We’re audiophiles in this home. This year we spent about $1800 is music purchases. More than anyone we know.

About 40% of all the iTunes/CD purchases were for acts signed to major labels. The rest 60% was all indie.

I hereby make it my resolution for the new year to never buy RIAA/majors’ music ever again. Even if I like some of their songs so much that it makes me cry.

The last straw for all this was learning that EMI sued Vimeo the other day. They claim that Vimeo endorses users to lip dub and that this is copyright infringement. This whole thing is obviously a sham, and just pathetic. Even the Rolling Stone commented that this lawsuit comes out strangely after Vevo going live.

For some of the lip dub videos on Vimeo might be on the fence if they’re eligible under fair use or not, but some are so creative that no matter if a closed minded judge deem them in the future as non-fair use, in my mind they are. These videos do serve as a great advertisement for the labels, but they don’t see it this way.

Most of the music I bought this year it was because it was originally free out there. I downloaded the legally free mp3s, and if I liked what I heard, I’d go to iTunes to sample the rest of the band’s music. And if I liked what I heard, I bought the album. Many times I’ve heard a song on Youtube or Vimeo, asked what it was, and then bought it too (e.g. Feist’s “One Evening”). Instead, the majors (and RIAA), have become over-protective about the whole thing somehow, and they prefer to go to court. I really don’t see the point of all that.

Sometimes I wonder if what they’re trying to do is simply to have restrictions apply to ALL (including indie artists), just so THEY can promote their artists via TV/radio as they always have. You see, the internet PR companies have no power over TV/radio/mags, but they have the internet. The majors on the other hand, they are mighty-powerful on TV/radio/mags, but are only equal in the Internet PR game. If the majors can kill part of the internet hype machine by making video sites add more and more restrictions, then their songs will get more recognized/hyped via the traditional media rather than the Internet. So all these lawsuits against people, youtube, vimeo, might be just a strategic way to kill the indies! Destroy the competition by simply destroying THEIR TOOLS (aka the Internet way of doing things).

Rest assured, I’m not against the notion of copyright. What I’m against is the lawmaker’s abusing of that notion to make copyright laws worse and worse as the time goes by. Originally, copyright was meant to last 25 years. Now, with amendments on the law, we’re looking in to a century (in EU too). And the fair use allotments are simply too limited. They were written before the age of Youtube. Instead of the lawmakers taking these changes into mind to change the law, they make the law even more draconian, paying lip service to RIAA. The new international treaty that the media companies are cooking up for all countries is definitely not going to be pretty either.

As a media creator, I have already moved to Creative Commons for my music needs for 2 years now. I don’t touch non-CC music for my video projects.

As a media consumer, December 2009 is the time where I stop buying the major’s music. And if an indie label gets on the same tune as RIAA, I’d ban it too.

I ask all of you to think about this. If you read comments online, many say that “RIAA and the majors will fall soon”, but this is NOT TRUE. The only way to have them fall is if we don’t buy their products. These guys are not going anywhere if they still have money in their pockets.

The Gandhi way, is the ONLY way.

Update: An update to this article can be found here.

Discovering new artists has been my hobby this year — even replacing videography as my #1 interest. Here are the artists I discovered this year, and I believe that they are the best of the best newcomers. Regarding Blitzen Trapper and Portugal. The Man, I knew about them since 2007, but it was only this year that I actually got into them for good.

Find legal, free mp3s in the links provided.

[I like the three first just the same]

1. Blitzen Trapper
1. Cloud Cult
1. Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

4. Paper Route
5. Malbec
6. Seabird
8. Living Things
9. Cage the Elephant
10. Portugal. The Man

Right now, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros are on a constant rotation. I try to get into other music in my 39 GB iTunes library, but I keep going back to them. Their album is one of the best in our decade, in my opinion.

My favorite song of theirs, the “Desert Song“, is one of my all time favorites too. Very avant-garde. The video too. If these guys had proper PR behind them, this song would have been a classic already.

SyFy Channel put up on their web site an extended-cut version of Caprica’s 2-hour pilot, for free. I’ve watched the teaser scenes the channel put up early this year, and I didn’t like it back then. It really felt like a boring soap opera. And in fact, there was a huge online backlash from people feeling exactly like I was.

Having watched the actual pilot though, I can conclude only two things: either we were all wrong, or in the 9 months following the teasers SyFy re-shot part of the pilot to make the show more sci-fi than it originally was meant to be. Apparently, that’s what happened: they added/changed scenes based on feedback from the DVD version that was released a few months ago.

The story is taking place 50+ years before the annihilation of the 12 colonies by the Cylons. It shows the first baby steps of Cylons, how they were created and why. Most importantly, it will show how Cylons will get to acquire their artificial intelligence, and how this will end to the first Cylon war.

What I liked:

- The pacing was good.
- The characters were interesting and were evolving well.
- The CGI were good.
- The story was moving from tech to soap and back to tech with a good pace.
- Learning and seeing more about the rest of the Colonies was a nice touch.

What I did not like:

- The technology shown was uneven. We see a USB key (yes, actual USB), 2008 model cars, and… coin-operated park meters (that looked very old even for our own standards), while at the same time they have very advanced virtual reality systems, robots, and even spaceships. Overall, it’s a ’50s noir era for fashion, but with 2000s and futuristic tech. I personally find it laughable, cheap, and a cop out.

- This really pissed me off: [Spoiler] When the daughter’s data were corrupted inside the Cylon, we are given the impression that the father lost the data. Which is not freaking possible, since there is this thing called BACKUP. Digital data that can be copied once, can also be copied unlimited times. So when the father shouted “nooooo…”, like he lost his daughter’s data, that was completely unrealistic. It was disrespectful to my intelligence.

- The Cylon’s voice is robotic, while even a Powerbook at 500 Mhz can re-create the human voice. In fact, their house robot had a human voice. There was no reason for the Cylon to have a robotic voice, other than for being faithful to the original series.

- That God/Gods shit is all over the pilot, and I don’t like religious themes in my sci-fi. It’s like adding mustard in my soup. Having said that, the show does deal with a theme that will become more prevalent for us too, in this century: God, human’s desire to imitate him via science, and the polarization that this will create.

- The audio in the external scenes is bad (seriously vocodized too in order to cut out noise). The show needs a better sound guy.

Despite all that though, the pilot is definitely watchable. It could be better if SyFy had more money in order to expand the Colonies worlds.

Rating: 7/10

I first learned about Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros during this past summer, via their legal & free mp3 downloads, and their DayTrotter session. I liked the songs a lot, but I didn’t think much of the band. I didn’t check them further on iTunes.

Tonight, the RCRD.BL net-label offered one more free & legal mp3 download from the band’s debut album, which I downloaded and listened. Well, that song was… different. It had an epic feel in it. Half of it was in Spanish too. So I decided to check these guys out a bit more. I smelled there was more to them than I originally thought. And surely there was:

- This is a 12-piece band (sometimes more)!
- They seem to be hippies, and they tour the US in their white school bus.
- Edward Sharpe is a pseudonym for Alex Ebert, who used to be the singer of Ima Robot, a… power-pop band.

Needless to say that the Magnetic Zeros music has absolutely nothing to do with cheesy power-pop. A lot of it is reminiscent of the ’60s rock, but other parts remind me of Arcade Fire, or alt.folk. And by having such a large band, they have a very rich sound, with many different instruments used (trumpet, accordion etc).

However, there’s something very interesting about this band. See, the front-man Alex Ebert wants to do a musical based on his music. So far 2 out of the 12 parts of his feature-length musical project has been shot and released to the public. When all are completed they will tell a story. So far, the videos look great! Worth a look for sure!

That’s one band and album you don’t want to miss out. If they don’t run out of money and are able to complete their 12-part story, it would become one amazing piece of art. Something that people would refer as a “classic” in the years to come.

If only I knew of all this just a week earlier, so I wouldn’t have to miss their San Francisco show last Saturday.

I’ve been playing with my HTC Hero the last few days. I installed a lot of popular Android apps (about 80 of them), and tried to see how they feel compared to my iPhone’s.

Basically, the iPhone apps are more mature/stable. Developers seem to be spending less time testing for their Android ports, and more for their iPhone’s. However, on the other hand, Android has more free apps than the iPhone. If you can have a bit of patience with them, you will save money. Basically, it depends if your time is worth money or not.

The iPhone is not perfect though. Here are my three major gripes with the iPhone. All these features are supported on Android (#3 is done via 3rd party apps):

1. Background apps. From Twitter, to IM and VoIP apps (that are simply impractical to use with just PUSH), background apps are a must have. If anything, create an Android-like security system and services’ server that keeps control of misbehaving services.

2. Let the device operate as a USB-based device so we can drop files in there. Then, make some sort of file access/management accessible to third party apps. For example, what if I want to just copy a few random-format VGA videos on my iPhone, and there’s an app like VLC that can read these files while the iPhone video viewer can’t? I don’t want to transcode to h.264/AAC, I just want to play them as is via an app that can understand these formats. And that’s just a multimedia example. The same kind of example can exist for office or other documents too. And recently, I became aware that the first real video editor for the iPhone, ReelDirector, has no way to add music to the videos because Apple doesn’t offer access to the iPod music, or to a storage facility like the one suggested above.

3. AVRCP/PAN/LAP/Obex Bluetooth support. I need to be able to send a picture, or other kind of whatever-format file (see #4) to someone else’s phone (not DRM’ed files of course). Even dumbphones have support for these Bluetooth profiles.

4. Some kinds of apps are missing exactly because of #1 and #2. If Apple listens and fixes these two issues, we will see *useful* utilities and complex apps entering the AppStore, as opposed to yet another game or unit converter.

5. Just under the search box, I’d like to see a list-view with various app/phone notifications. Something between Android’s and Palm Pre’s, but with Apple’s touch. Again, for that we’d need #1, since PUSH won’t cut it in all cases. Originally I thought that a widget system for that empty space under the search box would be nice, but I think that a well-designed notification list view, makes more sense in that limited space.

On the other hand, the Android ecosystem is missing more stuff:

1. Not as good of overall usability/ergonomics as in the iPhone. Apps are more stable, beautiful, and with more features on the iPhone. On Android they feel like patchworks. Especially games, which is a shock!

2. I’d like a media player that makes sense and is a joy to use. The current media player sucks goats compared to the iPod Touch usability. Oh well, at least it can read all album art (Nokia phones, and even Sandisk players can’t).

3. AppleTV/iTunes Remote (TunesRemote on Android doesn’t work with my AppleTV, which is our main audio server in our home — we don’t use our AppleTV for video).

4. Skype via Wifi. Currently, Android’s Skype only works via GSM on the Android, because it was released around a time where not all VoIP-assisting APIs were completed on Android. Version 1.6 of Android does have the necessary APIs completed, but and I don’t see Skype getting fixed, since the company even removed their Android web page! Here’s hope they will wake up and add WiFi support.

5. Google Voice currently doesn’t work via VoIP/WiFi. Therefore, it’s completely useless for me right now since I need it to call my mom in Greece, and I only have a PayAsYouGo AT&T account.

6. No video editor is possible for Android (even if it doesn’t have iPhone’s file-system limitations) because not all needed media APIs exist (AFAIK). Plus, I’ve yet to see a single Android phone that shoots better video than the iPhone 3Gs anyway.

7. While there’s a task killer available, I want to also control apps to not automatically load on the background when the phone starts. Surely, that’s something that the app itself should offer me in its settings as a preference, however, very few implement it. So I’m now faced with apps that eat my RAM and I don’t want to be loaded (but I do want installed, e.g. Google Finance). That extra utility should be Google’s job, as it was Microsoft’s when they wrote msconfig.exe to carry out the function. If Apple adds the ability of background apps, they should implement this too (along a task killer).

And some things that both platforms need to implement. Who knew! They have something in common!

1. Get their shitz together with audio/video on multi-IM/VoIP. How more should we wait for A/V chats via WiFi? It’s 2010 already God damn it. I’m not even asking overloading 3G towers, I just want it via WiFi!

2. Adobe Flash 10.1. With GPU acceleration please. Android’s getting it according to Adobe, but until I see Vimeo working with it at 30 fps (VGA, non-HD videos), it has to stay in this list.

3. UPnP support. Both as a server and a client.

I have a bunch of Kodak HD digicams lying around (they cost just $100-$150 these days), but I don’t really use them because they are so slow to edit. You see, on the PC side, editors use the Quicktime engine to decode the MPEG4-SP format. On the Mac side these files are re-encoded during import to a friendlier format, so it’s not a big deal there, but on the PC side it is, since Quicktime for the PC is very slow. Not only that, but under Sony Vegas, using these MPEG4-SP MOV files via the Quicktime decoder is crashy.

So obviously, I needed a way to losslessly re-wrap (NOT re-encode) these MOV files to AVI, in order to force a more sane decoder to take over the decoding job under Vegas. So today I found a way to make these 720/30p HD files REAL TIME on my 5 year old Pentium4 3Ghz PC under Sony Vegas. From 2 fps previewing speed when using Quicktime under Vegas, to full 30 fps when using ffdshow instead! And it’s mighty stable! Here’s how:

Main method

1. Download ffdshow. Use the latest CLSid version for your operating system. Here’s the current 32bit version (as of this writing), if you are lost and you don’t know which one to download. Install it.

2. Download and install SUPER (use the RO server, the US one is corrupted). Load the app, right click, and set “Output file management” to any newly created folder (this will be the folder that will hold all your AVI files). For example, e.g. C:\myvideos\holidays\france\

3. Create another folder in that folder, call it “originals” (so now it becomes something like C:\myvideos\holidays\france\originals\). Copy the Kodak .mov files from the SD card to that “originals” folder.

4. Navigate to the “originals” folder with Windows Explorer, and drag-n-drop all the MOV files to SUPER. Set up SUPER exactly as shown below in pink, and press “encode active files”.

Now, transcoding will commence. Transcoding to AVI will be really fast, since we only re-encode the audio (Vegas can’t decode the original ulaw audio format without Quicktime you see, and these AVI files don’t use Quicktime). Also, this conversion is completely LOSSLESS, you won’t lose quality at all by doing so.

5. Load Sony Vegas (or any other PC video editor that uses the “Video for Windows” technology), and load the newly-created AVI files in it (not the MOV files). Load the Vegas “project properties” dialog, and manually set resolution to 1280×720, frame rate at 29.97, field order to “none/progressive”, quality to “best”, de-interlacing to “none”. In the “audio” tab, change the audio resampling & stretching to “best”. Leave any other fields found in that dialog as is. Click “ok”.

6. Now edit (previewing is going to be stable and faaaaast when using the default preview/auto mode). When you are done with editing, you MUST select ALL clips in the timeline (either by using the “edit mode”, or by using the SHIFT key), and right click on them, select “switches” and then “disable resample”. This is very improtant because otherwise you will get a “ghost” image out of these clips (because these stupid Kodak cameras don’t record in a fixed frame rate). When done, export for PC viewing or Youtube/Vimeo/PS3/XBoX360 like this under Vegas. For other video editors look here.

Alternative method

Windows 7 has problems with SUPER. Also, some people just hate it, or don’t trust it. So, here’s the command line edition of the same workflow shown above. It requires some small knowledge of MS-DOS usage.

1. Follow #1 from the first method.

2. Download the latest build of ffmpeg. Create a folder called “ffmpeg” somewhere, and unzip the contents in there.

3. Inside that same ffmpeg folder, create another folder, called “videos”.

4. Copy the Kodak .mov files from the SD card on the ffmpeg/videos/ folder.

5. Open a DOS prompt, navigate to the ffmpeg/video/ folder, and run the following command for each and every one of your MOV files:
..\bin\ffmpeg.exe -i kodak_001.mov -f avi -vcodec copy -acodec pcm_s16le kodak_001.avi

Substitute the “kodak_001″ file names with your video file names. E.g. the 100_132.mov will become 100_132.avi, etc. You will have to manually do that for every one of your files, unless you are proficient with MS-DOS scripting/programming, in which case you can automate it using “batch” files. If you don’t know what I’m talking about scripting here, just do the job manually.

Transcoding to AVI will be really fast, since we only re-encode the audio (Vegas can’t decode the original ulaw audio format without Quicktime you see, and these AVI files don’t use Quicktime). Also, this conversion is completely LOSSLESS, you won’t lose quality at all by doing so.

6. After the conversion to AVI is done for all files, move all these newly-created AVI files in another location, e.g. where you usually store your video projects (e.g. C:\myvideos\holidays\france\ whatever).

7. Follow #5 and #6 from the first method. Read the important notes. You’re done.

Tutorial for MJPEG MOV files

IF you’re having speed/stability issues with HD MJPEG MOV digicams too (e.g. Panasonic LX3, Nikon D90, and many other digicams), you can apply this tutorial too to create AVI MJPEG streams. This would result in previewing these files twice faster. You need to do two changes to the tutorials above:

1. After installing ffdshow in step #1, load ffdshow’s “VfW Configuration” panel, click the “Decoders” tab, click “Codecs”, scroll down to find the MJPEG format, and change it from “disabled” to “libavcodec”. Screenshot.

2. When you set the frame rate on your Vegas or other PC video editor’s project properties dialog (just before you edit), you must figure out what is the source’s footage frame rate. Vegas tells you what the original is if you select it in the Project Media tab, and read its status bar. It will say something like “30.000 fps”, or “24.000 fps”. Type in the frame-rate field that number. Set up the rest of the project properties as shown in the tutorials above. At the very end of editing, after you “disable resample”, export at 29.97 fps if the original reported frame rate was 30, or at 23.976 if the original was 24. Leave at 25 if it the original was 25. This will ensure sane, standard-compliant, frame rates.

Everything else is the same as in the tutorials above.

Important notes

1. While editing, the gamma will be different than the original Kodak MOV files. This is normal. Quicktime has a known problem with MPEG4 footage, rendering them with a lower gamma value (looking washed-out). What you will get with AVI and Vegas, is how the camera REALLY recorded the footage — which is a good thing.

2. This method only offers speed and stability under PC editors for MPEG4-SP & MJPEG files, not for MPEG4-AVC/h.264 files. Please note that the Kodak digirecorders, like the Zi6/Zi8/Zx1 are h.264-based, not MPEG4-SP based like their actual Kodak HD digicams. Therefore, for these Z-series digirecorders you’ll need something like Cineform NeoSCENE (costs $99) to go around the editing problem.

3. SUPER might trigger your anti-virus. This doesn’t mean it has a virus or that it’s malware, it’s just that it doesn’t always play nice with some anti-virus apps.

Experimental music is not meant to be very accessible or well-understood, but there are some bands that do manage to be both fresh, and accessible. And there are others, who I just don’t get at all. Here are my own favorites and least favorites such bands. In parenthesis, find free, legal, promo mp3 downloads.

Best
1. Cloud Cult (“The Tornado Lessons“)
2. Blitzen Trapper (“Crushing The Wheat“)
3. Yeasayer (“2080“)
4. HEALTH (“Crimewave“)
5. Sin Fang Bous (“Catch The Light“)

Worst
1. Radian (“Git Cut Noise“)
2. Múm (“Illuminated“)
3. Dirty Projectors (“Knotty Pine“)
4. Deerhoof (“Offend Maggie“)
5. Beirut (“My Night With the Prostitute from Marseille“)

Ok, Beirut are listenable, but just barely.

After just 4 hours of overall shooting time, but 2 months of various setbacks, the music video I shot for local Bay Area artist Andy Kong, is finally up. Andy is a great singer/songwriter, so if you like the song, go ahead and check his music on iTunes!

Video was shot with a bare HV20 (just an ND filter was attached to it) in 24p, and in 60i for the slow-mo scenes. There are a few shots that I’d like them to be different, but overall I’m reasonably happy with the result. HD version here.

I had a 3-hour nap yesterday, and during that time I had the weirdest dream ever (although I’m known to have adventurous dreams). I saw some gangs that some of its members were hideous monsters, I saw my mom telling me that the little girl that’s part of one of these gangs was my twin sister that I never knew I had. While trying to free her (with… Adam Lambert’s help), I got chased and I had to swim away and fight the bad guys like a ninja.

By the time I got out of the water, the gang boss, none other than Samuel L. Jackson, took away my mother and my sister and he wouldn’t tell me where they were. Myself and some ex-gang members… tortured him, to no avail. Then, another monster comes in, and told us that Jackson has a secret place in his basement, a labyrinth. To get in and out of there without getting lost, you need to be accompanied by a kid that was a twin (and that was the reason he had kidnapped my supposed twin sister as a baby). I decided to go in.

It was an amazing place, and for the first time in a long time I did not realize that I was dreaming. It felt real. Some of it had places where you fall “up”, some of it had floors that would break apart and re-arrange itself, some of it had corridors with doors that monsters would come out and bite you, and the rest had a lot of stolen art, technology and what not. Even Adam Lambert was stashed there, and couldn’t find the exit. I asked him if he saw my mom and sister, he led me to them, and with my excitement for finding them, I woke up. I guess we’ll never know if I was able to lead these trapped people out.

Wow, just wow! A mixture of real footage and motion design, inspired by the look of Dutch ’70s postcards and class photos. Shot with a Canon HV20. HD version here.