[Shana]Preview of my first AMV project

Here's a preview of my aforementioned AMV. :)

Someone asked me if I have a deadline for completing the video. Not really, I just want something to work on that feels productive. Up 1:24 of video, that's the beginning of the song all the way through the part I used as a "preview." Of course the song is 6:11 so I've still got a bit to go before its done.

Its a harder process than I might have assumed, I've listened to the song plenty of times and read the lyrics even more now in both Japanese and English trying to find parts that make me "see something" and then I search through all the hours of the video I have to find clips I want. And then there's the processing... the last few builds actually took a few minutes to encode.

One issue I didn't expect is that the software I'm using for video doesn't support playing sound from videos. It supports sound in the videos, it just won't play it. So I've got to open my audio in a separate program to "measure" the music.

Anime Music Videos

I've decided its about time I finally make my own anime music video. The song I've decided to make one to isn't anything I'm too familiar with actually. Its AIR's opening theme, Tori no Uta. I have seen an episode or two of Air, but I just stumbled across the song surfing YouTube; and here's a particularly handy video with Japanese subtitles. Incidentally, about half of the video clips I've noted that I want to use are from Clannad (Clannad and Air are both productions of Kyoto Animation and based on Key games). The other half come from Shakugan no Shana. Its my first AMV, but its a great song and I've picked two animes I love, so wish me luck so that I won't disgrace it too much! hehe =)

DVD Authoring

Meet DVD Flick. The first free open source software solution to catch my eye for creating DVD videos. Much to my surprise it even supports the ever-popular Matroska (.mkv) container file format. Menu creation, video and audio recoding, and subtitles are all supported. After the software has finished with this it then supports authoring and finalizing the DVD. I'm trying my first experiment with it as we speak and will hopefully update with good results after I attempt to play this on a DVD player.

Update: A few days later
Okay so it works, but the video playback was a bit choppy on my PlayStation 2. This is the only system I've tested it on so far so perhaps other players might do better, but that's doubtful in my opinion as the "chops" are very regular as in being at the exact same place. Not unwatchable by far but it was a little disappointing. Maybe I'll have better luck if I play with the settings and try again. YMMV.

Tsuruya + Haruhi = Misao?

After watching both of Kyoto Animation's recent animes Lucky Star and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, one will be quick to notice the many references to the latter which often are lampshaded throughout Lucky Star.

While most of these are noted across the net, one thing which I hardly ever see anyone else mention strikes me. Lucky Star's character Misao Kusakabe has a strong resemblance to a character we know and love from Haruhi; Haruhi herself. Eye color, hair color and usual style, and even height, relative to the other characters, match to a T. But this is with one small addition. The "cute little fangs" of Tsuruya, a.k.a. LOL Fang-tan.

Tsuruyu-san

+

Haruhi Suzumiya


=


Misao Kusakabe

Google's Little SSL Problem

I'm not a usual user of Google Chrome. But I must say that I find it slightly surprising that Google's warning for SSL misidentification popups when I attempt to use the Gmail domain as a shortcut to mail.google.com with the HTTPS protocol.

Chrome is quick to notice that Gmail's certificate is for mail.google.com instead of gmail.com.

Project AD2

Since the comeback of Al1enDesigns, my old code has been having a bit of a complication which I'm not entirely sure of the exact cause of, but I'm putting the blame to poor coding style.

At the current time I'm working on approaching my content management system all over again. This time, I'm approaching it from an object oriented angle. I've been referring to this little project of mine as AD2.

Progress has been slow at best thus far. I've been hacking away on the many problems that have been coming up lately and I seem to be slowly gaining experience with PHP's style of OOP (as prior to this I've only used OOP in C++ and Java).

AD2 OOP Tech Demo

Of course, right now at least, you can't see what's really going on, just that it works. Maybe I'll manage to get some screenshots or class hierarchy information put up for criticism.

MTP on Linux

Some surfing on the web reminded me to investigate developments in the area of using MTP on Linux. I had attempted this once in the past and failed to manage to connect to my MTP MP3 player. Some homework today led me to an article on mounting MTP on Linux over at abi.

At the first step I had to substitute the following command on my Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

sudo apt-get install mtpfs

The rest of the steps worked perfectly as is, and to my surprise, mounted my Samsung YP-P2!

A quick follow-up:
Since I'm incredibly lazy, I just wrote a couple scripts for mounting and unmounting my P2 on Ubuntu.

p2.mount

#! /bin/sh
sudo mtpfs -o allow_other /media/p2.mount

p2.unmount

#! /bin/sh
sudo umount /media/p2.unmount