Max and Darwyn colouring

Max and Darwyn colouring

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Max sings ABC's, Twinkle-Twinkle

Max has been doing this for a while now.  We finally managed to catch it on video.  These aren't his best performances.  But you get the idea.




Technical notes to myself (and other interested nerds)

The original videos produced by our camera were 130MB in MOV format.  I needed to compress them to a reasonable size for upload to blogger.  You'd think this would be easy.  You'd be wrong.

MOV is a proprietary Apple format.  Before anything can be done with it, it must be converted to AVI.  After much painful trial and error, I found Pazera does a good job.

Normally, AutoGK can be used to compress AVI videos very easily.  But sometimes AutoGK chokes on the audio stream.  This happened to me.  When this happens, you must manually "demux" the AVI file -- that is, remove the audio stream to produce a silent video.  Then use AutoGK to compress it.  Then "mux" your audio back in again.  Demuxing and muxing can be done with AVI-Mux GUI.  What a collossal pain.

5 comments:

  1. Great videos. Nice accompaniment, Dad. A little to much work to publish though.

    From one of Blogger's help pages:

    Note that Blogger accepts AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real and Windows Media files and that your video must be less than 100MB in size.

    This is pretty lame. Anyway, I don't think I've ever uploaded video to Blogger. Try a private upload to Youtube instead and just embed in Blogger, email, etc... Size is way less restrictive (20MB) and it supports .mov without conversion.

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    1. Thanks, Mike. I know it's a ridiculous amount of work for one blog post. But compressing videos is a tool I've wanted to acquire for a long time now. This post just provided a good impetus. I know I could have used Youtube. But I don't like Youtube so I avoid it when I can. Perhaps I'll break down and embrace Youtube in the future. But for now I'm holding out. Also, compressing videos allows me to conserve bandwidth. Think of it as taking my bike instead of driving a car. ;-)

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  2. that just kind of made my night :)

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  3. You ought to be able to use VLC's streaming and exporting wizard to convert the video from MOV to something more convenient. Handbrake ought to be able to do it too.

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  4. Bump. Where are all the blog posts? I want more photos and videos of my niece and nephew!

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