Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

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Preserving digital memories

By 18 Comments

Like most (technology-oriented) parents, Christina and I have recorded hours and hours of Digital Video (DV) of Anya and Kyan growing and we’re still doing it now.

Digital Video (DV) requires a lot of space (of the order of 15Gb per hour!) Consequently, we edited the raw footage like mad and discarded all the crap to come up with beautiful movies (for us at least — I guess that most of you will fall asleep if you were ever subjected to them…)

Initially we only had one way to archive the movies: on VCD (No! Not DVD!) The reason is that we didn’t have DVD burners then. Of course, the quality is not great (MPEG-1 / 352×288 / 1150 kbit/s) but we personally do not care. Watching Anya discovering the world for the first time is what is important!

Then we acquired a DVD burner and shortly after we were producing our own DVDs. The quality level rose abruptly (MPEG-2 / 720×576 / around 2500 kbit/s) and we did that for years until H264 came.

H264 is the new MPEG-4 Part 10 video compression standard which has become pervasive since its adoption by Apple, Sony, Nokia and the Blu-ray Disc Association. Consequently, this year, Christina and I stopped creating DVDs and started rendering our movies to H264 at 720×576 and 1500 kbit/s.

The big decision

Two weeks ago, Christina and I decided that having VCDs, DVDs and H264 Quicktime movies on my MacBook was going to hurt us in the long run. I did a little bit of investigation and realized that we had to convert all our VCDs and DVDs to H264. We settled on using HandBrake to do the conversion because, well, it’s excellent and open source.

As we are planning to buy an AppleTV some day, I used the AppleTV preset in HandBrake with the following changes:

  • H264 Video / 720×576 / 1500 kbit/s
  • AAC Audio / Stereo / 48kHz / 128 kbit/s
  • 2-pass encoding
  • Turbo first pass
  • Anamorphic: no
  • Keep aspect ratio: yes
  • Crop: manual
  • Deinterlace: yes, slow.

The result

Christina and I are now the proud owners of 48 home made H264 movies taking 17Gb of space (more than 24 hours.)

We have bought an external hard disk (a Lacie) to store those 48 files and I’ve copied them on the hard disk of one of the desktop computers I have access to. I have also copied them on a second external hard disk I normally use to backup my MacBook. All in all, I’m happy… for the time being.

Amazon S3

I have been looking at Amazon S3 for some time now as a means to keep my most important files in a data-center somewhere. And those 48 movies certainly qualify as my most important files ever! Unfortunately, sending 17Gb of data to Amazon from Mauritius is not practical (and this is one of the most massive understatements I’ve ever made) due to the pathetic bandwidth we have here.

Let’s see, at 128 kbit/s, 13 days would be required to upload all the 17Gb of video. Maybe it’s more sensible paying an air ticket to Réunion Island and doing it from there… Anyway, the cost to keep the data on Amazon S3 would then be:

  • $4.25 (Rs. 113) for the first month (to account for the initial data transfer)
  • $2.55 (Rs. 68) per month thereafter.

This is extremely cheap! One added benefit is that the videos will all be accessible online. Surely, Kyan and Anya will be able to stream the movies from S3 to their mobile phones when they’ll be big enough to have phones :-)

A question

Have you had the same problems? What strategy have you settled on for archiving your precious digital memories?

Amazon.com is down!!!

By 16 Comments

Something terrible is happening to Amazon.com right now: it is not working!

I don’t know about you but I personally find this frightening. In our era of online services, I don’t expect website like Google, Apple and Amazon to stop working. Given that Amazon.com is not a single server but rather a massive cluster, the problem must be really serious. I can imagine hundreds of Amazon engineers maddeningly working on restoring the website to its pristine condition.

For some extremely obscure reason, https://www.amazon.com/ is working.

Jeff Bezos must be mad right now ;-)

What is a heavy user?

By 115 Comments

Since Orange has imposed its Fair Usage Policy on us, there has been intense discussion here. The latest version of the FUP states that:

Your FUP threshold, i.e the amount of data that you can download will depend on the offer to which you are subscribed to. Monitoring of your downloads will be done on a monthly basis and if you exceed your FUP threshold over a period of 2 consecutive months, you will be subjected to FUP on the third month. 

Orange then gives the following example:

(1) you exceed the FUP threshold for your package during months 1 and 2. (2) during month 3, you again exceed your threshold, say on the 21st. (3) after the 21st until the end of month, you will be subject to speed restrictions. (4) at the start of month 4, your speed will be back to normal as long as you do not again exceed the FUP threshold.

Naturally, there is a major unknown in this equation: what is the FUP download threshold per month?

It seems that the following has been said by the Orange people:

  • FUP download threshold for Home 128K is 10Gb,
  • FUP download threshold for MyT 256 is 3Gb.

The 3Gb monthly threshold is causing some uproar in the Mauritian Internet community as many feel that 3Gb is pathetically low. At first, I had the (wrong) impression that 3Gb was reasonable. But then I checked what I’ve been using on my own MyT 256 ADSL connection for the past six months:

  • 1.6Gb in November 2007,
  • 2.4Gb in December 2007,
  • 3.1Gb in January 2008,
  • 2.7Gb in February 2008,
  • 2.5Gb in March 2008 and
  • 3.2Gb in April 2008.

… and I realized that 3Gb is really too low a threshold!

As you can see, I’m dangerously close to the FUP threshold. But I am not a normal Internet user. For the time being, Christina and I browse a lot and we do indulge in some MP3 downloads from time to time but we don’t watch videos from YouTube a lot and we don’t download DivX movies at all.

BUT this might change anytime. Christina and I might like to start watching videos and listening to radio all day long and this is bound to make me a heavy downloader even though we’re just being normal (and very patient given the ridiculous speeds we have to endure here) Internet users.

I wonder how the Orange people came up with the 3Gb for the MyT 256. I guess they only did some simple divisions using their calculator. But they must realize that we are in 2008 now and video and streaming audio is the norm (ask Steve Jobs and Bill Gates). Sure, I understand the need to have a FUP (or else the whole system will just break) but 3Gb is too low. In my opinion, Orange must think carefully about this threshold and communicate clearly with its subscribers. I am sure that together, we can come up with a threshold which is more in line with how people use the Internet now. Of course, given the fact that the nature of information is changing rapidly on the Internet, this threshold will have to be reviewed upwards very frequently.

The Internet is a major enabler (like Computer Science in fact). It is a tool that allows people to innovate and to create wealth. Orange has a social responsibility towards the development of the country. Limiting the usefulness and potential of the Internet is going to harm Mauritius in the long run.

Get your sights right, Orange!

(PS to my readers: what has been your own Internet consumption over the last six months? Use the online tool to calculate this.)