanted the video to play on screen.
I ended up giving up and posted on the Gallery forums asking for help, as it seems there’s also been other people that hit this same problem. So at this point, I started looking up info on FFMPEG as that’s what Gallery uses to generate thumbnails. Apparently there’s already support for WMV9, but required to get the latest nightly builds. What I found interesting about FFMPEG was there was no download for it. There download/files page on SourceForge had 0 files. The only way to get it was to download the source code from MPlayer and compile it on my own, which I ended up doing.
I replaced FFMPEG and regenerated all my thumbnails and my videos now have icons. Yay!
Then I thought, maybe Gallery was marking .mov files as Unknown because it FFMPEG said it wasn’t a movie file. So I tried reuploading a .mov file and BAM, it worked! So both my problems were solved just by updating FFMPEG.
Random Crap:
Darth Vader Phones Home – I believe this a scene from Robot Chicken on Cartoon Networks’ Adult Swim. The scene features what happened after they blew up the Death Star and Darth Vader phones the Chancellor. Really funny video.
Workers discover chocolate Virgin Mary – Workers at Angiano’s gourmet chocolate company, Bodega Chocolates, discovered under a vat a 2-inch-tall column of chocolate drippings that they believe bears a striking resemblance to the Virgin Mary. Sigh… Another Virgin Mary resemblance…
Zune interface, features detailed (from /.) – Here’s a prototype of Microsoft’s Zune player, that is going to compete against iPod.
A truly bizarre crime… – Thieves in Germany stole 7,500 euros ($9,554) from a man by throwing feces at him from behind and then pick-pocketing him while they pretended to help clean up the mess, authorities said Monday. Interesting way to pick pocket.
Current events dwarfed by pop culture… – here’s my score card:
- # of dwarfs from Snow White you can name: 5
- # of Supreme Court justices you can name: 0
- Who is J.K. Rowling’s fictional boy wizard: Harry Potter
- Who is British prime minister: Tony Blair
- Name of Homer’s son on the television show “The Simpsons”: Bart
- One of the ancient Greek poet Homer’s epic poems: The Odyssey
- What planet Superman was from: didn’t know
- Which planent is closest to the sun: Mercury
- Name the Three Stooges: didn’t know
- Name the three branches of the U.S. government: legislative, executive, judicial
- Name the most recent winner of the television talent show “American Idol”: didn’t know
- Name the Supreme Court Justice confirmed in January 2006: didn’t know
A gallery of unusual Chinese robots (from /.) – Chinese engineers have unveiled a series of robots these days — without releasing lots of technical details about them. In the past two months, I’ve gathered pictures of robots which can act as waiters in restaurants in Hong Kong or pull rickshaws near Beijing. I’ve also found a four-finger robotic hand able to play organ, a female robot greeting tourists visiting the Sichuan Science Museum with ‘ni hao’ (‘How are you?’ in Mandarin — if my sources are correct), and even a robotic chimpanzee. Please visit my photo gallery…
Firefox Circle – a group of friends found a field that hasn’t been harvested yet and made a crop circle resembling the Firefox logo. Pretty neat!
Dell users in China upset about processor mislabelling – article’s not that interesting, but I found the cartoon funny:
(Left: Chinese consumer) – You lied to me! That’s not right!
(Right: Dell) – It’s not affecting your usage, why be so concerned?
Active Virus Shield (from B$) – a new service provided free from AOL. Although I’m very anti-AOL, this is a move that I approve. They’ve rebranded Kaspersky Lab’s AV software and is giving it away for free. Kaspersky Lab is rated as one of the best AV software. If you think Norton or Symantec is good, you haven’t tried Kasperksy Lab or Computer Associates.