We love the media and spend most of our free time around or immersed in it, whether it be watching it or creating it! And now we're going to talk about it!
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If we understand Stan Walker’s “Black Box” correctly, the song uses a plane crash and the black box used to keep records of the flight to symbolise a failed relationship, secrets, and surviving the “crash” of the relationship. If that is the meaning, why is the music so upbeat when the lyrics seem so serious, and at times, angry? We just don’t understand why the song is arranged such a way.
Does anyone think that the lyrics don’t match the feel of the music?
It’s been over a week since the last episode of Chuck’s second season aired in New Zealand. It’s been a tough week; we haven’t been able to eat, sleep or carry out basic tasks because we haven’t had our Chuck fix—just kidding. We do miss it though. It is such an entertaining series. We love everything about the show: the humor, the action, the characters, the relationships; each and every episode never fails to keep us watching and wanting more.
So to find out that due to low ratings and stiff competition from other networks Chuck had been facing possible cancellation in the US, we were surprised. How can NBC (the network carrying Chuck) think about axing Chuck after revealing that the once clumsy Chuck can now take down a team of trained spies without so much as a bead of sweat appear on his skin?
Fortunately, thanks to a fan-initiated campaign, Chuck was saved from such an outcome. It seems NBC has decided to order thirteen more episodes of the series, making up Chuck’s third season. Although the season contains as many episodes as the first, it is definitely not a full season, falling short of nine and with budget cuts. We may have a third season, but Chuck’s future doesn’t look very promising.
In saying that, we urge fans of the series to sign the online petition to save Chuck from future cancellation located at PetitionSpot.com. Currently there are 41,000+ signatures (target: 100,000). We’re not sure if these online petitions get noticed, but maybe with enough signatures, it will; and we fans can persuade NBC to keep it on past this short third season.
The Sony Video Walkman does not appear to support videos with embedded subtitles or externally-stored subtitles (soft subtitles/softsubs). The only option available for this device then is to burn the subtitles onto original video frames (hard subtitles/hardsubs). So, for this entry, we’re going to suggest a way to hardsub your video footage so you can watch it on the Sony Video Walkman; this is not meant to be a step-by-step tutorial, but an overview of what is needed to hardsub videos.
There are four programs you’ll need – all are completely free to download online:
1) Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK)
2) VirtualDub
3) Handbrake
4) SubRip
Brief explanations of what each of these programs are for:
AutoGK and VirtualDub
Together with VirtualDub, AutoGK is used to burn the subtitles onto the video footage and converts the file to an AVI video format. A note: when you download the full package, it’ll come with three more installers: VobSub (a plugin for VirtualDub to do the hardsub), AviSynth, and the XviD codecs. Make sure you install all of these if you haven’t got them on your computer already as they will be called upon by AutoGK during the hardsubbing and conversion process.
Handbrake
We talked about using this program in a previous post, “Finally! A video converter for the Sony Video Walkman!“. This is the converter we’ll use to encode the AVI file produced by AutoGK to MP4 (or any one of the other formats accepted by the Video Walkman).
SubRip
If you have a DVD, a VOB file, or some other video file with embedded subtitles, you can use this program to extract the subtitles and save it as a subtitle text file (for example, an .srt file) for inputting into AutoGK. This program isn’t necessary if you’ve other means to obtaining a subtitle text file, for example the internet.
Hardsubbing
Now that you have all the required programs, plugins and codecs installed, you can begin hardsubbing. Grab your source file (video footage) and subtitles and input those into the appropriate fields in the AutoGK program; select the audio track/language track you wish to use, define the output size before adding the job to the queue at the bottom of the program’s interface. That’s pretty much as hard as it gets as AutoGK does everything else. At the end of the process, you’ll get an AVI file with burned-on subtitles.
Converting to a format compatible with Sony Video Walkman
Take the AVI file AutoGK produced and get the Handbrake program to convert the file to a format the Sony Video Walkman accepts. Remember, make sure that you do adhere to the supported file format specifications outlined in the Sony Video Walkman user manual; make sure you do not exceed the maximum resolution, framerate, bitrate, or file size stated. If you do exceed them, you’ll find that the file won’t play on the Video Walkman.
Last words
Apparently in the AutoGK program, you can select – what we assume – embedded subtitles from your video footage. If you find that embedded subtitles from your source file do appear in the program’s “Subtitle track(s)” section, you could try using those instead of external ones. Since our video footage was just video footage with no embedded subtitles, we used an external subtitles file for the subbing. To input external subtitles, you’ll need to bring up the “External Subs” field by pressing CTRL+F8 as the field is not readily displayed.
There are also Advanced Settings for AutoGK which allows you to configure the output resolution, codec, and audio type. We left them all as default: “Auto Width”, “XviD”, and “Auto” (respectively). We figured if we wanted to change anything we’d do that in Handrake where we do the final conversion.
Well, there you go. This is one way of getting subtitles on the Sony Video Walkman. We know people don’t like hardsubs because 1) it takes hours to encode a 1-2 hour video; 2) you can’t turn subtitles on and off; and 3) you lose multilingual support; but when it’s the only option, it’s the only option.
For those of you who are looking to hardsub for this device, we hope that this has been somewhat helpful. If anyone has any questions or need some help, don’t hesitate to send us a message. Also, if anyone knows another way or there is in fact an alternative to hardsubbing for this device, please do let us know too.
Well, that’s a wrap! Enjoy watching your subs!
Looking for a video converter that can convert your favourite video content for the Sony Video Walkman?—Yes? No? Well, we were and it took surfing countless sites, downloading and testing countless video converters available for free download to finally find one that was compatible with the Sony Video Walkman.
The video converter we’re referring to is called HandBrake. All other programs available for free download either produced poor video quality or the audio was horribly out-of-sync by the end of the clip—guess you can’t really expect too much for free stuff, eh?—but HandBrake proves you can get stuff that works for free. It compresses well, accepts pretty much any type of video as source (including DVD VOB files!), converts them to video formats compatible with the Video Walkman such as MPEG-4 and M4V, and most important of all, it is not a free-trial version, it’s free.
We won’t go into the features here as you will be able to read all about them on HandBrake’s site (which we’ll provide a link following this entry). Just know that it creates good quality video with synced audio that will play on the Sony Video Walkman, allowing you take your favourite clips, episodes, films, etc anywhere you go.
Testing the program, we decided to try it with an episode from our favourite TV series, Star Trek Voyager. We dropped in a 44-minute DVD VOB file into HandBrake and began converting it to MP4 (MPEG-4) format, using the XviD codec (and later the H.264 codec too), and for the audio, AAC codec, Stereo, 44.1kHz, 128Kbps. It took roughly 45 minutes to encode and came out to be about 175MB in size.
The results were not bad at all. In fact we were very pleased. Unlike the other free video converters we tried where we encountered problem after problem—poor video quality, out of sync audio, and fluctuating audio levels—HandBrake presented us with clear video, great audio quality that did sync with the footage, and a file size we were happy with. Finally, our search for a good free video converter was over, leaving us free to convert and enjoy our Star Trek Voyager episodes on our Video Walkmans (we have E-series Walkmans if that’s any use)! Yay.
So if you’ve still yet to find a good video converter for your Sony Video Walkman, try HandBrake.
Just a note about encoding video files using the H.264 (x264) codec to produce an MP4 file: for some reason the Sony Video Walkman does not recognise it. To solve this problem, go to the “Advanced” tab of the program and copy and paste in: ref=2:bframes=2:me=umh into the text box at the bottom. That should do the trick. We can’t remember the forum we found this piece of code from, but if we find it again, we will provide a link to it. The forum has some helpful threads.
Another couple of tips: 1) In the “Audio & Subtitles” tab, click the drop down menu and select the source audio track (usually third in the list) instead of leaving the source as “Automatic” as we found that not selecting it sometimes produced out-of-sync audio; 2) make sure the video and audio specifications meet the ones listed in the device’s user manual because if they don’t, you’ll find an error message saying that the file cannot be played even when the file is in a format accepted by the Video Walkman.
Happy watching!
Useful Resources:
A fantastic free video converter that is compatible with the Sony Video Walkman. It is also good for general video converting. It takes in a range of video format as source: VOB, AVI, FLV, WMV, etc, and converts them to M4V, MP4, MKV, AVI, and OGM, as well as allowing one to set the file size limit (very handy).