Inspired by video encoding with handbrake.

HandBrake is a very high-quality piece of software – next time you need recoding something into H.264/MPEG-4 (using MKV or MP4 containers) – try HandBrake. It easily saturated all my CPU cores – which I failed to achieve with ffmpeg, which even with threads=8 was only saturating 2 cores.

Attached to this post are 2 profiles for recoding movies for Nokia E71. The “_best” profile has exhaustive motion detection, otherwise is identical to the base profile.
E71.plist
E71_best.plist

Related:

• x264 ffmpeg mapping and options guide
• ffmpeg audio/video encoding cheat sheet

If you are a Python zealot, and Java doesn’t feel right, but the project you are working on is a Java project – try

• Jython – Python for the Java platform, compile your python scripts into Java bytecode
• Groovy – not Python, but still a scripting language which compiles to jars

In my childhood, I greatly enjoyed the series of novels by Roger Zelazny about the Amber multiverse. I also did enjoy the book by JRRT.

Many of the epic and thrilling worlds have been brought to the wide screen in recent decades. So today I came to IMDB looking for just any film adaptation of the excellent novel series by Roger Zelazny, and found… nothing! Roger himself is accurately catalogued, though.

The Amber multiverse seems to me even bigger than that of JRRT’s world, yet the LoTR has a screen version, and Amber doesn’t. That’s unfair! I want a screen version of Amber world!

I’ve found a thread at IMDB, which asks for the movie, so I’m not alone in that.

P.S. Inspired by the recently re-viewed episodes of SW, including the CW animation series.

Excellent play of Hugh Laurie (Doctor House), terminology-enriched plots, and the style of “medical detective story” – all add up to an excellent viewing pleasure.

If you enjoyed Jeeves and Wooster – be sure to check House M.D.. It is completely different, but Hugh Laurie really excels in both.

Highly recommended!

4 seasons (23 episodes) of highly enjoyable British comedy. Excellent playing by Stephen Fry (Jeeves) and Hugh Laurie (Bertie Wooster). Good stories by P.G. Wodehouse. Highly recommended!

P.S. “Jeeves and Wooster” differs strongly from the IT Crowd I had written about before. IT crowd is an every-day-situational-comedy, while J&W is genius-serving-the-idiot, with most laughs at Wooster’s plans and deeds.

If taken out of [Ani]Matrix context, and filtered through internal “over-exaggeration removal”, then this exact 9-minute animation (episode 2 of 9) is quite coherent with soon-possible problem to face humans.

Yes, I do believe the creation of sentient machines is within perceivable future. And yes, I do think that the problems of “robot personality” will be acute.

In support of my view – cloning is an unresolved ethical problem, which also grows into legal and social problems in the case of human cloning. When even the possibility of having two genetically identical humans arises, this leads to debates and disagreements (to clone or not to clone?). What could be said about a machine claiming it’s right for life?

Claiming other human rights?

Racism and xenophobia are characteristic for some countries even nowadays, and it can be even said that there is no country where the number of xenophobic or racist citizens is equal to zero. And that’s human-human relations problem.

In other words, I did enjoy The Second Renaissance, Part I (except for the clearly contradictional last two minutes of it).

Overall The Animatrix is good.

And the message I was trying to express is that mankind better be prepared to live side-by-side with machines – develop some realistic co-existence model. SciFi writes will help here . Just let’s avoid the fake, insincere model tried in The Animatrix: Matriculated (episode 9, the last one).

The IT Crowd is a British sitcom.
I greatly enjoyed both seasons (a total of 12 episodes).
Though somewhat and sometimes primitive, The IT Crowd is highly enjoyable and recommended for watching.