I’m in the middle of an extremely “First World” sort of project, re-calibrating the video projector, now that it has more than 500 hours on the lamp. Grayscale tracking is done, and tomorrow I’ll tweak the color gamut. The next thing after that will be figuring out what to do with the tangled mess of A/V cables.
For Christmas I gave the missus a Kindle Fire HDX 7″. Couldn’t resist the $179 special price. The picture and sound are amazing but, like all Android-based products, Adobe Flash isn’t supported, and this site relies on Flash plugins for audio and video. So here I’m testing an HTML5 plugin for MP3 and MP4.
I’m very fond of the Flash audio player plugin, but the old, old WordPress theme that I’ve used lo these seven years causes it to conflict with the HTML5 plugin. I tried a workaround that doesn’t work, and now I’ve switched themes to accommodate this, and I’m still hitting a problem — two in fact — so now I’m disabling the plugin and going with the HTML5 media support that’s built into WordPress, which has fixed one issue but introduced another. Aaugh! Everything was running so nicely for such a long time, that this sort of frustration was inevitable.
Video support is also rather limited compared to the Flash plugin I’ve used, which can be adjusted to fix an incorrect aspect ratio, and smooth out a picture when it isn’t run in its original resolution. Both problems are apparent here.
For a long time I have been intending to restore a lot of video clips that were taken offline when I changed web hosting services, but now I also have to contemplate converting them from FLV to MP4. What a painful undertaking!
Well, the little TEAC CD-ROM reader has met its match in a particular CD-R disc. After a certain point it got into trouble, gave up and popped the lid open. But everything up to that track was good, and having only one disc in the retry pile is certainly a lot better than it had been.
Those headphones are the Pioneer SE-A1000. It’s one of those items that Amazon sometimes has in stock, other times it’s “fulfilled by Amazon” or some other seller. I paid $59 for my pair, and I recommend them highly for those with a large hat size, like myself, and where a very long cord is needed, which is not what I need them for at the moment. The SE-A1000 is excellent for very critical listening. The sibilance in the vocals of certain less-than-perfect recordings can sometimes be over-emphasized, but that same quality makes the SE-A1000 perfect if you’re comparing an MP3 copy to the original, or trying to distinguish between a CD data error and a splice in the master tape of a recording.
I’ve been struggling with a project at home for some time, ripping a bunch of CD-R’s to MP3. Some of the discs simply could not be read by any of the combi-DVD/CD drives I have. The only player that worked at all is a dedicated CD reader that came with the Compaq computer I bought on October 25, 2001 — the day that Windows XP was released. But some songs wouldn’t finish ripping, and even if they did finish it could take hours, and even with error correction enabled on the drive the results were awful, as heard on the audio player’s first track. The song, by Bonnie Guitar, was #27 on the Billboard music charts the week of June 24, 1957. The second track on the player has a clean rip of the song from the CD-R.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2013/12/1st+rip.mp3,https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2013/12/2nd+rip.mp3|titles=Bonnie Guitar: Dark Moon – bad rip,Bonnie Guitar: Dark Moon – good rip]You would think the first recording was taken from a badly scratched record, and the second from a CD, but they both came from the same CD-R. What made the difference? An amazingly nimble 10-year-old TEAC CD210-PU USB CD-ROM reader I got hold of that sails through the same discs that gave five other units a fit.
That same week in 1957, another recording of the song, done by Gale Storm, was #7 on the Billboard chart, and it makes for an interesting comparison to Bonnie’s version. I hear a definite Elvis influence here.
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2013/12/GStorm.mp3|titles=Gale Storm: Dark Moon]The Web site name TVonline.cc was registered this past February 2, by somebody in Iran — if the domain administrator information is to be believed — and the site supposedly originates in California, west of Reno, Nevada. Wait! Now it’s in Germany. I don’t know where the video I’m watching now is coming from. What’s the video? Last week’s installment of Breaking Bad.
This isn’t a Torrent site, and it’s offering free embedded videos of popular TV shows that play through Flash, like most everything else does in a Web browser. I don’t know how they’re getting their material, but the quality is excellent, even in full-screen. I can’t imagine that any of the programs have been licensed, and I have to wonder how long TVonline will last before it’s forced to shut down.
Next February with be the 20th anniversary of when I first connected to the Internet from home by dialup modem, and yet being online still seems like a new thing to me, maybe because streaming media is still in flux. Netflix started its streaming video service in 2007, and the turmoil in TV land continues with Aereo, the DVR in the Cloud. It’s taking way too long for broadcasters and cable TV providers to adjust to online services that challenge their out-of-date business models.
