Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express.

[reddragdiva]

The pics from jhaelan's picnic last Sunday are finally up. (If you absolutely despise a shot of yourself, please let me know.) There is no reason at all some are sepiatone, other than me pressing the wrong button.

Possibly the high point of the day's entertainment was mr_flay escaping from a straight jacket. Which sushidog and miss_soap had locked him into somewhat more securely than he had assumed. I got a short AVI (1.8MB) of the proceedings; if my camera had sound, you'd have heard some remarkably creative swearing. Note ladycat elegantly passing behind.

I also have an AVI of childeric juggling a hedgehog (714KB). (Does anyone know of a handy tool for losslessly rotating an AVI ninety degrees? Until then, turn your heads to the left.)

(Please wait a bit before you hit the AVIs — that's a home DSL. Feel free to mirror. I hope to use them to properly test Rocknerd's connection shortly ...)

The bestest bit, of course, was redcountess making it out to play with all the lovely people. I have photographic evidence! We brought Tigger, Eeyore and a toy spider. "This is the tale of the day Tigger and Eeyore went down to the Hundred Acre Wood and fell into Shelob's domain ..."

Today will apparently involve Ikea. (shudder)

Update: Looks like the best answer is VirtualDub, an open source video converter for Windows. That will apparently work somewhat in Wine. We'll see.

Update 2: Now on rocknerd.org — test our bandwidth to your heart's content.

Comments

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I have a GIF animation tool that can also be used to edit AVIs. When I'm home again I'll download it and see what tweaking I can do.

[reddragdiva]

AVIs are lossily compressed, but (as with JPEGs) it should be possible to do Funky Shit to the file to rotate it ninety degrees so that people don't have to turn their head sideways to see Ed hopping around bent over ...

[arkady.livejournal.com]

It should be - but I'd have no idea how to go about it in BSD. This GIF animation tool is the first one I've come across that allows AVI editing - normally you have to go for proper video editing software for that. It handily means I can grab individual frames to make animated icons with though! ;-)

[reddragdiva]

That's an idea! I just asked on questions@freebsd.org ...

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Hee! Glad to have prompted an idea, even though I know nothing about BSD myself. :-)

[rataxis.livejournal.com]

1) Isn't AVI just a container, like a quicktime file? I mean, a file can be an AVI and use any compression method supported by Windows.

2) Have you tried MPlayer? It's an open-source video player which can also do a lot of post-production stuff including converting/resizing/rotating/....

[reddragdiva]

1. Something like that. I have no idea what's in the container, nor how to get it out losslessly. I'd be extremely happy were it an MPEG-2 stream, for instance.

2. Couldn't get it to behave on this box. I may bother next install, which is overdue (this installation is getting on toward two years old, and there's lots better toys now).

[trishpiglet.livejournal.com]

I love the Angst! pictures.

Good luck with IKEA.

[reddragdiva]

The ones before that were less "Angst!" and more "rolling around pished and giggly" ...

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten those! I'm pretty sure they were all "rolling around pished and giggly" though... :)

[vatine]

IKEA is OK in small doses. I am vaguely considering seeing if urocyon_c is up for testing the pub designated for the wedding do.

[urocyon-c.livejournal.com]

What do you mean, "OK in small doses"? You know you love trekking through there. *g*

[steer.livejournal.com]

Excellent pictures.

You could always ask people to rotate their monitors 90 degrees.

[Actually, my monitor at work can do this at work quite easily -- I wondered why it had that feature -- now I know.]

[minigoth.livejournal.com]

Noooooo, IKEA is wonderful, full of pretty little things that are affordable, too!

Unless you're going to buy furniture. Then it is Hell on Earth.

[reddragdiva]

GUESS WHAT WE'RE GOING THERE FOR!

Though now going is contingent on Liz's legs working again. Ikea involves a bit of hiking ...

[arkady.livejournal.com]

PIKEA!! (http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/pikea.htm)

[minigoth.livejournal.com]

Her legs probably refuse to work because they know what's waiting...a lot of walking up and down the aisle where the item you want is SUPPOSED to be, then walking to the Info desk to find out where said item IS, then another mile or two to another aile, as far away from the first as possible.
They got these big trolleys, could you not put her on one of them? That could be fun!

[reddragdiva]

There's getting there too. Walthamstow to Brent Park is two tubes and a bus ...

[minigoth.livejournal.com]

Ouch! I was thinking you at least had something nice, like a car. I take it you're having stuff delivered then? Which is a nightmare on its own.

[duster340.livejournal.com]

You should have let me know you were planning a Pikea trip - hoofing it on a bank holiday weekend is going to end in murder.

Next time, let me know in advance and we can all go in the car. And you can pay me in swedish meatballs.

[reddragdiva]

Thank you, sir! How's next Sunday for y'all?

The Bank Holiday Weekend Massacre aspect didn't actually occur to us ...

[duster340.livejournal.com]

Fine - Sulky will be working and there's no Grand Prix on, so I'm free all day :)

[excy.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can rotate an avi without reencoding.. you can get some direct show filters to make it playback how you want but that's not really an answer. mplayer probably has these too.

[aidan-skinner.livejournal.com]

http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/ ?

[reddragdiva]

Oooh, that's a thought. Might have a play.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The squirming-about video, at least, is "IBM Motion JPEG including Huffman tables" at a data rate of 1136kbps.

Mind, that's heavily-compressed MJPEG (you can get near-lossless MJPEG too, but it's way bigger). I tried transcoding it to MPEG-4 after rotating, and it came out slightly larger.

VirtualDub is the tool to go for, though avidemux (if you can get it working on BSD, not sure) may also do the job -- don't have an install around to check.

I'd be happy to do it for you if you want, as I use VirtualDub quite frequently and have the licensed DivX Pro codec. Could even set it to some music easily enough.

(If ever there were a candidate for a snippet of Psycho, that'd be it.)