The website currently known as Otherstream.com is eighteen tears old today. What this means is:
- Children born the day I uploaded the first version of the site are now of legal age in the United States. Unless they want to drink. Or run for president.
- I have been doing this for a good deal more than a third of my life and more than half of my adult life.
- The site has survived several homes, cars, and jobs, and has now lasted almost twice as long as my stab at marital bliss.
- I’m old.
Moving into year nineteen, I continue not to be certain what the whole site is about anymore but I also keep on not pulling the plug. So go figure…
Also, after tolerating it for work for quite a while, I’ve also just jumped onto Twitter because (a) the person who had staked out @otherstream for quite some time has apparently relinquished it and (b) I figured I’d better associate the site with it for at least a few months before it becomes the next dead technology. Twitter annoys me more than a little so I’m not sure how active I’ll be, but feel free to stop in.
Anyhow, thanks a lot to the seven of you who still frequent the site. I really appreciate it!
Camper Van Beethoven. Carrboro. An hour ago.
Young Rival
Better Things to Do (2013)
I really like this…
Sitting on the couch in my room, watching the rain and the ocean, listening to Oscar Peterson, and reading a good book about Montreal in the 1940s and 1950s. I really should spend more vacations this way. Maybe I wouldn’t be so exhausted when I got home…
A more recent tradition. The song may be sixty years old but I’d never heard it until a holiday trip to DC six years ago.
Required and essential tradition number two…
Cristina
Things Fall Apart (1981)
I think I have made it abundantly clear that I’m pretty much done with Christmas. Nevertheless, there are certain traditions that must be followed lest the universe become unbalanced and start to tilt in an unpleasant way. This is one of those traditions.
Apologies for the half-assed fake video…
So as the video project winds down for the holiday (and because I’m almost done), I’m finding that the stuff from 2010 to the present is taking much longer and requiring much more hand holding than the older stuff. And why is that?
- High definition video takes a lot longer to encode than standard definition. That one’s a gimme and it’s made worse by the fact that I really need to buy a new computer. Apple hardware lasts a long time but this one is really past its prime.
- Pre-2010. most of my stuff was identical formats at identical pixel dimensions. That’s really easy to batch and doesn’t really have to be hands-on at all.
- Post-2010, though, I use many different devices, all spewing forth different resolutions, codecs, audio formats, and wrappers. I merge all my video into one file per day and combining all this stuff has been challenging. I have a program that can edit and merge many types of MP4 files without re-encoding, so there’s no loss of quality and it’s much faster. But it doesn’t work for all of them.
- Some MOV files are pretty much MP4 files wrapped up with a different file extension. Change the extension and they’re fine. Not all, though.
- It’s especially cumbersome to mix DV files at VGA resolution with more compressed HD video files that have different dimensions. Mind-numbingly so.
The process is basically just as confusing and annoying as watching cable or broadcast TV on different devices for the past five years or so. But soon I’ll have nice MP4 access copies of all my home video (I’ve shot a LOT of video over the years) and I’ll be able to plug a hard drive into the Roku and watch them with ease on the TV in the living room. but I’ve had. Assuming I ever want to see them again after this.
I could also stream them wirelessly but Ive had…um…mixed results with this.