When I get behind at work and can’t spend my lunch reading this here interweb tube thingie.
I have posted the QotD and something else I’m sure you’ll enjoy below, but right now, I would like to ask you for a favor. Don’t worry, it is a time favor and nothing much more.
I want you to click on this link right here. Let me explain.
When I made the video of Polly the Hungry Turtle last week, I tried to watch it at work, off a CD-R using Windows Media Player, but it would not play. It told me I was missing some “codec” that WMP couldn’t find on the net.
However, I can watch it at the RNS Blogstation just fine, using every MPEG-2 compatable player I have. SO, I am asking y’all to download that short video off the RNS server and tell me whether you can watch it or not, and then leave your results, along with what program you used to get them. I will be wanting to try and separate myself from the Google monoploy on interweb streaming video in the future and am trying to figure out if I am doing something wrong or if the WMP at work is just retarded.
The vid was shot by the wife over the weekend. I was out firing up Grimm to take him for a spin and top off the fuel tanks, and she thought it’d be cute to use my new video cam against me.
I’ve edited it down to less than 4 seconds long/2.02MB for a quick download, and yes, there is sound.
As a thank you/reward of sorts, I am also offering up this video of a rather scary bit of new Big Brother Tech being put to use by the po-po in British Columbia, Canada.
It’ll read 3000 license plates in an hour and the list of who and what gets loaded into it’s recognition DB is a bit scary, though they justify it as “For the Common Good” and “Making police work easier”.
Make sure you watch it all the way through. The last line sounds a bit creepy to me, coming from a police officer from another soverign nation.
Sent to me by my co-worker, Paul.
One of the reasons I wish I’d left the GA plates on my car: no front plates. Same in SC.
Makes photo radar and other such devices impotent. Not so sure about redlight cameras.
VLC media player 0.8.4a on my Windows box plays it fine, and says it’s using the mpga audio codec for stream 0, and the mpgv video codec for stream 1.
Windows media player 8.00.00.487 plays it just fine, and says the audio codec is Nero Digital Audio Encoder, and the video codec is Nero Vidoe Decoder.
Hm. I don’t seem to have Quicktime on here…
I could not play it using Firefox as my web browser and Quicktime. The same software played the original turtle mpg fine though.
Grimm movie plays just fine, sounds good too, nice big-block rumble out of that old Ferd. Can even hear the tappets, means you need some high-mileage oil in the old Grimmus, bro.
Oh, and instruct the wife how to brace herself against the wind gusts when filming.
Re: the scary technology. Combine that with the already widespread police system “faces” which does computer assisted face recognition with now around 95% accuracy, and the ability for the lens to look through the window at your face…..now data-link all that from the servers to the patrol cars.
It’s about time they issued all of us license numbers that correspond to our cell phones, plus handcuffs. The cop can just call you up, tell you to park and cuff yourself and wait for the paddy wagon….
If there were some way to ensure that it would only be used for finding stolen vehicles, it would not bother me too much. But I can see where it could be abused and misused by both the authorities and unethical law enforcement personnel. I don’t like it…
The first link doesn’t play in Vista Enterprise – but this edition of Vista doesn’t instal CODECs by default, known issue. I’ll try it from WinXP and let you know.
Played fine here using Media Player Classic (not the Windows Media Player). Got the Media Player Classic from the K-Lite Codec Pack.
This is what it said about the video under properties:
Audio: MPEG Audio 44100Hz stereo 224Kbps [Mpeg-1]
Video: MPEG2 Video 640×480 29.97fps 4000Kbps [Video]
I could not watch it on Firefox.
Sorry for the double answer, I pasted the link into WMP (on Windows XP) and it played.
did not play, W2K and WMP version 9
briefly flashed “Error Downloading codec”, then dialog box with “Windows Media Player encountered an unknown error.” w/ [close] or [web help] options.
Hmm. Grimm opened and played just fine on Firefox for me, but I used Windows Media Player instead of Quicktime. I’m running Windows 2K if that makes a diff.