riding the Bangalore Metro

Had my first metro ride on Namma Metro at Bengaluru. A little more than 5 km, Mantri Mall to Yeshwantpur Railway station. The ride took 15 minutes. There are supposedly metro rides every 10 minutes 8 am to 8 pm, our ride was 7.30 to 8 pm. 6 to 8 am and 8 to 10 pm are supposed to have rides every 15 minutes. Air conditioned, good ambience. Security check like at an airport but in a more relaxed way, large luggage not allowed. It wasn't crowded at all, less than half the seats were occupied. Plenty of standing room too. The actual movement of the coaches was more jerky and noisy than I anticipated - almost like a commuter train. Overall, if the two reaches are joined, can be a nice time saver. But that will probably take a couple of years more.

small tweak to player code

I'd noticed quite a while back that Opera Mobile browser on Android played the live streams linked from the radiosai.org home page using the web player without any issues, but did not play the files chosen using the on-demand player. Checking out the code, found that the on-demand player, which is in a php file, did not have the doctype tag - the rest of the page was similar to the html page of the stream web player. Added
!DOCTYPE html
just before the html tag, and the on-demand player also started working on Opera mobile.

This change was prompted by this discussion also, along with the trial and error understanding.

duration issue for flash-based player

Unfortunately, of late, the flash-based player for radiosai shows wrong durations (usually x2) for mp3 files. The HTML5 based player does not have this problem. Apparently this is a bug newly introduced in new versions of Flash plugin,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jplayer/Tu_c_QpG7yE

Tried to make HTML5 as the default player, but that caused the player to break in Firefox, so left it alone.

Update on May 1, 2014: With the latest flash update, this issue seems to be resolved :)

Adobe Premiere 5.1 gotchas

I'm using our old copy of Premiere 5.1 to put together the Cosmic Architecture of the Universe show. For the last few days, did not have any issues to speak of. Suddenly, it failed to start today, and complained of not enough RAM. This discussion led me to start Firefox and log in to GMail before starting Premiere, that used up sufficient RAM to reduce free RAM to less than 2 GB, making Premiere start up!

Another issue was with transitions from XVID video to still frame and vice versa - they were making the output frame blank. Other manipulations like frame hold also had this issue. Tried with H.264 codec also, that also had the problem. But Huffyuv encoded videos are fine, they are able to handle transitions and cuts without problems. Only problem with them is file size. Exceeding 2 GB causes other issues, crashes! Legacy VFW libraries are limited to 2GB etc. So, short clips of Huffyuv where transitions are required, XVID where no transitions are required. 

GL_warp2Avi 2 GB file-size limit

Found by trial and error that the GL_warp2Avi has a 2 GB file size limit for both input and output avi files. This is due to the limitations of the legacy video for windows code used. The limits are discussed at
http://neuron2.net/LVG/filesize.html

Because of this, I could not use huffyuv codec for clips longer than 30 seconds or so. My workaround was to use x264vfw for high quality input and output avi files with small size.

Note: Workaround for input file limits - using virtualdub frameserver.

desturate in CEP

Wanted to try and "restore" a clipped piece of audio in Cool Edit Pro, so tried out a search for doing so in Audition and found this discussion which may be useful. In my case, just changing the sample depth 32 to 16 was enough for me. But useful for reference:

• Convert to 32 bit
• Normalize to 50%
• Use Chebyshev bandpass 18th Order, 4 Hz to 22.5 kHz.