SmallShrink 

Thursday, March 11, 2010

SmallShrink 0.3 is available to download. This remains a fairly technical release but it makes major improvements and flexibility to the way DVDs are processed, and adds a variety of other features:

• Allows choice of tools to use for DVD extracting, demuxing and remuxing.
• Allows greater control over whether the DVD will be requantized (shrunk).
• Allows DVD titles to be extracted to individual files instead of a DVD image
• Separation of the basic and advanced controls in the user interface
• Allows temporary files to be kept or discarded
• Writes output to a log file in the specified output directory

This release has only been tested on Mac OS X 10.6.

Many of these features need a little explaining, which I will aim to document in the near future. What does need explaining now though is the extraction/demuxing/remuxing options.

The default method of extracting, demuxing and remuxing the DVD is to use mencoder. In my own tests, I've found that this works on almost all of my DVD collection. Although I've not timed it, I think that using tccat for extraction, ffmpeg for demux and mplex for remux is a little faster, but less reliable for heavily copy-protected DVDs.

If this release proves to be fairly stable, the next one will aim to hide some of the technical detail to make it more accessible for "normal" people.

Finally, the source code is now available at smallshrink.googlecode.com.

iPlayer 

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I was really disappointed to learn today that Phil Lewis has decided to drop get_iplayer in response to BBC's lack of support for open source software. He explains his reasons here, which are completely understandable. In recent weeks, the BBC have made changes to make it more difficult for open source software to use iPlayer - see the links from Phil's article for more details.

SmallNews 

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Whoops. I found a bug in the wait for publication feature that was added to SmallNews 2.0 at the last minute. It didn't work for the 1st-9th of the month. Fixed now in SmallNews 2.01.

SmallNews 

Friday, February 26, 2010

SmallNews 2.0 can now create the newspaper as an ePub format eBook. ePub has been in the news a lot recently because it was mentioned as the format that the Apple iPad will support. In fact, most recent eBook readers (with the notable except of the Amazon Kindle) will read it. The best known desktop client is Adobe Digital Editions.

So which is better, PDF or ePub? That depends on what you want to do with it. If you format a PDF with the page size of the device you're going to read it on, then it looks great. But if you read an PDF formatted for A4 pages on an 6" eBook reader screen, it looks a mess. Yes, some readers do enable the PDF to be reflowed, but this is never entirely successful. Also, on my Sony Reader, if I increase the font size, the page flow gets messed up.

ePub, on the other hand, is designed to be reflowed. I find that at the default font size, there is not much difference between ePub and PDF on my Sony Reader. But if you increase the font size, the ePub version handles it much, much better. So I've switched to using ePub as the main version I read.

Where ePub really comes into it's own is on even smaller devices, such as iPhone/iPod Touch. I previously used GoodReader to read the iPod version of the PDF. This worked quite well. I tried Stanza, but never really liked it for reading PDFs. But it's a much better ePub reader, so I've switched to using Stanza/ePub on my iPod.

I said in the release notes that support for ePub in SmallNews is experimental. I have found that articles from The Guardian work very well in this format. But some other feeds are a little more unpredictable. ePub is an XHTML-based format, so the HTML from the newspaper site has to be converted to XHTML. If the source material is not well-constructed, this can cause problems. Most feeds I have tried do work, but my Sony Reader has crashed on 2 or 3 occasions. Whether this is the fault of the Sony software or the ePub created by SmallNews, I don't know. Anyway, I would argue that even if the ePub is not quite perfect, the Sony Reader still shouldn't crash. I will watch this over the next few weeks and see if I can establish any pattern.

If you're interested in the technical detail of creating ePub files, they are basically a zip file of XHTML content, XML metadata and images. I found three tutorials about very useful:

• http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/epub-guide_hxa7241_2007.html
• http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp
• http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/2008/12/13/creating-ebooks-an-epub-tutorial/

SmallNews 

Thursday, February 25, 2010

SmallNews 2.0 is (finally) available for download. It's taken a long time because I kept adding features I want to put in, rather than finishing the others ones I'd already started.

This version adds three new features:

• Purging of the database. This can be performed manually from the Settings tab, and you can specify how many days of articles you want to keep.
  
• Experimental ePub support. You can now specify that an ePub version of the newspaper is created either as well or instead of the PDF version. It works very well for The Guardian, but can be a little more unpredictable for other feeds. More information about that to follow.
  
• Wait for publication. The handler for the The Guardian has the (as yet, undocumented) ability to generate the newspaper in the same order as the printed version. This makes it a great deal more coherent, but The Guardian don't always get around to publishing this until mid-morning. This option can instruct SmallNews to wait until today's edition has been published before starting a scheduled run. More info to follow on that too.
  

All of these need a bit more documentation, which I will aim to do shortly. I have added quite a bit of extra documentation since 2.0b3; you can find it on the SmallNews page.

Also, the source code for SmallNews is now available. It has always been an open source application in principle, I just never got round to publishing the source.

SmallNews 

Friday, February 12, 2010

A third beta release of SmallNews 2.0 is now available. This adds most of the features that had been marked as "not yet implemented" in the previous release, and a couple of other minor changes.

• Scheduled daily creation of the newspaper
  
• Create PDFs of articles from the database
  
• Send PDFs of articles from the database by e-mail
  
• A feed tester, to allow individual feeds to be tried (useful if they are not behaving the way you expect)
  
• A fix to one of The Guardian handlers which was not writing articles to the database correctly

I've also written some more documentation, and will continue to add to this over the next week.

The one outstanding feature that needs to be added before I call this version 2.0 is the ability to purge the database of old articles.

After this, I am planning to add two new significant features:

• Ability to search the database by keyword, author, date, etc, instead of just the article id.
  
• Support for the Apple iPad. This looks to me like it's going to be a great device to use SmallNews on, but I'll have to wait and see what the best format will be. I understand that it will support the ePub format, so I may look again at that. I originally consider ePub when adding support for the Sony Reader, but decided that a small-page PDF worked very well, so it wasn't really necessary.

Friday, February 05, 2010

This website has had a fairly major overhaul. The main reason for this is to make it easier to update the documentation for SmallDVD, SmallNews and SmallShrink, which has been getting very badly out of date (or in the case of SmallShrink, has never existed).

The old website was based on Wordpress, which was great when the site only had one product (SmallDVD), and was mostly blog-based. But over the last year, there's been a lot of other content added to the site, and Wordpress isn't very good at non-blog content.
The new site is based on ExpressionEngine, which should make it easier to get the documentation for SmallDVD, SmallNews and SmallShrink into better shape than it is now.

SmallDVD 

Friday, February 05, 2010

SmallDVD 2.4 is available for download. This version adds more control over the colours of the DVD menu.

You can now:

• specify the colour of the buttons, labels, and the highlight and select colours used when navigating the DVD
• choose to use a solid colour as the background instead of an image file
• choose whether the buttons should have borders (I always thought this was necessary, but turns out they weren’t).

I’ve also improved (I hope) the logic about which menu settings get saved in the template.

There is known problem when selected dark coloured labels on a dark image background. The button borders show up, but the text doesn’t. I think this is a bug/oddity in iMagine Photo which is used to create the menus. If you use a solid background, or lighter colours, it’s OK.

ffmpeg  SmallDVD 

Saturday, January 09, 2010

SmallDVD 2.3 is available for download. This release adds the ability to create DVDs without menus and optionally play the videos in a loop. There is also an updated version of ffmpeg, and a change to the way MPEG2 files are handled.

A new DVD settings tab has been added, which allows you to specify whether the DVD should be created with a menu or not (by default, a menu is created). If you put several videos on a menuless DVD, they will play in sequence. If the DVD has no menu, you can specify whether the videos should play in a continuous loop. Also, the aspect, format and chapter settings have been moved from the DVD menu tab to the DVD settings tab.

This release also makes two changes to the way ffmpeg is used. The short reason for this is to improve the compatibility with MPEG2 input videos.

If you're interested in the long explanation, first, a word of explanation. ffmpeg is the fabulous video conversion command line utility which SmallDVD uses for converting and remultiplexing video files ready for placed on a DVD. It is constantly evolving, supporting more file formats. As ffmpeg doesn't have formal releases, it is typically built from source code using all the latest enhancements submitted. But it appears that "latest" is not always "greatest".

All versions of SmallDVD up to and including 2.0 used a version of ffmpeg I compiled back in March 2007. For SmallDVD 2.1 (and subsequently 2.2), I compiled a new version to enable a wider variety of files to be accepted by SmallDVD. However, this later version had two problems:

• Videos saved from MPEGStreamClip as "MPEG2 with MP2 audio" were no longer accepted by SmallDVD.
  
• In some cases, chapter marks were not being inserted correctly in MPEG2 videos.

The first of these problems was an ffmpeg bug, which was fixed by building a newer version. However, this still showed the second problem. Therefore, while I have included a new version of ffmpeg (r21020) in SmallDVD 2.3, I have also reinstated the original version I was using (r8320) up until SmallDVD 2.0.

So, in SmallDVD 2.3, MPEG2 input video which does not require conversion will use the old ffmpeg. All other video which does require conversion will use the new ffmpeg (this includes MPEG2 files you have explicitly set to be converted).

The end result, hopefully, will be better compatibility with as many types of files as possible. Ideally, I would like to use just one ffmpeg, but until I can get the new version working as reliably on MPEG2 files as the old version did, I will retain both.

MPEGStreamClip  SmallDVD 

Monday, January 04, 2010

A number of people (myself included) have run into a problem where SmallDVD 2.1 and 2.2 can no longer recognise video files saved from MPEGStreamClip. This appears to be caused by the new version of ffmpeg added to SmallDVD 2.1 not recognising files in this format. My initial research hasn't found anything obviously wrong, so it may be an ffmpeg bug.

In the short term, the workaround is to save from MPEGStreamClip using "Convert to TS with MP2 audio". But I will look into why it's not working with the standard format saved by MPEGStreamClip.
Alternatively, you could revert to SmallDVD 2.0.

I use the combination of MPEGStreamClip + SmallDVD a lot, so am highly motivated to fix this!