Why Apple's Shares Are Still Going Strong

All the hype around Apple must have something to do with the quality of their products, it cannot be clever marketing and cool design alone.

Example: Power Consumption

This weekend I saw some interesting figures in the computer magazine. The new Mac Mini consumes only 11.7 Watts when idle. That is extraordinary! I did not know Desktop computers could be so energy-efficient.

Compare that to another piece of interesting hardware, Tranquil PC's SQA-5H Home Server. Its concept is great - finally a NAS with a Windows OS, Home Server in this case. It uses Intels energy-efficient Atom CPUs, but nevertheless consumes 36 Watts with one hard disk only when idle.

When looking at those two numbers, the Core 2 Duo-based Mac Mini with less than 12 Watts and the Atom-based Tranquil PC with more than 35 Watts, I understand why Apple's products are highly valued. It is not enough to have an interesting concept. Many hardware vendors have those. You really have to think things through and pay attention to details. That is what few companies understand.

Note: One might argue that I compare apples to oranges. Very well, read this: A direct rival of the Mac Mini, Acer's X1700-U3700A needs more than 70 Watts when idle. Green IT certainly still has a long way to go.

Mozy - Computer Upgrade / Data Migration - Lessons Learned

My familiy and me generate data all the time, mostly pictures and videos. I store it all on a PC in my small home network. That PC acts as a file server and, as all servers, needs to be backed up. The mere thought of losing all that information gives me the creeps. After initially copying all data to an external USB drive using an advanced rsync algorithm I switched to a more secure method - at least, that was my plan. Storing data offsite on the internet provides the benefit of not losing priceless photographs and videos when desaster strikes your home. Reading about the online backup service mozy.com, which offers unlimited storage capacity for a mere $ 4.95 per month, I signed up immediately and underwent the painful procedure of uploading roughly 180 GB during several months to mozy. That went relatively well, the client software had only small problems now and then. When all my files were uploaded, I was content. Until I decided to upgrade the hard drive of my home "server" hosting all my data.

Up until recently it ran Windows XP and had a 300 GB hard drive. That became too small, with all the video files we are taking. So I bought a 1 TB drive and decided to reinstall the machine with Windows Vista. While in the process, I reorganized my partitions and changed my data drive from C: to D:. After installing Vista, I copied all my data over from the old hard drive and installed the mozy client.

Sleepless nights followed (nearly literally). The mozy client did not recognize that the data was the same, only moved to a different place. Instead, it started to re-upload everything from scratch. The last thing I wanted: another couple of months to upload all my stuff - and the prospect of having to repeat the procedure when the "file server" computer gets replaced, which is about to happen in a few months.

Next try: I wiped the new hard disk clean and reinstalled Vista. This time I created first a data partition and a (smaller) system partition for the OS. 30 minutes later I realized Vista has too much logic built in - it assigned the drive letter C: to the second (OS) partition. My attempt to separate data and OS/programs failed.

Third attempt: This time I installed Vista to a single partition encompassing the whole drive (goodbye data separation). At least, this way my data would be able to reside on C: as it had been before (due to historical reasons, as a matter of fact). But still to no avail: mozy tried to upload everything again.

Fourth attempt: In my Vista installations I had given the computer a new name. In theory that should not affect mozy, since its client calculates a unique ID for each installation. In practice - who knows? So I renamed the machine back to the original name it had with Windows XP and reinstalled the mozy client (just to make sure). And what happened? Nothing different from before. Mozy still started to upload everything from scratch.

So, all in all, what can I say? It just does not work, at least not the way I tried. Maybe, if I had done it "right" the first time (ie. chosen the same computer name and disk layout) mozy would have recognized that everything is the same on the new machine as it was on the old. Maybe. Maybe not. Migration between computers and from one installation to another seems to be a big problem of mozy they need to address. Soon.

What I am going to do? I do not know yet. Since I have half a year of prepaid service left with mozy I might re-upload. On the other hand, what is the point? At some point in the future I will replace my computer. And there is one thing I know for sure: I am not going through this again.

Notes

This applies to the mozy client version 1.10.4.2 (build 4377).

Additional Information

I have posted an article covering backup/restore topics in more depth here.

References

http://www.michaelodonnell.com/2008/10/17/mozy-vs-carbonite-continues/
http://trevinchow.com/blog/2008/03/30/carbonite-and-data-migration-to-new-computer/
http://trevinchow.com/blog/2008/02/12/mozy-to-carbonite-oh-no-you-dont/
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/2008/06/13/mozy-restore-sucks/
http://wonko.com/post/it_turns_out_mozy_isnt_so_hot_after_all

MEncode.cmd Now Supports Wildcards

My simple yet effective batch file-based solution for converting digital videos in Quicktime MOV format from Panasonic Lumix and other cameras to MPEG-2, MEncode.cmd, now supports wildcards, too.

Now you can run the following command to create MPEG-2 versions of all MOV files copied over from your camera:

MEncode.cmd "C:\Some Folder\*.mov"

MEncode will then take each input MOV file in "C:\Some Folder" and create an MPEG-2 file from it. The original will of course not be touched.

MEncode.cmd can be downloaded here.

How to Convert Quicktime MOV Video Files to MPEG-2

[Update 1: Fixed bugs in the batch file and made it available for download]
[Update 2: Wildcards are now supported]
[Update 3: Timestamps are now copied from source to destination files. For this, touch.exe is needed.]

I recently bought a new compact digital photo camera, Panasonic's Lumix LX3. Although I acquired it solely for its still image capabilities, I quickly discovered that it records video in very high quality, especially when compared to my digital video camera, a JVC model equipped with a hard disk on which video files are stored in MPEG-2 format in DVD resolution.

The major downside to the new LX3: the format in which video files are stored. For some reason Panasonic chose Apple's Quicktime format. This essentially means that only Apple's Quicktime software can play those files. That is far too inflexible for me. I need a video file format that can be played and edited with different applications, both today and in 20 years. I do not want to be caught in a format trap, like, for example, owners of Video 2000 equiment (remember that?).

I decided some time ago to store video footage in MPEG-2 format only. MPEG-2 is the format used on DVDs. Although these are soon to be replaced by Blue Ray Discs which employ a different codec, I am confident enough to be able to play and edit MPEG-2 even in 10 or 20 years time.

That left me with the question of how to convert Quicktime MOV files to MPEG-2.

Requirements

My camera creates .MOV files. The video stream is encoded as MJPEG, a simple codec that creates large files since compression is low. Here is some technical data on the format:

• Video resolution: 1280x720
• Aspect ratio: 16/9
• Frame rate: 24 fps
• Video codec: Quicktime MJPEG
  
• Sound: 1 channel (mono), 16 kHz
  
• Audio codec: uncompressed (PCM)
  

Since I only want to convert the video format, downscaling the resolution was out of the question. The resulting MPEG-2 file must retain the original resolution of 1280x720 pixels.

Research

I downloaded and tried out evaluation or free versions of the following programs. All are capable of reading MOV files and converting them to MPEG-2.

• MP4Cam2AVI, free
• AVS Video Tools, commercial
• Magix Video Deluxe 15, commercial
• SUPER, free, but dubious website
• MainConcept Reference, commercial
  

Unfortunately none met my requirements. At first, the free MP4Cam2AVI looked perfect. But then it refused to read one of my video files which Quicktime played without complaint. The commercial AVS and Magix are limited to DVD resolution (720x576), which also applies to SUPER. MainConcept worked flawlessly in my tests and I was nearly convinced I would have to hand over € 290 to the manufacturer when I discovered a free alternative.

Solution

The MPlayer/MEncoder combo is a powerful toolkit for playing and encoding digital video. It has all codecs built it and does not rely on DirectShow, Video for Windows or any other framework. The best thing of all is that it is free and open source. Not even installation is needed. Just download and unpack it to any folder you like.

The downside of both MPlayer and MEncoder is that they are command line tools. This is especially true for MEncoder since it offers literally hundreds of settings which are controlled by equally numerous command line switches. That makes MEncoder extraordinarily difficult to use. Add to that the sparse documentation and you know why only few people use MEncoder directly. For that reason I was not able to find sample scripts for what I needed to do.

It took me some time to figure out which parameters to feed to MEncoder to make it do what I wanted. In oder to simplify the process in the future I wrote a batch script that takes the path to a MOV file, invokes MEncoder with the correct switches to make it convert the file to MPEG-2 and place it in the original file's folder with the extension MPG.

Explanation

The first half of the script consists of comments. Please read those before putting it to use.

At the real start of the script various variables are set. You can adapt them to your needs, for example if you have input files with a differing resolution. However, you should leave LAVC_OPTIONS and MPEG_OPTIONS alone, unless you know what you are doing.

The script loops through all input files matching the input specification (a file system path that may contain wildcards). For each matching file, the script then checks for existence of the output file. This is a safety, since MEncoder will overwrite its output file without asking for confirmation. After that, MEncoder is invoked to create the MPEG-2 output file. Finally, touch.exe copies the timestamps from the source to the destination.

How to Use it

1. Download the MPlayer binaries and unzip them to a folder of your liking
2. Download Touch from Sourceforge and unzip it to the folder to which you unzipped MEncoder.exe
3. Download the batch file and save it in the same folder to which you unzipped MEncoder.exe
4. Open a command line (type cmd.exe at Start->Run)
5. Switch the current directory to the folder containing "MEncode.cmd"
6. Start the conversion of a MOV file by entering MEncode file.mov, or, to convert multiple files MEncode "C:\Videos\New Files\*.mov"