After six and a half years of working at the same place, I quit my job today. The circumstances aren’t very pleasant, but the moment I talked to my superiors (so to speak) and announced my departure, an immense weight was lifted off my shoulders. I’m feeling very good right now.

I’ve worked there for a very long time, and I really like my colleagues and the fun we had, but the time of moving on has come. I’m looking at several options right now, but I’m not sure yet where I’ll go.

It feels weird though. I’ve worked at the shop for so long, it’s going to be weird not to be there any more.

Ham pee to though sand nigh into ever ewan.

Whilst I have read large portions of the Bible, I have not been able to stick to reading it consistently.

For this year, it is my intention to read the whole thing. I have prepared a reading schedule that covers a couple of chapters a day. The biggest problem was fitting this immense amount of information into an index card that I could use as a book mark.

This is what I?ve created: View the schedule.

How to Use This Schedule

1. Look up the current day in the table using the day number across the first (or last) row, and the month on the left

2. The 1^st row in each month shows the corresponding book. Where names are unable to fit they have either been abbreviated using standard abbreviations, or references which are defined underneath the table

3. The corresponding cell below the book for each day tells you which chapter to start reading at. Continue reading up to (but not including) the chapter for the following day

4. On some days you will read more than one book. In these instances that day?s cell is split into two or more, but the cell underneath only provides the chapter number of the first book to start on

   

   Here, you would read 1^st Peter chapter 1?4 on one day then on the next day read 1^st Peter Chapter 5 (and onto the end of the book) as well as all of 2^nd Peter (reference mark ?L?)

5. Please note that Psalms Chapter 119 and Jeremiah Chapter 25 are very long and are subdivided between two days. The single-dagger mark notes that on July the 5^th you should read Psalms 117?119:72 and Psalms 119:73 to the end of the chapter on the following day. Secondly, the double-dagger mark notes that on the 14^th of August, read Jeremiah 23?25:16 followed by Jeremiah 25:17 to the end of the chapter the next day

I had originally tried to create this using Pages, but it refused to split table cells anymore once I got down to Amos. Printing in browsers is generally very broken and inept, but you should be able to scale the schedule down to the desired paper size using the advanced printer settings.

If anybody could make some decent PDFs for me in A6, A7, Index card and Pocket Mod size, I?d greatly appreciate it, thanks!

I’ve chronicled my adventures with Bloglines before, several times, in fact.  I was not happy when their new “beta” was released, but after several revisions, it proved to be a worth successor.  Some time ago, I switched over full time to the beta version and never looked back.  It’s better looking, smoother, with a much more modern feel to it.  However, from time to time, it’s done weird things.  

Most recently, I realized that it simply stopped updating certain feeds.  One, in particular, was TUAW.  I later found that TUAW had moved their feed to Google, and were 301 redirecting requests to their RSS URL, http://tuaw.com/rss.xml.  Bloglines is supposed to follow 301s, but in this case, it just stopped updating the feed.  Other feeds has items that were clearly missing.  All of this came to a head yesterday when I was having regular troubles just getting into Bloglines at all. 

The lack of any sort of Sync API and the lack of tools being developed around Bloglines forced me to make a decision: am I going to stick to Bloglines, which has worked well for me for a long time now, or jump ship? 

Suffice it to say, I’m back on Google Reader.  The things that really annoyed me are mostly fixed: the site is much faster and smoother than before.  My only gripe is that when I click on a feed, the items must be scrolled past in order to be marked read.  I preferred the Bloglines “classic” way, which was clicking on a feed immediately marked all items as “read.”  

Anyway, we’ll see how things go with Google Reader.  You can be certain I’ll report back on the situation.

see more pwn and owned pictures

Sure, the vehicle section takes a lot of practice. Sure, some of the colonial buildings are all the same but with different interiors. Sure, the game is very difficult to get into. Sure, the graphics aren’t always any good.

But Jesus-fcuking-Christ does Mass Effect make up for it by being by far the most in-depth game I’ve ever played. The attention to detail and the amount of work that has gone into each and every little element of the game - from the history of the galaxy all the way down to the history of the simplest of weapons you get to use - is just mind blowing .

Every item, location, and person in the game has a tremendous amount of history, and you can learn all about it if you want. You can talk endlessly with the NPCs about a huge number of topics. To illustrate, at one point I was having a discussion with one of my team members about the merits of God when you’re in outer space - “Just because I’m in space, I’m not allowed to believe in God? What bullshit is that?” - and you go back and forth about the topic. My conversion with her lasted like 20 minutes. And you can have discussions like this with many characters.

Everything is explained during the game, in great detail. Sure, you can skip it all, but you’ll miss so many subtle points, so many things that help you understand why and how things happen in the Mass Effect universe. Sure, it takes its cues from Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, but who gives a shit - Mass Effect is much less idiotic than Star Trek, but has a more life than BSG. The Mass Effect universe is actually kind of plausible, and the whole main story about the cycle of civilisations being destroyed and rebuilt again just for the pleasure of some… Well, some sort of deities is very compelling.

One of the side quests involves trying to talk a teenage girl out of committing suicide. She was taken from her human colony when she was four years old, to become a slave. She knows nothing of emotion and love and caring, and it shows in her speech. She refers to herself in the third person, and knows nothing than punishment and abuse. Say one wrong word, make one wrong movement, and she’ll pull the trigger. It’s all quite emotional, and very well acted.

I think that sums up Mass Effect pretty well. The game is much more about people than about graphics and violence. Heck, I don’t think I’ve seen a single drop of blood, and there weren’t any oversized tits either. You can see it; most of the graphical work has clearly gone into the characters, and their facial animations are better than in any other game. Engaging in conversations is completely different than in other games too; it’s like a film. You leave the third person perspective, and you get movie-style camera work, with everyone actually speaking out their dialogue - even the player’s every word is voice-acted. And dear lord, the voice acting is good. I’ve never seen a game with such incredible voice-acting.

What’s also really good is that the choices you make aren’t just obviously good OR obviously evil; there’s a lot of grey to choose from too. This gives you very fine-grained control over how situations turn out.

And finally, finally, finally, a game with a worthy ending sequence, which seems to last like forever, is extremely spectacular, and is still under your influence: there’s dialogue in it, and combat, so what you do matters.

The game isn’t perfect, but it’s a rare gem among the mediocre shite of modern gaming. Definitely my game of the year, and I hope BioWare makes a worthy sequel.

You know what’s the whole funny thing about the situation in Palestine/Israel?

These people who believe that there can be peace between Palestine and Israel. People who believe that both sides are striving for a peaceful resolution to one of the most nonsensical conflicts in the history EVAR.

Reality check. In case you haven’t noticed, both sides of the conflict benefit immensely from being at war with each other. Hamas and other terrorist organisations need the war as leverage for their own popularity. If the conflict would die out, with Palestine becoming a viable independent state, and Palestinians had the opportunity to live their lives in peace, there would be no more need for Palestinian terrorist organisations.

The very thing Hamas & Co. is fighting for is the very thing that will eliminate their reason to exist. They flourish on the misery of Palestinian people.

On the other side of the fence wall, Israel is in more or less the same boat. If a peaceful resolution were to come to fruition, Israel would lose a large portion of the military and financial support it’s getting from - mostly - the United States, which amounts to large sums of money and goods.

The very thing Israel is fighting for is the very thing that will make them lose a pretty substantial revenue stream. They flourish on the misery of the Israeli people.

So obvious, yet so few seem to see it. Sad.

Apparently, Linux Mint has a new release out named ‘Linux Mint 6 Felicia’.

There is something very, very disturbing going on here.

It’s a conspiracy. And I’m the only person in the world who’s not in on the joke.

I was always a bit afraid of them. Mention their name, and music enthusiasts all over the world instantly start burying them under boatloads of words of praise, with such devotion and determination it usually made me wonder - can these guys really be as good as everyone promises me? Does any artist (other than Fiona, obviously) really deserve such devout adoration?

Consequently, I stayed away from the band in question as if they had herpes. I just couldn’t believe all the pink ponies and rainbow stories with them in it, and in order to not be disappointed, I ignored them.

Well, as it turns out, I was wrong. Radiohead deserves all the praise they’re getting. Dear lord, these guys are good.

It's awesome to see that the Perl 5 source code repository has been migrated from Perforce to Git, and is now active at http://perl5.git.perl.org/. Congratulations to all those who worked hard to migrate the entire version control history, all the way back to the beginning with Perl 1.0!

Skimming through the history turns up some fun things:

• The last Perforce commit appears to have been on 16 December 2008.
• Perl 5 is still under very active development! (It seems a lot of people are missing this simple fact, so I don't feel bad stating it.)
• Perl 5.8.0 was released on 18 July 2002, and 5.6.0 on 23 March 2000. Those both seem so recent ...
• Perl 5.000 was released on 17 October 1994.
• Perl 4.0.00 was released 21 March 1991, and the last Perl 4 release, 4.0.36, was released on 4 February 1993. For having an active lifespan of only 4 or so years till Perl 5 became popular, Perl 4 code sure kicked around on servers a lot longer than that.
• Perl 1.0 was announced by Larry Wall on 18 December 1987. He called Perl a "replacement" for awk and sed. That first release included 49 regression tests.
• Some of the patches are from people whose contact information is long gone, rendered in Git commits as e.g. Dan Faigin, Doug Landauer <unknown@longtimeago>.
• The modern Internet hadn't yet completely taken over, as evidenced by email addresses such as isis!aburt and arnold@emoryu2.arpa.
• The first Larry Wall entry with email address larry@wall.org was 28 June 1988, though he continued to use his jpl.nasa.gov after that sometimes too.
• There are some weird things in the commit notices. For example, it's hard to believe the snippet of Perl code in the following change notice wasn't somehow mangled in the conversion process:

commit d23b30860e3e4c1bd7e12ed5a35d1b90e7fa214c
Author: Larry Wall <lwall@scalpel.netlabs.com>
Date:   Wed Jan 11 11:01:09 1995 -0800

   duplicate DESTROY
  
   In order to fix the duplicate DESTROY bug, I need to remove [the
   modified] lines from sv_setsv.
  
   Basically, copying an object shouldn't produce another object without an
   explicit blessing.  I'm not sure if this will break anything.  If Ilya
   and anyone else so inclined would apply this patch and see if it breaks
   anything related to overloading (or anything else object-oriented), I'd
   be much obliged.
  
   By the way, here's a test script for the duplicate DESTROY.  You'll note
   that it prints DESTROYED twice, once for , and once for .  I don't
   think an object should be considered an object unless viewed through
   a reference.  When accessed directly it should behave as a builtin type.
  
   #!./perl
  
    = new main;
    = '';
  
   sub new {
       my ;
       local /tmp/ssh-vaEzm16429/agent.16429 = bless $a;
       local  = ;      # Bogusly makes  an object.
       /tmp/ssh-vaEzm16429/agent.16429;
   }
  
   sub DESTROY {
       print "DESTROYEDn";
   }
  
   Larry

sv.c |    4 ----
1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

Yes, it really is that weird. Check it out for yourself.

The Easy Git summary information from eg info has some interesting trivia:

Total commits: 36647
Number of contributors: 926
Number of files: 4439
Number of directories: 657
Biggest file size, in bytes: 4176496 (Changes5.8)
Commits: 31178

And there's a nice new POD document instructing how work with the Perl repository using Git: perlrepository.

In other news, maintenance release Perl 5.8.9 is out, expected to be the last 5.8.x release. The change log shows most bundled modules have been updated.

Finally, use Perl also notes that Booking.com is donating $50,000 to further Perl development, specifically Perl 5.10 development and maintenance. They're also hosting the new Git master repository. Thanks!

While attending OSCON '08 I listened to Steve Souders discuss some topics from his O'Reilly book, High Performance Web Site, and a new book that should drop in early 2009. Steve made the comment that 80%-90% of the performance of a site is in the delivery and rendering of the front end content. Many engineers tend to immediately look at the back end when optimizing and forget about the rendering of the page and how performance there effects the user's experience.

During the talk he demonstrated the Firebug plugin, YSlow, which he built to illustrate 13 of the 14 rules from his book. The tool shows where performance might be an issue and gives suggestions on which resources can be changed to improve performance. Some of the suggestions may not apply to all sites, but they can be used as a guide for the engineer to make an informed decision.

On a related note, Jon Jensen brought this blog posting to our attention that Google is planning to incorporate landing page time into its quality score for Adword landing pages. With that being known, front-end website performance will become even more important and there may be a point one day where load times come into play when determining natural rank in addition to landing page scores.

I've been using Twinkle and Ekiga for SIP VoIP on Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64. That's been working pretty well.

However, I finally had to take some time to hunt down the source of a very annoying high-pitched noise coming from my laptop's sound system (external speaker and headset both). I have an Asus M50SA laptop with Intel 82801H (ICH8 Family) audio on Realtek ALC883. I first thought perhaps it was the HDMI cable going to an external monitor, or some other RF interference from a cable, but turning things off or unplugging them didn't make any difference.

Then I suspected there was some audio driver problem because the whine only started once the sound driver loaded at boot time. After trying all sorts of variations in the ALSA configuration, changing the options to the snd-hda-intel kernel module, I was at a loss and unplugged my USB keyboard and mouse.

It was the USB mouse! It's a laser-tracked mouse with little shielding on the short cable. Plugging it into either of the USB ports near the front of the computer caused the noise. The keyboard didn't matter.

At first I thought my other USB non-laser ball mouse didn't add any noise, but it did, just a quieter and lower-pitch noise.

Then ... I discovered a third USB port near the back of the computer that I hadn't ever noticed. Plugging mice in there doesn't interfere with the audio. Sigh. Maybe this tale will save someone else some trouble.

In the process I also fixed a problem that was in software: The external speakers didn't mute when headphones are plugged in, as others have described as well. One of their solutions worked.

In /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base add: "options snd-hda-intel model=targa-2ch-dig" and reboot. Or, if you dread rebooting as I do, exit all applications using audio, modprobe -r snd-hda-intel then modprobe snd-hda-intel. Finally, uncheck the "Headphones" checkbox in the sound control panel.

The end of the road.

That was Eugenia’s last blog post for a while. That’s not what I want to talk about, though. I want to talk about something else.

Today, right before Christmas, the 18th Dutch soldier has been killed in Afghanistan. Terrible news. Men in military uniforms informing the parents. Crying girlfriend. Friends grieving, maybe angry. No matter what you may think of the war, our men and women in the armed forces are working their behinds off trying to make this world a better place, and they deserve all the respect and admiration in the world. Having a good friend in the military really opens your eyes to just how professional, dedicated, and determined these men and women are.

As pathetic as it may sound, the Fallout series has the best way to describe war, and it seems ever so fitting in today’s world.

War. War never changes.

My sincerest condolences and sympathies to the soldier’s parents, friends, and relatives. It sure is the end of the road for them.

This is the end of the road for this blog. Seven years on it I got tired of it, I have nothing new or important to add to it, and it doesn’t really make a difference anyway in the grand scheme of things.

On top of all that, my physical health is bad, so I should be catering to it rather than this online life that takes so much of my time daily. My JBQ suggests that it’s perfectly possible to keep up with both my normal life and the online one, but it’s not how I work. Either I give 100% of myself to something, or I don’t do it at all. So the time has come to take care of myself, and to do that, I have to focus on it. So no more blogging and heavy online presence for me.

You can still keep up with me by checking my videos on Vimeo. As long as I keep posting there once a month or so, it would mean that I am still alive and that videography is still my hobby.

This blog might get re-opened some day, depending on the circumstances. But for now, it’s a wrap. Thank you for reading my rants and thoughts all this time, truly appreciated. Take care!

What’s the difference between Vegas Pro and Vegas Movie Studio Platinum
Info about it here. Discussion about it and more details here. There are several DVD authoring applications out there to fill the void of DVD Architect (in case of the OEM version purchase of Vegas Pro 8 which doesn’t include a DVD authoring companion app). I would suggest the freeware DVDFlick which does the basics well.

Can’t capture from the HV20/30
Connect your camera to the firewire cable (not to your USB cable), put it into “play” mode and rewind the tape. On Vegas click “File” and then “Capture video”. A window will popup asking you if you want to capture DV or HDV. If you don’t get this window you must re-enable it at the Vegas’ preference panel. Select HDV. Then, in the Capture window/tab, click the little down-arrow next to “Prefs”, then “Device” and select the HV20 from there. You can also specify where you want the captured files to be saved. Then, on that same Vegas window, press “play” and then press “record”. You will find your .m2t files on the folder you set it to save, and on the “project media” tab (next to the capture tab). If you still can’t capture, make sure your HV20 doesn’t have its “DV Locked” setting ON, and that the date/time is set in your camera. As a last resort, reset your camera’s settings with the button behind the battery compartment. Finally, you could try capturing with the HDVSplit freeware utility — if HDVSplit can’t capture either, the problem is with your Windows/PC or the hardware of your camera, not with Vegas.

Tape capture stops all by itself
When capturing HDV video, Vegas has the bad habit of stopping the capturing if you moved your window/mouse focus to another application. To change that, click the “Prefs” button on the “Capture” tab and uncheck the “Stop device on loss of focus”.

Optimize Vegas for speedy video preview
You can speed up the Vegas video preview with the following tips:
1. Make sure that you use your M2T or AVI files with the right “Project Properties” template. If you don’t use the right template Vegas’ speed can decrease. If you don’t know what files you have, or you are using 24p and there is no available template for that kind of footage, then click the third icon “match media” on the “project Properties” window and navigate to one of these files you want to edit. Vegas will read that file and will figure out automatically the format and will fill up the right settings in the “Project Properties” panel.
2. Despite Sony’s claims, you need at least 2 GBs of RAM for HD editing. Otherwise, Vegas will start swapping sooner than later and everything will get really slow.
3. If you run Vegas on a Mac, make sure that you use XP or Vista on its own partition, and you cleanly reboot to it via Bootcamp. Do not use virtualisers like Parallels or VMWare.
4. It is recommended that Vegas’ temp folder remains on the C: drive, but the footage itself on another drive. This way the hard drive don’t have to spin back and forth between locations, as the job will be shared within two drives. I can’t recommend USB/Firewire external drives as on some systems the media become “offline” and never wake up (seems to be a Vegas bug). Your mileage may vary.
5. Right click on the preview tab/window and de-select the “Scale video…” option. Make sure that “Simulate device…” option is selected.
6. Go to Vegas’ settings/preferences panel and on the Video tab tell it to use 4 threads. If you experience random crashes, go back to 2 threads. The fewer threads the more stability, but the more threads the more speed (for a hyperthreaded/multi-processing/multi-core CPU, that is). It’s a trade off until Sony fixes all their multi-threaded bugs.
7. Do not use plugins or pan/cropping if you need every bit of previewing speed while editing. Same goes for transitions and transparent tracks/media. Add all these at the very end, just before exporting.
8. If you are using the Pro version, stay with 8bit editing and not 32bit. While 32bit editing can offer a tiny bit better visual quality when using plugins or transitions, it is extremely slow to edit as such.
9. Set the preview quality (in the preview window) to “preview (auto)”. If you use a single monitor try editing at 1/4 of the original size (that would be 640×360). If you have two monitors and one of the two is a full 1080p monitor, set the preview quality to “preview (full)”. If you are using a full 1080p monitor as a secondary preview monitor, expect the preview speed to reduce, as the graphics card and CPU will have to work extra hard serving you in this large resolution.
10. Vegas does not use special graphics functions like some other NLEs do. It will work with any DirectX 9 card. However, it does benefit (up to 10%-15% sometimes) from graphics cards that have fast bandwidth throughput, e.g. some of the latest ones from nVidia.

Exporting tips
In the “Project Properties” window, even after having selected a template or you had let Vegas auto-configure itself, there are two options that you want to mess with manually.
1. Set “full-resolution rendering quality” to “Best”.
2. Set “De-interlace method” to either “Blend Fields” or “Interpolate” depending on the content of your video. If it’s a very fast moving video, use interpolate (at the expense of losing half of the resolution, but you get clean shots). If it’s a pretty static video, use “Blend Fields”. While people are swearing for one or the other, truth is that are both algorithms are useful for different things.

You can’t have a single kind of export for every possible need. For example, if you are interested in archiving your project, you might want to try exporting in Cineform or .M2T. If you want to export to DVD Architect, you need to export in mpeg2/AC3. If you want to export for Vimeo or YouTube HD or for your viewing pleasure in your PC, you want to export in WMV or MP4 in 720p.

If you are interested in saving only the media files you used in a project and nothing more (in order to save hard drive space), you can click “File”, “Save as”, and then check “Copy and trim media with project”. This will create a new folder in your drive that will only save the parts of the M2T files and other media you used in the project and not unused media.

No mpeg2/AC3/AVC exporting available, or no M2T support
If your Vegas doesn’t offer you these codecs to export it means that either:
1. You forgot to install the companion application DVD Architect (offers mpeg2/AC3).
2. You pirated Vegas and so these codecs refuse to work without online registration (mpeg2/AC3/AVC h.264).

HDV 24p support in Platinum
While Platinum does not have any preset 24p templates like Pro does, it does work with 24p timelines and footage. Just manually set the frame rate in 23.976, or use the “match media” icon to let Vegas auto-configure itself after you select one of these 24p video files.

Please note that Vegas (Pro or Platinum) won’t remove pulldown off of PF24 footage. You first need to remove pulldown using an external utility, and then bring the resulted pulldown removed files into Vegas for editing in 24p mode.

Vegas can’t read Cineform files
If you remove pulldown with Cineform’s Neo/AspectHD utilities and Vegas can’t read these files then close down Vegas. Go to the C:Program FilesSony folder and find your Vegas installation. There, rename the cfhd.dll to cfhd.dll-OLD. Then, re-open Vegas. Now Vegas will use the system-wide Cineform codec instead of the old and outdated licensed version that comes with Vegas.

Formats that Vegas doesn’t like editing
Vegas is optimized to edit fast Cineform, DV AVI, mpeg2, AVCHD and some other types of videos. But expect extremely slow editing with MOV and MP4 containers, and WMV. Additionally, Platinum doesn’t seem to like XViD/DivX files (even if a third party codec might be installed it usually doesn’t like it much), while Pro fairs better in that regard. Vegas may have issues with files captured by HDVSplit.

Proxy Editing
If your PC is not fast enough to edit HD, you can use this tutorial to utilize proxy editing.

Ghosting on slow/fast-motion, or when there’s too much motion
Vegas has a pretty mediocre resampling algorithm. If you see ghosting where there shouldn’t be, select the clip in the timeline that shows the problem, right click it, select “Properties”, and then “Disable resample”.

Crash when too many pictures are part of a project
Some versions of Vegas will crash if you have way too many huge megapixel pictures in your project. So for example, if your digicam is 10 megapixel, you will have to resize these pictures to the Vegas project size in order to ensure not only the best quality and speed, but also stability So, first download this batch resizing utility from Microsoft and install it. Then, you must decide on the correct size that you need to resize your pictures to, depending on the aspect ratio of your current project.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD burning
Vegas Pro 8 and Platinum 9 can burn your current open project on the timeline in a Blu-Ray or plain DVD disc, in HD format. There is no support for menus or other beautifications, just a straight HD burning. A Blu-Ray player is needed to playback the disc back, but not necessarily a Blu-Ray burner. Vegas Platinum 8 does not have this ability, but there is a free alternative way to achieve the same thing. For HD-DVD burns on plain DVD discs, check here.

Tips for AVCHD support
1. Make sure you have installed the free updates for either Vegas 8+ Pro or Platinum from Sony’s website. Without these updates for your Vegas there are bugs & even incompatibilities with some camera model formats.
2. If your AVCHD camera snaps full 1920×1080 video (instead of the usual 1440×1080) and you insert that video on Vegas Platinum 8, Platinum 8 will resize that video to 1440×1080 (because that’s the maximum resolution it supports), and you will lose this way both resolution and quality. You will have to either upgrade to Pro if that’s the case, or get Platinum version 9.
3. Editing AVCHD can be slow as it is a much heavier format than HDV. You can import your AVCHD files in the timeline, match their format in the “project properties” window, and then directly export one by one your clips to the Cineform format which is much faster to edit (and it’s visually lossless, so you don’t lose quality during the conversion). You will find the Cineform codec under the AVI filetype rendering option: click “custom”, select the Cineform codec in the video tab, and fill up the right options for resolution, frame rate & aspect ratio in that same panel too. When you are done convert all your clips, you start a new project, match your AVI footage in the project properties window, and use these AVI Cineform files to edit.

No way to export h.264 AVC from Platinum 7/8
While Pro has two h.264 encoders under its belt to choose from and Platinum 9 has one, it is a mystery why Platinum 8 has zero. There are several ways to go around the limitation:
Export either in a lossless codec using exporting options that match your source footage (I suggest Huffyuv because it’s supported by the vast majority of applications), or by using a frameserver: http://www.debugmode.com/frameserver/ . Then, use either ffmpeg as per my tutorial here or download the freeware utility “SUPER” which can will work equally well. Here’s how to export with SUPER in h.264 MP4. Even easier, try Handbrake.