Why didn’t anyone tell me…

The economy is bad, and I realized early this year that my audiobook subscription was next on the chopping block, and, screaming in my heart, I clicked “Close” on my Audible subscription. And then I resumed reading the last 2 books I picked up.  Unfortunately, the second was a serial with 3 other parts, and I rather liked it. So I was in trouble. What to DO!?

So I did the next most logical thing. I went to the public library’s web site. Now, of course, this is where many of you will get angry with me, because I’m part of the San Jose Public Library system (www.sjlibrary.org) and you’re probably not. I can only say that this is documenting how I got around this problem, and you’ll have to adjust your experiences accordingly. Moving on.

So I still did the next most logical thing. I went to the public library’s web site. And sure enough: there on the left is a search catalog link. Which is exactly what I was after. I typed in the title and clicked search.  The list came back with over 300 entries. Most were paper, most by other authors, but the great thing was: they had audiobooks in there too. And I don’t just mean the CDs you can get on the shelves, which was all I was expecting - but electronic audiobooks. So I clicked, and fell down the rabbit hole.

For Father’s Day this year I got my audiobook subscription to Audible renewed for one year, so I have book credits on hand. However, I’m surprised by two changes; first - I love the new Audible site design with the NYT Bestseller lists and favorite-ever lists, and second - now that I know how to get so many books from other sources for ‘free’, I’m surprised how little is left on my Audible list that can’t be found elsewhere.  There are some exceptions, like there are a hand full of Orson Scott Card books that I just don’t find elsewhere, and some Michael Crichton (I limit myself to one Crichton book a year or I stop enjoying them). But even many of the newest books appear in the public library in short order.

For the impatient, I’ll just shortcut to the:

Workflow Cheat Sheet

• Keep a master wish list at Audible or Amazon. They have the big catalogs of books, with a variety of reviews available and star ratings that may keep you out of a book that sounds like one thing but turns out to be another. And sometimes they will have books that aren’t available from public locations. I hate forgetting: what-was-that-book-that-sounded-so-good-but-then-I-forgot-to-write-it-down-and-then -I-got-busy-and-now-I’ll-never-know-if-it-was-any-good-or-not. Get in the habit of using the voice recorder on your phone if you don’t feel like typing. I use the iPhone camera in book stores and the public library to snap the title and author of anything that looks good. They don’t have to like me.
• Periodically go to your wish list at either site above and start searching your public library catalog. I’m finding that about 2/3 of the books I search for can be had at one of the free sources, albeit with a wait. Even if there is a wait, I have 12 books queued up, I can be patient.
• Go to the public library site and search, sort by media kind and scroll all the way down - ebooks and audiobooks are at the end mostly. This catalogs both what is in the ebooks site and what is in the physical holdings. First pick the electronic version if you can get it. No CDs to import, quality is sufficient for translation into medium or low quality Audiobook Builder format. And no driving.

The San Jose ebook web site has its own flow. The flow here is [ optional - wishlist]->waiting list->bookshelf for 1,2,3 weeks. They manage it in the same way you would manage the paper copies - only so many copies are available for checkout, and you have to take turns with the others. Their wish list has each books current “Get it now” or “You’ll have to wait” status.

Spend some time one day just throwing piles of stuff into your wishlist from your master Audible/Amazon list, or from browsing. If you keep your checked-out list (a.k.a. bookshelf) about half full, you’ll still have room if a couple of your waiting list books come to you.  Otherwise you’ll miss your reservation window. Go ahead and keep your waiting list books more or less full and don’t be afraid to put yourself back in a queue if you miss it because of a full bookshelf. Remember about once a week to go back and check the wish list for available books and check out enough to keep it around half full and you’ll be happy.

Second choice is to get the physical CD set. Sometimes there is also an mp3 CD set. I was quite impressed with the quality of this. If the library is between work and home, I’ll drive it myself. If not, I’ll request a delivery to the one closest to home.

• Then turn to LibriVox. A surprising amount is available there, so don’t discount it.  Just don’t cringe at the narrators - quality varies widely. But also because they aren’t hindered by things like production cost, you can find a lot more content there than in most commercial collections, like their Sherlock Holmes collections are far more complete. The problem is that the LibriVox site is hard to navigate; but again, the price is right. If I liked my voice, I might consider doing some narrating myself. Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, seriously good stuff available.
• If all else fails, money talks. Audible or Amazon can help you find nearly anything in audiobook form.

Okay, now the details.

Welcome to DRM - we hates it forever

First: At home I’m a Mac user by default. I have a Windows box and 3 linux boxes, but my preference for the UI is the mac. iTunes is run on my mac mini - which is its main job really, followed by the endless video encoding I do. So when I showed up at the San Jose Library’s ebooks section (run by Overdrive DRM software, piggybacking Windows DRM), there were a few things of note:
1. They do have mp3 audiobooks with “do it yourself” DRM - please delete when you are done with a reminder from the download client.
2. They have far more DRMd WMA books.
3. But hey, the price is right.
4. Books can be checked out for 1, 2, or 3 weeks at a time, with a max limit of 10 at a time.
5. You can also put yourself on the waiting list for individual books. If you have a book slot open on the day your number comes up, you can check it out.  If not, just put yourself back in the queue tomorrow. Be sure to check your email.
6. They recently added “iPod friendly WMA audiobooks”, which apparently means that if you run iTunes from Windows, you can sync them to Apple devices. I haven’t tried them.

So, being an Mac iTunes-iPod-iPhone person, this limited me to just a subset of those books, but you can search just within that range and still get quite a bit.

Bundling and Organizing

So, just the same, I got busy with the checking out some MP3 audiobooks and some CD audiobooks, and remembered one of my pet peeves about the whole business. The “Audiobook” handling in iTunes is only scalable to the point at which you copy one or maybe two to the device you use. The interface on the iPhone and iPod for their Audiobooks navigation is annoying - titles only. So I’ve taken to storing them as Music, so I can navigate like so:

1. Music
2. Genres
3. Audibooks or Radio for radio shows
4. Author as Artist
5. Series name or Title as Album
6. Title Part N

I also keep a set of playlists based on the intended listener:

• Book Queue New

- for my new books. I keep them here to get around to them in some sort of order, whatever I feel like. I find that if a book is too dark or too much work, I only listen to it on the way to work and prefer something lighter for the trip home.

• Book Queue Reread

- for the lighter books or just anything I feel like I want to come back to soon.

• Book Queue Kids

- The public library has lots of audibooks geared toward the short set. I’ve picked up some for them and put them in here so we can get to them on the school run. They loved the Star Wars Radio Shows I got a couple years ago and a Peter Pan radio play.

So if Apple ever offers Audiobooks the same navigation, I’ll switch them back, but it’s a simple change.

Each publisher has different policies when dealing with the track length, and the books you get from the public library could be chapter divisions or they could be disc divisions, or something else entirely. Enter Audiobook Builder by Splasm software. It does exactly what I want it to do - combine lots of different little chapter or whatever files into a single set of m4b audiobook format files for iTunes. Bingo! Well worth the $10 I paid for it three years ago.

So now that I have my books and can listen to them and they aren’t 6 bizillion little files, I pop them into iTunes and the silence is gone. I have recovered - and the only thing I had to buy (but already owned, so no expense for me) was Audiobook Builder. $10 for a serious pile of audiobooks.

So I guess that’s the conclusion as well. I have a lot of credits for the things I can’t get from the Library, and the Library does a spectacularly efficient job of giving me access to books I can hear.Happy listening!

Thought I’d add this one to the list simply because I discussed it with a friend recently and didn’t have a chance to put it up here.

Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show

Now generally I like short story collections, especially in audio form, because the change from story to story is a lot of fun, especially with a 30m - 1h commute most mornings. Sometimes you complete a whole story on the way to or from work and you feel like you’ve accomplished something, and you get the whole picture in a short time. It’s nice. These were especially fun because they were extremely well thought out, sometimes silly, sometimes sad, and they touched me beyond the normal, “heh, that was cool.” The one about Elvis had me rolling in my seat in the parking lot, 10 minutes after I’d arrived at work. I’m glad nobody saw me there. As it was, I had to re-tell the story to my wife, doubled over in laughter the whole time. Highly suggested collection.

Intensity  by Dean Koontzzszszz. I’ve read a couple of his books and really like them, but this one I’m putting down. His books that I’ve liked I would call thrillers. This one I would call horror. I just don’t care to invest any more of my time in it.

SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT

I don’t like the violence done to the characters immediately at the beginning of the book. I don’t like the particular violence described, nor the reasons. I think he could have done better without the descriptions. I don’t like the extreme masculinity assigned to the female lead character. I’m just not enjoying it. So I’m done.

<daveb> or maybe I’ll just leave things alone and play video games instead
<nate>
<nate> always a good solution
<daveb> sat down last night to play some Gran Turismo and fell asleep BEFORE THE GAME STARTED.,
<nate> the load screen always takes a long time
<daveb> Dave Barry has a fun article something about The Snake, referring to how growing old is like falling into the clutches of a great snake that swallows you. “One day you have children of your own and one day you catch them setting fire to something, and you shout “Someone Could Get Hurt!” - and mean it - from inside the snake. And then it’s too late. The Snake has you.
<daveb> That’s how I feel about what happened last night. I sat down to be young and frivolous, only to wake up in the belly of the snake.

Recently the only hours I have are occupied hours. The work situation is stable, but so busy that I don’t even take lunches properly any more. This has cut into my daytime light photography quite a bit. Not that I can find much in a 30 minute circle from work to go visit that hasn’t been captured a zillion times by more skilled hands than mine. So I’ve mostly been just working and trying to sit out this economy trouble thing.
My book reading has gotten a bit slimmer because there were no raises this year, and the promised stock options aren’t likely to be worth anything even if they are granted eventually.
So what’s been occupying my time? I’ve been turning to the only real option for such late night free time - video game racing and catching up on TV. I’ve been playing Gran Turismo 4 and 5 on the Playstation and rFactor on the PC. Both of them with the steering wheel and pedals. It makes a big difference. I’ve also been working on Battlestar Galactica, season 1. Yes, I’m that far behind. I’ve also got a mad desire to start following Formula 1 racing and my traditional baseball. And importantly, I’ve started going to the public library and raiding their audiobook collections. I’ve picked over the local library’s audiobook section, so I’m probably going to raid the classical selection next.
Why do I drag you into this whole dreary thing? I don’t really know. But I do feel that what few readers I have should understand why this isn’t going as fast as I had hoped.
I hope to start doing a photography piece or two, and I have ideas of what I want to do, but it requires daylight hours and I just don’t have as many of those as I could wish for.

I just finished the full length adaptation of Blade Runner (the book), which is the stretching out of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, both by Phillip K. Dick. First, it’s not the movie. It’s not even the same story. The thing that impressed me most is the split personality he exposes between the priority that earth people put on pets (in the book) versus the priority they place on artificial pets, which are both higher than escaped androids. I’ll be honest, I preferred the story from the movie, but I’m not disappointed with the book.

Forgot to mention that I also read Orson Scott Card’s “Ender in Exile“, which I find to be a good, but rather schizophrenic book. I can’t figure out which story he’s trying to tell. There are at least 3 story lines that happen, and I think I’d have preferred if they were dealt with in a “Book 1, Book 2, Book 3″ style instead of just mostly jumbled in. While I was able to follow the stories, I didn’t think they had much to do with each other, or not enough that it was interesting to have them intermixed. Maybe I’d have just preferred to have three short stories instead of the novel-length version. Either way, I was not unhappy with the book, but I felt like there could have been a stronger way of telling the same content.

There are a few books I’ve read since I last blogged. And here’s something I don’t do often enough: I stopped reading midstream. That’s right, I gave up on a couple of these books. Gasp! The horror!

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. While I appreciate that this may have been the launch of modern True Crime books, the fact is that we see twice as hard on CSI three times a day with new seasons being cranked out in triplicate even now. The wandering nature of the narrative is distracting and plainly annoying to a modern reader. This is a book that time has outdated. I appreciate that it may have been groundbreaking, but now it’s just broken. Uninteresting and slow with no apparent direction. Please everyone, run out to your local store and demand they stop selling this disaster of a book. Send it back to the ’50s where it belongs.
Also given up on:
Bridge of Sighs. At first it opens like a guy going to recount a story about a trip to Italy, to tell about his life in context of life in a small New York town, then it suddenly jumps to him getting locked into a trunk in the woods by a bunch of bullies and him listening to drunk people having sex, and the life of a spoiled artist in Venice. What happened? After a quarter of the book and nothing really going anywhere, it was ejected. There were clearly 2 stories going on, but I just didn’t care enough about either of them to waste more time on it. 1 point for the old man narrative, -1 for the artist, -1 for jumping around. Shame on you Russo. Reel us in and keep us, don’t try to make Memento a book.

I think it’s time someone took those old cameras out of circulation, and I think I’m the man. So I’m holding a photo contest of a different sort. Send me a photo of your oldest camera body or other equipment in the act of being violently destroyed, and I’ll pick the best one and send the winner $100. I don’t care about how old or rare it is, I care about the boom. Let’s hold this open until September 1 at which point myself and an uninterested second will judge the best one.
Now go out there with your explosives and don’t hurt yourselves while shooting. JPGs, under 800×600 resolution.

encode

Back Story

We finally stepped part way into the HD era, by attaching a PS3 to our SD television. Sacrilege, I know, but it’s what I have for now, and the economy isn’t getting any better this week. But, as we only have two games for it (Little Big Planet and Mater-National Racing), we have found that it has another wonderful use. The Videos menu.

(Keep in mind that I have 3 little kids in the house, and while most of their viewing is in the broadcast-DVR, I still have hopes that they will take an interest in longer attention span viewing, or at least the Muppet Show season sets and Looney Tunes sets I have waiting. But handing them DVDs is a great way to have things get destroyed. Enter digital viewing on the TV.)

So, having an Infrant ReadyNAS x600 in the garage, I bought a copy of the far more predictable TwonkyMedia server that handles all the gross stuff related to sharing your video folder with the PS3. The built-in server just wasn’t maintaining itself well, no matter how I tried. I’m sure someone can make it go, but I needed something a bit more turn-key. But the bigger problem still remained: I have something along the line of 300 DVDs between movies, television series, and home-made things. Ripping is the tetchy topic, and if you have questions we can talk via email, but the fact is that ripping even the most difficult DVDs is now possible. But now you have at least one hard drive full of DVD folders or ISO images of DVDs, and you have to turn this into something a bit more manageable.

This is the PS3 specific portion - if you are comfortable with how your player plays back and what encoder settings you can get from Handbrake, then feel free to skip forward. As clients to my encoded DVDs, the first priority was everything was to be HD resolution for the PS3 and/or my TViX 4100. There was also a smaller subset that I wanted to play back on my iPhone. After much experimenting with  Handbrake, I settled on a set of 2 encoding strings that made me happy. One was the default PS3 profile, plus chapter markers (for computer playback), plus 2-pass encoding. The other was the same, but with deinterlacing turned on, for those titles like the Muppet show that were interlaced on the discs. (If you don’t deinterlace those, then the frames come out in the wrong order when replaying on the PS3, and make things jump around forward-backward-forward and drive you to turn it off.) Fortunately, the TViX plays these files without modification, so I was set for both devices. So those two strings were written and set aside. Then I came up with a parallel pair of strings for the iPhone setting.

So I had my 4 preferred encoding settings and a pile of 300ish ripped DVD images or folders to eat through. I knew there was a problem. At PS3-2pass resolution, each encode was about 4 hours. That’s a lot of hours, and queuing each in Handbrake’s GUI takes more time than I want to do. I already knew exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t want to do it by hand.

What I Did

So I did a little digging on Google and discovered that for some reasonably old version of Handbrake, someone wrote a bash script that would turn VIDEO_TS folders into mp4’s. As time had left this little gem behind, I did some minor repairs and used that for a couple encodes. But it had some limitations I didn’t like, and didn’t work at all for Windows machines, and so on. I even modified the original VIDEO_TS script to work with ISO images, and that saved me some more work. I could then do massive batch encodes using my two scripts. I took images to work and left the far faster work computers cooking m4v’s for me over weekends and nights. It was great for saving me weeks of computing at home. But I had to custom-build the scripts for Windows via shared folders on the mac, and it still took too long to manage two scripts across multiple machines. Enter the perl experience. At work I’ve been working with cross-platform scripting for a while now by using Perl. I opened up the guts of the VIDEO_TS script again, figured out how to do what they were doing, added the new abilities of Handbrake’s latest versions, and got to work giving the Windows machines the same logic the Mac had with the bash script.

The new script, stupidly named encode.pl, now handles pretty much anything that Handbrake can handle - or at least anything I encountered. First, you queue a directory. It simultaneously queues VIDEO_TS directories, ISO images, wmv/avi/mov/etc. files for encoding. Then it proceeds to do discovery via Handbrake about what it should encode. It does this by querying the title list for the duration and then applying a filter for length. For instance, my default setting is anything between 20 and 600 minutes, but that can be tuned with the –minimum or –maximum settings. Then it goes through them one by one, handing the whole thing off to Handbrake to be encoded. As each one finishes, it goes to the next one. No mess, no fuss. Until you run out of hard drive space that is. Can’t help you there.

So then I had to tune the way I organized my DVD images for feeding into this thing. My ReadyNAS had enough space at the time, so I put things into distinct folders. In the media share, I had a Videos folder. Inside I created the following:

/Volumes/media/Videos/todo/…

…/deinterlace/long

…/deinterlace/episodes

…/long

…/episodes

- and here’s why. The long directories were for things that I wanted only the titles that were over an hour and ten minutes. This let me get a single file for all of the Looney Tunes shows, strung together, instead of a pile of 7-9 minute shorts. There are enough per DVD to make it frustrating to have to return to the menu for each new show. Kids will just give up, and so will I. They already have a title with all of them together, so I just added the –minimum 70 setting when I do the long directories.The episodes directories were for things no longer than an hour. These are the opposite of the long things. So for cartoons, sitcoms, and other 22-44-minute episodes, I don’t want the whole DVD as one title, I want each show as an individual m4v file. That directory got the –maximum 50 setting. This pretty much handled everything except for a couple odd cases that I just encoded more or less by hand with the GUI - mabye 3 discs total.

For output directories, I created:

…/m4v

…/iPhone

Now, because I had central storage for both the input directory and the output directory, I also considered using multiple computers. I was able to use the 4 computers under my desk to all work on a central queue. I would go to each computer, mount the share, and put together the encode string for that machine, and set it running. Each computer when it starts an encode creates the file it’s starting on, and then starts the Handbrake line. I had to do this because with 2-pass encodes, the output file is not present until the second pass starts. Because of this, if you have computer A starting on title 1, then computer B might start on it too. If the file is present, then computer B says, “Oh, that one’s there, let’s start the next one.” So you get a cheap claim-before-starting system built in if encoding to the same destination. Then another thing came up. I could do encodes on my laptop while away from the main servers. So I added the ability to keep a log of what’s encoded and copy that to remote locations (*cough* work) and still not get double encodes. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than nothing.

The Interesting Part

So the result is a semi-distributed way of encoding a seriously big pile of movies into a standardized format using both Macs and PCs, possibly central storage, and getting a pile of files with at least standardized names.

I’ve actually considered trying to add a way to use STAF to auto-distribute encodes to available systems, but that takes a bit more time than I have at the moment. But that could allow you to have a central “encode controller” and some “encode slaves” that you hand out single encode jobs to. It’s within reach, I just need an hour here or there to try it.

Anyway, here’s how you use it:

perl encode.pl -i /Volumes/media/Videos/todo/long -o /Volumes/media/Videos/m4v --minimum 5 --maximum 70 -e "-Z PS3"

or the equivalent in Windows paths:

perl encode.pl -i M:\Videos\todo\long -o M:\Videos\m4v --minimum 5 --maximum 70 -e "-Z PS3"

-i for an input directory

-o for an output directory

-e for anything you want to hand directly to the encoder. “-Z PS3″ is the default PS3 string, but be careful with “-Z ‘iPhone & iPod Touch’” because the shells differ in quote handling. Try it on a single command line to get it right and then keep it around in a text file somewhere to be sure. Also, because of the funny quoting problems, I usually try to make the -e setting the last one I hand in.

–minimum is the minimum time in minutes that you want to approve a title for encoding

–maximum is the opposite. Note that minimum and maximum ignore seconds.

Note that almost everything is optional. You can open the perl code and change to your favorite defaults. On the Mac, the default input and output directory is ~/Movies, on PC it’s in My Documents. The pitfall of using the output directory as the input directory is if you cancel any encode, you’ll try to re-encode anything you’ve finished in the last pass. So try to keep them separated for sanity’s sake. I ended up one morning with MY_MOVIE.ISO_T2(through7)_T1.m4v trying to figure out what the heck went wrong.

So here you are readers, a new and improved mass encoder script for using Handbrake to eat massive piles of DVDs with one or more computers and Handbrake. Enjoy!

–edit

A little more experience added a few more things.

1. Favorites, so you can save your favorite encoding strings by name. Mine are PS3 PS3-d PS32 iPhone and iPhone-d with predictable results. But this is easier to type. So replace your -e arg with a favorite -f iPhone and you can save yourself a world of hurt. But -e still works as it did before.

2. Partial encodes are saved to blah.part.m4v until they complete, when they take on the name of their finished product. This was supposed to handle the situation of an unfinished encode displacing the encoder’s next pass, but alas, something doesn’t consider it an error when it’s interrupted *cough handbrake* so I’ll have to work on that some more.

Upload to follow shortly.