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I know some of you probably got a Zune for the holidays and there are a lot of great programs now that will encode your videos for a variety of portable media players. I've used many many of these applications in the last year or so, some of them free, some not so free. But when it comes down to it, for the Zune it is hard to beat the free Windows Media Encoder 9. What sets WME apart from many of the other applications I've tried can be seen in the photo at left; WME will suck up all the cores you want to throw at it, meaning I can encode in a fraction of the time of some of the other products I've used.

Once you get WME installed, run it from Start > Windows Media > Windows Media.

• Go ahead and click New Session, then select Custom Session and OK.
• This will put you in the Session Properties box, in the "Source from" section, you want to choose File.
• Now click that browse button right under it and select the file you want to encode.
• Go back to the top and click the "Output" tab, uncheck "Pull from encoder' and select "Encode to file", picking the name and location to put it (probably your [username]\Videos directory).
• Now click the Compression tab, change the "Destination" dropdown to "File download (computer playback)", change "Video" dropdown to "DVD quality video (1Mbps VBR)", and change the "Audio" dropdown to "CD quality audio CBR".
• If you want to spend video quality on being able to put more videos on your Zune, you can click the edit button to the right of Destination and lower your bit rates, change size to 320x240, and audio to 128k.
• Click Apply, click "Start Encoding", then sit back and watch it fly through your video.

Lançado em 2002 somente nos Estados Unidos, finalmente chegou ao Brasil o Windows Media Center, o meu produto favorito para mídia digital. Conhecido inicialmente como Windows XP Media Center Edition (seu apelido era Windows MCE), ele agora vem dentro das versões Home Premium e Ultimate do Windows Vista e passa a ser chamado de WMC. Do Windows MCE original nasceu uma divisão inteira dentro da Microsoft chamada eHome, cujo foco é criar produtos e soluções para a casa digital. Lá estão as divisões de Xbox, Zune, WMC, Microsoft TV e tantas outras. Para o mercado norte americano, e alguns europeus, um produto como o WMC faz sentido. A penetração de computadores, tocadores digitais portáteis, vídeo games e televisores de alta definição, é mais ampla. Além disso, lares nesses mercados já contam com múltiplos computadores. No Brasil, porém, onde raros conhecem coisas como TiVo, DVR, Slingbox, Video On Demand, o conceito é muito novo.

Dentro desse cenário o WMC veio trazer a experiência com mídia digital que o PC permite para os televisores comuns em salas de estar e ambientes mais confortáveis. O que começou com ligando um PC tradicional a um televisor hoje já vai muito além. Diversos dispositivos se conversam num intercâmbio de mídia digital que permite o consumo de suas músicas, fotos, vídeos, televisão e até conteúdo de Internet em qualquer canto da casa, tudo com uma interface bonita. Essa é a finalidade do WMC, liberar nossa mídia do PC onde hoje armazenamos quase tudo e dar a elas uma navegação simplificada através do controle remoto, comando familiar para quase todos.

Eu estarei publicando uma série de sete vídeos curtos ensinando as principais funcionalidades do WMC. Vamos começar com o mais básico, como conectar e configurar um PC com Windows Media Center. Para quem tiver dúvidas específicas, por favor registre-as na área de comentários. Eu espero poder fazer um follow-up com configurações e usos avançados do WMC - por exemplo, utilizar o WMC como biblioteca de filmes, acessar seu WMC pela Internet para ver todas suas mídias, até TV ao vivo, e eventualmente utilizá-lo como plataforma para automação residencial. Para quem quiser mais informação, acabamos de traduzir o site oficial do Windows Media Center para português: http://www.microsoft.com/brasil/mediacenter.

Had I found this earlier, I would have added it to my Zune hacks post. With this registry hack, you can enable playback of your Zune over your laptop's speakers. First of all: warning - don't edit your registry if you don't know...oh blah, blah, blah...you know the drill.

1. Add the following key to your registry, either by creating a reg file with the text, or go there yourself and create the binary value:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000\Settings\filter\SpeakerHp]

"EnableInputMonitor"=hex:01

2. Reboot

3. Enable the input monitor by going to "Control Panel" --> "Sound" --> "Speakers/Headphones." Click on "Properties," then click on the "Levels" tab and enable the input monitor button.
4. You're done - rock out!

Thank you, Dell Community Forum poster and .netDEvHammer!

Uma das coisas mais legais do Zune é que o rádio dele funciona no Brasil. Digo isso porque o rádio (FM) do Zune capta informações do sistema RDS que as emissoras podem transmitir junto ao sinal de áudio. Ele também armazena as suas estações favoritas, é claro. Confira as imagens abaixo.

Com o novo Zune surgiu a comunidade social do Zune que permite aos seus usuários um intercâmbio de informações e gostos musicais. Para facilitar esse compartilhamento, foi criado o Zune card, um cartão semelhante ao Gamer card do Xbox, que mostra ao mundo as suas músicas, álbuns e artistas favoritos e mais tocados. Como o Zune Social ainda está em beta, não ficou muito claro como criar os Zune cards. Um funcionário da Microsoft criou esse gerador automático de Zune cards. Basta inserir o seu nome de usuário do Zune e clicar em generate. Depois copie e cole o códgio HTML nas páginas Web ou até em assinatura de emails. Lembro que o mais interessante desse cartão é a possibilidade de interagir com os mesmos. Você pode ouvir trechos das músicas no Zune card, além de enviar para terceiros ou até comprar a música (somente nos EUA).

Veja o meu cartão:

Hoje foi o lançamento da nova geração do Zune, que muitos vêem só como o dispositivo tocador de mídia. O Zune vai além do dispositivo - ele tenta trazer uma nova experiência ao ato de curtir sua mídia, focando principalmente em música. Seguindo esse conceito de experiência, temos o software que é a central da experiência, os dispositivos que dão portabilidade e mobilidade à sua experiência, e temos a comunidade, ou Social, que expande a experiência. Tem muita coisa nova aqui e farei um vídeo para mostrar tudo. Na hora de ler as avaliações e reviews que estão pintando por aí, lembrem desse conceito de experiência e que todas as partes foram pensadas de forma integral e não isoladas. Vamos aos screenshots do novo software e da comunidade, lembrando que não é necessário ter o dispositivo para usar o software.

Para quem nunca viu ou não lembra, essa era a cara do Zune software antigo:

E essa é a cara do novo software:

O novo suporte para Podcasts, tanto da loja do Zune como via hyperlinks inseridos manualmente:

O novo modo de visualização:

Como falei antes, a experiência é composta por 3 pilares: hardware, software e serviços. Esse último é composto pelo Zune Marketplace, a loja online para o Zune, e o Zune Social, uma comunidade para conhecer novas músicas, novos artistas e novos amigos. O Zune Social lembra o Xbox Live com seu Gamer card, um cartão virtual que identifica o seu perfil de gamer para outros membros da comunidade ou até para a Internet.

GalileoBR

No Zune Social, você tem um site semelhante que disponibiliza os Zune cards, um cartão customizável que mostra os seus artistas, álbuns e músicas favoritas para todos conhecerem. O mais legal é que esses Zune cards são interativos. É possível escutar trechos das músicas favoritas dos seus amigos, comprar a música, enviá-la para outro amigo e também adicioná-la como favorito em seu Zune card. Veja um exemplo legal do Zune card do J Allard, criador do Xbox e atual líder do projeto Zune (clique no cartão para manipulá-lo):

Realmente tem muita coisa para encontrar no novo software e nos serviços. Ainda não tenho um dispositivo do modelo novo, mas já atualizei o meu Zune 30 e realmente está legal. A experiência tem sido muito boa e recomendo a todos que testem pelo menos o software e o social.

Here is a way how to be truly original. Dress up your player into some nice piece of art. Zune Originals is a new website that will be launched tomorrow where you can find 27 original art works created by 18 international artists. These are designed to be engraved onto the back of the device. Visitors of the site will be able to customize their Zune by size, color, illustration and also with up to four lines of text. This all will come free of charge. If you can´t wait till tomorrow and want to see some of these pictures today have a look here.

Ancient History

Compression, although an obsession with me since I was 19, didn't appear to be a career option until many years after that. My years at Hampshire College were spent essentially majoring in neuropsychology, minoring in computer science, and spending my evening and weekends helping out my film student buddies. It all seemed hopelessly random to my parents and advisors, but turned out to be the perfect background for what I do now (after all, what's compression but extremely applied neuropsychology?).

After college and a couple of science internships under my belt I decided I didn't want to spend my life writing grant proposals or doing lab work so I started a video production company with my friends, including my recent interviewer Halstead York. The plan was to use emerging technology to be able to produce and post independent films from our own scripts. We thought we had a financing deal lined up back in 1994, and purchase a NLE: (a PowerMac 8100/80 with a Radius VideoVision card, and 4GB SledgeHammer RAID) was purchased for doing video editing. The idea was we could rent it out before and after post in order to cover some of the costs. Then there were two big problems:

1. The infamous defective BART chip in those early PowerMacs meant it couldn't keep sync for more than a few minutes.
2. Our financing fell through.

So, there we were, with a script, no money, a bunch of debt, and a NLE that couldn't edit video. However, we found a nice market using shorter clips with looser sync requirements: CD-ROM video! And so we were launched in the heady early days of multimedia. Journeyman Digital was a full service production company for digital media, and we did all the screenwriting, production, and post that we dreamed of, but not for our own projects. But we kept writing screenplays on the side. We got as far as a few meetings with Sony Pictures on one, but like nearly all screenplays, nothing really happened in the end. And while I liked doing the work, when it came down the the fundamental gut check of moving to LA and rolling the dice, I didn't NEED to do it. Instead I got married and soon enough had three little kids, and rather ran out of time for side projects.

Halstead is only recently married and currently kidless, and had time. So he and many members of the old gang dusted off one of our old screenplays, Temporary Insanity and darn if it they didn't actually shoot the whole thing in HD! Halstead just finished up the trailer. Quite an experience seeing jokes I wrote a decade ago there on the screen. And it's amazing to see how it's finally possible to make movies on a hobbyists budget, even with high-end techniques. Check out this post on color correction in the home office.

I didn't have time to work on the production itself (I was busy having that third child get born and joining Microsoft), but I certainly wasn't going to let anyone else compress the trailers (now available for download)!

The project

And so, after all that ramble, we're back to talking about hands-on compression.

Halstead had a pretty typical 2x2 matrix for encoding: two formats at two data rates each:

Formats

• MPEG-4 compatible with QuickTime/AppleTV/iPod
• Windows Media compatible with Windows Media Player/Flip4Mac/Xbox/Zune/Silverlight

Data rates

• 3 Mbps for a 720p30 HD version compatible with Xbox360/AppleTV
• 300 Kbps for a low data rate download, which would also be portable media player compatible (iPod for .mp4, Zune for .wmv)

Workflow

The source was provided as a 730p30 .AVI file using the CineForm Aspect HD codec. It was video-only - audio was provided in a separate .wav file.

HD WMV encoding was easy - I was able to use the source as is. And the current WMCmd.vbs supports specifying a separate .wav file as source for the audio track.

HD .MOV was harder. I wanted to use QuickTime's H.264 encoder to output, since it uses a complexity-constrained mode that is well tuned for computer playback via QuickTime, on both Intel and PPC (and there's a lot of G4 PowerBooks out there among Indie film fans). While it won't offer the same compression efficiency as a highly-tuned H.264 encoder from another encoder, it'll also playback well on more machines.

However, QuickTime, even QuickTime for Windows, can't read AVI files using the standard DirectShow API! Now that we've added support for the QuickTime API in Expression Media Encoder, it's only fair for Apple to support DirectShow now :). So, I used Rhozet Carbon to encode my .avi and .wav source files into a single Photo-JPEG compressed .MOV file that QuickTime could then read (believe it or not, there's no lossless Y'CbCr 4:2:0 encoder in QuickTime for Windows). I wound up doing that compression on my G5, so I could do it in parallel with the WMV encoding on my Windows box.

For the mobile versions, I used VirtualDub to make me a nice 320x180 version of the .AVI and Carbon again to make a 320x180 JPEG .mov.

As an alternative (and what I would have done if this was going to be a high-volume process and not just a one-off) would be to using Carbon to encode all four outputs from the single source. Also, using the "multipass" mode with Carbon and other tools other than QuickTime Player Pro itself results in very, very slow rendering time, since it reruns preprocessing for the entire clip for each pass, although only a small part of the file might be adjusted per pass. So in a high-volume workflow, probably only the 1-pass mode would have been used.

Windows Media Settings

WMV HD @ 3 Mbps:

cscript "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\WMCmd.vbs" -input "G:\Temp Insanity\Trailer 1 timed v5 720.avi" -output "Trailer 1 720p 3M 192.wmv" -a_input "G:\Temp Insanity\Trailer 1.wav" -a_codec WMASTD -a_mode 4 -a_setting 128_48_2 -v_codec WVC1 -v_mode 4 -v_keydist 5 -v_bitrate 2870000 -v_peakbitrate 6000000 -v_peakbuffer 4000 -v_performance 80 -v_bframedist 1 -v_dquantoption 2 -v_loopfilter 1 -v_mmatch 0 -v_mslevel 4 -v_msrange 0 -v_percopt 2

Pretty standard stuff, with the same basic settings as my previous encodes. A few items of note:

1. Not excessive vertical motion and HD, so I didn't bother constraining the number of threads.
2. Since the source was just stereo, I used WMA instead of WMA Pro, in order to preserve Silverlight 1.0 compatibility.
3. Note the use of the -a_input flag to specify a different audio source.

WMV mobile @ 300 Kbps:

cscript "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\WMCmd.vbs" -input "Trailer 1 timed v5 320x180.avi" -output "Trailer 1 280 Zune.wmv" -v_codec WMV9 -v_mode 4 -v_keydist 10 -v_bitrate 235000 -v_peakbitrate 600000 -v_peakbuffer 4000 -v_performance 80 -v_bframedist 1 -v_loopfilter 1 -v_overlap 1 -v_mmatch 0 -v_mslevel 2 -v_msrange 0 -v_percopt 2 -v_numthreads 1 -a_codec WMASTD -a_mode 4 -a_setting 48_44_2 -a_peakbitrate 160000

Pretty much identical to the Zune encoding settings I posted last week, except with lower data rates to hit the 300 Kbps total.

1. The audio was pretty simple, so 48 Kbps was enough when using VBR mode (again VBR audio is a very underused and very useful feature for downloadable files).
2. the data rate was so low, I went to the max and used -mslevel 2 (full floating point chroma search) and -v_numthreads 1 (single-thread encode). Even with those, this encoded much quicker than the HD version, since the frame size was so much smaller.
3. Main Profile is required by Zune, and thus I can't use DQuant.

QuickTime Settings

QuickTime's advanced settings aren't available via command-line, so I'll include screen shots of my MPEG-4 settings.

I matched the WMV settings as closely as appropriate.

MPEG-4 Main Profile @ 3 Mbps