With the recent addition to the family, I’ve been taking a lot more photos and shooting more video, so I thought a post that catalogues all the various ways I create, process and store media would be interesting. If nothing else, it might help me remember where I put stuff in case I forget!
I’ll start with photos, as it’s the most straightforward. I use a Canon A720IS, which I bought back in 2008. It’s served me well, and I have zero complaints about it. For editing I use Picasa from Google (without a doubt the worst collection of code to have ever escaped from Mountain View). It serves it’s purpose (the limit of my post-processing is hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button), and I stick with it primarily because of the support for Google Web Albums. All the photos taken with the Canon get uploaded here, and I breezed past the free 1GB account Google gives you a long while back. Very early on I decided to pay for additional storage: I currently pay$20 per annum for an extra 80GB, and consider it money well spent for the peace of mind it brings in terms of long-term storage. I have an inherent distrust of hardware for self-storage, having broken too many external HDDs over the years, so I’m happy to throw my media into the Cloud – presuming the price is right.
Video next and it’s a big ‘un. I shoot the majority of my video on a JVC Everio GZ-MG130, which shoots decent quality clips, but formats them in the most bizarre way. Clips are saved as .MOD, which is just MPEG2 with some timestamp and aspect ratio info stuck into an accompanying .MOI file. VLC plays MOD files without the MOI present, so not sure if they’re all that necessary. I back up everything directly from the camera’s HDD to Amazon S3, using a superb little piece of software called JungleDisk. JungleDisk allows you to read and write any files directly to your S3 account, as if it were a drive on your computer or local network – I’ve used the Windows and Linux versions and have had no problems with either. You pay a one-off fee to JungleDisk, and then Amazon bill you directly for storage space and transport costs, on a per-GB basis: I’m currently paying between $4-$5 per month to store every piece of video I’ve shot on the Everio since 2008, which is a pretty good deal. This is my “insurance” – I don’t watch or share any of the videos using S3 (too expensive), I just know it’s there in case I lose the other copies of the videos. I have no faith in the durability and longevity of DVDs, which is I why I don’t use the Everio’s built-in DVD creator function.
So backup is easy, watching is hard. As I mentioned, VLC will play the MOD files, but I want to be able to watch the movies on my TV. I have a Memup media-box, but it’s pretty limited with the formats it supports (and firmware updates seem non-existent), so the MOD files need to be converted to a format it handles before I can watch them. I use Avidemux for this – it seems to be the best of the free open-source video editors/converters, but the interface is definitely for the advanced user – there’s a definite lack of a “Start Here!” button :) It took a lot of trial-and-error, but the process of converting the MOD files to watch them on the Memup is very simple: as per the screenshot, set the Video and Audio options to ‘Copy’, and the Format option to ‘MPEG-PS (A+V)’.
This seems to be the simplest way to just get the stupid files to play – there’s little or no compression involved, so it’ll presumably eat disk space quite quickly. However, it works, and I’ll leave well enough alone for the moment, as it took too long to get it working in the first place!
I’ve come across a bit of stumbling block recently though (sigh): the Everio went on the blink from Jan-June of this year (mysteriously resolved itself, so not going to dig any deeper), and I shot a lot of video using the Canon. The Canon stores video clips as MJPG, which I cannot manage to get working in any way, shape or form on the Memup, and I can’t seem to convert it to an intermediate format using Avidemux either (it doesn’t seem to like how the audio is encoded). I’ve run out of patience with the Memup at this point, so I’m taking a new approach. I’ve been toying with the idea of hacking my Nintendo Wii for a while now, and this problem with the Memup and MJPG files has given me a great excuse to give it a go. The plan is to use the BannerBomb hack to add the Homebrew Channel, and then hopefully play the MJPG natively using a Homebrew app (worst comes to worst, I’ll write one myself if I have to :). I’m just waiting for an SD card adapter to arrive in the post and I can get started – I’ll put up another post detailing the steps when I’ve had a crack at it: and whether or not the whole high-falutin’ scheme actually worked…
As an aside: thinking about all the various places online that I store memories raises some interesting questions with regard to accessing the services in the case of death: if I pop my clogs I don’t imagine that Amazon will be promptly handing over my S3 login credentials to my wife. It’ll be interesting to see if someone starts offering some type of managed service around this, some sort of online ‘Will and Testament’ for multimedia – or does one already exist?
