I have no words to express how sad i feel regarding the sudden and unexpected death of Michael Jackson. The music just lost an icon and a true creative person.
Rest in Peace Michael Jackson, only God will judge you now, and thank you for the Music, after all, thats your legacy.

Sincerely, Diego.

The following tribute video is something that i did like a year ago, enjoy.

So yesterday I downloaded the new Safari 4 beta release from Apple… and yes, it is faster, the new “top sites” feature is kinda “cool”, but I happen to see way too much “Chrome like” UI features here, specially, the new tabs design. Apple clearly wanted to imitate the tabs in Chrome, but they did it wrong, because, if you have 3 opened tabs and you want to reach the 3rd one, the distance between Tab 1 and Tab 3 is more than 2/3 of your screen (or more than 1000 pixels in most standard screens).

Die hard apple fanboys have told me things like “It’s just a matter of getting used to them” or “You have to use keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs”.

Well, let me tell you that i see no reason why i should “get used” to something that I don’t like at all, and let me also tell you that when I’m browsing the web, i usually DON’T use the keyboard at all which is why I’m blaming at the new tabs. Of course, thanks god you can switch back to the old tabs scheme, but right now, the preference is hidden, so i really hope that apple adds this as a standard preference for the final release.

Anyway, a video is better than a thousand words.

Last minute note…. while editing this post, i found that Safari 4 breaks the Rich Text Editor in Wordpress, but since it is yet a beta, i guess it’s ok.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

For those of you who know me because of my music, here is a snippet of what is coming.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Instruments and Software Used for this track:

• Roland XV-5080, JV-2080 and XP-80.
• Korg Legacy Collection (MS-20 and Polysix)
• Rob Papen Albino 3.
• Waves TrueVerb, the amazing API eq’s.
• Focusrite MixMaster Platinum.
• Native Instruments Battery & Kontakt.
• Cubase SX3 Mac.

Produced and Composed by Diego Massanti (aka Insphire) 2008.
ASCAP / BMI / SADAIC by Diego Massanti. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of this material for commercial purposes is forbidden.

So i have a lot of family videos on several analog media (VHS-C, Super VHS, Hi-8 and 8mm) that i want to finally convert to something not so vulnerable to aging, DVD being an option but Blu-Ray saying “me! me!” on my head.

Even the fact that I have several workstations with professional level video capture devices, those machines are usually working doing renders or any other thing and is not that I can waste days capturing all that media there, so i decided to buy one of those EasyCap devices on eBay and give it a try.

The specifications are pretty outstanding for what it is, and specially, for the $15 price… AND it is compatible with Mac OS (by using the non-free VideoGlide app) which makes it even better.

Just some highlights:

• Complies with Universal Serial Bus Specification Rev 2.0
• Supports NTSC, PAL (B), Video format
• Video input: RCA composite or S-Video
• Audio input: Stereo audio (RCA)
• Dimension(Main Body): 8.8cm x 2.8cm x 1.8cm typical credit card size is 8.5cmx5.4cm)
• Powers by USB 
• Supports high quality video resolution for 
• NTSC: 720 x 480 @30fps
• PAL: 720 x 576 @25fps

Im still waiting for it to arrive, and i will post several video examples and personal impressions as soon as i get it.

Some days ago, I published a tutorial with some bash scripts to automate the whole process of encoding MP4 files with H264 video and HE-AAC audio which are playable by flash players and the like.

Since I’m working on a really big project which involves a “youtube like” behavior, i though it would be cool to also create iPhone / iPod compatible streams (I’m amazed at the fact that 3% of the people coming to this site is using iPod’s or iPhone’s)… so, I did some modifications to the original script for it to generate the compatible streams.

Now, how am i dealing with this… well… let me explain you:

The iPhone specification states:

Video formats supported: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats

This means that the high profile streams that I am generating with the MKMP4 script won’t play, simple as that. So i have 2 possible approachs:

1. I could just use a single low profile stream for the iPhone and iPod, and since the stream is H264 and low complexity AAC audio, it will just play fine on the flash players too.
2. I could have 2 different files, one for the flash players (making use of b-frames, entropy coding, and a high profile stream, which substantially improves the final video quality).

I decided to use the option 2, mostly because i want to give desktop users as much quality as possible, and i want to use the HE-AAC encoder to save some extra bandwidth that i can instead use for the video stream, so I am using 2 different files, one for desktop users, and a different one for iPhone or iPod users.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been nothing but amazed about the feedback that i got on my prior tutorials on how to automate the whole chain of free and open source tools to create amazing quality video at really low bitrates (great for flash streaming, etcetera).

I usually write such tools and scripts for myself or for clients, but due to the fact that it seems a lot of people is interested in the process, I’m releasing here the new version of my encoding tools for the Mac and any Linux / Unix variant.

Needed tools and applications

For all this to work, you will need the following things

• The latest GIT version of the one and only x264 encoder.
• The latest SVN version of mplayer
• The latest version of the GPAC utilities
• My build of the 3GPP HE-AAC encoder if you are on a Mac, or the Nero Digital Audio Encoder if you are on unix / linux.

Extra pre-requisites for Mac OS X

Mac OS X users need to install the Apple Developer Tools (aka XCode) in order to compile software, also, for building the x264 encoder, you will need to get and install YASM.

Now, you have to build and install all the tools, AND they have to be on any directory in your executable path. My scripts assume that all the tools are in your executable path.
Read the rest of this entry »

As you maybe know, time is a commodity these days, but i took some hours to fix some bugs and update several things in MediaInfo Mac.
Most of the fixes are related to the usability aspect of this little tool, as in, improved open and save dialogs, etc, but there is also some speed improvement in the parsing routines, and, the application is 64bit ready now (for capable hardware).
For the late comers, MediaInfo Mac is a Macintosh version of an amazing tool (called MediaInfo) created by Jerome Martinez, you can find more info about his incredible work by going here.

If you want to download MediaInfo Mac, you can visit the official site by going here… or, if you are lazy, you can just grab the latest version by clicking here.

Below is a little video demo of what the application can do and what kind of detailed information you should expect when processing video / audio files.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

As usual, questions, comments and suggestions are welcome

So you are moving your website or blog to a new domain / url, but what happens to all that people and search engines trying to reach the OLD domain that you are leaving ?

Well, as you maybe noticed, I have moved my blog to a subdomain (yes, now this blog is at http://blog.massanti.com) and i was somehow worried about how to deal with all that people and search engines still going to the OLD url (http://massanti.com), so obviously, one thing came to my mind: “Apache redirects”.

This took me a whole 5 minutes to write, so I’m writing it here just for anybody interested.

Basically, the goal was to redirect anybody going to massanti.com/someblog/post/here to blog.massanti.com/someblog/post/here AS LONG as the file doesn’t exists on massanti.com: i.e: i don’t want massanti.com/somedir/somerealpage.html being redirected to blog.massanti.com/somedir/somerealpage.html.

So what i did was to create a .htaccess file in the root directory of massanti.com with the following contents:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.massanti.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</ifmodule>

Let’s analyze this:

• The ifmodule encapsulation is self explanatory, it basically means “do whatever you find inside me only if the mod_rewrite module is enabled”.
• The first RewriteCond line takes whatever url parameter we get and checks if a real file exists, while the 2nd line does the same, but for directories.
• The “[NC]” bit in each of the conditions tells mod_rewrite to ignore casing.
• The RewriteRule line will only execute IF ANY of the 2 RewriteCond conditions is TRUE (if no real file and no real directory is found in the file system matching the URL request), AND if that happens, it will redirect the client’s browser or search engine to the new page (blog.massanti.com/ + the requested URL) and it will send a 301 permanent redirect header, telling the browser and search engines that the redirection is permanent, hence, causing most search engines, browsers and RSS readers to automatically update all the URL’s to the new ones.

How can you feel sad for the passing away of somebody that you don’t even know in person, how could you cry like a baby about somebody you only knew on an internet forum and IRC Channels…

Am i weird ? am i sick ?

It was with terrible sadness that i did read the news today, one of our members at insanelymac, just passed away… 17 years old, Cancer.

His name was Anthony Muoio and he was better known in the community under the nickname “PRawker”.

I don’t have words to express what i feel inside myself right now, I’m trying too hard not to cry again, and the sound of the unexplanable is the only thing that i can hear.

I think i will miss you, I think we all will miss you, like somebody else said…

“Goodbye, Prawker, you were taken from us far too soon.”

Hi there visitors, I’m amazed to see the growing numbers on the stats for this site, so, thank you very much to all the people who comes here to read (and comment) about some of my writings, specially the video / audio related ones.

I am also amazed by the fact that i have 762 suscribers to this blog, i NEVER expected to reach that number…. really, so Thank you again.

There are some posts on this blog who happen to have more than 60 comments, and i was thinking about the possibility to add a forum to this site, in order to create a better place to discuss, share and learn about the things we happen to share ( serverside video encoding techniques, audio encoding, etc ).

I am pretty aware that there are already several forums and communities covering those aspects, but they are, imho, too big and they cover way too much topics.

So I’m hearing for opinions, do you think that adding a forum to this site could help to a better discussion and sharing of knowledgements ? Any feedback is welcome

Diego.