This was originally sent out by post to subscribers of Rush Limbaugh’s “The Limbaugh Letter” in 1996. Back then, as was the case until Rush died in early 2021, Rush was the #1 talk radio host in America, syndicated to a radio station in almost every market in the country, and an incredibly influential voice in conservative politics and beyond.
I bought this VHS off eBay in 2015 and intended to digitise it and upload it. I didn’t get around to it until last year. In a way, I’m glad I waited as I was able to access much better quality equipment for the job than I would have been able to use in 2015. Alas with age and use the tape has deteriorated a bit so the playback wasn’t perfect, but now that Rush is no longer with us, it is a great memento of the wonderful years of his broadcasting.
As a followup to my thought in the previous post about needing to go back through some of the very old videos on this site in the Flash video format, which no longer play in web browsers and haven’t for a few years, I picked one of the old files and had a quick go at converting it to MP4. Most decent video transcoding tools will convert flv files, however it is nice to be able to play the original file and compare it to the transcoded file to ensure there’s nothing amiss with the new file (such as audio/video out of sync, lower picture quality etc).
I chose the video from the night long-time WIN Canberra news presenter Peter Leonard retired and was given a send-off by the other presenters, as it is one of the more historically important videos on the site. I have the original off-air recording around here somewhere, but I decided to just work with the flv file to prove the concept.
After I downloaded it, my computer immediately decided it was a file openable by VLC, an excellent and free video player. Makes sense, VLC will play almost any file you throw at it. This then gave me an idea. VLC can also perform transcoding. The results can be a bit variable but it was worth a shot. In this case it worked very well once I changed one setting.
The process is this
1. Open VLC and go to File -> Convert/Stream
2. Select the file you want to convert, choose the MP4 profile, and choose an output file. Note that for some reason, VLC unnecessarily insists that you can’t use .mp4 as the file extension for the output file and must instead use .m4v which is strange but not really a problem and can be fixed later.
3. Customize the MP4 profile and go to the audio tab. VLC defaults to plain MPEG audio here, and while VLC will happily play that, a lot of other things including QuickTime and web browsers probably won’t. Change this to MPEG 4 Audio (AAC). You can leave the rest of the settings alone.
4. Click Apply, then click Save, and VLC will start transcoding. You will see the status bar move while the transcode is taking place but you won’t see any video while it’s happening.
5. You should then have your original FLV file and a new M4V file. Rename the M4V file with a mp4 extension.
Direct download (at the time of writing, the embedded player above is adding a watermark which is not on the file itself. I’ll deal with that in due course)
A slightly smaller filesize but a practically indistinguishable video quality. The video itself is quite small as the original Flash one was, and perhaps I should dig out the original recording and upload a larger sized video now that postage-stamp sized videos are a relic of the past, but that’s not the point here, merely that the transcoding process works well and simply.
Fairly quick and straightforward, so it’s a task which shouldn’t take me too long in my overall site tidy up.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for many years will recognise the pattern of silence for a long time, a sudden burst of activity, and then another long silence. Welcome to the end of another silence.
Seriously though, I recognise the pattern and a few times when I’ve thought about starting blogging again, I’ve also thought about how it’s not particularly fair on you, dear reader, to have me start writing again for a while and then disappear and leave you in the lurch. The main reason I can see for the long silences is that I usually only write about things which interest me to some extent, and I either end up with a whole heap of things to write in a backlog and realise how long it will take to write about them, and just don’t, or I write about things which start to make me so cranky that I don’t want to write about them any more.
So a few times, having recognised this pattern, I wondered whether it was really worth keeping the blog online if I wasn’t going to commit to using it again. After all, the history of it is archived in a few places including the National Library of Australia, so it wouldn’t be a wiping of history per se, and it does cost me a few dollars but not really that many to keep it online, but maybe I’m sentimental about it as I could never bring myself to actually shut the blog down and get rid of the hosting. There was always the possibility that I might find something to write about which I can be interested and motivated enough to write about on an ongoing basis.
Well, it so happens that there is something I can write about and probably even put some videos together about. I have had some discussions in recent days about this particular topic and can see it being viable. I’m going to keep you in suspense about what that topic is for the moment though.
Now, having something to write about is one thing. The question which remained with that was: if it’s a complete change of topic, do I keep this blog going or start again elsewhere? The main topic I’m thinking of isn’t a complete change for this blog as it has been a minor theme over the years and in fact some of the posts on that topic continue to receive a burst of traffic once per year. It won’t be the only thing I write about. I’d like to have a few more personal posts, which is where this blog started out way back when, and dial back the political posts a bit as politics has really left me quite disillusioned in recent years. That subject may very well be my next post!
There’s also something nice about moving away from some of the social media platforms and back to my own domain. Not entirely perhaps but to an extent. There’s an irony in how, back when Google Video and YouTube were just starting to gain prominence, I was opposed to the idea of uploading all of my videos there exclusively, insisting on having at least a copy of the video files available directly on this site; likewise I absolutely refused to use any of the photo album wesbites such as Flickr and had all of my photos here and on my own hosted photo gallery software. In both cases, handing over control of my content to some third-party who could do what they wanted with it and change their pricing structure at-will seemed like a terrible idea. Yet despite this, I, like just about everyone else with a personal blog, took to Facebook and Twitter and seemingly abandoned blogging.
I was chatting with a friend late last year about this move of personal bloggers from their own blogs to the major social media platforms. Blogs have, it seemed, survived for niche topics and evolved into something else for political sites, but not survived as much as personal journals. My plan is to keep this site running as a personal site but with some specific topics which have a fair bit of focus.
In order to do this, I think the site needs a bit of a tidy up. There’s a heap of dead links on the sidebar. The photo at the top of the page is probably 14 years old and could use an update. The theme of the site overall is dated, not that I mind things looking a bit old-fashioned, and in some ways I think it has aged well compared to many more modern-looking sites, but the site is not very mobile-friendly or even particularly scalable for modern desktop resolutions. Whether I persist with the current theme and make a few adjustments or change theme entirely is something I haven’t decided yet, but it’s safe to say there will be a few cosmetic changes.
At some stage, and it’s quite low on the priority list but will need to be looked at eventually, back in the day when I didn’t want to use Google Video or YouTube at all and simply embedded videos on this site directly, I did so in the Flash Video format with a Flash Player wrapper. Flash was killed off almost completely three years ago so those videos don’t play, although I did have the foresight at the time to link to copies of the videos in other formats so they’re not completely inaccessible. I thought about this when Flash was killed off at the end of 2020 as I was working somewhere which had a Flash based system as a key component managing various systems and even had its own custom Flash Player so it wasn’t susceptible to the built-in kill-switch in Adobe’s Flash Player. I will look at seeing how else I can embed those old FLV files at some stage, probably by transcoding them to some other format which modern browsers will play natively.
Anyway, I’m back on the blog and you will hear from me again soon. I look forward to writing some interesting things for you to read and enjoy, and hopefully find quite useful.
