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Wow!
About a month ago, my hero Glenn Beck had actor, writer, artist, etc. William Shatner on his television program for an hour-long interview. I missed it and didn't record it so I was very pleased to find out it was re-run this last Friday and got snagged on my DVR.
Wow!
That interview was just amazing and, surprisingly, contained almost no Star Trek content whatsoever. There were some clips from Star Trek shown when they were talking about Shatner's reputation for "overacting" but that's about it.
What did they talk about for an hour if not Star Trek? Some politics, some philosophy, some Shatner history, and alcoholism (Shatner's third wife suffered from alcoholism and it ended up claiming her life.)
Maybe I enjoyed it so much because it was just an almost-informal hour of discussion between two of my favorite people.
It looks like some dude on YouTube has done the honors of capturing the entire hour in six parts. At least he a real job of capturing the video and didn't just smack a Flip video camera in front of the TV like I've seen some people do!
Here are the obligatory links:
After the MiniDV videotape camcorders and before the explosion of hard disk camcorders,
several manufacturers were making these camcorders that would record directly to DVD media. A handful of them recorded to full-size DVD media, but most recorded to a small (~3 inches in diameter) mini-DVD media. One of these discs can hold about 30 minutes of SD (740x480, 30 frames per second) video or about 1.4GB of data.
A couple years ago, I was working on a video editing project and one of my sources was from one of these mini-DVD camcorders. One of the perks of the mini-DVD format is you can throw it right into a DVD player and it plays it, without much grief, like a normal DVD movie. There's even a scene-selection menu that shows you thumbnails of images to select scenes recorded on the DVD.
I think the mini-DVD format was a great idea for people who just want to videotape an event and throw it in the DVD player, but it's not so good for someone who wants to edit the video on the computer. The camcorder manufacturers probably shipped the cameras with some kind of conversion program to extract the video from the discs and convert it into an editable format, but since I didn't own one of these mini-DVD camcorders, I didn't have such software.
A little googling and I found the answer!
Check out this command:
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile dvd.vob
This mplayer command may be familiar to those who rip video from DVDs to convert it to an MPEG4 format or something similar.
I can't edit a VOB file, so I needed to convert the VOB into, preferably, an AVI. Most of the AVIs I edit are DV format AVIs that I get off my DV camcorders. I knew if I could get the video on the mini-DVD into that format, I'd be in heaven. I didn't find a direct way to do this, but I did find two more steps that would do it.
ffmpeg -i dvd.vob -target dv dvd.dv
cat dvd.dv | dvgrab -f dv2 -s 0 -stdin
The first command (ffmpeg) converts the VOB into raw DV data. This is data you could stream to a camcorder and store on a tape. It's not in an AVI container, but it's close. The next command (dvgrab) is usually used for capturing video from IEEE 1394 (Firewire) video devices, but being that it has an option (-stdin) for reading data from standard input, we can use it to convert our raw DV data to an AVI.
Voila!
It pays to study your history or else you're doomed to repeat it.
View the video segments on YouTube.
Some people have seen this, but now I've uploaded it to YouTube.
This is a video I put together on September 12, 2001. I guess it was my way of dealing with the grief I was feeling after the 9/11 attacks. The footage was taken in 2000 while I was in New York for the LinuxWorld conference at the Javitz Center. My buddy Chadd and I walked from Midtown to the World Trade Center.
I'm not sure why I hadn't uploaded this video before, but I was inspired to do it tonight. You can watch it on YouTube by going here.
You can also read my September 12, 2001 entry.
I think this will be the last interview video from the 2007 Utah Open Source Conference. This is Derek Carter of NeverBlock talking about Xen, virtualization, and his history using and teaching about Linux and open source software.
I think I may be able to put together video for one more conference session, but otherwise, we're pretty much done with video for the 2007 conference. We're looking forward to doing a better job of recording all the keynotes and sessions at the 2008 conference.
You can see this video and many others by going to my YouTube Open Source TV playlist, or by visiting the UTOSF YouTube group.
I've uploaded two more videos to YouTube for OpenSourceTV.tv.
First, we have an interview with Clint Savage of the Utah Open Source Foundation and the main driving force behind last year's first Utah Open Source Conference.
Next, we have an interview with Scott Paul Robertson (AKA "spr") who gave a presentation at UTOSC 2007 on Django and who is also the author of one of my favorite open source utilities: oggify.
I've got at least one more interview to edit and upload and we also have other content coming soon as well.
You can see Clint's interview and Scott's interview and many others by going to my YouTube Open Source TV playlist, or by visiting the UTOSF YouTube group.
Reporting from the 2007 Utah Open Source Conference! This has been a remarkable experience seeing the community of Utah open source fans gather for fun, enlightenment, and education.
I have not been able to attend too many conference sessions, unfortunately. I had planned to, but I’ve been distracted by a new role doing interviews for Open Source TV — a project being driven by KnowledgeBlue.
Yesterday, I interviewed Dax Kelson of Guru Labs and Jared Smith of Digium. Both interviews went very well, I thought.
Today, I am hoping to talk to Pete Ashdown of XMission, Christer Edwards of ubuntu-tutorials.com, Tim Riker, Tim Nicholes of Apache, and Scott Paul Robertson (spr).
I’m also giving my presentation on NetworkManager later this afternoon.
Episode 2 of Solitary World has finally hit the YouTube!
In this episode, I talk about NetworkManager which is software for Linux that makes connecting to networks easier and more intuitive. My buddy Dave Baker and I discuss a ridiculous press release that was released in June about research into teens and the Internet. The results will shock you! Well, not really.
Watch the episode on the Solitary World website or on its very own YouTube page.
Fozzout.
And here's the second part of that Sons Of Nothing concert I uploaded to Google Video. See previous entry for the others. This is Sons Of Nothing in Spokane, WA July 2006.
I went on a video-uploading rampage last night and uploaded a whole DVD's worth of video from a Sons Of Nothing show from last summer. We played at The Big Easy in Spokane, Washington. It was one of the nicest venues we ever played at and the whole experience was great fun. I really regret we didn't have two or three cameras capturing the event for posterity.
The audio comes off the soundboard and sounds great.
So, sit back. relax, slip yourself something if that's your thing. Envelope yourself in the music of Sons Of Nothing as they pay tribute to Pink Floyd (and play a couple of their own tunes.)
- 1 - Speak To Me/Breathe
- 2 - On The Run
- 3 - Time
- 4 - In The Flesh
- 5 - What Do You Want From Me
- 6 - Welcome To The Machine
- 7 - Mother
- 8 - Mr. Serious
- 9 - Wish You Were Here
- 10 - Echoes
That's the first set from the show. I'll put putting up the second set as well in the next day or so.
