TSA lied with impunity, airport body scan images can and are stored after all…so smile you’re on candid camera, naked
by Admin on Aug.04, 2010, under Local News
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The TSA had claimed that electronic body scan images “cannot be stored or recorded,” and yet apparently tens of thousands of them made their way magically onto federal police agencies systems. These full body scanners, some using millimeter wave technology others backscatter X-rays, are now found in airports all over. You may have gone through them without even knowing it and been photographed nude practically.
Recently, some doctors and medical scientists, even some involved in the pioneering work of this technology now say that there are health risks to these scanners not just privacy issues… (see previous posts here..)
Ironically, there’s no major apology about “sex, lies, and videotape”. The TSA and the government seem to assume that everyone understood when they said images cannot be stored or recorded, that it actually meant that OF COURSE they WILL be recorded and stored! So no need to apologize because it should have been obvious from the get-go! They laugh because apparently they can do whatever they want and no one can stop them…”let them eat cake”…(just bread and games/entertainment will be the end of all…)
Is your vote becoming worthless? Voter enacted Proposition 8, making marriage between man and woman is overturned by a judge, is Federal uber alles? How about the State, how about the people?
by Admin on Aug.04, 2010, under Local News
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Regardless of where you stand on Proposition 8, you should be very much disappointed at the total disregard of the people when judges so easily rule against what the people have decided. Some might not care since this time the ruling is in their favor, but what about the legalization of marijuana? Wouldn’t these same people jump up and down and ‘demand’ the authority of the state to run things inside its own way? They don’t like it when the Feds come cracking down on the medicinal pot dispensaries, yet where are they to defend the state’s rights when it comes to upholding Proposition 8?
Supporting something you know is wrong, just because it benefits you at the time will eventually come back and bite you, what goes around comes around, the Biblical ‘you reap what you sow’ moral law/karma will always prevail in the end. Everyone should learn to stick together on the importance to protect STATE rights first of all or be ready to accept Federales Uberalles!
Long Live Vegas! I mean Sony Vegas, Las Vegas will likely burn in hell ;) How to fix Vegas by adding biggest missing feature, DirectShow support with AviSynth and video file wrapper
by Admin on Aug.04, 2010, under VideoFX
-->Sony’s Vegas Pro video editing and FX software is a nice little gem. It is a great stepping (up) stone for those who want to move to a very powerful yet very intuitively easy to learn video editing/compositing/effects system. Vegas Pro, for about $599, although some educational and other versions can be had for $300 and upgrades even cheaper, has some feature which some systems costing ten times as much don’t have. Due to its connection with “SoundForge”, a wonderful professional audio software, Vegas Pro also handles audio with ease. You can scrub live through even your Divx videoclips with ease, not just uncompressed clips, and you can hear the audio perfectly synced at varying rates, even backwards.
The most compelling feature though is its clear workspace layout and naturally intuitive workflow which allows one to just figure it out easily as you go, no reading manuals all day long. Also, because Sony had a big hand in the AVCHD HighDef codecs, it will probably handle your HD camcorder footage better than just about anything else. And although it supports a very very wide range of codecs both for import and export/rendering I did find a big flaw.
It seems like Sony Vegas does not support DirectShow, but uses VFW and uses its own codecs instead of the Windows “SYSTEM” codecs. Here’s the problem with this…
I did some screencaptures, I used the DIVX version 6.7 to encode the screencaptures and then opened them up with Sony to view a garbled mess. You see, with other players, they simply call on the DIVX system decoder and it works very nicely but apparently Sony Vegas Pro’s Divx decoder is a bit dated. There’s no solution to this even using Xvid Nic’s Four CC changer (which can help you get some Xvid files to “open” if vegas refuses to…)…..well actually there is a solution, here’s what I found that works for me.
Go Install AviSynth from here:AviSynth
Go Install Avs2Avi wrapper
(You can then right click on the .inf file and select “install” after which when you right click on an AviSynth file with .avs extension you can select “Wrap into Avi”)
After you did the above, all you need to do is open Notepad or some good ascii text editor and create a simple file with ending .avs extension with something like this in it:
DirectShowSource(“C:\MyVideos\DivxVideo.avi”, fps=24, audio = true)
Of course, change the path to correspond to your file path…. then do a right click on this .avs file you made and choose “Wrap into AVI” and then just drag and drop the resulting AVI file into Vegas Video.
That’s it! The video should then be working fine inside Vegas, using the DirectShow decoder. I should mention that the audio channel didn’t carry through, so I imported it separately.
OK 
if you want AUDIO to work also….I just got it to work using VFAPI…
Go download VFAPI here
Also download the READAVS from here
It’s important, because it wont work without the ReadAVS files.
To install VFAPI, after extracting the archive, VFAPIConv-1.05-EN.zip, run the batch file vifpset.bat , after that unzip the ReadAVS.zip archive and edit with NOTEPAD or other text editor the ReadAVS.reg registry file so that it reads something like this:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VFPlugin]
“Avisynth”=”C:\\ReadAVS.dll”
Please note that you’ll have to change the path to wherever you decide to put the “ReadAVS.dll” file….above, it means it expects to find it in the root of drive C which is probably not where you extracted it, so change that to reflect real location of readavs.dll file.
Afterward just run VFAPIConvEN.exe click Add, open the same .AVS text file from before , say ok, and then click “convert” button…it will take a bit and will create an .avi file for you which you can simply drag and drop into Sony Vegas Pro and this time it worked nicely for me, importing both the audio and video. The resulting .avi file created by VFAPI is almost 30megs compared to the very small 100Kilobytes .avi file when using the avs2avi method above. (The source/original divx6.7 video file is a little over 50megs)
(apparently there is yet another method using a program called MakeAvis which is included with ffdshow?)
On a related note? What’s your favorite high quality codec for small file size yet quality rendering?
Why Adobe After Effects is still King. The rest are still a work in progress…
by Admin on Aug.04, 2010, under Linux Unix Stuff, VideoFX
-->It’s been quite some time since I played around with Adobe After Effects, perhaps several years. And yet even with version 4 and on and on….it was quite “complete” in its features. It had and still has the widest range of plugins available. The latest incarnations, the CS series, currently the Adobe After Effects CS5 mainly adds native 64-bit OS support over CS4 along with Roto Brush tool and the mocha plugin.
Now I was always curious why so many raved about Eyeon (eyeonline website) FUSION years ago when it had no sound/audio support, and apparently years later it still doesn’t. The same thing can be said for D2/thefoundry’s NUKE or NukeX, again absolutely no support for audio, not even playback, forget about keeping it in the final render. Some would have you think that’s not a big deal….which is ludicrous.
Sure it isn’t ‘bad’ to own Nuke, NukeX or Fusion but my recommendation is if $10k is a lot of money to you, stick to Adobe After Effects. Its an unbelievable bargain for the power within it, and you won’t have to go through headaches of manually synchronizing audio clips. (frame numbering never agrees between applications with certain encoders like Divx etc and when you base it on time its not as accurate and forget about effects that change the timeline since then resyncing your audio will have you pulling your hair out and then jumping off a cliff.)
So why don’t these so called “high-end” FILM video compositing systems support audio? Adobe After Effects does, and does it well, which allows for easy usage of such great fx such as Trapcode Sound Keys and others. The music, audio/sound effects in a movie or a commercial are just as important as the video and there is no doubt being able modify one without having to redo the other is a very huge time saver.
So no, not having audio support doesn’t make those programs “cool” and “high-end” and not “bloated”, it makes them incomplete, a work in progress, beta software, at least not something that can be used without crutches.
I say this out of disappointment, because I really do prefer the NODE based workflow. I really enjoyed Silicon Grail, Rayz and also NothingReal Shake (then bought by apple to be cannabilized).
I’m now very curious about Autodesk TOXIK (it seems to borrow a lot from the ultimate Autodesk/Discreet FFI, Flame, Fire, Inferno along with their great keyers which used to be SGI only back in the days), which has been renamed Autodesk Maya Compositor and is included with Maya 2010. It also has a nice nodal based workflow reminiscent of SHAKE and I bet it probably can handle AUDIO, because Autodesk is a ‘real’ company
Spyware everywhere? please nuke it from NukeX, it reflects badly on D2, the foundry, see PluginInstaller.exe
by Admin on Aug.04, 2010, under Linux Unix Stuff, VideoFX
-->It has been discovered that the ever growing in popularity video compositing piece of software called Nuke or NukeX seems to have some spyware of sorts. Apparently, during installation, the PluginInstaller.exe which is automatically invoked tries to send information to the company’s servers, to the IP of The Foundry. Apparently the snippet of data sent may even be the user’s email address if they happened to be logged in to their account at that time, even if they did not provide any of that info during the installation. (Supposedly the firewall software caught the attempt to transmit snippets of data to their servers…)
Perhaps this should be double checked since it seems a bit unbelievable that legit companies would be doing this much. I would think likely maybe the PluginInstaller.exe was just trying to announce to their servers that someone had installed their software…and not to harvest any specific personal identification information. Also, apparently if the PluginInstaller.exe can not reach the network/internet, it stops/crashes and will not install.
Should windows’ built-in firewall warn users of programs attempting to send data out to the internet? It might get annoying seeing that each time you initiate a computer ’search’ there’s some packets sent to microsoft servers. Not to mention all the software ‘update’ programs you might have running.
Are there any really good firewalls out there that let you specify which programs can access what range of the network or internet? Let’s say you want to allow the program to access local network only, or perhaps to block it from communicating with a range of IPs or domain names but allow it access to the rest of the internet.
Washington BP – Politics, Greed, and Corruption spills into the Gulf. Louisiana oil spill from Horizon Deepwater explosion worse than Exxon Valdez yet cleanup efforts remain tangled in red tape and politics.
by Admin on Jul.11, 2010, under Local News
-->It’s common knowledge that a huge tanker retrofitted to skim huge amounts of oil from the spill has been waiting to be given clearance to start working on helping to clean up the spill. Dozens if not hundreds of other companies and even nations have offered similar help to skim oil and have been turned down. Washington says they are doing everything possible to clean up the mess and yet they are backing BP in turning away free help. Now of course not all this free help is purely philanthropic, likely whatever OIL these companies extract from the water they want to keep as their own. But apparently BP would rather let this oil, degrade into the water, as they have claimed would happen to much of it. They would rather destroy the environment pumping more chemicals into the water to break up the millions of barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf. (to be continued…ie Jones Law etc…)
Fedor, the last Emperor, regal even in defeat. Fabricio Werdum owes Minotauro Nogueira big time…
by Admin on Jul.03, 2010, under MMA Fighters and Boxers
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Fedor pic not sure after which fight
This was the real reason I’ve always had so much respect for Fedor Emelianenko, sure his pretty much perfect record until his match with Fabricio Werdum helped but I never considered him to be invincible or superhuman or stronger/tougher than everyone else. I thought Fedor was a very intelligent fighter, and that’s what made him so successful. Yet as even King Solomon had his blunders, now so does Fedor. He underestimated the physical strength in my opinion of Fabricio Werdum compared to Minotauro Nogueira.
I clearly remember cringing and being very nervous for Fedor in his fights against Minotauro Nogueira as he seemed to be unaware of the existence of the ‘triangle choke’. Later I figured out that he wasn’t concerned because he felt much stronger physically and could power out at will. In fact, I forget the entire quote, but Minotauro himself said, “I will never be as strong as Fedor..”
Perhaps Fedor is a little bit weaker than he was in his prime when he fought Minotauro, regardless of the BS from some old (over 40) fighters that they’re better than they ever were in their prime, I think many will tell you they feel a pretty big difference even one year away from their prime…there is a big fall-off that seems to happen and then a bit of a plateau for a couple more years before another big falloff, perhaps following natural body testosterone and growth hormone levels. This aging process not only makes a fighter less agile but weaker and not able to exercise at the same high intensity as before, not only that but they can no longer take a punch as well as before, and can not recover as quickly. Not to say a fighter can’t be much better in their forties than they were in their twenties if they had no brains back then…
So Fedor lost due to fight tactics that weren’t fixed to compensate for an opponent he could not easily physically overpower, and also because of that split second mistake he made right before the lock, the split-second hesitation as he put it….had his corner fixed his tactics he would not have to worry as much about such split second mistakes anyway….
So why does Fabricio Werdum owe Minotauro Nogueira? Simple, he obviously had the advantage of watching those fights and may have realized he could catch Fedor in a triangle choke if Fedor fought the same way. With only a minute into the fight there wasn’t much sweat to make submissions more difficult either. I even wonder if Fabricio purposefully tricked Fedor into coming down for an early ground and pound by feigning being hurt and letting himself go down to lure Fedor in to his game when he was in full control of his faculties. Perhaps it was all planned ahead of time, perhaps he got lucky it just happened that way and he was smart enough to make the right move to lock in deep in the split second Fedor hesitated which way to move. Fedor himself after the fact admitted that his hesitation proves he needs to practice his ground game some more so it becomes natural ‘instinct’ again not requiring any thought…a good observation.
Personally, I think Fedor should try to avenge his loss to Fabricio Werdum and then retire. There’s no reason he should keep on fighting, there’s a new breed of heavy weight fighters these days and he’s just too small. Sure, we’d all watch and cheer him on but why risk his health anymore fighting guys with over 30 pounds of muscle more than him? Especially being past his ‘prime’ and yes I definitely believe he is past his prime, he should try to avoid fights with guys bigger than him unless he has the advantage in experience/skill ‘and’ something else (such as if he’s smaller but equal in strength, or if he’s faster, or if he has a much better chin than the big opponent..). Otherwise, if one goes into a ring against an opponent who is naturally much bigger, has a much longer reach, a tougher chin, and just as good stamina due to younger age, it will be very hard to beat them barring their lack of brains/skills etc…I think we are beginning to see some very athletic ‘big guys’ at 265 lbs, and I don’t mean fat/obese amateur fighters, but these new naturally huge 265 pound fighters with a 7 or 8 inch reach advantage!
Teach one of these behemoths how to kick like Ernesto Hoost or other muay thai kickboxers and better have those stretchers handy for their one legged opponents. (…having been at 265lbs or more for many years, their bones, shins and all will be much stronger than other fighters’…black fighters in fact generally have a higher bone density than all others, medical data shows native indians coming in second followed by mexicans…many Brazilians I’d venture have better bone density than whites also…anyway I digress…but the point is once these big guys with super skeletons learn to kick decently it will be very hard for someone 40 or 50 pounds lighter to deal with them.)
As far as I know heavyweight scale right now is 206 lbs to 265 lbs and some organizations do not even have an upper limit… PrideFC had some very entertaining fights between huge 350 lb guys like Bob Sapp and 5′9″ Minowa the 194lb ‘Punk’ and others much smaller than him. It’s too bad there seems to be no place for really huge guys over 300lbs in the UFC. Personally I think we need more weight classes to make things more fair for those who are around 220lbs and those around 230lbs, and having super heavyweight 265+ so this way these big 265 guys can get some return karma when they start facing guys 300+
Now getting back to these new 265 pound fighers, I think that Alistair “Demolition Man” Overeem is a very dangerous fighter right now. He completely destroyed Brett Rogers and Brett Rogers did give Fedor a run for his money with a bloody and likely broken nose. Overeem is very tall also, same height as Brett Rogers and from what I saw of the fight he looked like a guy on roids, perhaps he’s never used any steroids, all the more impressive, the guy is huge. It doesn’t seem that he has as thick a bone structure as Brett Rogers but that means that at about the same weight he will be much stronger than Brett and can easily man handle him in wrestling/grappling to ground and pound.
Fabricio Werdum is only an inch shorter than Overeem but will likely still be clearly out-powered by the Demolition Man unless Fabricio decides to bulk up and if he can build it with all muscle not belly fat. One thing I’ve realized with many of these Brazilian fighters is that they seem to be pretty good at taking a punch…if so, it might be worth it for Werdum to try a little chute boxing and leg kicks on Overeem and try a couple a shots to his chin when he tires him or his legs out and then go for a submission. But to wrestle with Overeem right off the bat will be very tough…
Fedor will probably continue to be my favorite heavy-weight mma fighter but I think at 5 feet and 11 and a half inches (and 229 lbs), not truly even 6 feet tall as some stats list him, he is too small of a frame to face the new generation of agile/nimble 265 lbs decently skilled fighters emerging.
I wrote before an article “Will CroCop ever get a fair fight in the UFC?” explaining why I thought Mirko Cro-Cop’s time for fame was gone…that he was especially too small of a guy and also couldn’t take a punch too well so when he lost his biggest asset, the explosiveness of his kicks, he could not stay at the top of the game due to a lack of grappling/submission skills also…with age, explosive reflexes are first to go…and CroCop relied too much on his explosiveness, his speed…
My Original post on this subject I had started on the Matt Hughes forum, it was entitled something like “There’s no Justice over 205″ see http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/theres-no-justice-above-205-the-ufc-badly-needs-a-new-225-230lbs-weight-division.htm I don’t think it’s on the Matt Hughes website any longer though…
Best luck to Fedor in his next and last fight on his contract…and if he decides to continue fighting and take on these new huge monsters I’m sure just about everyone will be rooting for him, the David against these Goliaths…long live the king, long live the last emperor.
Lost in LOST again, hard to keep track of everything, seems like ABC put the steam back in the engine, everybody loves Hugo, will everybody love LOST again?
by Admin on Apr.22, 2010, under ABC LOST Episodes
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Yet, another intriguing episode, been a few in a row, I’m almost embarrassed to think perhaps I’ve turned soft and like them for the sappy love stories developing, don’t tell my woman! But really, the web of connections coming together brings a lot of excitement back to the series. Jack Shephard finally finds out indeed it was the evil smoke possessing John Locke’s form that pretended to be his father, though does the devil ever lie? His city parallel universe version Jack Shepard finds his sister, Claire (pregnant). I was trying to figure out why Desmond ran over John Locke, I think it was just to get him meet Jack Shepard perhaps but then the car scene seemed pretty brutal, like it could have easily ended in death, there must of been better ways to get them to meet than to almost kill John Locke. Well, can’t wait for the next one, its my dose of rest and relaxation these days…
HTML5 Video Streaming for iphone and ipad with Theora OGG Vorbis? Apple verus Adobe ok but is apple against open standards such as Theora and Ogg?
by Admin on Apr.18, 2010, under Linux Unix Stuff
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Well, as I promised I just did some Live Video streaming tests with Theora video format (using libtheora on linux). What I can report is a video delay of about 22 seconds. It was about 45 (stream was around 27kbps I think)seconds when I had ffmpeg take the 192 x 144 screencapture area and resize it to stream it at 320 by 240, of course at the new 320×240 it was a bit zoomed in but seems like also the transcoding to resize added about 20 seconds delay (stream was around 58k-65kbps from what I recall). The stream was the linux desktop screencaptured since I didn’t have a webcam on the remote linux box, I served the live screencam stream off of icecast server running on the same box and served it up to view back on my local windows xp desktop through an html5 simple page served by apache on that same box, using the video embed tag to serve the icecast theora live video stream. (there was no audio in the stream, no audio was captured and no audio channel streamed..)
(see my previous post for the audio streaming tests details http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/comparison-firefox-html5-realtime-audio-streaming-of-ogg-vorbis-versus-standalone-player-zinf-theora-libtheora-video-also.htm )
Perhaps I should also mention that I was doing the screencapture of the remote linux box while being logged in to it remotely with NX (using freenx nxserver), but it was just a physical box, not a VMware virtual machine, VPS etc…so I think delay due to graphics driver issues can be overlooked, it was quite responsive and robust while using it through NX (by nomachine) remote desktop.
It’s quite unfortunate that currently video streaming is in a huge disarray, there’s nothing that works on everything, you have to recode/transcode for different platforms and serve with different servers. Apple may claim they’re the good guys pushing for HTML5 standards versus Adobe Flash proprietary plugins but some would say they are dishonest if they would try to play the pro-standards good guy when they do not wish to support OGG and Theora instead of their own AAC format etc…so sure html5 currently supports theora on the desktop but far as I know nothing supports theora on mobile platforms, they support only mpeg4/flac/aac/h264 etc..hopefully this will change soon but with everyone trying to push their own proprietary technology it may take a while if the consumers don’t force them to by demanding open protocols. (just don’t watch streams encoded in PATENT encumbered formats, if everyone did that you’d be amazed at how quickly open patent-free formats would become the most widely used…
Has the serpent given us the ‘forbidden Apple’?
Comparison, FireFox html5 realtime audio streaming of OGG Vorbis versus standalone player Zinf, theora libtheora video also
by Admin on Apr.17, 2010, under Linux Unix Stuff
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Well, I was bored I guess so I wanted to check out FireFox’s new html5 audio and video tag support. I was able to play a Theora encoded ogg file just fine using Firefox video tag, this was a file I had created using linux screen capture. Anyway, I was more interested in serving a live shoutcast/icecast stream to firefox html5 for a quick easy way to embed live stream without any plugins. I found that it did indeed work, I was broadcasting live through my microphone on my windows desktop computer (Windows XP) to my linux shout server and was listing to the feed back on my windows desktop but at a whopping FULL minute delay! Yes, no kidding everything I said was delayed by a full 60 seconds.
So while it certainly did work just fine, the audio wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t choppy, it didn’t break up, worked fine other than being a full minute behind. I decided to not change anything except the player, I started up Zinf application/player and loaded up my streaming URL into it. I then did the delay test and it was about half of the delay with FireFox, about 30 (closer to 25) seconds or so delay only. It also took considerably longer to do the initial connection with firefox which took around ten or more seconds while with Zinf it only took a second or two for the buffering to complete and the audio to start coming in..and I should mention that streaming live mp3 at 128kbps took only a split second to connect to live stream with Zinf and flash player on website and the delay was just 4 seconds long.
Bear in mind that I was streaming at about 16-20Kbps only! With a Vorbis quality setting of -1 and without stereo, just a Mono stream sampled at 11025 rate. Cranked up to the highest Vorbis quality settings and streaming at around 450Kbps or more, with Zinf I was able to get the delay down to just two seconds! Still can’t jam live over the internet at near zero latency ASIO levels but its good enough for a live broadcast internet radio station.
Next, I’m planning to do some tests with live streaming video in ogg container, theora format and see what kind of video delay I’ll get.
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