stib's guff

Seems the ABC website uses some lame flash based player or even worse, Real Player to deliver its live streams now. But buried on the site are links to aac+ streams (as well as windows media and mp3 if you're that way inclined).

Here, mainly for my benefit are the links to the AAC+ streams for my favourite stations.

ABC Classic FM
http://www.abc.net.au/res/streaming/audio/aac/classic_fm.pls

ABC News Radio
http://www.abc.net.au/res/streaming/audio/aac/news_radio.pls

ABC Radio National
http://www.abc.net.au/res/streaming/audio/aac/radio_national.pls

And while I'm at it..

WNYC's Q2 stream - they also try to get you to use some stupid web based player

http://www.wnyc.org/stream/q2/aac.pls

WFMU mp3 stream - they just put a proper link to the stream up like sensible people, but I might as well put it here too:

http://wfmu.org/wfmu.pls

WCBN - more free-form radio.

http://floyd.wcbn.org:8000/wcbn-hd.mp3

3 RRR - best goddam station in the world. One of these should work.

http://s2.stationplaylist.com:9020/3RRRFM.m3u

http://media.on.net/radio/114.m3u - via internode

http://iiradio.iinet.net.au:8027/  - via iinet (unmetered for iinet customers)

if you're looking at the expression in the previous post you might notice that it only works properly for compositions where the layers are all the same size as the comp, with their anchor points in the middle. Like you get if you import a layered potatoshop file as a composition, but without choosing "retain layer sizes".

This was bugging me.

It bugged me enough that I wrote my first useful After Effects script using the Extendscript ToolKit. So here it is, my brand new moveAnchorPtToMiddleOfComp.jsx

if you're working with 3D in AE, a useful trick to know is how to make a layer fill the frame of the camera when moving it on the z axis. It's pretty easy with expressions.

If you look at the camera's properties (double click the camera layer or ctl/cmd+shift+y), you'll see the Zoom setting, which is a useful, if slightly counter-intuitive number – it's the distance that layers have to be from the camera to be at full size from that camera's view point. At twice this distance layers will appear half size and at haf this distance layers will appear twice their size.

It follows that if a layer is x pixels from the camera then x / Zoom is the factor we have to scale it to appear full size. The benefit of using zoom as opposed to the angle of view is that we don't have to mess about with trigonometry to get useful results.

TL;DR: to make a layer appear at 100% scale to a 3D camera, add this expression to the scale property of a layer (alt-click on the stopwatch to add an expression to a property):

scaleFactor=1 / thisComp.layer("Camera 1").cameraOption.zoom;
transform.scale * scaleFactor * length(thisComp.layer("Camera 1").transform.position, transform.position);

of course you will have to change "Camera 1" to the name of your camera. With this expression on, you can still change the scale of your layer with the scale property, it just multiplies that by a scale factor to match the relative positions of the camera and the layer.

I find this useful when setting up a 2.5D style comp, where different layers of an image are moved forward or backward, but retaining the original composition. Once I've set it up I turn the expression off, after converting the expression to keyframes.

I'm interested in seeing how various tyres perform on my commute. Now that I keep track of my kilometers I can actually compare them objectively

the voodoo is

ffmbc -i themovie.foo -vcodec prores -profile hq -acodec pcm_s16le output.mov

-profile can have the values: proxy, lt, std, hq. FCP likes signed 16Bit Little Endian audio.

cute Processing easter egg:

Now it's easy enough with the command line to get a whole lot of processes running in parallel, that's one of the great advantages of CLI software like ffmbc and its older sibling ffmpeg. With GUI applications however you're generally limited to whatever multi-processor support the software maker built in. So here's a trick that can help you when you have CPUs and RAM to spare, but not time.

Command Line, Meet the GUI

There's an OS X - only command-line programme called open that, you guessed it, opens stuff. Generally it works as if you'd double clicked things with your mouse, so if you type open foo.png it will open foo.png in whatever your default application for looking at pngs happens to be, or if you point it at /Applications/someApp.app/ it will recognise it as an application and run it (In case you didn't know, applications in OS X are actually folders).

Where the magic happens is one of open's command line options. Here's the list of options from the man page:

Now the important one for us is the -n option. This lets us override the usual mac behaviour and lets you open more than one instance of a programme. This is great if you want to run something like MPEG Streamclip which has a built in limit of 4 simultaneous encodes. Here's a screensot of it running 3 instances, doing 4 encodes each.

The CPU and RAM on this machine had power to spare - I could have even run another instance if I'd needed it. And my job took a third of the time. 12 cores. Love it.

So the script to get this going is simple. Open Terminal and type

open -n /Applications/MPEG\ Streamclip.app

rinse, repeat. Of course this works for other programmes as well, you just substitute /Applications/MPEG\ Streamclip with whatever the path to the application is.

You could of course further automate this process thus

for i in {1..12} #replace 12 with however many instances you want

do open -n /Applications/MPEG\ Streamclip.app

done

I synch in FCP by matching the audio recorded by the 5D with the audio off the Zoom. It's a pain, but it's alot easier than synching on a Steenbeck. When I've got a match I modify the timecode of the video to match the audio, as the Zoom records with proper timecode, the 5D doesn't.

Now since editing h.264 footage in FCP is about as fun as falling off a bicycle into a barbed wire fence I make a proRes-422 production copy of all my 5D footage before I start editing. I keep my original camera footage in my archives, and if I want to be able to resurrect the project later without having to keep all my modified proRes movies I have to make sure that the origianal footage from the 5D matches the timecode of my production copies.

Luckily ffmbc lets me write timecode to files without any transcoding. So here's the script I use:

cameraFolder=/path/to/the/5D/footage/

productionFolder=/path/to/my/proRes/production/copies/

I was given a portable hard drive with a whole lot of video shot on a Sony AVCHD consumer camera, in the form of m2ts files. And now I'm faced with the task of turning them into something I can persuade FCP (7) to open. Log and transfer doesn't work (I'm assuming that whoever copied the camera files didn't do the right voodoo with the file structure) leaving a whole lot of orphaned files that FCP just refuses to open. Just to frustrate me, they play fine with VLC, so I can see them but I can't use them.

M2TS is the format used by blu-ray and some Sony cameras. It's an MPEG2 Transport Stream container, with h.264 encoded video inside. If you don't know what that means, it's a bit like getting a Betacam SP cassette case and putting an SD Card inside it. My first response is to break out MPEG Streamclip and batch them into ProRes. Gah! For once MPEG Streamclip lets me down. Episode, Compressor all fail too. Since VLC can play them I give the streaming / transcoding wizard from VLC a bash, but as usual it doesn't work. I've never yet had that thing work for transcoding - it looks like it's doing something, and takes a whole lot of CPU time to produce video files that won't play. Great media player though.

Turns out I shouldn't have mucked around with these GUI apps, I should have just gone straight to the command line. Using ffmbc (the 'broadcast' version of ffmpeg) I can convert them to quicktimes using an uncompressed codec (v210 in this case, I could have used qtrle - AKA Apple Animation codec - and saved some disk space, but v210 was four times faster). I want ProRes for my edit so I have to then recompress, but that's a simple job for MPEG Streamclip.

I had a bit of trouble working out what audio format Quicktime likes, turns out it's 16 bit signed, Big Endian. So just to remind my future self what CLI juju I need here's the magick for converting a folder of m2ts files:

for i in *.m2ts;
do ffmbc -i "$i" -vf yadif=0:-1 -vcodec v210 -acodec pcm_s16be "${i/m2ts/mov}" ;
done

The for loop is so it batches a whole folder of m2ts files. If you wanted to do just one you'd get rid of the first and third line and the do on the second line. and you'd replace "$i" with your input file and "${i/m2ts/mov}" with your output file. The  -vf yadif=0:-1 bit is for deinterlacing them with Yadif (the numbers mean 1 frame per two fileds and automatic field order), so if you don't want the output to be deinterlaced you could remove that bit.

I've only recently discovered the usefulness of Apple's Spotlight search tool. For some reason I'd never really clicked that it could be a very handy little launcher for applications and documents, until I noticed the Mac techo guy who came to plug all the wires in and adjust the tappets on my new 12 core machine at work <smirks>. But now I'm addicted - I've even mapped the Spotlight keyboard shortcut on to one of my mouse buttons and got rid of Butler.

So of course I couldn't be satisfied with just launching apps and dox, I want all my webs to appear in Spotlight too. After some googling I find that this isn't as easy as it would appear, especially if you don't want to use Safari.

Well here's what I came up with. A modification of this modification of a Perl Script that produces URL files. Why URLs? Well they're simple than webbokmarks, and since FireFox doesn't read the content of .webbookmark or .webloc filesbut relies on data in the resource fork, weblocs and webbokmarks didn't work anyway. Bad Firefox.

So I need a little helper app to read the url file and open FF at the right page. It's simple enought to do with a shell script or a bit of perl etc, but the OS won't let you assign these as the default app for the file type. So I used an AppleScript as a wrapper.

So if you want your Bookmarks to appear in Spotlight here's what you have to do.

first run this perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $meta = "$ENV{HOME}/Library/Caches/Metadata/Firefox";
system("mkdir -p $meta");
system("rm $meta/*.url");
my $bookmarks = `find \~/Library/Application\\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -name 'bookmarks.html'`;
open (IN, $bookmarks);
while (<IN>){
    my $line = $_;
    if (($line =~ m|HREF="(.*?)".*>(.*?)</A>|) && ($1 !~ /^javascript\:/)){
   
        my $url = $1;
        $url =~ s/&/&amp;/g;
        my $name = $2;
        $name =~ s{[/:;\*\\\"\'\.\|]+}{-}g;
#         my $uuid = `uuidgen`;
#         $uuid =~ s/\n$//;
        print $line;
        open (OUT, ">$meta/$name.url");
        print OUT "[InternetShortcut]\nURL=$url\n";
        close OUT;   
    }
}

You can copy and paste it or download it here. To run, just open a terminal cd tot he directory you downloaded the script (usually cd ~/Downloads will get you there) and type perl ffbm.pl

If you want to open the links with Firefox or Chrome, read on:

FF on the mac doesn't handle .url files or .webloc or .webbokmark files properly. We need a little helper to read the files and kick the contents to Firefox / Chrome.

So I've created this applescript. Plonk it in your Applications folder (or wherever). This basically munges the .URL file to get the URL out of it, and uses your default web browser to open it. Here's the code:

on open theURLfile --called when the OS sends a URL file to the script
    openURLfile(theURLfile)
end open

openURLfile(choose file) --called when the user just runs this script by double clicking

on openURLfile(theURLfile) --the actual Hoo-Hah
    set URLfilePpath to POSIX path of theURLfile
    set theURL to (do shell script "cat  \"" & URLfilePpath & "\"|grep \"URL=\"|sed \"s/.*=//\"")
    do shell script "open " & theURL --the OSX open command opens whatever you give it according to your default application choice
end openURLfile