roman kalous

After a few years of happy usage of the nokia 6021, with the calendar and messaging connected through BT and PC Suite to my laptop, I was recently in serious consideration of a switch to even more advanced phone. The main reason was accessibility of these devices, such as iPhone, nokia e75, etc.

I was thinking of integrated calendar (personal & working), notepad for writing instant thoughts when laptop is not available, and also a light-catching device (for ad-hoc photographs and clips).

I made a try with an iPhone–having one borrowed for a while. It was cool experience. But I did not get comfortable with the virtual keyboard though, especially for larger texts… And also I was surprised by its rather weak battery powers.

Then, I figured out I may be benefitting from having a company blackberry device! I ordered a blackberry 9000 bold and am using it for two weeks now. It brings all the calendar features, notepad writing and photo-device inside. The writing is a bit complicated as well –esp. in Czech, but I need to get used to it.

Now, look at the images below and make a guess what device these were taken with! It’s the blackberry. The camera is definitely not an SLR one, with light enough it makes for acceptable portaits. But these blurry shapes surprised me greatly.

Intensionally I am not telling any details on it. Hope you may like it as well.

Once again, we visited čerchov. This time we were there the whole family, Lucka, me and Bohdana. This Sunday an ‘outdoor’ mass was celebrated there, in Czech and German at once.

The weather was excellent all day. Bohdana was a bit nervous sitting in the pram all the way up. On the top then she enjoyed rambling around which nowadays is her most favourite activity. We managed also to attend the mass partly.

I got the camera with me as well but the occasions to take some snaps were rare. Not because of situations themselves, rather because I needed to take care of Bohdana. Sill, when waiting for two beers, I made it to shot the two additional shots of the two towers.

after nearly three months, another MOV-to-FLV convert appears. I tried to re-use the commands I listed in previous post on video conversion.
I discovered that the -acodec option did not work and I had to update it. Then, I also added the bitrate option which enhances the quality of the final output.

The current version is as follows.

mencoder -of avi -o output.temp.avi -srate 8000 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=2:dia=2:vmax_b_frames=2:vb_strategy=1:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:preme=2:qns=2:vbitrate=2000 -oac mp3lame
ffmpeg -i output.temp.avi -vcodec flv -s 400x320 -b 2000k -acodec mp3 -r 24 -y -ac 1 -ar 22050


after a 4 hours of struggling I managed to put videos into wordpress posts.

seen at Lucka’s pages. of course, the videos concern Bohdana. the first one sketches Bohdana’s first non-breast-feeding experience, the second is just a short clip of Bohdana’s ordinary afternoons games (means buzzing on the floor cracking everything around…)

now, how I made all the things do.

1. find and install the flowplayer plugin. found here
2. install the flowplayer plugin according to its instructions
3. whenever you need a video, just put a ”
   
   
   

   )” string

that’s simply it. now how to get the right video format so that the video is visible after loading the page.

here the 4 hours came of trial-error experiments. after these 4 hours I more or less by accident came across the magic commands. here we are. I hope this will be helpful.

I converted MOV files from panasonic LSXXX.note the double call of a mencoder and then a

mencoder -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell -of avi
<file.mov> -o output.temp.avi -srate 8000

ffmpeg -i output.temp.avi -vcodec flv -s 412x240 -acodec libmp3lame -r 24
-y -ac 1 -ar 22050 <file.flv>

this way encoded, the <file.flv> should be visible in the web-page in a flowplayer window.

further improvements will be reported.