Archive for February, 2010


My Peru trip

 

Picture taken with Sanyo Xacti FH1

For my vacation I went to Peru. So we left New York which was around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and we arrived in Lima at 80 – 85 degrees, just beautiful. Lima, the capital city is located right on the Pacific Ocean. The first night we stayed at the Miramar hotel in Miraflores, the touristic area, and then we went to the San Martin Square in downtown Lima and we stayed at the Bolivar hotel. Hotel Bolivar was really nice. It was an old building with nice architecture, high ceilings, chandeliers, and thick walls, it would easily turn into a fortress. In the reception area they had an old Ford 1920 model. The Lobby was round and it had a dome with painted glass, really nice.

We visited the Museum of Italian art and the new park with artesian water fountains. The artesian fountains are a rarity. They rival and perhaps exceed the Bellagio fountain in Vegas. The admission fee was only 4 soles ~ 2.5 dollars. The park was full of people and teenage couples were the predominant population admiring the fountains.

Afterwards we flew to Cusco City at an altitude of 11 thousand feet and we went sightseeing. The altitude gets to people so I advise you to have some excedrin for headaches. The people there use coca leafs tea to help for digestion and high altitude related problems. Coca leafs have many uses over there and many are medicinal purposes. Too bad that we became too smart and made cocaine, now we have to do without.

We went to places like Moray Valley, Ollantaytambo or Sacred Valley of the Inca, Chinchero, Saqsayhuaman and others. All the sights were breathtaking. We saw the famous Inca constructions that didn’t use mortar, they are actually in use today trough Cusco. They are so well made that a razor blade can’t go in between the blocks. We saw plenty of houses that were build on top of the Inca walls. But the tour guide told us that most of the time on earthquakes the Inca walls have no problem only the constructions on top of them topple.

The people are nice and they don’t seem to get affected by the daily struggles. The two cities left a good impression on me. So all of you that want to go to Peru and you are not sure, just go. Troughout the trip I felt that there isn’t enough time because there were so many things to see. It is unbelievable, the sights are amazing and they have great stories too, go see and hear them for yourselves. I will post some footage for anyone that wats to get a feel of Peru.

By the way the food is unbelievable. Everything we ordered was just good, you have to try it.

VLC player

Recently I acquired a Sanyo Xacti FH1 camcorder and I am having fun with it. But VLC media player is having a hard time playing back the Mpeg-4/ AVC H.264 files 1920 x 1080 @ 60 FPS. It seems that it is lagging behind on play back. Apparently Windows Media player has no problems with that, but it is not friendly. So I  am just waiting for VLC team to update their player. Until then I just have to put up with windows media player.

VLC should include diverse icons for all the file-types, and shouldn’t associate the single “Cone” icon for all the media file-types. I need all my icons to point and differentiate among the file types. I can’t have all looking the same, that is nonsense. Moreover VLC should install without having the icon association checked as default. That is why I don’t really like installers because they install all their crap in your system. After that we the users and admins have to de-crapify the computer after one installer went to town on it.

There are many free and non-free tools out-here that install additional nonsense, and slow down the systems. But so far I am suggesting to the VLC team to take action and make these changes, because it will be beneficial to them. The best media player that I ever used is that Mplayer 6.4 the remade version that is just an executable. You download and run the exe and that is it. No file association nonsense, and other crappy things. That is the cleanest app I ever used, and it seems to work quite good. It just needs some codec updates and it should be taking over the world. Microsoft did a smart thing in Win 7, they made windows media player to behave like 6.4 when one executes a media file. That was really smart on them, Kudos!

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Sanyo Xacti FH1 camcorder review.

          Photo by J. Cornelio with Iphone

I was looking for  a camcorder to buy for my next trip. And obviously I was looking at Sony, Canon Panasonic and JVC. All of them had tempting features and I could not decide which one to buy. I wanted a 1920 x 1080 progressive, none of that interlaced nonsense. I actually wanted to ask all these juggernauts (Canon Sony Panasonic) why on earth do they still make interlaced cameras? 1930s are far away and I know is time to move on from that technology.

So I settled for the Sanyo FH1 full HD, and I am finding out that it wasn’t a settlement at all. This thing really works. What impressed me the most is the 1920 x 1080 at 60fps. I noticed in Blu-Ray dvds that there is a certain flicker at 30 fps. After I purchased the camera I recorded the first video 1920 x 1080 @ 30 fps. While I was recording I saw that the video didn’t seem seamless like is just flowing, I kind of saw a small flicker of the frames. So I bumped it up to 1920 x 1080 60 fps. And that worked way better, the video was clear when the camera or the subjects moved. Therefore I think there should be a change of standards out-there. All the cameras have to come with the option to record at 60 fps progressive, at least. In addition the Blu-Ray standard has to change to 60 fps because it flickers at 30 fps. I am not sure why Sony did not do this already since they pushed the BD standard on the market. The camera records Mpeg-4 AVC/ H.264.

The FH1 has good capabilities. For example it has a manual white balancing feature that can be set ahead of time. It also has preset white balancing and automatic, but the automatic changes too fast, and you can get from too warm to too cold in the same room just by moving the camera. So I keep it on manual and set it up whenever I need to shoot.

The camera is impressive with the additions that it has for just $400. All the other cameras that can get to 1920 x 1080 Progressive cost around $800 to $1300. So Sanyo really did a great job with this thing. The camera also records at 240 fps and plays back at 59 fps in slow-motion. But the frame sizes are smaller 448 x 336 @ 240 fps. I took one video and it looked good.

I also played with the ISO the F-stops and the Joystick shortcut features which come in handy. The shortcut features really come in handy because you don’t have to fly trough the main menu to adjust the f-stops or the ISO. But one thing that is missing is the ability to assign the manual White Balance to the shortcut menu. That would help a lot because I wouldn’t have to go trough the menu every time I want to white balance, nor anyone else.

Overall the video quality looks really good. The camera supports other frame rates as well and it supports interlaced too, who would need interlaced I don’t know, but Sanyo made it available. I ‘ve been waiting for 4 years to get me a camcorder that is capable of progressive frames and I am glad I waited because this one really does a good job for its size and cost.

Now I looked at what Sanyo has in store for their next release. There are two new models (Sanyo VPC SH1) coming out in march and they can zoom in 30 times, but apparently they don’t seem to shoot progressive. I really don’t understand why Sanyo would move backwards? It is really annoying because I assumed that these new models will add some new features and increase the quality of existing features in FH1. The only cool feature is zoom of 30x. But who cares when you movie is interlaced and is going to look all jagged and misaligned.

Well I hope that they will come back to their senses and add new and better features to the FH1 model which does a good job. 

So here is a list of features that I think will help a lot for the next FH1.

First, is an optional larger battery pack that can last for like 6 hours or more. Then they should play around with the f-stops and quality of the video, because when the F-stops are increased to the max, the video gets these horizontal shadows that move up and down. It might be a term for that, but whoever knows it they can leave a comment and enlighten me. Then all video formats no matter the frame size should support 60 fps progressive. They should also add some more features and improve the response and quality of the existing. Overall I like this camera a lot and I really hope that Sanyo will improve on it. Firmware updates will be also required to add new features and correct minor bugs. If anyone desires other features just leave a coment.

Windows 7

I haven’t worked with Windows Vista extensively because it was terrible. But Windows 7 ameliorated the problems Vista had. I did not notice until the transition to 64 bit that the Winver.exe command has become useless.

I doesn’t make any sense to have that there and not put on it the fact that the OS is either 32 or 64 bit. Microsoft should fix this at once. I can’t live w/o winver.exe.

All you novices run this command at “run” dialog menu in any windows. Anyway this is my February rant after I just managed to fix my Wordpress from a terrible error. I am glad it works now, because I can rant, rant and rant some more.

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