Geekery: Converting Video for BlackBerry Curve
Posted by Steven Buehler in Geekery on March 8, 2010
I just got a prepaid BlackBerry Curve 8330 from Boost Mobile (much cheaper than a contract with the major companies) now that Boost is running on the Sprint CDMA/EVDO/3G network, and spent time searching the ‘net for instructions on what the proper video settings should be for converting video that I want to watch or show off on it. The device supports 3GPP, MPEG-4, and Windows Media 9 out of the box, and after doing some comparisons with the Roxio-based media converter that came with the BlackBerry (great if you’re a Windows user, not so good if you’re on a Mac), I found some optimal settings that I figure are worth sharing if you’ve got one of these little gems and Handbrake on your Mac (or on Windows).
(I also figured out why they call them “CrackBerries”—I’m already addicted to mine)
These screens are from my Mac; the Windows screens are nearly identical.
- Set the average bitrate to 512 kbps. This requires clicking the “Average Bitrate” radio button to switch from Constant Quality. The Roxio application seems to use this bitrate as the “sweet spot” for video conversion.
- Change the video codec from H.264 (which the BlackBerry doesn’t fully support) to MPEG-4.
- The Roxio Media Manager application converts media to 24 fps for the BlackBerry, so I duplicated that setting in Handbrake. 24 fps is the framerate for motion picture film, and you won’t notice much difference between 24 or 30 fps (used by NTSC video) at such a small image size.
- From here, click on your Picture Settings icon in the toolbar of Handbrake. You’ll need to change some settings here as well.
- In Picture Settings, the first thing to do is change the "Anamorphic” setting to “None.” This frees up the size elements above it for the changes you need to make.
- Set the default width to 320 px and make sure the “Keep Aspect Ratio” checkbox is checked. The Height field can be left alone since using “Keep Aspect Ratio” will automatically set the correct image height for the source video you’re converting.
- If your source video is interlaced (DVD or MPEG-2 input from your set-top box, for example), you’ll want to turn on the deinterlace or decomb filters on the Filter tab of this dialog (you only need to set one; decomb produces better quality output while deinterlacing is faster)
Once you’ve got these settings in, you can save it as a new preset (I call mine “BlackBerry,” naturally) and then queue up the videos you want to convert in Handbrake and let’er rip.
I’ve found the quality from these settings is pretty darn good (on par with my iPod Classic). You may notice some screen redraw artifacts, but that’s simply because of the BlackBerry’s inferior video chip compared to the iPhone or iPod. Unless you’re a die-hard videophile it’s not a big deal.
Hope this information is useful to ya!
Defending your value
Posted by Steven Buehler in Social Media, business on March 5, 2010
Get over the 22K price tag. It’s amazing what this has brought out of people. I’m seeing a lot about you from how the negative folks responded. I have lots of other price tags, too. 10K-30K for a whole month of New Marketing Labs time. See that? You can get plenty more value if you buy my team instead of just a day of me. I could do this all day. It’s what I’ve chosen to charge, not what you have to pay. Pay what you want. It’s called a marketplace. It’s part of MARKETing. Right?
Years and years and years of free stuff shared all the time and folks get a bit worked up over rates. How do you think I afford to do what I do? How do you think I can afford to flit around and visit everyone face to face and spend time at free and inexpensive events, and why do you think I travel away from my family so often? I earn my living. I earn every hour of it. Begrudge me that and I don’t really know what to say.
Just wanted to take a moment to repeat what I twittered to Chris Brogan after reading his post (he stopped following me on Twitter shortly afterwards; I’m not going to speculate whether this was related to my comment or not):
@chrisbrogan You don’t need to defend yourself. Those who see the value will pay for the value. Those that don’t, won’t. End of topic. about 15 hours ago via Seesmic in reply to chrisbrogan
I know enough about business to understand the law of supply and demand and the rules of competition. Chris charges $22,000 for a day of his undivided attention applied to your business, because he chooses to. It keeps his client base down to two or three clients a month, which I assume affords him the ability to do his best for those two or three clients instead of trying to divide a finite supply of attention to too many clients if he were to charge less. People and companies that are genuinely interested in Chris’ knowledge applied to their specific environment will pay the amount he asks for it.
In defense of Mr. Brogan, it’s not like he’s reserving his “special sauce” for those paying clients. He gives away the same advice on his blog for free; his paying clients get the same advice in a means specific to the client’s particular situation and objectives. Clients pay his bills, keep the lights on, put the food on his table; clients are what give him a living. And I’ve seen the cost of living in the Boston area—it’s the only reason I haven’t moved up there yet (central Florida’s cost of living is about half Boston’s). I for one am grateful that Chris has chosen to publish his advice for free via his blog because it has some good nuggets not just for marketing, but for life in general. And, Mr. Brogan also takes the time to give credit where credit is due and take note of people that make a difference to him.
Social media is spoiled.
Posted by Steven Buehler in Life on March 4, 2010
There’s a firestorm starting across the Social Media space, and Chris Brogan started it. Kind of.
Put simply: The FREE model is dead. And the shift was coming for some time.
We’ve been seeing a lot of this lately, and I’m listening to C. C. Chapman’s Managing the Gray putting it all together in his latest podcast episode. J. C. Hutchins wrote in his blog about how reputation and his fanbase isn’t paying his bills. Chris Brogan appears to be getting all sorts of angry uprising from “the community” when he disclosed that he charges $22,000 to a client for a day of his time, while suggesting that people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki charge significantly more. They’re huge numbers, but Chris has a reason behind his (he pares down his client list that way).
The fact is, as I’ve mentioned before, that we’ve been tragically spoiled by the ‘free’ model when the ‘free’ model was actually working, when the model was easily supported by online advertising and the ‘free’ model often funneled potential clients into money-charging (and money-making) products from the same provider. Providers could provide enough of a ‘tease’ to get people to pay for the full product.
Then something changed. Providers stopped thinking about revenue and started thinking instead about how many eyeballs they could get on their product, and lifted the paywall, giving away their content for free.
Lately, something’s changed again. We’ve started discovering that the number of eyeballs on a site does not necessarily translate to dollars in the balance sheet, especially when one is giving away the content for free. Whereas it could be offset by online advertising, the economy caused those advertising dollars to decline significantly, to the point where the free model can no longer be supported by advertising without the addition of significant other investments, none of which genuinely guaranteed a return on the money being poured in. Then, when the credit markets suddenly seized up, so did the spicket of venture capital and investor money. A true ROI is now suddenly not just desirable, but essential, if your company wants to remain a going concern. The list of once stellar web sites that are now winding down “due to the economy” is growing.
So, now many are in the process of trying to put the genie back in the bottle, reerecting the paywall and reestablishing the distinction of free ‘teaser’ content and paid ‘premium’ content. And the spoiled-rotten masses are rising up in arms.
The fact is, you poor people, that ‘free’ doesn’t pay our bills. ‘Free’ doesn’t put food on our table. ‘Free’ doesn’t keep the lights on. I could never make money from blogging, which is why I spend most of my days looking for a regular job that will pay my bills, even though the crappy economy hasn’t provided me with a job yet and my unemployment benefits are fixin’ to run out in the next month or two. It’s why I provide means for people who read here to support what I do in terms of writing by subscribing to the blog via Amazon Kindle (99¢ per month isn’t much, but it’s something to help me know that people actually want to read what I write). I certainly can’t charge $22,000 a day for my time—I’m no ’social media guru,’ and the dream of being a preacher is officially over now that I’ve recently reverted back to Catholicism. There isn’t much here in my own writing that I feel I could (or should) charge anything for.
It’s time to wean ourselves off of ‘free content’ and accept the fact that things can’t continue the way they have been for the past several years when everyone was throwing money at the ‘next big thing.’ Business can’t function that way anymore.
My response to Tiger Woods
Posted by Steven Buehler in Life on February 27, 2010
I read the transcript of Tiger Woods’ public statement this morning about his marital indiscretions and sexual addiction, after reading some of the reactions from people who think they know better, about whether the apology was “genuine.”
As someone who has been through the same addiction, I believe it was.—Wayne Drash, CNN [link]
I’m not surprised it took three months. In fact, I was surprised he came out as soon as he did (So was the more-famous-than-me Dr. Drew). Most people dealing with these issues through the Step process take a year or longer to reach that point. Assuming that the facility Tiger has been receiving his therapy at follows something close to the 12-Step Process, making amends doesn’t come up until nearly two-thirds through the Steps:
- We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
- Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
- Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
- Continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs
There’s a reason that making amends—making the apology—comes later in the process. It has to, because before we can make amends for what we’ve done, we need to understand ourselves first and come to terms within ourselves (with the help of a trusted confidante, or sponsor) about our actions, addictions, and the impact they’ve had on others before we can make a full and honest amends to those we’ve hurt with our habits. We also need to have that moral inventory in order to understand what caused our addictions to begin with, because addiction is not itself the problem, but almost always a symptom of much deeper hurt. The lack of real, honest relationships in my past were the deeper hurt in my own life that was acted out in my sexual addiction as I tried to find those relationships and fill that hole in my life with artificial relationships (pornography, etc.).
It’s impossible to have a honest apology/amends if we haven’t first acknowledged that we’ve done something wrong, understood that we need help to recover, make the conscious decision to allow ourselves to recover, and then search within ourselves for what caused our wrong actions and those that are involved to whom we need to make amends. The other thing about making amends is that doing so is not for the people that we’re making amends to. It’s for our own conscience and recovery. How people react to Tiger’s attempt to make amends is not Tiger’s problem. He did what he was supposed to do, and he did so starting with the people closest to him. He didn’t need to let the Press be involved. He’s doing this the right way. My advice to the Press and those who think Tiger’s statement this morning was a PR stunt rather than genuine: Give him and his family the time and space to recover and restore what was lost. Words will never be enough to make everyone happy. He’s going to have to prove himself all over again and spend the next months and years regaining first the trust of his family. That can only be done in private away from the cameras.Two years on
Posted by Steven Buehler in Life on February 27, 2010
Sunday marked two years since the divorce was finalized. Two years removed from my biggest failure in life.
The last three years have been a domino effect of one negative event after another—the recovery, being laid off, the divorce, being fired for the first time in my career, and now the bankruptcy after over a year (and counting) of unemployment. It’s only by the grace of the landlord that I’m not now homeless. My new romantic relationship and change of faith has me believing in “happily ever after” again, although with a more realistic view, which for me is a good thing. Nothing else, though, has even gotten started toward being positive. Well over 700+ applications, two interviews, no jobs. There but for the grace of God, go I.Credit where credit is due—J. C. Hutchins
Posted by Steven Buehler in Credit Where Credit is Due, Social Media on February 25, 2010
J. C. Hutchins (via Facebook)
Bravo to thriller author J. C. Hutchins for his valiant effort in bringing together podcasting, multimedia, social networking, and print to create the 7th Son series of thriller novels.
Unfortunately, in spite of the valiant effort put forth by grass roots movements across the Internet, St. Martin’s Griffin, after determining that the response to the first volume of 7th Son didn’t work out financially, decided not to publish the rest of the series; Hutchins has also decided not to pursue another publisher and move on to other creative pursuits, according to his blog.
J. C.’s work made a number of firsts:
7th Son: Descent made history in the way it was promoted: It was the first mainstream novel to be simultaneously released in free serialized audiobook, PDF and in text format (at BoingBoing.net). It was the first book to use serialized prequel audio short stories as part of its release promotion. It was the first novel to have an accompanying music album (the Anyman EP) sung by a character from the book, timed to its release. I am very proud of these groundbreaking accomplishments.
But he also notes something important that people hoping to make money online really need to know:
Put simply: The new media model viably supports only the most blessed and talented of authors. The time, effort and money I invest in entertaining you for free pulls my attention and talent away from projects that can generate revenue. While podcasting, podcast fiction, and — most importantly — your support and evangelism has positively impacted my life and career in ways I’ll never be able to fully express, I cannot continue to release free audiofiction if I wish to make a living wage with my words.
One of the major obstacles of publishing over the Internet is that the millions that use it now expect to obtain the content they want for free, and until the current “Great Recession” we’ve been spoiled by companies who sacrificed their revenue streams to grant our wish. Now many companies are reevaluating that model. “Free” is not a model that is going to ever create sustained, workable revenue.
Been down a few days
Posted by Steven Buehler in Uncategorized on February 25, 2010
The site has had some downtime over the past week so you’ve been reading my Posterous backup. I’ll be migrating those over shortly. J
An update on the job search
Posted by Steven Buehler in Life on February 15, 2010
The official word from the State of Florida on the unemployment check I just received this past week:
The well hasn’t totally run dry—there is still EUC3 (another 13-week emergency extension Obama signed into law in November). That is, if I’m reading the latest letter correctly.
It’s now fourteen months, ten days of unemployment. The bankruptcy continues to progress without incident.
My Visual CV is at http://www.visualcv.com/swbuehler.
Photo credit: NoHoDamon via Flickr® (cc/by-nc-sa)
Social media update
Posted by Steven Buehler in Social Media on February 13, 2010
Verizon cancelled my FiOS account a couple of weeks ago after trying to catch up on my bill, so I’ve been forced to change providers (back to Bright House) and also change my contact information for Yahoo! and its services.
- Flickr® – My original account stevenwbuehler is still there, but I’m not able to update it anymore because it’s tied to the verizon.net account that’s now cancelled. So, I had to open a new Flickr® account as sacredproject. If you’re currently a contact with swbuehler, stevenbuehler, or stevenwbuehler, you’ll want to update it to sacredproject.
- Yahoo! – My Yahoo! ID for IM and other stuff is stevenwbuehler.
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About Me
I'm a 30-something blogger, sometimes writer/musician, and geek-of-all-trades starting life over in Plant City, Florida, with the faith of my youth, the love of my life, and prayers for a job before my unemployment compensation runs out in April 2010. I'm also the host of The Sacred Project Podcast—This Ain't Your Grandma's Church Music!
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