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#1 Reason we weren’t allowed into the Hilton?
Jan 19th
The next day we parked in the Bellevue Hilton’s forecourt. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were no rooms. Personally, I think the it was the ply-wood with too much camping gear strapped to it. ;)
How to make a high quality HD MP4 iPhoto Slideshow
Dec 23rd
For some reason, with iPhoto ’11, I just couldn’t get high quality MP4 slideshows to play on my PS3. The quality was terrible, especially in the cross-fade. I also recently wrote an article on how to convert MOV, which comes out great, to MP4 using iMovieHD, but again, either the file was too big, or the quality was too bad. You also may have noticed that on some converters, your cross-fade disappears. This is because the MOV has some crazy JPEG/Crossfade filter that nobody else recognizes. I messed around with just about every setting in the Custom Export screen, and finally gave up. So here’s how to create an HD, high quality MP4 from iPhoto that’s super easy.
- First, download, compile and install ffmpeg. This article by Stephen Jungels is invaluable. I added a few more options to the configure command though: –enable-avfilter –enable-swscale (I have a backup of these instructions. Contact me if the page by Stephen is unavailable).
- First of all, you want to do a custom export to a QuickTime Movie.
- Click “Options” and set the “Size” of the movie. This’ll make it pretty big. It might tell you that you need several gigs, but the size will come down.
- Now pick your poison for the compression settings. I used these, and the quality was good.
- Once you have the MOV or M4V, you’ll need to flip it to MP4 using ffmpeg. I did ffmpeg -i “Tree&JoelSlideShow-HD.mov” -sameq -ab 262144 TreeJoelSlideShow-HD.mp4
Voila. A high quality MP4. My 3.5 minute slideshow came to about 175MB. Not too bad.
HostGator and CloudFlare Speed Tests
Nov 23rd
I recently added CloudFlare CDN to a few of my HostGator sites, and the results were a little surprising. Here are some tests I did on various sites:
| # | Domain name | Size | Load Time | Average Speed per KB | Type |
| 1 | www.franceshamm.com | 4.43 KB | 0.21 seconds | 0.05 seconds | Vanilla HostGator |
| 2 | www.kudusoftware.com | 4.22 KB | 2.39 seconds | 0.57 seconds | CloudFlare + HostGator |
| 3 | www.joelgerard.com | 35.88 KB | 2.69 seconds | 0.08 seconds | CloudFlare + HostGator |
| 4 | www.bravurasoftware.com | 7.19 KB | 0.61 seconds | 0.08 seconds | Dedicated Colo (Not HG) |
| 5 | www.microsoft.com | 1 KB | 0.59 seconds | 0.59 seconds | ? |
Convert MOV to MP4 with Mac iMovie HD
Nov 14th
Here’s how to convert a QuickTime MOV video to MP4 so that it will work on other devices like your PS3.
- Open iMovie HD, and create a new project.
- Import the MOV file.
- Export the MOV file as a QuickTime file, but choose Expert Settings.
- Click share and then, and when the save dialog comes up, from the export menu, choose “Movie to MPEG-4″
- Select the Options button.
- Select the following settings. You can go auto, but I used the following for high quality settings. You’ll probably need to experiment though.
Convert Mac OSX MOV to MP4 for free (really)
Nov 9th
Update: A better way to do this can be found using iMovie HD in this post.
Sometimes Google just gets it wrong. I was looking for a way to convert my MOV slideshow from iPhoto to something that would play on my PS3. After hours of searching and getting the “free” versions of converters that cost 20,30,40 bucks and all of which appear to NOT work AND add the watermark at the same time, I found Squared5, which just converted my MOV to MP4, plain and simple. There Google, was that so hard?