Attacks on DreamHost and Enabling CloudFlare

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For the past 2 days, our site has been going up and down like a roller coaster due to attacks and connection issues at our webhost (DreamHost):

As a temporary fix (maybe permanent?) against the attacks, they’re limiting every account to only 3 simultaneous connections, which has created a new set of problems for us, causing what many of you saw yesterday as 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable.

For now, we’ve enabled CloudFlare on our site, hoping by having CloudFlare cache our site (which is mostly static), it would help relieve some of our simultaneous connections issues.

We’ve also reworked how our site caching worked, making it less agressive at expiring cache. You might end up seeing some stale pages once in awhile. Hopefully that’ll help too.

In the meantime, we’re looking into options for a more reliable webhost.

Converting MKV to MP4 on Mac OSX

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So I’ve been using QuickTime Player to re-encode most videos into 1080p, 720p, and 480p resolutions and that’s been working out great so far. The only problem is it doesn’t seem to understand MKV files, making it unable to re-encode them.

I’ve been searching for a tool for Mac that can do that job. On Windows, I’ve have an arsenal of tools that I used to use (e.g. Yamb, MeGUI). On Mac, everything I’ve tried seemed to do a rather poor job. Audio/Video quality was bad and often times would just fail trying to re-encode the file.

Today I happened to find this thread, which was extremely helpful: Why is it so freaking hard to convert .mkv to .MP4? Despite the topic, there were some really good information on which tools to try:

So the first one I tried was FFMpeg, because it was free and I was able to quickly install using HomeBrew. The command to run looked easy enough:
ffmpeg -i video.mkv -vcodec copy video.mp4

The video output was flawless, but the audio was all garbled up. Not that it was unrecognizable, but the audio had a much deeper pitch than the original. I’m pretty sure there’s some options I could pass into it to increase the audio quality, but I decided try some of the other suggestions.

I tried Subler next and this one failed hard. I selected the tracks I wanted followed by how to encode it, but every configuration I tried errored out with no message or log.

I looked at iVI next, but it was linked to a $10 app on the app store, and I wasn’t willing to purchase it w/o confirming that it would do the job. Later I found out their website actually allowed you to download a trial. They should probably mention that on their app store.

iFlicks looked more like a media manager that made videos compatible with your iDevice, so I skipped that one.

From the thread, HandBrake was suggested if I wanted to passthrough the video and audio, but I knew I needed to re-encode the audio track, so I skipped this one too.

I finally ended up at MP4Tools. I had skipped this initially because it sounded like a tool I’ve tried on Windows which was rather bad. But it turned out this tool was the best for the job on the Mac. Interface was pretty straight forward and at the outputted file’s video/audio quality was top notch. This is shareware and I ended up paying the $6 registration fee because this app’s going to save me a lot of time in the future.

Hope this post helps anyone looking for a better way to convert MKVs to MP4 on Mac OSX.

Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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theperksofbeingawallflower-poster-jpg_220830I wasn’t very interested when I first saw the trailer for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but Netflix suggested I should watch it (4-star worthy) and they really know me better than myself.

Though one thing I do have to say about the trailer was that it introduced me to Imagine Dragons, one of my favorite new bands. After rewatching the trailer, I noticed they pulled out “BE AGGRESSIVE! PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE!” scene.

I initially thought the story was about a coming of age story about a boy starting high school with no friends, but it’s so much more than that. The 3 main characters (Logan Lerman as Charlie, Emma Watson as Sam, and Ezra Miller as Patrick) gave outstanding performances.

<spoilers>
Right off the bat, you get a vibe there’s something not quite right with Charlie. He seems like a kid dealing with depression. You have a feeling the family understands Charlie isn’t quite alright, but doesn’t really know everything that is going on. Whatever it is, it’s preventing Charlie from making friends.

Charlie meets up with Patrick and Sam shortly after starting high school and he feels he could be friends with them. One time at a party after getting stoned, he divulges that his best (only?) friend had shot himself. Not too much details here, and it felt a bit forced just to set the mood, but you learn this was really curve ball for the much bigger reveal at the end of the story.

Update: So after watching the deleted scenes, his best friend does show up in a memory sequence. It doesn’t really explain why he killed himself, but does explain the cafeteria scene where he doesn’t sit next to a girl he pointed out. Apparently that girl was his best friend’s girlfriend.

The story is told through a series of letters he writes to an anonymous person he “overheard” from some other students. I understand that the recipient of the letters isn’t really important, but it’s another aspect of the story that felt a bit forced. Who is the recipient? Was there a recipient? Given that that recipient never plays an active role in the story, would the story have been any different if Charlie wrote in a journal? If there was a really a recipient, was there really a reason he replied to offer help.

Update: I was reading the book’s plot on Wikipedia and was wondering why they didn’t include the part where Charlie’s sister got pregnant and confides in Charlie. Charlie sticks by her while she got an abortion. The scene was actually shot, but removed from the final cut. You can watch it in the deleted scenes.
</spoilers>

Very melodramatic, just the way I like it.

Netflix | Amazon | iTunes

Yahoo! Redirection Script

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Yahoo! has once again changed their API. Although I have discovered how to obtain the direct download URL, it’s only a temporary URL which expires quickly. That makes it unusable on our site.

Therefore, I’ve written a redirection script which runs some javascript that obtains and redirects you the temporary URL. At which point, you should be able to view and download the trailer. Unfortunately that means if you’re using a download utility or attempt to right click and save as…, it won’t work for you anymore.

I apologize for this inconvenience and if there’s any further development, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I also plan on updating the Yahoo! download tutorial shortly.

Happy Holidays!

Update 2013/06/03: Updated the Yahoo! Download Tutorial

Option 1: Open the link in a new tab/window:
option 1

Option 2: Click Download when the trailer is playing:
option 2