Random Thoughts

… when we first practice to watch some movies

As I’m sure you remember from yesterday, I got an external HDMI screenshotting box to do screenshots while watching films from Amazon Video.

That worked fine, but using an infra-red remote to trigger the screenshots is slightly awkward: The line of sight thing means that I either have to have the (not very pretty) box in line of sight (and pretty close by), or I had to use an IR repeater of some kind.

Yay. More gadgets.

But then I though… “This box can also record video! Let’s try that!”

The upside here would be that I could just play the videos on my normal Linux machine, and everything would, like, work the way I wanted, without stressing with the Ipad, using remotes, switching the source, etc.

Besides: Freedom! DRM is obnoxious! You’re not the boss of me! Etc!

Let’s have a look at today’s experimental set up:

First of all, a nice and big SD card is necessary, since the recorded H.264 (AVC) video files the recorder box creates rather big files. (About 12GB for a film.) So I use my normal filming card for this, which has the added advantage that it’s an UHS-II card (Ultra High Speed: The Second!). Note all the additional contact points on the card.

The “HDMI splitter”, the Aven video recorder, and the hated HDMI switch (which I no longer need, kinda).

And instead of using my ginormous Ipad, I got a used Iphone Touch (6th gen) cheap. I didn’t know whether that would work, but look how much smaller it is! It’s much more practical than carrying the Ipad around and plugging in here and there…

Finally, my USB 3.0 UHS-II SD card reader to transfer the files to my computer. I get about 100MB/s reading speed with this setup, so transferring an entire film takes less than two minutes.

I had a peek at a recorded film (a review of which will be coming to these very pages later today, I guess?) and it looks nice. The video is a bit “soft”, but no more artifacty than the film I watched directly from my Ipad yesterday. We’ll see…

But! I then thought that it would be nice to trim down the recorded bits to the actual film length (since I had forgotten that it was running and there were two hours of blackness at the end of the file), so I loaded it up in LightWorks…

And the exported film had an audio/video mismatch of over three seconds.

Whaaa!?

And that program re-encodes everything, so I didn’t really want to use it, anyway. So I installed avidemux, which had a very strange interface, but managed to chop off the black parts at the end without re-encoding. Very fast.

And the resulting file had a six second audio/video lag.

Wat.

Just about to give up, I found Lossless-Cut, a simple editor written in JavaScript (!) that uses ffmpeg under the hood.

I loaded in the file, set the start and end points in the excellent and easy-to-use editor and clicked “save”. Amazingly fast, it saved the resulting file at 100% of theoretical disk bandwidth speed, and…

The audio/video sync was perfect!

Whoho! Go JavaScript!

But is this a sensible workflow for watching films? Eurhmn…

Freedom!

WFC Nigeria: Half of a Yellow Sun

Tech progress report: I’m watching this via Amazon Prime (+ HDMI dongle etc), but the novel thing this time is that I downloaded the film before viewing. And this time there were no glitches! So the problem experienced the last time is apparently not because of the HDMI dongle thing, but because of the streaming.

If that’s the case, that’s pretty weak. The Amazon app could have been buffering more, couldn’t it?

Anyway: Yay.

(It’s not exactly DVD quality, though. It’s kinda grainy and artifacty, but not disturbingly so. Most of the time.)

Oh! The film!

I found this film really confusing. The first fifteen minutes I thought is was a parody of a British period film: It’s extremely professionally filmed, acted and edited, but it’s so lifeless and trite that I thought it had to be a satire of sorts.

But then I remembered: Nigeria is, like, the Bollywood of Africa? “Nollywood” and all that. Then it made more sense: This is just a really, really bad film.

It’s very competent in all the wrong ways. Some of the actors are kinda enjoyable to watch, though.

This film is mostly about the Biafran secession from Nigeria, which is something that I extremely vaguely remember from my childhood. Googling it now, it brings back the memories: It was a horrible catastrophy (millions died) and it became the start of Norway’s foreign aid activism, which is probably why I still remember it. (I was two when the war was over.)

This film is so anodyne. It portrays the entire thing as (at most) a slight inconvenience for some rich people in Nigeria.

Half of a Yellow Sun. Biyi Bandele. 2013. Nigeria.

Super Simple Summer Punch

1 part vodka
2 parts cranberry juice
2 parts mango juice
1 part soda water
raspberries
orange slices

Moddle the orange slices and the raspberries with the vodka in a highball glass. Add ice and stir until cold. Add the juices and stir further. Top off with the soda water and stir lightly.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

The Tangled Webs We Weave…

My mission: To watch films from all around the world. My problem: Many films are only available on Amazon Prime (US Edition). My solution: Errr…

In this part of this (seemingly never-ending series) I’ve reached the point where I’m able to watch Amazon Prime videos, but taking screenshots while doing so (AND I HAVE TO DO THAT, DON”T I? DON”T I?!?!?!) is still not solved problem.

Until today!

I can watch (and screenshot) on my Galaxy View Android device, but it seems to all be in lo-def, and I really want HD and on my TV. So I got an Apple HDMI dongle for my Ipad and a box for screenshotting.

But that didn’t work, because DRM. The box doesn’t support HDCP, so the Amazon Prime app just refused to output anything.

So! I got a (euphemistically named) “HDMI splitter”, which is really an HDCP stripper. Figuring out which ones work this week means reading the very newest comment on Amazon and taking a chance.

AND IT WORKS!

So here’s the setup tonight:

First the Ipad to the HDMI dongle…

Into the “HDMI splitter” (cough cough HDCP stripper cough cough).

Into the Aven screenshotting box.

Into an HDMI switch (that I had to add since I now have more than one HDMI source).

Into a CEC command injector device (that I added earlier).

Into the TV! That’s just like 20 meters of cables and stuff.

And as you could see in the previous post, it works. (I stuck a FlashAir card into the Aven box so that I can pull down the screenshots automatically into Emacs.)

See? IT”S SIMPLE!

DRM. Digital Customer Fuckery. I’m sure that’s what it stands for.

But as you can see, the picture quality from this setup is fine, although it was choppy. For the next film, I’m going to use the same setup, but download the film onto the Ipad in advance.

Stay tuned! In about two hours you’ll know the results!

WFC Afghanistan: سنگ صبور

So for this film I watched it via Amazon Prime on the Ipad via an HDMI dongle. It works kinda OK, but there’s general jerkiness that appears irregularly. It’s like it drops a couple of frames every so often. It’s not very pleasant to watch, so I’, not using this method again, I think…

Perhaps it’s because it’s streaming? I could try downloading first.

Anyway! The film! Love the actors, especially Golshifteh Farahani. The shakycam isn’t my favourite, but the cinematography is fine.

It’s very harsh, and for most of the film I was going “nooo… doooooon’t…” Inevitably heading towards disaster, one way or another.

So not a delightful experience, but it’s a strong film.

(And to nit-pick, I don’t think anybody would survive on a bag of sugar once in a while for so long.)