A few years ago, classic TV comedy MASH, was remastered and released on streaming platforms. The picture quality was massively increased with just one minor flaw. They cropped the image to 16:9 widescreen 😱 This upset some fans. The thing about widescreen is that it chops off the top and bottom of the picture. The top of Hawkeye's head? Gone! The bottom of Hot-Lips' boots? Vanished! אױ װײ איז מיר But, there is an upside. Or should that be side-side? Anyway, the new remaster adds some previo…
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I'm always interested in when anachronistic technology pops up in the media. Whether it's Kelly Rowland trying to send an email using Excel, or people in spaceships developing film photographs, or futuristic moonbases which use BS 1363 plugs - I just love it! So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're Gone" by Bryan Adams (featuring Mel C) - when I noticed this: It appears to be a desktop videophone! The interlacing looked artificial to me - but I've noted before that…
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I started working for Vodafone in the early 2000s, just about the time they paid billions for their 3G licences. As "exciting" new phones were launched, teams were desperately trying to recoup that spending. It led to an explosion of profitable ideas - Ringtones! Games! Premium SMS! Adult video clips! - but I want to talk about something which didn't make quite the same impact. Video calling. You've got to remember that video calling wasn't even in its infancy - it basically didn't exist for…
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Inspired by this conversation on Mastodon YouTube hosts 360 videos. Here's one of mine, wandering through the Houses of Parliament. You can drag the video to see all around. If you let YouTube-DL download the "best" version, you'll end up with a video which looks like this: Each lens' view has been horizontally stretched, and then stitched into an over/under view. This is in Google's Equi-angular Cubemap format. Grim! There are two options available to you to get the equirectangular…
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I watched this video from my colleagues in NHS England - it's the first time I've seen a Sign Language overlay on a Twitter video. NHS@NHSukNeed help fast, but not sure what to do? Go straight to 111.nhs.uk . To find out more about NHS 111 including how to use the NHS 111 BSL interpreter service visit nhs.uk/111 #NHS111 pic.x.com/tk18uvm2vy❤️ 16💬 1🔁 016:00 - Sat 18 May 2019 Is it possible to have multiple Sign Languages available to a video? What you may not know is that British Sign Languag…
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This is part of my redecentralisation efforts to liberate my videos from YouTube. MPEG-DASH is a simple method of streaming videos which doesn't require any specialised server software. You convert a high resolution video into a series of smaller resolution videos. You chop each of the videos up into several chunks. As the video plays, your browser then decides which chunk of the video to load next depend on the bandwidth available to it. Easy! Aim From the command line: Upload a video…
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As ever, notes to myself. I hope you appreciate this future me! Photographs often contain EXIF metadata - really useful for finding out when a photo was taken. It turns out that you can add similar metadata to MP4 format videos. Here's how to do it with ffmpeg on Ubuntu Linux. The magic option is -metadata creation_time="2015-12-25T12:34:56" Stick that in when you're encoding your video and it will be added to the new file. The time should be in ISO8601. If you have a video that you don't…
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Way back in 2010, I got a pair of video recording sunglasses. I've been occasionally using them to "lifelog" what I'm doing. With the advent of Google's Project Glass, I thought it would be interesting to wear them to a fairly techy event - Not At SXSW London - to see what the reaction would be. Here are my findings. Caveats These are not Google Glasses. These are £15 DVR Sunglasses. They are cheap and nasty and don't look anything like the futuristic Google Glasses. They record VGA …
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Beautiful video about the work Derby Museum has been doing with Wikipedia & QRpedia. Derby Museum using multilingual QR codes from Andrew James Sykes on Vimeo. In 2011 Wikipedians wrote and translated 1200 new articles to allow the museums objects to read in over a dozen languages using QRpedia codes. …
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It's always an odd experience to watch yourself speak. Everyone - I think - finds the sound of their own voice really odd. I'm no exception! This is the video from the Derby Museum Backstage Pass where we gave the first public demonstration of QRpedia. The Video Video shot by Nick Moyes. The Slides All slides are a work in progress. This is a close approximation of what was presented on the day. Introducing QRpedia at Derby Museum from Terence Eden View more presentations…
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Here's the captured video from MobileMonday's Trends in mHealth panel. Presented in glorious HTML5 and hosted on Archive.org Part 1 (more…) …
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Oh! Woe is me! I can't make BarCampLondon 8. This will be the first BarCamp I've not been able to get to in ages. Following hashtags is fun, if a little disjointed. What I really need is some way I could attend virtually..... .social-embed {all: unset;display: block;}.social-embed * {all: unset;display: revert;}.social-embed::after {all: unset;}.social-embed::before {all: unset;}blockquote:not(*) {all: unset;}.social-embed a {cursor: pointer;}blockquote.social-embed {box-sizing:…
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