Firefox noscript add-on - time to start using it

A recent large scale hack of Microsoft's IIS web server means that lots of reputable web sites may be hosting exploits more commonly seen on the shady side of the net.

So it's probably time to start using the Firefox NoScript add-on ...

Hundreds of Thousands of Microsoft Web Servers Hacked - Security Fix

There is a great add-on for Firefox called "noscript," which blocks these kinds of Javascript exploits from running automatically if a user happens to visit a hacked site. Currently, there is no such protection for IE users, and disallowing Javascript entirely isn't really an option on today's World Wide Web. True, you can fiddle with multiple settings in IE to add certain sites to your "Trusted Zone," but that option has never struck me as very practical or scalable.

I've been using it for a few days. I whitelisted a number of the Google sites I use (if they're hacked we're all doomed) and so far it's been easy to enable JavaScript when needed by clicking on the S icon.

Video editing - lord, this is ugly

I'm pretty disgusted with iMovie '08, so I decided to read a review of Final Cut Express 4.

Yuck.

MacWorld desperately tries to say nice things about Apple, but despite the "4 mouse" rating the review reveals a right mess. Different behaviors on different processors, inability to import some formats iMovie '08 handles, etc, etc.

Video editing was always pretty complex, but I think the profusion of codecs and file formats has driven it over the cliff.

Apple's offerings are pretty sad at the moment (iMovie HD was the closest they got to a good solution, and they abandoned it). Unfortunately I think Apple is the only consumer video option for the Mac.

Digital-TV converters: choices for the Saint Paul area

A local paper's tech blog reviews Digital-TV converters available locally. His preference is the "Digital Stream DTX9900 sold by RadioShack". I need to spend my vouchers before they expire, so I'll probably follow his lead here.

From what I've read elsewhere broadcast digital may require a fairly expensive antenna investment. So the converters are only a part of the cost. We have very cheap antennae; I'll report on what we find in our real world testing. All we need is for one sports channel to come in so my son can spend his tv-time credits.

Update 5/4/08: Bloody 'ell, it worked.

QuickTime Player: saving the configuration files

QuickTime Player Pro AppleScript driven batch translation from FLIP Video 3ivx to Apple Intermediate codec requires a QuickTime configuration (.set) file.

You can't save a configuration file from QuickTime Player Pro. (How hard would that have been?)

You need to open video file, set up the export settings, then run an AppleScript like this one:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
tell first document
save export settings for QuickTime movie to file "BootDrive:Users:jfaughnan:Documents:aic2.set"
end tell
end tell

You'll need to edit the "BootDrive ..." stuff to match your hard drive (Volume) name and user name.

What a nuisance!

Apple stripped AppleScript functionality from QuickTime Player - in a fairly rude way

Once upon a time you could use AppleScript to make QuickTime Player do many of the tricks that QuickTime Player Pro is supposed to do. In those days people wrote scripts to do things like batch file translation:

Gordon's Tech: FLIP Video Ultra camcorder: iMovie HD works, iMovie '08 doesn't

Update 3/30/2008: I found an AppleScript that should do what I need. It tells QuickTime Player to open multiple AVI files, process them to DV stream, then delete the originals. Unfortunately, it's giving me cryptic error messages.

Update 3/31/2008: I'm beginning to think Apple quietly disabled AppleScript driven conversion in QT Player. Nobody seems to know anything about it.

As you can probably guess my theory of 3/31 seems to be correct.

When I ran those scripts with QuickTime Player, they simply didn't work. No error messages, but the AppleScript APIs didn't seem to do anything.

I paid for QuickTime Player Pro and now the original scripts work.

This seems kind of obnoxious. At the very least QuickTime Player should have produced an error message like "AppleScript functionality requires QuickTime Player Pro". Apple wasted a fair bit of my time.

Video codecs: iPhoto, iMovie HD, iMovie '08 and FLIP Video

As a part of my ongoing struggle with FLIP Video, I'm delving ever deeper into the broken world of Apple video.

iMovie '08, for example, recognizes some video formats when it's importing directly, but a smaller set when the video is stored in iPhoto. I even have an sneaking suspicion that my test results differ between my Intel MacBook and my PowerPC iMac.

The FLIP camcorder uses the 3ivx toolkit form MPEG-4 compression and playback, but it's a completely proprietary implementation. It can only be read with a 3ivx decode, so it's not what I want to keep video in.

So what format makes sense? I'd like something that

• is fairly standard
• is fast to edit
• doesn't use tons of disk space
• doesn't lose immense quality when it goes through edit cycles
• is recognized by iMovie '08 even when the video is stored in iPhoto
  

One option is Apple's Intermediate Codec (used by Final Cut, emphases mine):

Final Cut Pro 5: About HDV and the Apple Intermediate Codec:

... The Apple Intermediate Codec is a high-quality video codec that Apple developed for use as an alternative to native MPEG-2 HDV editing in an HDV workflow. Instead of editing the MPEG-2 HDV data directly, you can capture video from the tape source and then transcode it with the Apple Intermediate Codec to optimize the video data for playback performance and quality.

Working with the Apple Intermediate Codec is less processor-intensive than working with native HDV. Unlike MPEG-2 HDV, the Apple Intermediate Codec does not use temporal compression, so every frame can be decoded and displayed immediately without first decoding other frames. The drawback of this codec is that it requires three to four times as much bandwidth and hard drive storage space as MPEG-2 HDV.

Data rates for the Apple Intermediate Codec are variable; the data rates and storage needed may vary slightly, depending on the complexity of your footage. Images with a lot of detail have a higher data rate, while images with less detail have a lower data rate.

I did some experiments converting FLIP Video to MPEG-2 and Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). On my MacBook iMovie '08 recognized the AIC encoded .mov files within iPhoto (you need to restart iMovie to get it to recognize new iPhoto additions):

• Original (3ivx): 3.6MB
• Apple Intermediate Codec with AAC encoding for audio: 14MB
• MPEG-2: highest quality, AAC audio - 15MB
  MPEG-2 "high quality" - 7 MB

So in my testing the MPEG highest quality was about the same size as the AIC file, but the MPEG-2 "high quality" was half the size. Both were fairly quick on a MacBook.

On my iMac, using QuickTime Pro, I wasn't able to find MPEG-2 as an option for export. I did find Apple Intermediate Codec and even on the old PowerPC machine the 3ivx to AIC conversion was pretty quick. The resulting file was "seen" by iMovie '08 even when it was stored in an iPhoto library.

So I guess for the moment I'm going to be transcoding to Apple Intermediate Codec. Problem is that QuickTime Pro doesn't do batch file export. More on that later ...

Update 12/25/08: This all largely obsolete when Apple finally updated iMovie HD so it will work with FLIP camcorders after you install the 3ivx files (at least on Intel machines).

In any case, I did come across more explanations of 3ivx and other video codecs in a well done Gizmodo review:

Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of all of those, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (proprietary) and XviD (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. Like the Xbox 360, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common.

So 3ivx is a sibling of DivX. I wrote a later update on this topic.

Camino not working with Gmail

Camino has stopped working with Gmail. I assume the bug is well understood -- it's not obscure! The screen redraws constantly, never progressing beyond the first 20 pixels or so.

I tried upgrading to the new 1.6, but it has the same problem. I'm back to Firefox beta 3 for now. (Safari has never worked well with Google products, and it still doesn't.)

I'm surprised there's no fix yet.

Update 4/28/08: I followed the advice in comments; emptying the cache fixed the problem. It's funny, I used to empty the cache the first time I had browser problems, but it's been years since that did anything. I just lost the habit ...