News

Welcome to DVD-HQ.info, a website dedicated to information about high-quality digital video production, compression and image processing. You can browse the site using the menu on the left or the site map in the About the site section. This is the News page. Whenever something relevant is added or changed in the site, a new entry will be created on this page. Newer entries are placed at the top. Old entries may be condensed or deleted. Dates are in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

2014-02-04

Fixed an issue with forum registration introduced by a change in the hosting server's firewall rules. Made some small changes to the data compression guides.

2011-02-01

Added a few paragraphs to the data compression guides and cleaned up some existing parts to make them clearer. Also made some minor changes to the site backend.

2008-05-31

Corrected a bug in the calculator that was causing it to ignore the "scene motion" hint under certain circumstances.

2008-03-23

Some significant changes to the calculator (though not to the actual calculations). It's now slightly more compact, has a lot of new presets (ex., for HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs) and allows the creation of "custom presets" (by encoding the input values into the URL). This makes it possible, for example, to post a link to the calculator showing the settings (and result) of a specific project. Here are a few examples:

• 120-minute single-layer BD with 24-bit / 96 kHz PCM audio and 42 MiB reserved for menus
• 92-minute CBR VCD for a CD-800 disc
• 85-minute low-motion NTSC DVD with two 384 kb/s AC3 streams

2008-03-16

The frameserving guide is now online, which means the site is ready to replace the old one.

2008-03-03

Third and final part of the compression primer is online.

2008-02-24

I have coded a new calculator, with two extra input settings (scene motion and encoder scene detection), and more concise GOP suggestions. After locating and fixing a couple of elusive bugs, the new code seems to be working fine. Also, the third part of the data compression primer has been revised and is nearly ready.

2008-02-14

The second part of the data compression primer is now also online.

2008-02-10

A new article (about data and media compression), originally written for a seminar about digital post-production, and eventually adapted for and published by Digital Media Network, is being updated and added to DVD-HQ.info. The first part (of three) is already online.

2008-02-06

A new article (about alpha matting and premultiplication), originally written for Digital Media Network, has been imported into DVD-HQ.info and updated. You can find it in the Guides & articles section of the menu, on the left.

2008-02-02

A major redesign (and codebase upgrade / rewrite) of the site is underway.

2007-04-27

I have finished a series of three articles about data compression (including image and video compression), published by Digital Media Network. All three parts have since been added to DVD-HQ.info (see above).

Another article (about alpha matting and premultiplication), also published by Digital Media Network, has since been incorporated into DVD-HQ.info (see above).

2006-10-19

I've been a busy designing, coding and creating graphics for a few websites. The first of these to open to the public is Samarium's. Part of the code used there will probably be merged into DVD-HQ's site in a near future (no major differences in look, but the new code is easier to update and better at dealing with MSIE's bugs). The second site is Vita Technology's main site. The other two sites are still under development. Eventually all my design and animation related activities will get their own site (with samples, etc.), but for now, if you're interested in hiring me for that kind of work, use the contact page on this site.

Several minor updates. Not nearly enough donations.

2003-03-25

Updated the calculator with a new option ("Other assets") and a new format, to fit better in smaller screens. I think the old one looked slightly nicer, but it didn't fit very well on the screen if you were using less than 1024x768.

2003-02-13

Site is officially open as of 02:00 (UTC/GMT) today. I just broke a bottle of champagne on the monitor and, as a consequence, am now looking for a new monitor. ;-)

2003-02-11

Finally finished the new version of the frameserving guide, which now also covers Video Server. Implemented session control to let users enable and disable site features in the control panel. Moved a lot of processing from the client (JavaScript) to the server (PHP).

2003-01-26

The obvious news today is the creation of this News section. The site is still being constructed and not open to the public. New features include:

• Registered the domain DVD-HQ.info, hosted at Helping Host. Nice connection and more than sufficient space. So far it seems reliable, despite this week's attacks on MS SQL servers that left parts of the internet ridiculously slow.
• Added a forum (based on phpBB) with sections about DVD authoring, compression, and video in general. Customised a couple of graphics and added over 100 avatars. More avatars and smilies to come in the future.
• Rearranged and updated the site information page (now called About the site). Added a site map in case some browser chokes on the menu's JavaScript / CSS.
• Completely rewrote the menu code to give it one extra level (sections) and make it less cluttered. Also added icons and highlighting. MSIE still doesn't support fixed positioning or parent reflowing after element resizing, so the menu will look much better in Opera or Mozilla. Not much I can do about MSIE's bugs unless I make the whole site in Java or Flash, and I won't.
• Rewrote the menu to use PHP; no visible difference to browsers, but the code is now generated by a server script, which makes it much easier to update (previously, changes had to be applied to each page).