An option was to see the videos on the computer (my computer has a bigger screen and I have the codecs to watch those formats on Linux), but the experience is not the same. So I started a search for a converter but the ones I found were for windows and these days I don’t trust anymore the free software for windows, in fact I don’t have a windows partition.

Then I found AlltoAvi and problem solved!. AlltoAvi is a software project that can be used in Linux and Windows. In Linux I only needed to install mencoder and worked flawlessly.

To convert a file you need to enter the directory where the files are located, filetype, subtitle and audio track IDs, bitrate desired, the codec you want to use to convert and the width and height of the output.

Example:
./alltoavi . wmv 0 1 650 DIVX50 320 240
will convert all the WMV files located on the current directory to DivX with a dimension of 320×240.

The videos were converted to AVI with a slight degradation of image quality but it was tolerable. In this case applies that depending on the quality of the input is the quality of the output, because I tried with a video downloaded from the web and the quality of the “original” was terrible, I guess that because offilesize restrictions. After the conversion the AVI file was full of compression artifacts.

After that I tried to convert some MKV to AVI files from some Anime episodes and the result was good. Burned the files to a DVD and the DVD player recognized and played the files without problems.

The lesson of this?. If you want to watch your videos on TV, DO NOT encode them to WMV!, AVI or MPG using DivX is going to get you better image/size and compatibility with DVD players.

Some of the shows are hilarious and some are a bit scatological in nature.

More videos after the jump

I wonder why the shows here (Mexico) still use the same format of more than 15 year ago and not evolve into something more entertaining, I’m not saying that they should copy these shows but in case the producers do that at least would be an improvement.

The first one is the Rock Paper Scissors World Championship which got a post in Techcrunch , I’m still thinking the reason why it’s on that site but, that leads me to the other contest I want to write about.

This is the video of the contest:

Link to video

When I saw it I couldn’t stop laughing and my favorites were the fourth and sixth participants

I guess this one was spontaneous and does no have a website (as far as I know) yet, but it’s only a matter of time for someone to create a whole organization around this, the market is there in every comic and anime convention/expo.

Link to video in youtube

Gracias a Ginatonic tuve la oportunidad de ver 2 de estas, la de Microformatos con Hector Garcia (Kirai) y Windows Live (esta ultima no me interesaba tanto, pero 2 es mejor que nada =D).

Los videos estan en Youtube:
Microformatos: parte 1, parte 2, parte 3, parte 4 y parte 5
Windows Live: parte 1, parte 2, parte 3, parte 4 y parte 5

Espero poder encontrar videos de las demas ponencias y espero pronto se realice un congreso de este mismo tipo aqui y que cuente con la calidad de ponentes que tuvo este.

Este concepto de usar videojuegos para crear videos, peliculas, etc… se llama machinima y ya tiene algunos años, si mal no recuerdo empece a ver algunas creaciones de este tipo en 1999 que se hacian usando el engine de Quake o Quake 2