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Explained

Analyze: iTunes 6.0 Video Files

I had some change to blow from a previous gift certificate on iTMS, so I decided to buy an episode of Lost and see what interesting stuff I could find.

First, the main summary in iTunes:

I think the listed bitrate means jack (see below QT screen); very notable is that this has FairPlay version 2 DRM. Also, file type is `.m4v`.

Nothing terribly surprising here, although it’s nice to see proper track numbers on a per-episode basis. I wonder if we’ll lose the “Album” and “Artist” labels for TV shows in the near future, they seem a little inconsistent.

“Remember playback position” is checked by default, so they act as bookmarkable files. The “Video Kind” field is interesting; I obviously can’t select a value here, but on the two videos I did have in my library (both episodes of Teen Homicide), I can only pick from “Movie” and “Music Video”. It would be nice if I could choose “TV Show” for, you know, if I add my own TV shows.

Now, going outside of iTunes:

The path is unsurprising given the metadata (I use `~/Music/` for my music directory), so no tricks there. Failing to find fun here, I pulled it open with Quicktime Player:

Here we can see the proper bitrate (693.96 kbps), dimensions and framerate, and most amusingly, the metadata for the description of the track – which is totally unexposed in iTunes once you buy a show – or at least a chunk of it, anyhow. (This data IS available in the store, as the description.)

Above all else, I am fairly impressed with the quality, although like everyone else, I wish the video was a touch larger.

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Created

Ted Leo Seaport Video

Those of you that were chomping at the bit to see what there was to see, the lovely folks at Timorous Me have taken my overly large source video and smashed it down a bit into Quicktime format, and graciously mirrored it. Check it out.

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Created

Catching The Rain

A large thunderstorm started today, around three in the afternoon. I absolutely love rain, especially during the summer. I decided to go stand out under our grapevine with an umbrella and my camera.

After six failed photos, I went to video. I captured a minute – not the most interesting video in the world, I’ll readily admit.
But one of those weird coincidences happened as I snapped my camera shut; one of those moments that makes you question a lot of what you know goes on in the world. You see, as I closed my camera, the storm lost its nerve, and lightened dramatically. As I dumped the video to my computer, the last drops of rain slowed and stopped. As I uploaded it for this post, the sun began to shine again through the nearby window.

I don’t want to believe that I literally sucked the storm out of existence onto my camera, but it feels that way, at least a little.
For the rest of you who love the rain as much as I do, I hope you’ll enjoy this.