Day: February 10, 2007

Hitching Post

Hitch

Mark Evanier isn’t a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. But, then, he doesn’t like cole slaw either. Hitchcock is my favorite director, at least up to Psycho, but Evanier considers even that movie a disappointment.

Hitchcock can, I suppose, be categorized as a genre director of thrillers; but that would be the same as saying John Ford was a genre director of westerns, or Frank Capra specialized in screwball comedies.

NPR has a feature on a new book about the music in Hitchcock’s movies. Click here to hear. The audio player below has Bernard Herrmann conducting a brilliant arrangement of his music for Psycho, 14 minutes long, that I transferred from an old LP.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/Psycho.mp3]

Skeletons in the Closet

The recent announcement of the eternally embracing skeleton couple brought to mind the 1929 Disney cartoon, “The Skeleton Dance”. But I’d better not post it, because Disney is notoriously intolerant. So I’ll do the next best thing.

“The Skeleton Dance” was animated by Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Iwerks, who later briefly had his own cartoon studio. Iwerks created Flip the Frog, and while Flip was a forgettable character some of his cartoons are worth watching. “Spooks” from 1932 is one of them.

Now With MORE Storage!

After five months of blogging, and being generous with video, I’ve managed to use up 3.25 gigabytes out of a 50 GB quota. That’s 6.5%. Oh, no! I’m going to run out! Must get more! (That’s a joke for my wife.) But now I do have more. The Web-hosting service has increased the quota to 200 GB!

Obviously, at this rate I can keep going essentially forever. So I’ll increase the rate. The videos are encoded in Adobe Flash to stream at 512 Kb (that’s bits, not bytes) per second. The free Flash video (FLV) encoder I use works well, and I’m utterly reliant upon it, so I sent the programmer some money via PayPal. But the quality for a given bit rate isn’t as good as Windows Media Video 9 (WMV), or Flash 8.

There’s no way I’m going back to WMV9, because it isn’t cross-platform compatible and it doesn’t support a preview still frame. The problem with FLV8 is that it must be purchased from Adobe and it’s very expensive.

So what I’ll do to improve video quality is take advantage of all this storage capacity I have at no additional cost. I’m kicking up the bit rate for the videos by 50% or more. This will mean longer download times at your end. If you have trouble with sputtering-and-buffering playback, let me know.