Mickey S.

I think he had no choice or he would have been slightly 'shorter' than the girl in the rightmost picture... CU! -Mike

I have to get back to you on the technical bits, but I used Gordian Knot to compress it:

http://gordianknot.sourceforge.net/

Trolldeg,

thanks for the link. Mpeg & Co. is not an issue for me since I've been developing hardware regarding this during daytime work. I was only looking for a usable frontend. Either there's too much fancy stuff in a package or stuff keeps crashing once you require it to do something sophisticated. I'll check this software out... -- Just checked your version of the compressed video. Hm, don't get me wrong or take it personally but I think we definitely need to tweak the encoder's compression settings.

CU!

-Mike

==========================

PS: BTW, you might wanna change www.kompakt/upload/ballet_heels_compressed.avi into www.kompakt.se/upload/ballet_heels_compressed.avi...

Trolldeg, what program did you use? Could you please provide some stream data, like video-Mbps, audio-Kbps and frame size? CU! -Mike

The girl in the studio at the beginning of the clip said that: "... der letzte Mode-Schrei..." which would be on a word by word base: "... the last fashion-cry ..." (very bad English; sounds pretty silly that way - kids, don't try this at home! ). I must admit I didn't check if they were serious. I basically tried to stick to what they said so the result is pretty much straight-forward. Only where a rather one-o-one translation would have screwed the original statement I went for an English phrase that sounded right and basically reflected the idea. CU! -Mike

gary0618, unless I'm getting in serious financial trouble I don't think that I'll sell them ever. Sorry! CU! -Mike

JeffM, get the MPEG2-codec. But I don't think that's the problem since you were able to play it back to a certain point. The video is roughly 4min30sec. Try to download again or wait till the 'crunched' Divx version has been made available. CU! -Mike

These 19.7cm shoes are not from 6IHF. Sure enough they can make them as well. Originally, these shoes were made by a Californian shoemaker whose company was called 'Solanj Shoes'. I got a pair with 20cm heels from them myself back in 1999. Unfortunately, the old man who run the company retired and passed away about 2 or 3 years ago. CU! -Mike

I think that's correct. I got mine from tci-world (or something like that)... CU! -Mike

I must admit, this is the best answer I've ever heard on this topic! CU! -Mike

May I jump in? It's here...

CU!

-Mike

Good news people... I've managed to compress the video down to a more managable (but still large) 17 MB (from 75MB!!)

It's now DIVX with MP3 audio at 500kbps rate, also I reduced the size a little to help the compression.

And the bad news... I need somewhere to place it on the web to allow others to see, Jim - any chance you can help me out?

It's a great video - good subtitles too thanks! I'm very impressed by the lady that can walk in them like they're normal 4" heels... amazing. Also the tall girl at the shopping mall seems a natural.

Bob.

To view you'll need the divx codec, see

http://www.divx.com

http://download.divx.com/divx/DivXPro511Adware.exe

Then you can use windows media player.... or whatever.

two questions:

• Did you do that with only the "http://download.divx.com/divx/DivXPro511Adware.exe" tool? I've never used it but I suppose it's some sort of encoder software.
• Regarding the sound, 128Kbps@MP3 should be okay since it's mono anyway which doesn't need a lot of bandwidth. Remember the some MP3-tunes you were listening to? They all come at 128 .. 160Kbps. Did you try that? Would be interesting! I would expect another substantial decrease in filesize.

-Mike

JeffM, you probably need an Mpeg2 codec. I used Ulead Video Studio 9 and configured some standard compression mode - which could be the Mpeg2. Others gave a way bigger file and Mpeg4/DivX crashed with this program. So it's the only way to supply the video vs. codec & file-length. The easiest would actually be to install PowerDVD since this is gonna bring along some Mpeg2 codec which is needed for DVD playback since this technology bases on that particular compression. CU! -Mike

Folks, one more technical comment on the video: You might have wondered why you only got left-channel audio - Must have been a mistake when it was digitized. Anyway, it's a mono-recording. If someone could take it and copy the left audio track into the right one that would be great (post me how you did; fancy ULead Video Studio 9 is not capable of such trivial things or they are not good at explaining it). CU! -Mike

I've seen some 1m platform shoes on the 6" forever-site. This is the highest one known to me...

CU!

-Mike

Yeh, it's finally up and ready for downloading. Anyone who can MPEG4 it that our 56K-modem friends will have a chance too? CU! -Mike

You can also go for the chunkier women's styles if you just want to start. Or did I get you wrong? CU! -Mike

Transfer done. Jim will report back when stuff is available. I tried my best with the subtitling. Don't be mad in case I wrote something that's politically incorrect... ;o) CU! -Mike

I don't care if someone's pretending as long as noone else is harmed by the postings... CU! -Mike

invisible

Folks, I got a subtitled version compiled. But it's still ~75MB in size! I'll have to contact Jim in order to store a file that large somewhere publicly available. CU! -Mike

Occasionally I make some ooomph-ooopmh-ooomph-stuff using my computer, mainly for the aerobic-lessons at the gym. It's not a big deal but noone yet noticed that this stuff wasn't "commercially made"... CU! -Mike

Ruud,

'CODEC' is an artificial word, meaning enCODer / DECoder. This is actually some sort of code-library that is plugged in into the main program which task it is to do the video crunching. It takes the raw data and passes it to the encoder part of the library. When you play back a video then the decoder part is used. Every video stream or -file has an identification what it was compressed with. The player looks for installed codecs on your system and if one is found that matches the stream ID it starts with playback. Otherwise it doesn't know how to handle the data and you see the error message you keep getting.

For those who are interested - MPEG basics:

Video is compressed by converting the image into its frequency representation. Several tests have shown that human visual perception only requires a certain range of information that needs to be transferred/stored. By eleminating those parts of the images that doesn't contribute much we eventually save disk space without a noticable loss of information. Yes, there is a loss of information with that kind of compression, meaning you'll never get the original info back but only that what you need in order to get a 'good' picture. The higher the compression the less the bandwidth and the less the filesize but the less the quality of a video would be. Furthermore, in case you have a continous video stream you can save bandwith by only transmitting the differences from frame to frame in a sequence of images. Every two seconds or so there's a full frame transmitted otherwise you would have to continously watch a movie from the very first picture uninterruptedly.

By plugging in different codecs you can read/play-back a variety of video streams/files. So you must install the right one. This makes the whole thing kinda flexible. I'd suggest to install Divx since this is a derivative of MPEG4 which gives - provided it was configured smart enough - small file sizes by a relatively good quality. Saying 'relatively' means when played back and watched on a TV screen you won't proably notice that there was heavy compression applied since the TV's quality is much more limited than your computer's video system. If you watch it on your computer you'll see how lttle of the truth your TV actually tells you.

So, check the DivX-site or ask Thomas what particular codec was used in order to create the video(s).

CU!

-Mike

Don't hold your breath, folks! I might need to edit this clip a bit. I'm sorry but it's not gonna happen today. It's late already (11pm@GMT+1) and I have to get up early tomorrow morning (4.15am@GMT+1). I'll spend some time on Saturday... CU! -Mike

> ... no further questions... Exactly!!! CU! -Mike

It doesn't make any sense to compress video w/ ZIP or RAR. Using them will probably only increase the file size. That's why MPEG1|2|4 was invented. The problem is to encode it using MPEG4 or Divx and a proper audio format. I just got some information on how to set up my tools in order to get an appropriately crunched video. So the 90MB should boil down to 20MB or less or so, depending on the final xy resolution. CU! -Mike