More categories + MPEG encoding

Now that I can easily categorize posts (using labels), I feel better about posting about non-development topics here. I'll still try to keep it primarily work-related, but in addition to covering coding and tech support stuff, I'll also cover design and multimedia and anything else I'm working on at the time.

My current little pet project is to find a conversion app (not necessarily web-based) to convert a series of AVIs (or SWFs, which were the original format) into MPG files having MPEG-2 encoding.

There seems to be no shortage of little shareware apps for Windows that do file conversions like this, most of them in the $20-40 range, in fact I bought one the last time I needed to do this... unfortunately I misplaced the file and purchasing info from that. :/ But what I'd really be interested in is an open source app that can do batch conversions and/or be run from a command line.
One that I've been playing around with is MediaCoder, which seems to be an open-source Swiss army knife of multimedia file conversion. I'm optimistic that it'll be able to do the job eventually... I just need to figure out the right settings needed to make the files. So far, I can get it make an mpg file, but can't get anything but MPlayer to play the file. No good.

But there's a ton of settings and options to fiddlle with (the UI is a little klunky for presenting all the options), so hopefully I'll be able to figure it out soon, or find another app that can do it. Multimedia conversion isn't exactly at the top of my list of favorite things to do on a Sunday afternoon.

New Blogger: I'm disappointed

Don't get me wrong-- the system itself is awesome. It's everything I expected it to be (especially since I already test-drove it last week). I love the new Ajax template editor, and the labeling feature is definitely useful.

But what gets me is the fact that I didn't really have to wait this long to switch to the beta. I could've switched over long ago. I was waiting patiently for no good reason.

I thought they were systematically converting all accounts, and it was just a matter of time before they got to mine. But as it turns out, not all accounts are created equal. It turns out that accounts with certain features enabled would not be switching over (until later).

In my case, I had some defunct blogs set to FTP-publish mode, and apparently that feature isn't available in beta-Blogger yet. So as soon as I changed the publish mode back to Blogspot-publish, the magical blue beta upgrade box appeared on my Dashboard, and here I am!

I wish they had made that information more accessible... I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't been poking around the Blogger site regularly to try to find out everything I could about the new version.

I'm disappointed because Google is usually so good with providing users with what they need, whether it's useful information or a clean interface to work with. Unless it was a deliberate omission by Google, to prevent having too many beta signups before they were ready to handle the load. But that would be considered evil, wouldn't it? :P

Well, maybe it's not that bad. It's just that having to wait for something sucks. Especially when you know that others are already enjoying said item and their wait is over. Especially when you find out afterwards that you didn't need to wait after all.