This was quite a week. Lot's of work and, on top, I had to migrate this website to a new server (the old one was up since 1998). But if I think it was a tough week - what about Jammie Thomas-Rasset? She was sentenced today to pay 1.9 Million Dollars for the sharing of 24 songs. Well - bad luck. People are simply bored, ignorant or simply to lazy to move their asses off their recliners to stand up and fight for what they think ought to be right. So - they just ignore the law (it's more convenient) and some, in this case our gal, Jammie, gets to pay the ticket.

The German legislature passed a law that allows the Federal Police to simply block access to websites containing "indecent" material. No judge will have to be bothered and there is no public oversight worth mentioning. For the moment, "indecent" is limited to child pornography. But my German compatriots are flexible with such terms and politicians have already suggested to include "killer games", "online gambling" and, yes, "peer2peer networks" into the list of "indecencies" that deserve to be shielded from public access. After all that knowledge transfer to China, it seems, that China has transferred some of their knowledge back to Germany.

What else went wrong this week? My "Decipiatur" service is a web-anonymyzer that is used (most of the time) from China. It is also used to access, well, guess - right. Porn. This week however, it has been used extensively to access political information. Since I don't run logs on this server (for obvious reasons) I am unable to say where those people came from. However - since a lot of those request pointed to information in "Farsi" I think it's fair to say, that at least few of them are accessing "Decipiatur" to communicate from or to Iran. You go guys. Use my server to post all you want. At least you are doing something.

And - you poor Germans out there: If you want to see the "web"-world un-bothered, un-filtered and without blocked access: You are welcome to use my "Decipiatur" service as well. It wouldn't be the first time that America keeps the candle in the window for all the .... huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

April 7, 2009 Our new online-system, "Polepositioner" has started BETA testing. It's a great system that not only offers new ways of "finding" things (like jobs), but also offers unique and sophisticated security mechanisms to protect the indentity of our users.

However, I want to talk about a different topic today. We have one of those modern "hard-disk-recorders" that allows us to copy tv-shows with a simple push of a button. There was just one simple question: How to burn DVDs on Mac, Windows or Linux? Well, not just "burn" a CD, but shrink the shows so that we could burn two or even three episodes on one DVD+R - with a nice menu of course.

The HD-recorder was delivering a muxed, interlaced MPEG-2-stream with 9 MBit/s. A single 45-minute show would fill a complete DVD - unacceptable. We hunted for the easiest solution. Windows? Forgetaboutit. Everything is $$-ware and the test-suits just didn't deliver the results we wanted. There were some MAC solutions (pretty complicated) and the (free) software we tested didn't work well. We finally went back to our trusted Linux (should have done that from the beginning, mea culpa).

First step: Shrink the videos to an acceptable size (and de-interlace) while keeping acceptable quality.

ffmpeg -i source.mpg -target pal-dvd -b 4000k -acodec mp2 -ab 192k -deinterlace target.mpg

Well, yeah. It's PAL, we're in Europe currently. Ok. Now we needed a tool to do some DVD authoring. First and foremost, one needs 'dvdauthor', which can be installed with 'yum' (fedora) or similar tools.

Next step was the hunt for a graphical user-interface (dvdauthor is command-line only). I downloaded "qdvdauthor" just to find out, its qt3 only. Not really the tool I am looking for on a FC9-x64 platform. I finally stumbled over "dvd-styler", a nice, easy and well-working dvd-authoring tool. It allows to create menues and sub-menues and generally does most of the things we "video-amateurs" would need.

We have our working, easy to use solution now. It took us a few days to find and to sort things out. We get up to three episodes on to one DVD and are able to create our own menues with all the bells and whistles we want.

Just wanted to let you guys know.