SDSL is coming

After something like three years with asymmetric connectivity (less upstream than downstream), I've finally decided to order a SDSL line again. Even though it means I'll have to afford a 200% increase of ISP charges.

Back in Nuernberg almost ten years ago, I used to have an analogue leased line which ran at mind-blowing 33.600bps. Later I used the same line type with two Pairgain SDSL modems at about 1.5MBps... this is still the line where some of my old systems like coruscant.gnumonks.org, sungate.gnumonks.org and corellia.gnumonks.org are located.

Putting together a conference schedule for 2005

After being invited to CLUC in Zagreb, Croatia and Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2005 I'm trying to decide which conferences to visit this year.

As usual, I'll be at LinuxTag, Linux Kongress, Ottawa Linux Symposium and Chaos Communication Congress.

Another likely candidate is this years hacker summer camp What the Hack in the Netherlands, even though it quite closely follows OLS.

www.gpl-violations.org was down

If it wasn't for some user sending me email about the gpl-violations.org web-server being down, I wouldn't have noticed it. Apparently I made a stupid mistake while adding a new vhost to the apache2 config on that machine that went unnoticed until apache was restarted.

I'm not going into the embarrassing details here, but I would like to reveal that it was related to a new web-page called gpl-devices.org which I am about to launch. Let's see whether I can turn my ideas about it into reality, or if I never find the time, like with other interesting projects :(

Anyway, I'd like to apologize for the downtime. If someone had sent me an email earlier... *sigh*.

Frame Accurate Cutting of MPEG2/MPEG4/OGG

Since I now have the job of cutting (cropping/clipping) the A/V recordings of the more than 200 presentations of 21C3, I've been looking for a number of days for available free software to do GOP / key frame accurate cutting of MPEG2, mp4 and OGG/Vorbis files.

As for OGG/Vorbis, the vorbis-tools package contains a program called vcut, which basically does almost the full job. However, it's a bit clumsy to use, since it always splits a original file into two halves, before and after the cut position. I've modified it a bit in order to accommodate my needs better.

As for combined audio+video containers such as MP4, it becomes a bit more difficult, since you need to find key frames for both audio and video as close as possible to the user-specified cut point.

However, after learning a bit about Apple Quicktime and the MP4 container, plus the help of libmp4v2 from the MPEG4IP package, I was able to create a small tool for key-frame accurate cutting, too.

For MPEG2, there is lve (Linux Video Editor). This program even provides a graphical user interface for navigation through the video, creating clips and a cut&paste interface. Unfortunately the UI is not intrusive in any way, and it even seems to use it's own toolkit. After playing with it for more than 45 minutes, I wasn't able to actually cut a single video using it :(

Since MPEG2 is not a priority at the moment (we need to make .ogg and .mp4 available for download ASAP), I deferred this problem for now.

Maybe at some point I'll find the time to put together all the pieces and create some generic media cutting/clipping/cropping tool for any kind of format. However, judging from the differences of the media formats, there wouldn't be much more common code than parsing the command-line options ;)