Nice TV day on NRK today. :-)

I managed to go for a quick hill run during one of the slalom
transmissions, but for most of the rest of the day I've been watching NRK1:

Biathlon (Halvard Hanevoll & Ole Einar had a much better day than
yesterday), the Ski Tour (amazing finish by Bjørgen, Simen caught up to
and tried to follow Angerer, but blew up a bit on the final (Gieant
Slalom!) hill.

Petter Northug has been all the way 'into the basement' for several of
the previous days, but he still did a good race.

The 4-Hill Ski Jumping Tour ended with amazing performances by the two
new guys, Austria's Schlierensauer and Norway's Anders Jacobsen:

Anders jumped 142 m in the final, the best jump of the entire
competition, which was enough to win the Tour overall, but not quite
enough to win the final race.

This is a guy who until a few months ago was still working as an
apprentice plumber. :-)

The Norwegian national coach "found" him this summmer, and invited him
(& a few others) to an audition in Lillehammer.

Terje
PS. Due to some interesting work assignments I've been "forced" to
invest in a (tax-deductible!) 42" Toshiba LCD TV (1920x1080p) plus a
Dreambox digital sat receiver.

I've put a 300 GB hard disk in the Linux-based Dreambox, so now I can
"tape" anything I like, with no quality loss at all. :-)
--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Know what was on TV here in the States today, Terje? American football
and college basketball, the same things that were on yesterday. I'm a
fan of the former, but still - a little variety would be good. I hope
you realize that cosmic justice requires you to put that new
audiovisual setup to good use with you-know-whats posted
you-know-where.

Is Østensen for real? Where did this kid come from? Is his success a
fluke, or is he going to be as good as Northug?

Chr.

Terje Mathisen wrote:
I managed to go for a quick hill run during one of the slalom
transmissions, but for most of the rest of the day I've been watching NRK1:

Biathlon (Halvard Hanevoll & Ole Einar had a much better day than
yesterday), the Ski Tour (amazing finish by Bjørgen, Simen caught up to
and tried to follow Angerer, but blew up a bit on the final (Gieant
Slalom!) hill.

Petter Northug has been all the way 'into the basement' for several of
the previous days, but he still did a good race.

The 4-Hill Ski Jumping Tour ended with amazing performances by the two
new guys, Austria's Schlierensauer and Norway's Anders Jacobsen:

Anders jumped 142 m in the final, the best jump of the entire
competition, which was enough to win the Tour overall, but not quite
enough to win the final race.

This is a guy who until a few months ago was still working as an
apprentice plumber. :-)

The Norwegian national coach "found" him this summmer, and invited him
(& a few others) to an audition in Lillehammer.

Terje
PS. Due to some interesting work assignments I've been "forced" to
invest in a (tax-deductible!) 42" Toshiba LCD TV (1920x1080p) plus a
Dreambox digital sat receiver.

I've put a 300 GB hard disk in the Linux-based Dreambox, so now I can
"tape" anything I like, with no quality loss at all. :-)
--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Wow Terje,
You have a sweet set-up. I too tried to follow the NRK broadcasts out here
in California but was unable to get any decent video recordings. I got an
OK womens classic race 890 kbit stream save on Saturday, but on Sunday ( I
was up 3 am to 6am on West Coast) I had to endure constant internet packet
loss, buffering stoppages, and router gateway freezes on my sh*#ty Comcast
(overpriced/hyped US IP) broadband service stream path so I wasted sleep
time trying to download for nothing. When I can see "Nett TV" I notice NRK
is broadcasting in "16:9 bredformat" -widescreen. Don't tell me you can
watch over the air in 1080p high definition?! I will be insanely jealous!!
I thought only some Korean and Japanese domestic TV networks have done that?
Those countries and certain European networks' broadcast quality make our
American tv environment look like crap. Corporate America broadcasters are
only interested in cramming as many subchannels per assigned transmission
bandwidth to sell mediocre content at the expense of high picture quality.
Any way back to the races. I've never seen so many athletes piled up lying
in the snow gasping for oxygen across the finish line. That climb was just
brutal!! That cutie "Virpi" was still smiling as she carried the Finnish
flag over the line though.
Did you see the "road rash" (abrasions) that Lars Berger had on his left
thigh and buttcheek after the Saturdays sprint biathalon? I don't think
Oberhof could have had another day beyond today of racing without putting
everybody on roller skis.
When Anders lands beyond that red line in the safety zone on the Bischofson
Hill you can clearly hear somebody in the NRK commentating booth screaming
in celebration. That jump was so awesome!
Man, if you got a way to save those broadcasts in mpeg2 on your Linux
machine the torrents we could put together would absolutely ROCK!!

Tak!!

"Terje Mathisen" wrote in message
...
I managed to go for a quick hill run during one of the slalom
transmissions, but for most of the rest of the day I've been watching NRK1:

Biathlon (Halvard Hanevoll & Ole Einar had a much better day than
yesterday), the Ski Tour (amazing finish by Bjørgen, Simen caught up to
and tried to follow Angerer, but blew up a bit on the final (Gieant
Slalom!) hill.

Petter Northug has been all the way 'into the basement' for several of the
previous days, but he still did a good race.

The 4-Hill Ski Jumping Tour ended with amazing performances by the two new
guys, Austria's Schlierensauer and Norway's Anders Jacobsen:

Anders jumped 142 m in the final, the best jump of the entire competition,
which was enough to win the Tour overall, but not quite enough to win the
final race.

This is a guy who until a few months ago was still working as an
apprentice plumber. :-)

The Norwegian national coach "found" him this summmer, and invited him (&
a few others) to an audition in Lillehammer.

Terje
PS. Due to some interesting work assignments I've been "forced" to invest
in a (tax-deductible!) 42" Toshiba LCD TV (1920x1080p) plus a Dreambox
digital sat receiver.

I've put a 300 GB hard disk in the Linux-based Dreambox, so now I can
"tape" anything I like, with no quality loss at all. :-)
--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

tassava wrote:
Know what was on TV here in the States today, Terje? American football
and college basketball, the same things that were on yesterday. I'm a
fan of the former, but still - a little variety would be good. I hope
you realize that cosmic justice requires you to put that new
audiovisual setup to good use with you-know-whats posted
you-know-where.

Is Østensen for real? Where did this kid come from? Is his success a
fluke, or is he going to be as good as Northug?

He's very much 'for real', there's a _lot_ of kids training just about
as hard the the elite team, and in fact, several of the Norwegian skiers
on the Tour started the season on one of the secondary (non-World Cup)
teams.

Terje

--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

shreddir wrote:
Wow Terje,
You have a sweet set-up. I too tried to follow the NRK broadcasts out here
in California but was unable to get any decent video recordings. I got an
OK womens classic race 890 kbit stream save on Saturday, but on Sunday ( I
was up 3 am to 6am on West Coast) I had to endure constant internet packet
loss, buffering stoppages, and router gateway freezes on my sh*#ty Comcast
(overpriced/hyped US IP) broadband service stream path so I wasted sleep
time trying to download for nothing. When I can see "Nett TV" I notice NRK
is broadcasting in "16:9 bredformat" -widescreen. Don't tell me you can
watch over the air in 1080p high definition?! I will be insanely jealous!!

No, they don't have the bandwidth for HD yet, but it is _much_ better
than US NTSC: With the digital sort-of PAL signal it is very similar to
a nice DVD, unless the signal has been re-compressed multiple times.

I thought only some Korean and Japanese domestic TV networks have done that?
Those countries and certain European networks' broadcast quality make our
American tv environment look like crap. Corporate America broadcasters are
only interested in cramming as many subchannels per assigned transmission
bandwidth to sell mediocre content at the expense of high picture quality.

I agree, Never Twice the Same Color was/is a horrible transmission standard.

Any way back to the races. I've never seen so many athletes piled up lying
in the snow gasping for oxygen across the finish line. That climb was just
brutal!! That cutie "Virpi" was still smiling as she carried the Finnish
flag over the line though.

It helps a _lot_ to be able to give away a minute or two, instead of
trying to balance on the knife edge of lactate blowup for 10-15 minutes.

Of course, had any of them trained seriously for doing exactly that (it
seemed like only the Russian climber were in that class) they would have
kept better speed & style all the way up.

Did you see the "road rash" (abrasions) that Lars Berger had on his left
thigh and buttcheek after the Saturdays sprint biathalon? I don't think
Oberhof could have had another day beyond today of racing without putting
everybody on roller skis.

I didn't see Lars's injuries, but the biathlon organizers did a _lot_ of
work keeping the trails sort-of skiable for the entire weekend.

When Anders lands beyond that red line in the safety zone on the Bischofson
Hill you can clearly hear somebody in the NRK commentating booth screaming
in celebration. That jump was so awesome!

Actually, that red line is/was entirely virtual! It is the length of the
currently longest jump, inserted into the TV image by sw. :-)

It was a great jump though: The only comparable feat in the US would
have been to take a complete rookie onto an NFL team as quarterback, see
the team make it all the way to the finals, and then, when they lead and
only need to run the clock out, instead go for a 'Hail Mary' pass of 60+
yards that's caught in the endzone.

Anders only needed to jump 130+ m to win the tournament, 142 m was close
to a new hill record in far from perfect conditions.

Man, if you got a way to save those broadcasts in mpeg2 on your Linux
machine the torrents we could put together would absolutely ROCK!!

I know, I'm looking into ways to upload that's safe against lawsuits.

The Dreambox, being a linux machine, makes it trivially easy to FTP
stream files to/from a PC, while the VLC player is supposed to play the
same files as-is (I haven't tried this myself yet.) I have seen tools on
the internet which are claimed to be capable of turning these into
regular MPEG2s.

Terje

--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

Terje Mathisen skrev:
I've put a 300 GB hard disk in the Linux-based Dreambox, so now I can
"tape" anything I like, with no quality loss at all. :-)

Terje: Start seeding with torrents!

shreddir: are you paying for standard NRK TV via internet?

tall_thomas: keep up the good seeding!

It's free for all to watch the weekly "NRK Sports-review" program via
internet:
http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/prosjekt/462

It's usually packed with cross country and biathlon.

Terje Mathisen wrote:
shreddir wrote:
Man, if you got a way to save those broadcasts in mpeg2 on your Linux
machine the torrents we could put together would absolutely ROCK!!

I know, I'm looking into ways to upload that's safe against lawsuits.

The Dreambox, being a linux machine, makes it trivially easy to FTP
stream files to/from a PC, while the VLC player is supposed to play the
same files as-is (I haven't tried this myself yet.) I have seen tools on
the internet which are claimed to be capable of turning these into
regular MPEG2s.

I'm testing these things now:

The Dreambox stores all programs in /media/hdd/movie, each program
generates 5 files, with the same long leading filename part:
"20070107 1508 - NRK1 - FIS Tour de Ski_10 km fri, kvinner" and various
extensions:

..TS holds the actual video/audio stream, at slightly lower compression
level than a normal DVD, i.e. 2.7 GB for 54 minutes.
..TS.AP has a bit of data, 108 KB, while the rest of the files (.EIT,
..TS.CUTS and .TS.META) all are less than a KB.

Anyway, at 3 GB/hour, these files probably needs to be recompressed a
bit to make them useful on BitTorrent. :-(

The best would be to use the new high profile .H264 (HD-DVD) standard,
this would probably make it possible to more than halve the size without
reducing the quality. :-)

Playing the .TS directly in VLC sort of worked, but it showed just 10%
of each part of the clip. :-(

I've opened it in PVAStrumento 2.1.0.17, and found the following:

Stream info for
C:\temp\dreambox\20070107 1508 - NRK1 - FIS Tour de Ski_ 10 km fri,
kvinner.ts

Found 1 video stream.
Found 1 MPEG audio stream.

VIDEO #1
Resolution 704 x 576 (cropped D1)
Aspect ratio is 16:9
Frame rate 25.00 fps
Nominal bitrate 10000000 bps
First PTS: 08:29:14.529

MPEG AUDIO #1
MPEG1, Layer 2
stereo, sampled at 48.0 kHz.
Bitrate 256 kbps
Each frame contains 24.0 ms audio (768 bytes)
First PTS: 08:29:13.952

....
OK, after converting to .PVA everything works nicely, and VLC plays the
file perfectly. :-)

16:9 format, up to 10 Mbit/s (actually 2.5 to 8.8 Mbit/s on this clip),
there's a few spots where you can see the comb pattern typical of an
interlaced source file, but otherwise very nice.

I guess I could burn a trial DVD with one of these clips, then send it
to someone who can/will host it?

Terje
--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

cross country news in video for free he
http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/kategori/2987
Some are only audionews, look at the icons.

It looks like all live xc from NRK was free in December but I'm not
sure and can't test it now.

Terje Mathisen skrev:
Man, if you got a way to save those broadcasts in mpeg2 on your Linux
machine the torrents we could put together would absolutely ROCK!!

I know, I'm looking into ways to upload that's safe against lawsuits.

There is no way... Just keep a low profile :-)