Jarrett's Tech Blog - For November 2008
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Chapter Grabber for Chapter Titles in MKV
I recently updated an old program I wrote back in the .NET 1.0 days. Seeing some of my old code was very interesting as suddenly I became very aware of how much I’ve learned since then.
The updates I made are mainly to take advantage of tagChimp which is an online database of media metadata. They have an XML API where you can get chapter titles for movies and TV shows.
I’ve been making some backups of my movies into my favorite container format Matroska or MKV. I like to be able to skip to my favorite part of the movie using chapters aka “Scene Selection” as commonly seen on DVD and Bluray discs. My favorite media player, Media Player Classic Home Cinema edition has support for these chapters built in.
ChapterGrabber allows me to open the chapter times extracted from either my DVD IFO file or an existing chapter file. I can then search for the chapter names and apply them to the chapter times. The result is scene titles for your backup as seen above.
There are more details on the ChapterGrabber page.
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Change is Good for Technology
As many others, I’m very excited with the outcome of the presidential election. I’m proud to support who is being called America's first "tech president." His policies toward technology are very refreshing to a self proclaimed tech junkie like me. Hey, I bought a quad core as soon as they had 45 nano-meter transistors.
Obama’s policies can be viewed at the new website change.gov. Some of the highlights of his technology agenda are:
- Protect the Openness of the Internet
- Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership
- Safeguard our Right to Privacy
- Open Up Government to its Citizens
- Deploy Next-Generation Broadband
- Reform the Patent System
- Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems
These are great. I feel strongly about Obama working towards these goals. His view on net-neutrality is very refreshing:
The number-one priority of Obama's technology platform […] is to protect network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open communication on the Internet. The political argument surrounding Internet access is whether companies managing Internet traffic should be allowed to charge for higher speeds or capacities instead of treating all users equally. Service providers posit that charging for priority on the Internet will promote investment in networks and allow for better management of congestion caused by large amounts of digital data traveling online. Google, among other Internet firms, argues that service providers are pushing for profit that would stifle online innovation and economic growth.
"I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality," Obama said during a stop at Google's California headquarters. "Because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out and we all lose." -opensecrets.orgAlso, I hope to see a social revolution in the way people interact with the government. We should be able to directly vote on the issues rather than things being filtered through a “lobbied” congress. Or at least a nationally recognized system for tracking and providing feedback to our elected officials.
This is a great time for us in the technology community.
Disclaimer: The views represented here do not reflect the views of my employer.
