Creating Ogg Theora Files on Mac OS X With ffmpeg2theora

Thursday, 2 July 2009

To use the HTML 5 <video> tag in Firefox 3.5, you need video files encoded in the Ogg Theora format. Apple doesn’t support this format at all, so you can’t just export Ogg files from QuickTime like you can with H.264/MPEG-4. I spent some time trying to find the best easy way to create Ogg Theora files on Mac OS X, and I think ffmpeg2theora is it.

In his “Video for Everybody” article I linked to yesterday, Kroc Camen suggests using HandBrake to create Ogg Theora files, but I couldn’t get it to work in HandBrake 0.9.3 (the current release version) without crashing. (Well, one time it created a file without crashing, but the file was corrupt.) It ends up that HandBrake’s broken Ogg support is a known issue with no easy solution, and so Ogg support has been removed from the current branch of HandBrake, and there are no plans to bring it back.

Camen also linked to Xiph, an open-source QuickTime component that adds Ogg Theora playback and export to QuickTime. I don’t want to install this, however. For one thing, the only open-source QuickTime component I’ve ever had a good experience with is Perian. For another, I don’t want Ogg playback support in QuickTime. The fork in supported codecs for the <video> tag — Safari won’t support Ogg Theora and Firefox and Opera won’t support H.264 — doesn’t mean you can’t support all three browsers. It just means that to support all three, you need to include at least two <source> elements within the <video> tag, one pointing to an H.264-encoded file, the other to an Ogg Theora file, like this:

<video>
    <source src="example-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
    <source src="example-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
</video>

This serves the H.264 to Safari, the Ogg Theora to Firefox. And for Chrome 3.0, which supports both formats, this should serve the H.264 version because it’s specified first.

ffmpeg2theora is the one tool I found that simply just works for transcoding to Ogg Theora. The downside to ffmpeg2theora is that it’s only available as a command-line tool. But:

It has a nice Mac OS X .pkg installer. Launch it, authorize it with admin credentials, and it’ll install the ffmpeg2theora tool in /usr/local/bin/.
The command-line syntax could not be simpler. You just type:
```
ffmpeg2theora example.m4v
```
and it gets to work, outputting a file named example.ogv right next to the .m4v file. It shows an updating progress message in Terminal while it’s working. There are more options (and it comes with a man page that documents them), but in my testing you can just use the defaults.

ffmpeg2theora’s output looks good. I gave it a 3.9 MB H.264 file as input, and it created a 3.5 MB .ogv file that looked pretty good — way better than typical web video in a Flash player — when I played it back in VLC and Firefox 3.5. ★

Thursday, 2 July 2009

Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Monday, 29 June 2009

Copy and Paste

Friday, 26 June 2009

My favorite new feature in iPhone OS 3.0 is the combination of text selection and cut/copy/paste pasteboard commands. I started using the developer program iPhone OS 3.0 seeds in March, but, initially, only on my old original iPhone. But by mid-April I had installed OS 3 on my primary iPhone 3G, warnings regarding relying on the beta OS be damned.¹ The selection and pasteboard features were simply too good, too useful, to go back to using an iPhone without them.

One way I use my iPhone to actually “work” is with Movable Type’s excellent iPhone-optimized web app interface, with which I can post and edit items to Daring Fireball. I wouldn’t want to write a full-length essay with my thumbs, but it works great for posting short Linked List items.

I post new links to DF from my iPhone more frequently than you might imagine. I no longer lug my MacBook Pro around during the day at conferences such as WWDC, for one thing, and my iPhone is often all I have with me when I’m traveling with my family. Just about any time I’m out of my regular routine, it’s all iPhone, all day.

The basic post-to-DF-from-my-iPhone workflow is like this:

I have a page open in MobileSafari that I want to post as a link to DF.
I invoke a customized bookmarklet in MobileSafari. This bookmarklet sends me to the “create new entry” page on my installation of Movable Type, with the fields for the entry title and link URL pre-populated with the title and URL of the page in MobileSafari to which I’m linking.

I almost always edit the title, but the big score is having the URL field populated automatically by the bookmarklet. Prior to the arrival of copy-and-paste in OS 3.0, the only other way I could have gotten the URL from one page in MobileSafari to the link URL field in Movable Type in a second page in MobileSafari would have been to type it out by hand — painstaking and error-prone.

And but then what about creating additional links within the body of the entry? In those cases I was stuck doing it the pain-in-the-ass way. More often than not, I’d just not add any additional links to the entry, even if I wanted to.

And blockquotes — cited passages from the page being linked to — were pretty much out of the question. Without copy-and-paste, the only accurate way to quote even just a few sentences from one web page and insert them in the DF entry would have been to transcribe the passage by hand with paper and pen, then re-type the passage on the iPhone.

The copy-and-paste implementation in iPhone OS 3 has put an end to that. It’s everything I hoped for, and I use it all the time.

Do I wish this had been in the iPhone all along? Or that it had come a year ago in iPhone OS 2? Sure. But, as I wrote two years ago, given the way that most simple gestures had already been assigned in the iPhone OS user interface, it wasn’t obvious or easy at all to see how text selection and copy/paste should have been added to the iPhone. (And as much as I wanted the feature, I fully realized that most iPhone users don’t publish full-time weblogs and therefore didn’t need the feature nearly as much as I do.)

The two main problems Apple needed to solve were (a) how to allow for the selection of a range of text, and (b) how to invoke cut/copy/paste commands on a system without a keyboard and without a menu bar. Their solution to (a) was to make selection an extension of the existing magnifier loupe interface for placing the insertion point. Their solution to (b) was to present the commands in what is effectively a pop-up contextual menu that appears only when you have made a selection or moved the insertion point.

Screenshot of Cut/Copy/Paste menu in iPhone OS 3.0.

It all seems fairly obvious once you’ve used it, but there was nothing obvious about it before it was designed. This is one area where Palm, in designing the WebOS interface, couldn’t study what Apple had done (because Apple hadn’t shown it yet) and had to devise their own implementation. Despite the numerous fundamental similarities of the iPhone and WebOS interfaces, text selection and Cut/Copy/Paste are quite different on the Pre. (And, I must say, in my 30 minutes or so of tinkering on the Pre, inferior to the iPhone’s, especially with regard to selecting text.)

That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to.² This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.

It’s hard to prove that good is the enemy of great, but the evidence speaks for itself. ★

I wouldn’t recommend running beta iPhone OS releases on one’s main iPhone for the faint of heart. You get what you ask for if you run into trouble. ↩
Cue your favorite clip of Orson Welles pitching Paul Masson wine: “We will sell no wine before its time”. ↩

Apple’s Secrecy

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

This whole Jobs liver transplant story really hits the sweet spot for two of my obsessions: Apple (duh) and journalism. It’s the journalism angle that I find the most intriguing. The Wall Street Journal’s story Friday night was a huge scoop for them, and I noted in my analysis of it that The New York Times, when they finally ran their first story with the news one day later, clearly could not find a source of their own, attributing the information only to the Journal’s original report. If you know anything at all about the culture of premier news organizations like the Journal and Times, you know how that hurt the Times.

Today the Times has a follow-up by Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, but rather than making the story about Jobs, it’s ostensibly about Apple’s company-wide “obsession with secrecy”. Four paragraphs down, though, comes this:

But even by Apple’s standards, its handling of news about the health of its chief executive and co-founder, Steven P. Jobs, who has battled pancreatic cancer and recently had a liver transplant while on a leave of absence, is unparalleled.

Mr. Jobs received the liver transplant about two months ago, according to people briefed on the matter by current and former board members. Despite intense interest in Mr. Jobs’s condition among the news media and investors, Apple representatives have declined to address the matter, reciting with maddening discipline only that Mr. Jobs is due back at the company by the end of June.

Mr. Jobs was actually at work on Apple’s sprawling corporate campus on Monday, according to a person who saw him there. Company representatives would not say whether he had returned permanently.

So, note that the Times still does not have a first-hand source for the news regarding Jobs’s purported liver transplant. Read the sourcing carefully: according to people briefed on the matter by current and former board members. That’s second-hand information — “people” who were told about it by board members who know about it. (I wonder who the former board member(s) could be? Apple hasn’t had much turnover on the board in recent years. And why would a former board member know about Jobs’s current health status? Curious.)

I also don’t see how Apple’s handling of news related to Jobs’s health is “unparalleled”. They’re no more secretive about his health now than they have ever been. If anything, the low point was a year ago, when Apple PR stated that Jobs’s gauntness was the result of complications from “a common bug”.

And then this:

Even senior officials at Apple fear crossing Mr. Jobs. One official, who is normally more open, when asked for a deep-background briefing about Mr. Jobs’s health after the news of the transplant had become public, replied: “Just can’t do it. Too sensitive.”

Translated into plain English, this is the Times’s acknowledgement that they couldn’t get anyone to talk to them about Jobs, even on “deep background”, which term Wikipedia describes thusly:

“Deep background” This term is used in the U.S., though not consistently. Most journalists would understand “deep background” to mean that the information may not be included in the article but is used by the journalist to enhance his or her view of the subject matter, or to act as a guide to other leads or sources. Most deep background information is confirmed elsewhere before being reported.

In other words, no one at Apple would give reporters from the Times jack shit regarding Jobs’s health. And yet the Times story seems to portray this unwillingness on the part of top Apple executives to betray Jobs’s trust and privacy as something other than admirable.

The rest of the article details specific examples of Apple’s policies for guarding the details of products in development; the implication is that Apple is a weird and creepy place because they try to keep a lid on secrets.

Here’s one example:

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for marketing, has held internal meetings about new products and provided incorrect information about a product’s price or features, according to a former employee who signed an agreement not to discuss internal matters. Apple then tries to track down the source of news reports that include the incorrect details.

I’m not disputing that Schiller and Apple do this. But, as someone who has published one or two original nuggets of information regarding upcoming Apple products, I can say that I’ve never seen evidence of it. I’ve never received information from an Apple employee that turned out to be false.¹

I can’t help but feel that this story is a rather transparent lashing out on the part of the Times. They couldn’t get any original information regarding the story they really want — Jobs’s liver transplant — and so like a child throwing a tantrum when it doesn’t get its way, they wrote a story about how there’s something wrong with Apple because its employees keep their mouths shut.

Apple’s decision to severely limit communication with the news media, shareholders and the public is at odds with the approach taken by many other companies, which are embracing online outlets like blogs and Twitter and generally trying to be more open with shareholders and more responsive to customers.

So, yes, undeniably, Apple does not communicate via weblogs. I too think they should. I like Google’s approach to official blogging — they don’t write about upcoming products and services, but they do write about the new things they release, offering insight and tips into how and why to use them. (Google is pretty damn secretive about things like upcoming products and the details of its operation infrastructure.)

But: what’s the argument for how Apple has suffered for its secrecy? Yes, Apple is far more secretive than most companies, but they’re also far more successful. Measured by profit and revenue and growth, wouldn’t it make more sense to argue that most companies should act more like Apple, rather than the other way around? ★

False information I’ve received tends to come from third parties; for example, several iPhone case manufacturers were convinced that Apple was going to announce a smaller “iPhone Mini” at WWDC this month. ↩