Hey everyone! I recorded and captured the CA MUni Weekend TV segment that was on a local Sacramento tv station the 24th. It’s encoded in divx but Gilby said he had a little trouble playing it. Make sure you have divx installed from www.divx.com, and try using the DivX Player that comes with the divx.com download if the movie won’t play in Windows Media Player.
Also, it’s almost 50 megabytes in size, so if you don’t have fast internet (or maybe even if you do), I’d suggest right clicking the movie, and choosing Save Target As.
Oh, man, my computer is going at 42 KB/Second!!! That is slooooooooooow. It says 25 more minutes. I think I’m going to go to bed, and hope for it to be done in the morning.
That’s pretty good for a news magazine segment. No clown references or anything else derogatory.
The big 50MB video is actually encoded with the DivX 3 codec and the audio is uncompressed PCM. DivX 3 is only a little bit better in compression than MPEG-1.
The free (as in beer) version of the DivX 5 codec will only encode using the DivX 3 algorithm. If you want the advantages of DivX 5 you need to use the Pro version of the codec. DivX also doesn’t compress the audio so you need to use a separate audio compression codec (usually MP3) while encoding the video.
Anyways, I converted the big 50 MB DivX 3 AVI into an MPEG-1 video and got it down to 26 MB. Most of the savings was due to MPEG-1 compressing the audio with MP3. I was compressing an already heavily compressed video which is less than ideal. Starting with the original (hopefully uncompressed video) will give better results.
I would suggest using an MPEG-1 encoder like TMPGEnc rather than DivX v3. MPEG-1 video is playable by almost every modern computer and will give results comparable to DivX 3.
TMPGEnc is free for personal use. Encode the video at about 1000 kbits/sec and the audio at 64 kbits/sec and you’ll end up with a file around 26 MB. If you play around with variable bitrate encoding you may be able to get it down even further without loosing too much quality.
For videos I post I think I’m going to start posting two versions. An MPEG-1 version and a DivX v5 version. The MPEG-1 version will be a bigger file and the video will be a little lower quality than the DivX 5 version, but it will be playable by everyone without any bother. The people who want a smaller file can deal with the DivX version.
well im half way there.25 megs downloaded on 56k and 25 to go.it says i have another hour but i ran out of beer so im going to bed.hopefully i dont get dropped for awile and i’ll be able to see it in the morning.
That was my favorite part. As a transplanted midwesterner, I am proud to have started something that appears to be ‘very California!’
Thanks Jess for encoding it and posting it. I also got a VHS copy, and was going to give it to our guy at my office who offered to encode it, but he’s been out.
Thanks for doing that, Jess. It was a good segment, and I was excited to see I made into the final cut. What, you didn’t see me? Right when Jack (orange shirt) says “…I’m getting fat…” if you look in the upper right corner I am laying on the ground holding my knee, writhing in pain, with my friends standing around me. Okay, at this resolution I can’t really tell for sure it’s me, but I know that’s where I was.
BIG Thanks for posting the clip Jess. I was actually not expecting such a nice piece - I think they did really well. But then again, with talent like we had there that day, how could they go wrong?!
it may well serve to make more people aware of unicycling
that wil simply allow more people to find out that it’s ‘too difficult’ for them to bother
we’ve had this discussion before
In article <GILD.w1wdd@timelimit.unicyclist.com>,
GILD <GILD.w1wdd@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote:
)
)XWonka wrote:
)> *That’s really the kind of thing that is gonna bring unicycling to the
)> masses and make it a very popular sport. *
)
)
)i’m afraid i have to disagree
)
)it may well serve to make more people aware of unicycling
)that wil simply allow more people to find out that it’s ‘too difficult’
)for them to bother
)we’ve had this discussion
)‘before’ (http://tinyurl.com/stfc)
Unicycling will not come to “the masses” in the way that Razor
scooters did a few years ago. But it’s obvious that the exposure in
New World Disorder and other press has increased the number of
mountain unicyclists. More is better! Except perhaps on narrow technical
singletrack trails.
-Tom
That’s right. MUni seems to have taken unicycling to a place no other form of unicycling ever got, other than the association with clowns and circus. We are visible. People have heard of our sport. That’s huge! Unicycle track racing? Nobody knows about that (in the US anyway; I’m sure they do in Japan). Freestyle? Standard Skill? These will still garner the comment “I didn’t know that was a sport.”
MUni (including Trials) has broken through to a point where the media coverage has been enough for people to have a slight amount of “general knowledge” about it. This is not a level of expertise, just awareness that normal people like riding unicycles on rough terrain.
Well then i’ll have to disagree. I actually tried skateboarding but gave up because it was too hard. Now i’m crazy unicycle masta’. Was unicycleing any harder to learn than skateboarding? I think not. Unicycling was just my thing.
If people don’t uni because they think it’s too hard, then they really had no desire to ride it in the first place.
If something appears hard… that dosn’t stop most people from doing it anyway. I mean… How hard does Skateboarding look? It looks insanely hard to me. Before i even SAW a real-life unicycle. i must have downloaded a hundred movies off these galleries. All hard stuff that to this day i can’t do. I still don’t know how people can uni-spin.
Anyway i guess the point is that saying people won’t start unicycling because it looks “too hard” is really an unfounded statement on their part…
