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https://birds-are-nice.me/musi...

I show how the concept of the public domain has been crushed by demonstrating just how little popular music exists in it.

I'd call this shameless self-promotion, but I make about £0.03 a month in advertising off that. Factor in that everyone uses ad-blocking here and I might make £0.06 this month if it gets slashdotted. No, I just want to flood the internet with public-domain music in open-standard format.

https://birds-are-nice.me/musi...

I show how the concept of the public domain has been crushed by demonstrating just how little popular music exists in it.

Xylene: Does nothing at all.
Toluene: Does nothing at all.
Ethanol: Does nothing at all.
Water: Does nothing at all.
Acetone: Does nothing at all.
Tetrahyrofuran: Does... very little. Something. Not really soluble, but it seemed to be absorbed into the PLA and deform it.
Dichloromethane: Perfect! Does vapor smoothing (Though much slower than ABS/acetone), and does liquid smoothing very nicely indeed if you rub your print down with a DCM-soaked cloth.

I have pictures:
http://birds-are-nice.me/publi...

Have some shameless self-promotion... might finally have found someone who can figure out how to play this: http://birds-are-nice.me/VoroW...

No, that paper just discusses quadtrees for accelerated lookup. I had the idea of putting to use the convex property of voronoi cells (In Euclidian metric space, anyway) as a means of high-speed construction of bitmap image representations. It's very rapid when the size of the cells is large relative to the resolution of the desired bitmap image, and a lot simpler than (potentially even faster) scanline techniques.

This is what I came up with: http://birds-are-nice.me/progr...

As you can tell by the writing style, I am not a professional academic and have no formal training in computer science. I just dabble. I was interested in using voronoi diagrams as approximations for inpainting animation - removing the annoying channel logo in the corner.I had some success, too: http://birds-are-nice.me/progr...

No, that paper just discusses quadtrees for accelerated lookup. I had the idea of putting to use the convex property of voronoi cells (In Euclidian metric space, anyway) as a means of high-speed construction of bitmap image representations. It's very rapid when the size of the cells is large relative to the resolution of the desired bitmap image, and a lot simpler than (potentially even faster) scanline techniques.

This is what I came up with: http://birds-are-nice.me/progr...

As you can tell by the writing style, I am not a professional academic and have no formal training in computer science. I just dabble. I was interested in using voronoi diagrams as approximations for inpainting animation - removing the annoying channel logo in the corner.I had some success, too: http://birds-are-nice.me/progr...

https://birds-are-nice.me/musi...

If they try to sue me for that, I'll... back down without a fight, because I can't afford to spend my life's savings to stand up for my principles. But I will then tell everyone I can about the incident, including every internet rights organisation, and hope the backlash does some damage. Maybe one will even agree to pay the costs and handle the hassle for me.

I thought about this one a while ago, during an asset register updating that involved writing down many, many, many serial numbers on a notepad for later typing up.

I came up with this:
http://birds-are-nice.me/CANar...

Slashdot mangled my example link. Huh. Here's another example:
http://birds-are-nice.me/CANar...
Incidentally, if you can tell me what that song is, I'd be very grateful. If it's pre-1963 it's public domain in the UK and I can add it to me 'legal to use' collection.

Just to annoy them, http://birds-are-nice.me/video/bug.ogv

That's the highest resolution source I could find. Postage-stamp.

Actually, I can answer that question. It just happens that some friends and I like to dabble in high-voltage fun. We don't have a 3GJ test, but I do have a video showing what just 800J does to a tomato:
http://birds-are-nice.me/explodium/MK8a_fruit.webm

Up-one to see more things go pop.

http://birds-are-nice.me/programming/asfview.shtml

Little something I wrote years ago that reads an ASF file (Or WMA, or WMV) headers and decodes them all into a human-readable dump. Handy thing if you work with media in those formats.

Unless you're in the US. Can't use it there. That format is the subject of a patent. So I'm just going to sit here in the UK and look smug. If I were in the US, I wouldn't have been able to make that. The author of virtualdub is though, so he had to strip ASF-reading functionality out of his software when Microsoft threatened to sue.

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/audio_video/video_editing/virtualdub_1_3c.cfm

A Version of Virtualdub that works with asf. sorry to link you to afterdawn, the site blows thanks to dvdbackup23

http://birds-are-nice.me/programming/asfview.shtml

Little something I wrote years ago that reads an ASF file (Or WMA, or WMV) headers and decodes them all into a human-readable dump. Handy thing if you work with media in those formats.

Unless you're in the US. Can't use it there. That format is the subject of a patent. So I'm just going to sit here in the UK and look smug. If I were in the US, I wouldn't have been able to make that. The author of virtualdub is though, so he had to strip ASF-reading functionality out of his software when Microsoft threatened to sue.

The photobooth trick is called a 'difference matte' or 'difference key.' It's found in most high-end video editing software, though not always by the same name. I wrote one myself too - http://birds-are-nice.me/video/bluescreen.shtml

As you can see from my effort, it isn't as easy as you'd think to get good results.

I've done a few restorations before, but you can't see any of them other than http://birds-are-nice.me/video/restorations.shtml - all the rest are of various copyrighted videos.

Did you try Fizick's DeSpot for the Chevrolet commercial? It worked wonders for me on a HDTV broadcast of a crappy print of Private Benjamin, but I had to try dozens of different combinations of parameters to get the maximum clean with no false positives. It could be tweaked even better by using ConditionalReader and/or masking to not process the frames or areas of frames that had glaring false positives, but that's for some other day.

It's something of a hobby of mine.

I wrote a guide on the subject: http://birds-are-nice.me/publications/Optimising%20x264%20encodes.htm

x264 is easy at this point (CRF and --preset slower FTW).

Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to isolate indivdual hues using AviSynth so that my color correction will only target very specific problem areas. I've done a decent job getting worst of the teal and orange look from some of the worst examples (The Terminator remaster, where there was nothing white in the entire movie..it was all blue tinted), as well as getting the green out of Fellowship of the Ring, but those are global changes to get known reference colors to look right.

After that, I want to essentially color grade the movie again to fix the problems that are still left, but do it somewhat automatically, based on the existing color.

Interlacing is good if you need to use analog electronics. But that 'annoying' goes beyond just annoying: It over-complicates everything. The compression benefits are more than offset by the reduced efficiency of the more modern encoding, plus almost every stage in the process - every filter, as well as the encoder and decoder - need to be interlacing-aware. It's an awkward, obsolete technology and I eagerly await the day it is no longer to be found outside of historical video.

The link looks very interesting indeed. I've done a few restorations before, but you can't see any of them other than http://birds-are-nice.me/video/restorations.shtml - all the rest are of various copyrighted videos. I did one of Steamboat Willie to test some filters that was the most popular version on youtube for a time, until Disney DMCAed it.

There are tricks to that h264 encoding to squeeze a bit more. You can improve the motion estimation by just throwing power at it, though the gains are asymptotic. Or increase the frame reference limit - that does great thing on animation, if you don't mind losing profile compliance. Things like that. Changing the source is also often of great benefit - if it's a noisy image, a bit of noise-removal filtering before compression can not just improve subjective quality but also allow for much more efficient compression. Interlaced footage can be converted to progressive, bad frame rate conversions undone - progressive video just compresses better. It's something of a hobby of mine.

I wrote a guide on the subject: http://birds-are-nice.me/publications/Optimising%20x264%20encodes.htm

You're right about Zopfli though. Regarding h264, it changes nothing.

Including one of mine, for the music in a silent movie made so long ago the copyright had actually expired. I looked up the date of the producer's death and checked very throughly. Bug Vaudeville.

I can only theorise that while the producer/animator had died then, the composer managed to live on into his nineties - and with the US term of life plus seventy years, the music may still in copyright. The content ID notice claimed to come from a 'collecting society.' I can't verify this theory, as I have no idea who the composer was, and youtube's appeal system is just a joke - none of my attempts to contact them got so much as a response. It's quite possible that the music actually did expire in copyright years ago, and the collecting society merely 'neglected' to remove it from their list seventy years after the composer's death.

So I moved the video to my own site.
http://birds-are-nice.me/video/bug.ogv

Video restoration and filters: http://birds-are-nice.me/video/restorations.shtml

Stuff go boom: http://birds-are-nice.me/explodium/

Video restoration and filters: http://birds-are-nice.me/video/restorations.shtml

Stuff go boom: http://birds-are-nice.me/explodium/

http://birds-are-nice.me/programming/BLDD.shtml

The code is hideous. It's made just to see if it'll work. I'm a hobbyist, not a developer.

AVI is a terribly outdated format, but I find it's quite good enough for intermediary work - it's a widely-supported and dependable container for video while you work on it, before you mux the video into something more modern that supports VBR audio properly.

The many options do serve a purpose. They allow someone knowledgeable to get the best possible quality from a low bitrate, allow for handling of awkward inputs like interlaced video, and provide a means of handling profiles. A lot of hardware decoders have strict limits on what they can decode due to limited memory or processor capacity, knowing how to work within a profile allows you to be sure that a specific device will play your video and not choak on an out-of-memory error.

I know a lot about the options. I wrote (shamelessplug) http://birds-are-nice.me/publications/Optimising%20x264%20encodes.htm

I've seen worse. There's a certain group I know of that dabbles in high-energy experiments. Capacitor bank and such. But when you see their group shot... http://birds-are-nice.me/explodium/mk7.html

Then the new one gets flagged too, for the audio will still be similar... plus Youtube may consider this a deliberate effort to circumvent their contentID system, and block the account. I've been in the same situation myself, when contentID flagged the audio which couldn't possibly be copyrighted even in the US. I tried to protest, but after youtube completly ignored my appeal for a few months (Never even replied to my repeated attempts) I simply left the site in protest. I've got the videos hosted on my own personal website now (HTML5 makes this much easier!), but youtube is more than a video host. It's also a search engine and recormendation system, and I know that without the promotion that youtube provides very few people will ever see my video.

I dabble in restorations. If I may shamelessly plug myself, http://birds-are-nice.me/video/restorations.shtml

True. Almost. Actually, you don't have to worry too much about choosing the right codec - you still have to offer at least two video files, but video-tag capable browsers are capable enough to pick a format they support if you offer a list. That means all you need to worry about is resolution. I've been having trouble getting WebM to work quite right so far (It's still a young format), so my own videos are currently Theora/Ogg/Ogg. Firefox plays them fine. You can see the progress-so-far at http://birds-are-nice.me/video/ - but I've got a long way to go yet before it's ready to link with the site proper, not even done a layout yet and only got two test-videos up.

I think a greater problem is going to be getting traffic. Youtube isn't just a video hosting service - its recormendation engine is a powerful feature in itsself, and can serve as the means by which a very obscure producer gains recognition. Without such an engine, they may just languish in obscurity.

In the positive though, no youtube comments. I am not the only one to notice the strange effect: Youtube comments are overwhelmingly dumb. Not even just a little dumb, like blog comments often are, but some of the greatest concentration of stupid on the internet. I don't know quite how this happened.

Ah, well... if anyone has a use for it, http://www.birds-are-nice.me/programming/zipfilerecover.shtml

It's not the most sophisticated of programs, but it gets the job done. Truncated/damaged zip in, lots of little zips out.