The following programs have been encoded and uploaded to the VOD server thus far:
Frontiersmen of the Faith - 1951 - approx 25 minutes
Journey of Faith - 1950 - approx 20 minutes
Rome: The Sacred City - 1962 - approx 12 minutes
The Catholic Hour - Rome Eternal Pt. III - 1958 - approx 30 minutes
...and I have one ready for H.264 encoding:
Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary - The Resurrection - 1957 - approx 23 minutes
This has proven to be lengthy thus far, but so far well worth it. I did my color correction on Premiere after using Kino to transcode from DV files to AVI, then I used Ulead VideoStudio for titling. I'd very much like to take VideoStudio out of the equation at some point soon and hopefully use Kino for the bulk of the production engineering on these films. There's really no point in using something high level like Cinelerra for that, although I still want to play with that too as far as editing goes.
In fact, there's a good chance that Mater Dei Television will only have maybe one or two Windows machines and maybe one or two Macs and have the rest of everything all Linux, from file servers to desktop machines. Linux really does seem to be the most reliable OS out there right now, and you certainly can't beat the price. Not only that, but being able to get more out of older machines will also help save money that would be better used on either buying more films or hiring people to help with future productions. I have updated the page to include banner/button links to various open source and Linux projects. I honestly believe that this is the way things need to go, and will throw my support behind them 100%.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Have a Blessed Christmas, Everyone!
"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." - John 1:14 (DRV)
Tonight, at midnight, we celebrate not merely a birthday, as some would like you to believe, but something so much more than that: We celebrate Salvation coming to the world. The day when we know that we wouldn't have to spend eternity separated from God (unless it was by our own hand - yes, folks, we can lose Salvation if we're not careful). Have a Blessed Christmas, for our family to yours!
A few more notes for the Christmas season...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Tonight, at midnight, we celebrate not merely a birthday, as some would like you to believe, but something so much more than that: We celebrate Salvation coming to the world. The day when we know that we wouldn't have to spend eternity separated from God (unless it was by our own hand - yes, folks, we can lose Salvation if we're not careful). Have a Blessed Christmas, for our family to yours!
A few more notes for the Christmas season...
- Some folks from Save St. Stephen's in Syracuse, New York are trying to buy the old Church building from the diocese. Please say a prayer that they are able to purchase their old building now that the parish is closed. Please ask St. Stephen on December 26 for intercession on their behalf.
- The MPEG 4 of the 1951 program "Frontiersmen of Faith" is rendering as we speak on my main editor. I was having problems with this for awhile because the man who transferred it used Final Cut Pro, which uses DV files, and I use Adobe Premiere Pro among others to edit. This was solved by transferring the DV files to my Linux box and running them through Kino first. One more problem solved by using Linux!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, December 17, 2007
Newest Acquisition: The Vatican of Pius XII
Thank God for eBay.
Yeah, it's got it's problems, but without it, Mater Dei Television likely wouldn't exist. I've found so many good films on there over the last three and a half years that it's unreal. Sometimes I'll hit a dry spell and what not, and not find any films on there at all. Last weekend, my problem was quite the opposite; I found about six that I thought would have been fantastic to add to the Mater Dei Television collection.
Unfortunately, due to limited personal funds (and that I'm not even going to attempt to ask for donations until we organize Mater Dei Television as a 501(c) 3), we were only able to walk away with one of them.
The film that we obtained tonight is called "The Vatican of Pius XII". I've seen this film advertised on another site for about the same as I paid for it on eBay, but I figured this was the time to pick it up. It looks like it's a silent film, but I'm going to offer it for free as a VoD when it gets transferred. It runs about 20 minutes long, so about the same as "Journey of Faith" does.
I do already have the Castle Films collection of Pope Pius XII, but that will eventually get released to DVD. The idea is to use it as a fundraiser to buy more films. That'll be a nice volume, too, since I've also got a silent film about Pope Pius XI as well. We have roughly eleven films total that I'd like to release to DVD for this purpose, though, and if I pick up one more ("The Byzantine Empire" from Enyclopedia Britannica Films to be exact), then we can have three DVDs that would be perfect for homeschoolers and people in general who may want to learn a little about our faith (or at the very least help out MDTV).
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Yeah, it's got it's problems, but without it, Mater Dei Television likely wouldn't exist. I've found so many good films on there over the last three and a half years that it's unreal. Sometimes I'll hit a dry spell and what not, and not find any films on there at all. Last weekend, my problem was quite the opposite; I found about six that I thought would have been fantastic to add to the Mater Dei Television collection.
Unfortunately, due to limited personal funds (and that I'm not even going to attempt to ask for donations until we organize Mater Dei Television as a 501(c) 3), we were only able to walk away with one of them.
The film that we obtained tonight is called "The Vatican of Pius XII". I've seen this film advertised on another site for about the same as I paid for it on eBay, but I figured this was the time to pick it up. It looks like it's a silent film, but I'm going to offer it for free as a VoD when it gets transferred. It runs about 20 minutes long, so about the same as "Journey of Faith" does.
I do already have the Castle Films collection of Pope Pius XII, but that will eventually get released to DVD. The idea is to use it as a fundraiser to buy more films. That'll be a nice volume, too, since I've also got a silent film about Pope Pius XI as well. We have roughly eleven films total that I'd like to release to DVD for this purpose, though, and if I pick up one more ("The Byzantine Empire" from Enyclopedia Britannica Films to be exact), then we can have three DVDs that would be perfect for homeschoolers and people in general who may want to learn a little about our faith (or at the very least help out MDTV).
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Pope: seminaries must teach Latin Mass
According to the London Telegraph, the Pope wants English seminaries to teach the Traditional Latin Mass. Granted, this came from the London Telegraph, so I won't get too excited about it yet, but if this is true, it certainly is encouraging. What stands out to me is this part:
"In America, some bishops have anticipated this situation. Two seminaries in Pennsylvania – St Vincent, Latrobe, and St Charles Borromeo, Philadelphia – have just announced that they will be teaching the “extraordinary form”, as it is now known."
My diocese, the Diocese of Lafayette in Indiana, sends seminarians to St. Charles Borromeo, which is an excellent seminary to begin with. It's nice to know that there are more places that will teach the TLM other than Our Lady of Guadalupe seminary and St. Thomas Aquinas up in Winona, MN (yeah, I know it's an SSPX seminary, but to be perfectly fair, they DO teach the TLM there).
I think the leadership on both the Society's side and the Magisterium's side are listening to each other more and progress can be made. Granted, a lot of progress still needs to be made, but I have faith that relations will warm further between the two sides.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
"In America, some bishops have anticipated this situation. Two seminaries in Pennsylvania – St Vincent, Latrobe, and St Charles Borromeo, Philadelphia – have just announced that they will be teaching the “extraordinary form”, as it is now known."
My diocese, the Diocese of Lafayette in Indiana, sends seminarians to St. Charles Borromeo, which is an excellent seminary to begin with. It's nice to know that there are more places that will teach the TLM other than Our Lady of Guadalupe seminary and St. Thomas Aquinas up in Winona, MN (yeah, I know it's an SSPX seminary, but to be perfectly fair, they DO teach the TLM there).
I think the leadership on both the Society's side and the Magisterium's side are listening to each other more and progress can be made. Granted, a lot of progress still needs to be made, but I have faith that relations will warm further between the two sides.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Thursday, December 13, 2007
A Technical Update, an Announcement, and an Observation
First, the technical update. Fedora Core 8 has been dumped in favor of Ubuntu 7.10. Believe it or not, my version of Fedora Core became unstable, so I was going to have to trash it anyway. Couple that with the fact that it wasn't seeing any of my Windows boxes on my network when it was working, and that it seemed to spend an awful lot of time downloading updates, it was for the better. A friend of mine on the Yahoo Mother of God group recommended Ubuntu to me months ago, but it seems that I couldn't get it working at the time. Probably a the PC that I was using. Well, it works now, and is nice and stable.
Second, my friend Colleen Hammond will be in Indy speaking at Holy Rosary on March 12 as part of their Lenten mission. I'm hoping we can meet for lunch, possibly tape something that day too. We've not worked together in a couple of years now, and I'm hoping we can make good on a video we've needed to re-shoot two years ago.
Third, you ever notice that anytime you absolutely need something, you can't find it, but after you go out and buy another one, you find about twelve of what you were looking for? I was looking for a simple cable splitter this evening. I know for a fact I've got at least three or four of them, but they were nowhere to be found tonight. If I were to go and buy one, though, I guarantee that I'll find them.
In any case, hope to have the linux box hooked up to it's own line this weekend and we can do some actual testing.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Second, my friend Colleen Hammond will be in Indy speaking at Holy Rosary on March 12 as part of their Lenten mission. I'm hoping we can meet for lunch, possibly tape something that day too. We've not worked together in a couple of years now, and I'm hoping we can make good on a video we've needed to re-shoot two years ago.
Third, you ever notice that anytime you absolutely need something, you can't find it, but after you go out and buy another one, you find about twelve of what you were looking for? I was looking for a simple cable splitter this evening. I know for a fact I've got at least three or four of them, but they were nowhere to be found tonight. If I were to go and buy one, though, I guarantee that I'll find them.
In any case, hope to have the linux box hooked up to it's own line this weekend and we can do some actual testing.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Update: Technical and Non-Technical
First, the technical update...
I transferred the program files that I transcoded last week over to the linux box and started playing around with VLC. They have a very nice little page that talks about setting up VLC for a VOD system. I couldn't quite get it to work as it was; I may need a dedicated line to do streaming (which is OK since I just happen to have one). The other question is this: Can I get more than one file to stream out? These are my tasks for the following week: To see if I can stream more than one file in a VOD configuration, and to hook up the other line to actually do the streaming.
Now, the non-technical update...
Una Voce now has a chapter in Carmel, IN, which is good since this is where I live. This is good news, but I've been kept in the loop since Summorum Pontificum was released. They now have a website, though. Go check it out.
More later....
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
I transferred the program files that I transcoded last week over to the linux box and started playing around with VLC. They have a very nice little page that talks about setting up VLC for a VOD system. I couldn't quite get it to work as it was; I may need a dedicated line to do streaming (which is OK since I just happen to have one). The other question is this: Can I get more than one file to stream out? These are my tasks for the following week: To see if I can stream more than one file in a VOD configuration, and to hook up the other line to actually do the streaming.
Now, the non-technical update...
Una Voce now has a chapter in Carmel, IN, which is good since this is where I live. This is good news, but I've been kept in the loop since Summorum Pontificum was released. They now have a website, though. Go check it out.
More later....
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Test Clips
Over the last week or so (I've been either busy or sick - and I missed a local Una Voce meeting also), whenever I can get a spare moment, I've been encoding that episode of "The Catholic Hour" at different bit rates to see how well it performed. Tests were done at 500kb, 800kb, 1800kb, 2000kb, and 3000kb. Obviously, the higher the bit rate, the better it looked. The thing that stuck out to me most, though, is that the difference between 500kb, 800kb, and 1800kb was just about negligible. This is good, at least in the interim. I'm not going to have near the bandwidth that I will need to do 3000kb or even 2000kb bit rates, even though that ultimately, MDTV will be on it's own line (it's actually waiting - we have had DSL for a while now, and cable internet came with my day job, so like, two lines). I know what kind of bandwidth will be needed, but it's going to take a little time to get there. In the meantime, I'm hoping a dedicated cable line will do the trick.
And the only way it can do the trick, if what I'm thinking is correct, is to stream out at 500kb. That way, the bandwidth won't be eaten up too much and the file size will still remain small; roughly 120MB for a 30 minute program, compared to 189MB for the 800kb stream, 342MB for the 1800kb stream, 450MB for the 2000kb stream, and 667 for the 3000kb stream.
Next, we move the file over to the linux server and set VLC up to stream MPEG-4 on VOD.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
And the only way it can do the trick, if what I'm thinking is correct, is to stream out at 500kb. That way, the bandwidth won't be eaten up too much and the file size will still remain small; roughly 120MB for a 30 minute program, compared to 189MB for the 800kb stream, 342MB for the 1800kb stream, 450MB for the 2000kb stream, and 667 for the 3000kb stream.
Next, we move the file over to the linux server and set VLC up to stream MPEG-4 on VOD.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Right size...
...wrong container. I think. What I was trying to do was put an MPEG-TS container around an H.264 file. MediaCoder didn't seem to like that too much. I think when I'm done with capturing footage for tonight, I may just go ahead and try again, but this time with a simple MPEG-4 container on it. The size was good, though; a 30 minute program that's normally about 2GB in size was only 209 MB. Perfect.
Oh, and I found some more footage from that friend for whom we're transferring films, this time a parish's 50th Anniversary Celebration complete with 4th Degree Knights of Columbus and everything. And they're going to allow us to use them for MDTV too! It's so cool to have some good stock footage of various things Catholic.
Now, what to do with them...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Oh, and I found some more footage from that friend for whom we're transferring films, this time a parish's 50th Anniversary Celebration complete with 4th Degree Knights of Columbus and everything. And they're going to allow us to use them for MDTV too! It's so cool to have some good stock footage of various things Catholic.
Now, what to do with them...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Transcoding and Transferring
The results of last night's transcoding test are in....
Don't ever, EVER transcode from one MPEG format to another.
I did this last night, taking a copy of "Our Lady's Shrine" from MPEG-2 to H.264 (MPEG-4 basically) in an MPEG-TS container, and I got the same problems I had when trying to transcode from .mov files to .avi files back in about March or so. Really choppy, really jittery, and just not good.
So, I'm taking an .avi file and seeing how it comes out. This time, it's my episode of "The Catholic Hour: Rome Eternal Part III". Hopefully, taking it from uncompressed video to compressed will be better.
Oh, and in the midst of transferring my next client's videos, I found some footage of an old Mexican cathedral (the name eludes me right now - I saw a picture of the same cathedral up in the old La Hacienda restaurant in Fishers, IN before they moved, though), and equally as important, a few seconds of a memento mori. Since this footage belongs to some friends of ours, they may be willing to "donate" the clips that I need.
I'm pretty sure we can work something out.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Don't ever, EVER transcode from one MPEG format to another.
I did this last night, taking a copy of "Our Lady's Shrine" from MPEG-2 to H.264 (MPEG-4 basically) in an MPEG-TS container, and I got the same problems I had when trying to transcode from .mov files to .avi files back in about March or so. Really choppy, really jittery, and just not good.
So, I'm taking an .avi file and seeing how it comes out. This time, it's my episode of "The Catholic Hour: Rome Eternal Part III". Hopefully, taking it from uncompressed video to compressed will be better.
Oh, and in the midst of transferring my next client's videos, I found some footage of an old Mexican cathedral (the name eludes me right now - I saw a picture of the same cathedral up in the old La Hacienda restaurant in Fishers, IN before they moved, though), and equally as important, a few seconds of a memento mori. Since this footage belongs to some friends of ours, they may be willing to "donate" the clips that I need.
I'm pretty sure we can work something out.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Friday, November 23, 2007
Update/Progress
While the crack team of professionals at Red Hat have, in fact, patched Samba, I'm still trying to figure out how to configure it. There hasn't been much time in that regard, as I had a huge job of film transfer to do for someone else that was due the day before Thanksgiving. In any case, the linux box is still working (obviously - I'm typing this up on it) and I will figure out Samba as I'm down here working on my next film transfer job.
In the meantime, I think I found the answer to my previous question: Yes, I can transcode MPEG-4 to an MPEG-TS. What I'm doing now with MediaCoder is taking the film of "Our Lady's Shrine", at least the MPEG-2 file, and changing it to an H.264 file in an MPEG2-TS stream container. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to turn out yet, but VLC should be able to play it. If I see no difference in quality between the MPEG-2, the MPEG-TS, and the H.264 files, yet see a much smaller file with the H.264, then I'm in business. The next step after transcoding will be to load them up on the server and set up VLC for VOD.
Oh, and as far as new films go, I just got a short of Pope Pius XII shutting the door after the Holy Year of 1950 was officially closed. I'll have to take a look at it all the way through, but it looks like it came from Off-Network Productions. I'm not sure if it's public domain or not, but for five bucks it was worth the risk.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
In the meantime, I think I found the answer to my previous question: Yes, I can transcode MPEG-4 to an MPEG-TS. What I'm doing now with MediaCoder is taking the film of "Our Lady's Shrine", at least the MPEG-2 file, and changing it to an H.264 file in an MPEG2-TS stream container. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to turn out yet, but VLC should be able to play it. If I see no difference in quality between the MPEG-2, the MPEG-TS, and the H.264 files, yet see a much smaller file with the H.264, then I'm in business. The next step after transcoding will be to load them up on the server and set up VLC for VOD.
Oh, and as far as new films go, I just got a short of Pope Pius XII shutting the door after the Holy Year of 1950 was officially closed. I'll have to take a look at it all the way through, but it looks like it came from Off-Network Productions. I'm not sure if it's public domain or not, but for five bucks it was worth the risk.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
OK...Next Question...
As I wait for the crack team of experts at Red Hat to help me work on my Samba problem, the next question remains in my head: Now that I know I can encode MPEG-TS files from MPEG-2 files, can I do it with MPEG-4? The reason why I wonder this is simple: Bandwidth. MPEG-4 files are much smaller and less likely to clog up bandwidth for a high number of users.
Looks like I've got my next MDTV project.
In any case, I'm sorry there's little to no Catholic content on this blog right now. That will eventually change. At this point, though, this blog is helping me keep track of the whole troubleshooting record so I can refer back to whatever I may need in the future. The other plus side is that I'm transferring a large number of films right now, and I've discovered some nuances that are making them look better, so I'm getting better in that realm too.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Looks like I've got my next MDTV project.
In any case, I'm sorry there's little to no Catholic content on this blog right now. That will eventually change. At this point, though, this blog is helping me keep track of the whole troubleshooting record so I can refer back to whatever I may need in the future. The other plus side is that I'm transferring a large number of films right now, and I've discovered some nuances that are making them look better, so I'm getting better in that realm too.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, November 12, 2007
Another Nice Step Forward
While taking a small break from transferring client films, I took the MPEG of "Trail of Fr. Kino" and decided to make it into an MPEG Transport Stream file so as to get started on setting up Mater Dei Television on a VoD platform, and it worked fantastically! I used MPEG Streamclip to do the job, and am watching it currently on VLC. Now, just getting the Fedora and Windows boxes to talk to one another is going to be another step, but I'm happy with finding out what I found out tonight.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Great Steps Forward
OK. While I didn't wind up going with Darwin Streaming Server, I did get a couple of alternatives together and downloaded them and installed them on the linux box. They are simply VLC and Mplayer. They're both great media players (at least VLC is - I've not tried Mplayer yet), but I've not used them in setting up a VoD server yet. As soon as I figure that out, I think we're off to the races. Still, what has been accomplished today have been great steps forward.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Success! I think...
OK...I finally got an OS successfully installed on what I hope is the video server. I wound up using Fedora Core 8. Now, anyone out there who knows anything about linux who would like to help me get this box networked to my Windows network, I'd be grateful.
Phase two: Getting the Darwin Streaming Server installed.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Phase two: Getting the Darwin Streaming Server installed.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Not Jinxing It
OK. I'm sick of jinxing it.
I know, I know. I'm not supposed to believe in jinxes, but it never seems to fail; every single time I say I'm going to use a particular OS, I can't get it to install for some reason or another, or if I can, the GUI doesn't work, or the computer falls over and starts smoking or whatever.
So, I'm going to just say this much: I've got an OS loading on what I hope is eventually going to be my Darwin Streaming Server (at least until I get a faster computer to install this stuff on, then it can either be a backup or my web server). I'm not going to say which one it is. I'm not going to say I was successful. Not until I get the doggone thing to work.
In the meantime, back to work on film transfer.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
I know, I know. I'm not supposed to believe in jinxes, but it never seems to fail; every single time I say I'm going to use a particular OS, I can't get it to install for some reason or another, or if I can, the GUI doesn't work, or the computer falls over and starts smoking or whatever.
So, I'm going to just say this much: I've got an OS loading on what I hope is eventually going to be my Darwin Streaming Server (at least until I get a faster computer to install this stuff on, then it can either be a backup or my web server). I'm not going to say which one it is. I'm not going to say I was successful. Not until I get the doggone thing to work.
In the meantime, back to work on film transfer.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Grumble..
OK...for some reason, that Debian distro wasn't bootable. No clue as to why. Perhaps it needs a bootloader or something. Don't know. I got frustrated enough that I downloaded the BitTorrent client to get a copy of Slackware. I would rather have my Darwin Streaming Server linux based if at all possible, and Slackware is actually the way I wanted to go to begin with this time around.
We shall see.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
We shall see.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Back to the Drawing Board
OK. Tonight, in lieu of a dead KVM switch, I hooked up another monitor, keyboard and mouse to what I think is going to be my Darwin server. No, not THAT Darwin. I was talking about Apple's open source Darwin server that is used in an MPEG-4 based IPTV VOD system. I'm leaning towards Debian as my distro on this box, as the most success I've had with linux has been with a Debian based distro, so why not?
The idea at this point is to get a box running Debian, install the Darwin server on it, and then start playing with it. We'll see where things go from there.
It's late and I'm tired. I better bugger off.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
The idea at this point is to get a box running Debian, install the Darwin server on it, and then start playing with it. We'll see where things go from there.
It's late and I'm tired. I better bugger off.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, November 5, 2007
Long Awaited Update - No, I'm Not Dead
Yeah...it's been awhile.
There's been a lot going on in our neck of the woods. We've had our struggles with a multitude of different things, and I went through a job change to a company that I didn't realize is diametrically opposed to both my Faith and my morals. The good news, though, is that we have a new baby boy, named Nigel and he's healthy and reasonably happy (although he's trying to get the jist of having siblings, and noisy siblings at that).
The one good thing that came out of my job change is that it gave me some better ideas to make Mater Dei Television more effective. We are now looking at an IPTV based VOD (Video On Demand) system that will allow people to view MDTV with either their computer or an after market set top box on their regular TV. Video on Demand seems like the way to go, but I just don't like the vlog look too much; being a TV man by trade, I like TV to look like, well, TV.
I'll write more later. There's much work to be done.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
There's been a lot going on in our neck of the woods. We've had our struggles with a multitude of different things, and I went through a job change to a company that I didn't realize is diametrically opposed to both my Faith and my morals. The good news, though, is that we have a new baby boy, named Nigel and he's healthy and reasonably happy (although he's trying to get the jist of having siblings, and noisy siblings at that).
The one good thing that came out of my job change is that it gave me some better ideas to make Mater Dei Television more effective. We are now looking at an IPTV based VOD (Video On Demand) system that will allow people to view MDTV with either their computer or an after market set top box on their regular TV. Video on Demand seems like the way to go, but I just don't like the vlog look too much; being a TV man by trade, I like TV to look like, well, TV.
I'll write more later. There's much work to be done.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Testing...
Let's see how this works. Allegedly, in order for the Sopcast web player to work, you need Microsoft Internet Explorer. Seeing that I generally use Mozilla Firefox, I'm not sure how well this is going to work. Either way, I believe you still need the Sopcast client installed for it to work.
Here we go...
Here we go...
Sancta Missa Website
From the the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius...
http://www.sanctamissa.org/EN/index.html
Why wasn't something like this done a long time ago? A website tutorial on how to pray the Traditional Latin Mass seems like a good idea to me...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
http://www.sanctamissa.org/EN/index.html
Why wasn't something like this done a long time ago? A website tutorial on how to pray the Traditional Latin Mass seems like a good idea to me...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, August 6, 2007
OK...Need a Beta Tester or Two...
Setting up the Sopcast was not too hard; it was actually quite easier than Peercast, and easier to change my IP address without having to change the link constantly. It's running at home, but now I need some people to help me test it, since we apparently have new firewalls at my day job (for the next couple of weeks, anyway, before I start my new job) that don't like peer-to-peer anything, let alone broadcasting, it may be better for me to get some beta testers from my friends.
Here's what you do...
Download the Sopcast client at http://www.sopcast.org/download/
Then follow this link: sop://broker1.sopcast.com:3912/29085
Let me know if this works. I may have to tweak the firewall.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Here's what you do...
Download the Sopcast client at http://www.sopcast.org/download/
Then follow this link: sop://broker1.sopcast.com:3912/29085
Let me know if this works. I may have to tweak the firewall.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Sunday, August 5, 2007
That Was Quick...
We've been on Sopcast for a total of 23 minutes, and we've already have a viewer! I guess that answers my question...
There's apparently a way to embed my live feed into the blog, so it'll be considerably easier to watch...
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
There's apparently a way to embed my live feed into the blog, so it'll be considerably easier to watch...
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Feed Will Drop Shortly...
Just giving a head's up (to our two or three viewers) that the feed will be dropping shortly as we make the transition from Peercast to Sopcast. Oh...and if you're reading this, say a little prayer that the computer I picked up today from Jack's Computers will work. He gives away old computers, monitors, and printers he can't sell due to obsolescence, and this looks like at least a Pentium II, which will work with the MPEG-2 encoder card that I have.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Sopcast?
Three weeks into netcasting, and Peercast has not been nearly as impressive as I originally thought. It seems as if you have to jump through way too many hoops in order to get things to work correctly. A colleague of mine suggested to go out with Sopcast. Sopcast apparently is based on the BitTorrent system. I think I'll be taking the feed down here this week sometime and installing Sopcast instead, just to see how well it goes out. I'll be bugging some of you to help out, so if you're interested, drop me a line.
Or I'll be in contact with you...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Or I'll be in contact with you...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, July 30, 2007
One More Day!
Just a quick note: The programs I listed yesterday were more or less "still cooking" when I went to my day job today, so the new programming loop of the programs listed in the last post will be up by tomorrow morning.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Update
I apologize for there being this long without an update. The feed is going again, and I'm working on the next batch of films to air. The one going right now on the editor is "Journey of Faith", which chronicles Francis Cardinal Spellman leading a pilgrimage of Catholics from the Archdiocese of New York to Rome for the Holy Year of 1950. Spellman gives a short message in the beginning, and then off to sea. It's in color, too.
There will probably be another episode of "The Catholic Hour", this time it's "Rome Eternal - Pt. III". For the record, no, I don't have the other three parts of this series yet. If anybody has them (or any other Catholic Hour film reels), please get in touch with me. The other film will be a short called "The Trail of Fr. Kino", and it tells the story of a Jesuit priest who helped settle the American Southwest. They mention him briefly in the episode of "The Catholic Hour" which is playing right now. Still, his story is important, especially as you see just how much Catholics have contributed to the founding and exploring of America (but who generally don't get credit for it due to anti-Catholic sentiment).
More later...stay tuned!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
There will probably be another episode of "The Catholic Hour", this time it's "Rome Eternal - Pt. III". For the record, no, I don't have the other three parts of this series yet. If anybody has them (or any other Catholic Hour film reels), please get in touch with me. The other film will be a short called "The Trail of Fr. Kino", and it tells the story of a Jesuit priest who helped settle the American Southwest. They mention him briefly in the episode of "The Catholic Hour" which is playing right now. Still, his story is important, especially as you see just how much Catholics have contributed to the founding and exploring of America (but who generally don't get credit for it due to anti-Catholic sentiment).
More later...stay tuned!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, July 23, 2007
Feed News
OK. I got the encoder going again before going back to my day job. Got the KVM going again too (which is good, because I didn't really want to buy another KVM). Now, the reason why the feed isn't up is because I didn't start my return feed at home. While it was kind of a stupid mistake, it's good to know. I'll probably set up an old Mac or something as a dummy computer that just handles the feed so I don't tie up my laptop. Don't worry; it'll be back online by 23:00 ET or so. I'm trying to make a relay at my day job, as I know it's got some good bandwidth there too.
In any case, more later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
In any case, more later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Feed Down for Maintanence
Otherwise titled "Why is my KVM freaking out?" I think I'm going to need to take the wires off the KVM and reseat everything. So, in the meantime, we'll be down for a little while...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Sunday, July 22, 2007
We Had A Viewer!!!
To quote Homer Simpson..."I said 'Woo Hoo'..."
Now, all I have to do is hope that I didn't do anything to limit that. If you read this blog and you were the viewer last night, please drop me a line. Click on the picture to the right to see the stats...
Yes, I know that it's a little shaky right now. One flaky motherboard and the lack of equipment limited me severely, but as I get new equipment, we'll be upgrading things. In the meantime, as G.K. Chesterton once said "If something is really worth doing...it's worth doing badly!"
Update: We had two (2) viewers today! I can't count it as three because one of them is my return feed that apparently helps stabilize the feed. Nevertheless, we had two viewers today!
Until next time...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Saturday, July 21, 2007
OK...I'm Back...
I'm back from vacation, and it's been a hellish week. Especially last Thursday...
I wound up having to take care of three sick people (two little ones and one big one) pretty much most of Thursday afternoon and all evening. Fortunately, the boys were pretty much OK after Grandma and Grandpa came back from dinner. This was a good thing, because I came down with the same flu they had right after everyone got back. The drive back here was nasty, and mostly had to have my wife drive. I was laid up most of yesterday and all last night. It started to break this afternoon, so I'm back up to where I need to be, but wow, getting sick on vacation isn't fun.
Sorry for the digression, but that explains why I didn't come straight home and fix my feed. That's an even better story.
One of our friends who was taking the mail in for us said that she couldn't get through on the phone. My wife called AT&T (the root of all evil) and they said that "it was probably the computer equipment shorting out the phone." When I got better, I went downstairs and took a look. The computer equipment was fine. The encoder had stopped, and my IP address had changed (probably signifying I lost phone connection at some point while we were gone), but I was able to get online and everything. So I unplugged it and tried to call our land line again. Not really any better. Bypassed the answering machine. No go. Bypassed the filter for the DSL service. No luck. My wife called AT&T back and told them we did all the troubleshooting we could and we're pretty sure it's not the computer equipment. They'll send someone out by Tuesday at the earliest. Tuesday. Ugh!
This is also a reminder for me to spend the extra five bucks a month and get a static IP address. That way, I don't have to worry about losing power and changing IP addresses. That will make keeping a stable feed up that much easier.
So anyway, if you want to follow the directions from a couple of posts ago (I believe the post was for July 15), the feed is up if you want to check it out. I'm going to go check on it now. Now that I'm home, I should be able to keep a better eye on it.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
I wound up having to take care of three sick people (two little ones and one big one) pretty much most of Thursday afternoon and all evening. Fortunately, the boys were pretty much OK after Grandma and Grandpa came back from dinner. This was a good thing, because I came down with the same flu they had right after everyone got back. The drive back here was nasty, and mostly had to have my wife drive. I was laid up most of yesterday and all last night. It started to break this afternoon, so I'm back up to where I need to be, but wow, getting sick on vacation isn't fun.
Sorry for the digression, but that explains why I didn't come straight home and fix my feed. That's an even better story.
One of our friends who was taking the mail in for us said that she couldn't get through on the phone. My wife called AT&T (the root of all evil) and they said that "it was probably the computer equipment shorting out the phone." When I got better, I went downstairs and took a look. The computer equipment was fine. The encoder had stopped, and my IP address had changed (probably signifying I lost phone connection at some point while we were gone), but I was able to get online and everything. So I unplugged it and tried to call our land line again. Not really any better. Bypassed the answering machine. No go. Bypassed the filter for the DSL service. No luck. My wife called AT&T back and told them we did all the troubleshooting we could and we're pretty sure it's not the computer equipment. They'll send someone out by Tuesday at the earliest. Tuesday. Ugh!
This is also a reminder for me to spend the extra five bucks a month and get a static IP address. That way, I don't have to worry about losing power and changing IP addresses. That will make keeping a stable feed up that much easier.
So anyway, if you want to follow the directions from a couple of posts ago (I believe the post was for July 15), the feed is up if you want to check it out. I'm going to go check on it now. Now that I'm home, I should be able to keep a better eye on it.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, July 16, 2007
Obvious Feed Problems
OK. This obviously needs to be troubleshot, because as soon as I went to log into my feed, it wasn't there. I'm wondering if that encoder rebooted itself while I was gone. It'll have to be fixed on Friday. I have to admit; I'm still new to this Peercasting thing. Hopefully, it'll be an easy fix...
More later. It's been a long day, and I'm beat.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
More later. It's been a long day, and I'm beat.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Breaking News: We Have a Feed
I'm very pleased to report that we are now webcasting through the Peercast network. Here's what you need to do...
- Go to Peercast and download the appropriate software for your operating system and install it.
- Go over to the Peercast Address Book and use the drop down menu to select "WMV."
- Find Mater Dei Television and click on "Play."
That should be it. Things to keep in mind...
- You need to be running the Peercast software in order to watch Mater Dei Television.
- You can help out by configuring your Peercast software as a relay, and remember, since it's peer to peer streaming, the more people logged in means a better signal.
- There is only going to be one hour of programming per week, although on a continuous loop, at least to start. When we get more programming, we'll air it. Gradually, this will be increased to two hours, three hours, etc, until we are actually airing different programming every day (although probably repeating itself for awhile on a 12 hour loop, but changed out every day).
We're not going to just air old Catholic programming. We do intend on producing new programs, and ideas are welcome. Things to keep in mind with programming...
- Programs should have some relevance to the Traditional Latin Mass crowd and/or the Catholic Homeschooling crowd.
- We don't quite have the means to do a Mass yet, although frighteningly enough, I know how to build the PC that would allow me to do live switching between two cameras (and I can make it portable, too). In the meantime, we need to focus on programs that would be easy to produce and edit with one or two cameras, but not done live. Rosaries, Angeluses, speakers, and other programs that don't have to be aired live (or have a quick turnaround) would be ideal.
- Focusing on Summorum Pontificum would be ideal. It seems as if many bishops are not thrilled with this not because of going backwards necessarily but due to the lack of resources. I'd love to produce a program that helps both priests and laity learn enough Latin to get through the Tridentine Mass every day. Or even a program to help train altar boys. There seems to be endless possibilities as far as programming goes.
- Histories on how the Church influenced society in various parts of the world would also be welcome. Ideas are always good.
- If you want to produce for Mater Dei Television, sit tight and stay tuned. We have standards. When I talk this over with the board (or soon to be board), we'll post exactly what these standards are. I'd like a little diversity in this department, because while everything that comes from in house will likely have the same feel, the out of house programming probably won't, and that's ok (MEANING: I use Adobe Premeire Pro 1.5 on my main editor and my portable runs Premiere 5.1. That doesn't mean we won't take anything made with Final Cut Pro, Avid, or Cinelerra among others. Just make it relevant to what we normally air, and don't make it look bad.
Now, having said all this, we've both got a learning curve right now. I'll try to answer any questions the best I possibly can, but bear with me as I get used to this too. These beginnings are truly humble, but together, we'll make this into the first TV network geared for Traditional Catholics.
Here we go!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Gotta Love Forward Progress
Tonight, I got the Windows Media Encoder working, and I was able to get both sound and video from the capture card, so that's configured correctly. It was kind of cool, actually, because I think there's one thing in between that and Peercast that will need to be done for me to start transmitting.
Now, of course, the bad news (which, granted, isn't so much bad as it was frustrating, but hopefully easily fixed).
I can't seem to get that Cyberhome DVD player (the one that plays everything, including TDK discs, which apparently NO other DVD player likes to play) to loop the whole disc. Fortunately, there's a Sony DVD player sitting upstairs being unused at the present time (long story). It doesn't matter, though, because with any luck, this will be temporary.
Getting closer!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Now, of course, the bad news (which, granted, isn't so much bad as it was frustrating, but hopefully easily fixed).
I can't seem to get that Cyberhome DVD player (the one that plays everything, including TDK discs, which apparently NO other DVD player likes to play) to loop the whole disc. Fortunately, there's a Sony DVD player sitting upstairs being unused at the present time (long story). It doesn't matter, though, because with any luck, this will be temporary.
Getting closer!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Caught Up
I took today off to catch up on some projects that were getting to be long overdue; none of which were related to MDTV per se. Mainly client film and video transfers. Nevertheless, I checked my former MPEG player/current encoder, and it is seeing the capture card. That's always a good sign. In any case, it looks like until I get another working computer, I'm going to be encoding the Cyberhome DVD player I took out of service in favor of my Panasonic from the parish rummage sale. $1000 brand new in 2000; part of a $5 bag in a bag sale in a parish rummage sale in 2007. Sounds great. Looks great. No remote. Not quite as friendly to all formats like the Cyberhome is. I tell clients with expensive DVD players that I have an easier time playing DVDs on a $40 Cyberhome than I do on a much more expensive name brand. And the Cyberhome can be Region-Free too. And it plays NTSC and PAL. Not bad for forty bucks.
In any case, that's going to be my temporary video source. I so wanted this up this week. I'm now looking at this weekend. It WILL be done by July 16.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
In any case, that's going to be my temporary video source. I so wanted this up this week. I'm now looking at this weekend. It WILL be done by July 16.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, July 9, 2007
Good News/Bad News
Well, as you've already guessed, the bad news is basically this: I need to computers to run MDTV the way I'd like to, and I have one. I've tried every option, but it didn't look promising that three computers later, I still didn't have something that worked. The plan is now to turn the MPEG-2 player into an encoder and hook up a DVD player to it with the first week's programming burned onto a DVD-R and loop it. At least for the time being.
The good news, however, and I say this cautiously, is that I may have found a free tool to convert from .DV files to .AVI files. This is good because the guy transferring my 16mm film uses a Mac, and I use a PC. Needless to say, the files come to me as .DV files.
I'm using MPEG Streamclip 1.1 to transcode. Hopefully, this will work. I want to re-encode all the MPEG-2 files I did a few years ago with a watermark, but I kind of want to do this on the clip itself as opposed to while encoding the stream, as some of these films will be going to DVD at some point. In any case, first one is started. Hopefully, it'll turn out like I plan...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
The good news, however, and I say this cautiously, is that I may have found a free tool to convert from .DV files to .AVI files. This is good because the guy transferring my 16mm film uses a Mac, and I use a PC. Needless to say, the files come to me as .DV files.
I'm using MPEG Streamclip 1.1 to transcode. Hopefully, this will work. I want to re-encode all the MPEG-2 files I did a few years ago with a watermark, but I kind of want to do this on the clip itself as opposed to while encoding the stream, as some of these films will be going to DVD at some point. In any case, first one is started. Hopefully, it'll turn out like I plan...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Prayer Request
I don't know who's out there reading this, or how many of you there are, but please pray for this apostolate. Technical issues have plagued me all day. I don't have the SCSI drives for the NEC server, my trusty old Dell Dimension L400c wouldn't post, and a Compaq Deskpro I had sitting in storage would post but then the drive would keep failing.
In a strange twist of events, I'm out of computers.
I know of someone who may be able to help me (the guy who I made the 3Ghz P4 for earlier this week). He may be able to help. The idea is at this point is to either get a slower computer than my Dell Precision 420 to use as my MPEG-2 player and let the Precision handle the encoding, or find a fast computer to use as my encoder. A new motherboard and power supply would help (preferably micro ATX to fit into one of those old eMachine cases).
We're so close!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
In a strange twist of events, I'm out of computers.
I know of someone who may be able to help me (the guy who I made the 3Ghz P4 for earlier this week). He may be able to help. The idea is at this point is to either get a slower computer than my Dell Precision 420 to use as my MPEG-2 player and let the Precision handle the encoding, or find a fast computer to use as my encoder. A new motherboard and power supply would help (preferably micro ATX to fit into one of those old eMachine cases).
We're so close!
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
EXPLANATORY NOTE ON MOTU PROPRIO "SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM"
EXPLANATORY NOTE ON MOTU PROPRIO "SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM"
VATICAN CITY, JUL 7, 2007 (VIS) - The Holy See Press Office today issued an explanatory note concerning the Motu Proprio "Summorum Pontificum". The most important paragraphs of the note are given below:
"The Motu Proprio 'Summorum Pontificum' lays down new rules for the use of the Roman liturgy that preceded the reform of 1970. The reasons for such provisions are clearly explained in the Holy Father's letter to bishops which accompanies the Motu Proprio (the two documents have been sent to all the presidents of episcopal conferences and to all nuncios, who have arranged to distribute them to all bishops).
"The fundamental provision is as follows: the Roman liturgy will have two forms ('usus'):
"a) The ordinary form is the one that follows the liturgical reform undertaken by Pope Paul VI in the year 1970, as it appears in the liturgical books promulgated at that time. There is an official edition in Latin which may be used always and everywhere, and translations in divers languages published by the various episcopal conferences.
"b) The extraordinary form: which is that celebrated in accordance with the liturgical books published by Blessed Pope John XXIII in 1962."
In paragraph 8 the note reads: "The bishop of a particular place may erect a personal parish, wherever there is to be found a very substantial number of faithful who wish to follow the earlier liturgy. It would be appropriate for the numbers of faithful to be substantial, even if not comparable to those of other parishes."
The explanatory note also highlights some of the characteristics of the 1962 Missal:
"It is a 'complete' or 'integral' Missal in the Latin language, that is, it also contains the readings for the celebrations (it is not distinct from the 'Lectionary' as the later 1970 Missal is).
"It contains just one Eucharistic prayer, the 'Roman Canon' (corresponding to the first Eucharist Prayer of the later Missal, which includes a choice of various Eucharistic Prayers).
"Various prayers (including a large part of the Canon) are recited by the priest in a low voice inaudible to the people.
"Other differences include the reading of the beginning of the Gospel of John at the end of Mass.
"The 1962 Missal does not provide for concelebration. It says nothing concerning the direction of the altar or of the celebrant (whether facing the people or not).
"The Pope's Letter envisages the possibility of future enrichment of the 1962 Missal (inclusion of new saints, new prefaces, etc.)."
OP/MOTU PROPRIO/SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM VIS 070707 (430)
VATICAN CITY, JUL 7, 2007 (VIS) - The Holy See Press Office today issued an explanatory note concerning the Motu Proprio "Summorum Pontificum". The most important paragraphs of the note are given below:
"The Motu Proprio 'Summorum Pontificum' lays down new rules for the use of the Roman liturgy that preceded the reform of 1970. The reasons for such provisions are clearly explained in the Holy Father's letter to bishops which accompanies the Motu Proprio (the two documents have been sent to all the presidents of episcopal conferences and to all nuncios, who have arranged to distribute them to all bishops).
"The fundamental provision is as follows: the Roman liturgy will have two forms ('usus'):
"a) The ordinary form is the one that follows the liturgical reform undertaken by Pope Paul VI in the year 1970, as it appears in the liturgical books promulgated at that time. There is an official edition in Latin which may be used always and everywhere, and translations in divers languages published by the various episcopal conferences.
"b) The extraordinary form: which is that celebrated in accordance with the liturgical books published by Blessed Pope John XXIII in 1962."
In paragraph 8 the note reads: "The bishop of a particular place may erect a personal parish, wherever there is to be found a very substantial number of faithful who wish to follow the earlier liturgy. It would be appropriate for the numbers of faithful to be substantial, even if not comparable to those of other parishes."
The explanatory note also highlights some of the characteristics of the 1962 Missal:
"It is a 'complete' or 'integral' Missal in the Latin language, that is, it also contains the readings for the celebrations (it is not distinct from the 'Lectionary' as the later 1970 Missal is).
"It contains just one Eucharistic prayer, the 'Roman Canon' (corresponding to the first Eucharist Prayer of the later Missal, which includes a choice of various Eucharistic Prayers).
"Various prayers (including a large part of the Canon) are recited by the priest in a low voice inaudible to the people.
"Other differences include the reading of the beginning of the Gospel of John at the end of Mass.
"The 1962 Missal does not provide for concelebration. It says nothing concerning the direction of the altar or of the celebrant (whether facing the people or not).
"The Pope's Letter envisages the possibility of future enrichment of the 1962 Missal (inclusion of new saints, new prefaces, etc.)."
OP/MOTU PROPRIO/SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM VIS 070707 (430)
LETTER FROM POPE TO BISHOPS ON "SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM"
LETTER FROM POPE TO BISHOPS ON "SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM"
VATICAN CITY, JUL 7, 2007 (VIS) - Given below is the text of the English-language version of Benedict XVI's Letter to all the bishops of the world concerning his Motu Proprio "Summorum Pontificum," which was published today:
"With great trust and hope, I am consigning to you as pastors the text of a new Apostolic Letter 'Motu Proprio data' on the use of the Roman liturgy prior to the reform of 1970. The document is the fruit of much reflection, numerous consultations and prayer.
"News reports and judgments made without sufficient information have created no little confusion. There have been very divergent reactions ranging from joyful acceptance to harsh opposition, about a plan whose contents were in reality unknown.
"This document was most directly opposed on account of two fears, which I would like to address somewhat more closely in this letter.
"In the first place, there is the fear that the document detracts from the authority of the Second Vatican Council, one of whose essential decisions - the liturgical reform - is being called into question.
"This fear is unfounded. In this regard, it must first be said that the Missal published by Paul VI and then republished in two subsequent editions by John Paul II, obviously is and continues to be the normal form - the 'Forma ordinaria' - of the Eucharistic liturgy. The last version of the 'Missale Romanum' prior to the Council, which was published with the authority of Pope John XXIII in 1962 and used during the Council, will now be able to be used as a 'Forma extraordinaria' of the liturgical celebration. It is not appropriate to speak of these two versions of the Roman Missal as if they were 'two rites.' Rather, it is a matter of a twofold use of one and the same rite.
"As for the use of the 1962 Missal as a 'Forma extraordinaria' of the liturgy of the Mass, I would like to draw attention to the fact that this Missal was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted. At the time of the introduction of the new Missal, it did not seem necessary to issue specific norms for the possible use of the earlier Missal. Probably it was thought that it would be a matter of a few individual cases which would be resolved, case by case, on the local level. Afterwards, however, it soon became apparent that a good number of people remained strongly attached to this usage of the Roman Rite, which had been familiar to them from childhood. This was especially the case in countries where the liturgical movement had provided many people with a notable liturgical formation and a deep, personal familiarity with the earlier Form of the liturgical celebration. We all know that, in the movement led by Archbishop Lefebvre, fidelity to the old Missal became an external mark of identity; the reasons for the break which arose over this, however, were at a deeper level. Many people who clearly accepted the binding character of the Second Vatican Council, and were faithful to the Pope and the bishops, nonetheless also desired to recover the form of the sacred liturgy that was dear to them. This occurred above all because in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion. And I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church.
"Pope John Paul II thus felt obliged to provide, in his Motu Proprio 'Ecclesia Dei' (July 2, 1988), guidelines for the use of the 1962 Missal; that document, however, did not contain detailed prescriptions but appealed in a general way to the generous response of bishops towards the 'legitimate aspirations' of those members of the faithful who requested this usage of the Roman Rite. At the time, the Pope primarily wanted to assist the Society of St. Pius X to recover full unity with the Successor of Peter, and sought to heal a wound experienced ever more painfully. Unfortunately this reconciliation has not yet come about. Nonetheless, a number of communities have gratefully made use of the possibilities provided by the Motu Proprio. On the other hand, difficulties remain concerning the use of the 1962 Missal outside of these groups, because of the lack of precise juridical norms, particularly because bishops, in such cases, frequently feared that the authority of the Council would be called into question. Immediately after the Second Vatican Council it was presumed that requests for the use of the 1962 Missal would be limited to the older generation which had grown up with it, but in the meantime it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them. Thus the need has arisen for a clearer juridical regulation which had not been foreseen at the time of the 1988 Motu Proprio. The present norms are also meant to free bishops from constantly having to evaluate anew how they are to respond to various situations.
"In the second place, the fear was expressed in discussions about the awaited Motu Proprio, that the possibility of a wider use of the 1962 Missal would lead to disarray or even divisions within parish communities. This fear also strikes me as quite unfounded. The use of the old Missal presupposes a certain degree of liturgical formation and some knowledge of the Latin language; neither of these is found very often. Already from these concrete presuppositions, it is clearly seen that the new Missal will certainly remain the ordinary form of the Roman Rite, not only on account of the juridical norms, but also because of the actual situation of the communities of the faithful.
"It is true that there have been exaggerations and at times social aspects unduly linked to the attitude of the faithful attached to the ancient Latin liturgical tradition. Your charity and pastoral prudence will be an incentive and guide for improving these. For that matter, the two Forms of the usage of the Roman Rite can be mutually enriching: new Saints and some of the new Prefaces can and should be inserted in the old Missal. The 'Ecclesia Dei' Commission, in contact with various bodies devoted to the 'usus antiquior,' will study the practical possibilities in this regard. The celebration of the Mass according to the Missal of Paul VI will be able to demonstrate, more powerfully than has been the case hitherto, the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage. The most sure guarantee that the Missal of Paul VI can unite parish communities and be loved by them consists in its being celebrated with great reverence in harmony with the liturgical directives. This will bring out the spiritual richness and the theological depth of this Missal.
"I now come to the positive reason which motivated my decision to issue this Motu Proprio updating that of 1988. It is a matter of coming to an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church. Looking back over the past, to the divisions which in the course of the centuries have rent the Body of Christ, one continually has the impression that, at critical moments when divisions were coming about, not enough was done by the Church's leaders to maintain or regain reconciliation and unity. One has the impression that omissions on the part of the Church have had their share of blame for the fact that these divisions were able to harden. This glance at the past imposes an obligation on us today: to make every effort to unable for all those who truly desire unity to remain in that unity or to attain it anew. I think of a sentence in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, where Paul writes: "Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return ... widen your hearts also!" (2 Cor 6:11-13). Paul was certainly speaking in another context, but his exhortation can and must touch us too, precisely on this subject. Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows.
"There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church's faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place. Needless to say, in order to experience full communion, the priests of the communities adhering to the former usage cannot, as a matter of principle, exclude celebrating according to the new books. The total exclusion of the new rite would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness.
"In conclusion, dear brothers, I very much wish to stress that these new norms do not in any way lessen your own authority and responsibility, either for the liturgy or for the pastoral care of your faithful. Each bishop, in fact, is the moderator of the liturgy in his own diocese.
"Nothing is taken away, then, from the authority of the bishop, whose role remains that of being watchful that all is done in peace and serenity. Should some problem arise which the parish priest cannot resolve, the local ordinary will always be able to intervene, in full harmony, however, with all that has been laid down by the new norms of the Motu Proprio.
"Furthermore, I invite you, dear brothers, to send to the Holy See an account of your experiences, three years after this Motu Proprio has taken effect. If truly serious difficulties come to light, ways to remedy them can be sought.
"Dear brothers, with gratitude and trust, I entrust to your hearts as pastors these pages and the norms of the Motu Proprio. Let us always be mindful of the words of the Apostle Paul addressed to the presbyters of Ephesus: 'Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the Church of God which he obtained with the blood of his own Son.'
"I entrust these norms to the powerful intercession of Mary, Mother of the Church, and I cordially impart my apostolic blessing to you, dear Brothers, to the parish priests of your dioceses, and to all the priests, your co-workers, as well as to all your faithful."
BXVI-LETTER/MOTU PROPRIO/SUMMORUM VIS 070707 (1860)
VATICAN CITY, JUL 7, 2007 (VIS) - Given below is the text of the English-language version of Benedict XVI's Letter to all the bishops of the world concerning his Motu Proprio "Summorum Pontificum," which was published today:
"With great trust and hope, I am consigning to you as pastors the text of a new Apostolic Letter 'Motu Proprio data' on the use of the Roman liturgy prior to the reform of 1970. The document is the fruit of much reflection, numerous consultations and prayer.
"News reports and judgments made without sufficient information have created no little confusion. There have been very divergent reactions ranging from joyful acceptance to harsh opposition, about a plan whose contents were in reality unknown.
"This document was most directly opposed on account of two fears, which I would like to address somewhat more closely in this letter.
"In the first place, there is the fear that the document detracts from the authority of the Second Vatican Council, one of whose essential decisions - the liturgical reform - is being called into question.
"This fear is unfounded. In this regard, it must first be said that the Missal published by Paul VI and then republished in two subsequent editions by John Paul II, obviously is and continues to be the normal form - the 'Forma ordinaria' - of the Eucharistic liturgy. The last version of the 'Missale Romanum' prior to the Council, which was published with the authority of Pope John XXIII in 1962 and used during the Council, will now be able to be used as a 'Forma extraordinaria' of the liturgical celebration. It is not appropriate to speak of these two versions of the Roman Missal as if they were 'two rites.' Rather, it is a matter of a twofold use of one and the same rite.
"As for the use of the 1962 Missal as a 'Forma extraordinaria' of the liturgy of the Mass, I would like to draw attention to the fact that this Missal was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted. At the time of the introduction of the new Missal, it did not seem necessary to issue specific norms for the possible use of the earlier Missal. Probably it was thought that it would be a matter of a few individual cases which would be resolved, case by case, on the local level. Afterwards, however, it soon became apparent that a good number of people remained strongly attached to this usage of the Roman Rite, which had been familiar to them from childhood. This was especially the case in countries where the liturgical movement had provided many people with a notable liturgical formation and a deep, personal familiarity with the earlier Form of the liturgical celebration. We all know that, in the movement led by Archbishop Lefebvre, fidelity to the old Missal became an external mark of identity; the reasons for the break which arose over this, however, were at a deeper level. Many people who clearly accepted the binding character of the Second Vatican Council, and were faithful to the Pope and the bishops, nonetheless also desired to recover the form of the sacred liturgy that was dear to them. This occurred above all because in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion. And I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church.
"Pope John Paul II thus felt obliged to provide, in his Motu Proprio 'Ecclesia Dei' (July 2, 1988), guidelines for the use of the 1962 Missal; that document, however, did not contain detailed prescriptions but appealed in a general way to the generous response of bishops towards the 'legitimate aspirations' of those members of the faithful who requested this usage of the Roman Rite. At the time, the Pope primarily wanted to assist the Society of St. Pius X to recover full unity with the Successor of Peter, and sought to heal a wound experienced ever more painfully. Unfortunately this reconciliation has not yet come about. Nonetheless, a number of communities have gratefully made use of the possibilities provided by the Motu Proprio. On the other hand, difficulties remain concerning the use of the 1962 Missal outside of these groups, because of the lack of precise juridical norms, particularly because bishops, in such cases, frequently feared that the authority of the Council would be called into question. Immediately after the Second Vatican Council it was presumed that requests for the use of the 1962 Missal would be limited to the older generation which had grown up with it, but in the meantime it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them. Thus the need has arisen for a clearer juridical regulation which had not been foreseen at the time of the 1988 Motu Proprio. The present norms are also meant to free bishops from constantly having to evaluate anew how they are to respond to various situations.
"In the second place, the fear was expressed in discussions about the awaited Motu Proprio, that the possibility of a wider use of the 1962 Missal would lead to disarray or even divisions within parish communities. This fear also strikes me as quite unfounded. The use of the old Missal presupposes a certain degree of liturgical formation and some knowledge of the Latin language; neither of these is found very often. Already from these concrete presuppositions, it is clearly seen that the new Missal will certainly remain the ordinary form of the Roman Rite, not only on account of the juridical norms, but also because of the actual situation of the communities of the faithful.
"It is true that there have been exaggerations and at times social aspects unduly linked to the attitude of the faithful attached to the ancient Latin liturgical tradition. Your charity and pastoral prudence will be an incentive and guide for improving these. For that matter, the two Forms of the usage of the Roman Rite can be mutually enriching: new Saints and some of the new Prefaces can and should be inserted in the old Missal. The 'Ecclesia Dei' Commission, in contact with various bodies devoted to the 'usus antiquior,' will study the practical possibilities in this regard. The celebration of the Mass according to the Missal of Paul VI will be able to demonstrate, more powerfully than has been the case hitherto, the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage. The most sure guarantee that the Missal of Paul VI can unite parish communities and be loved by them consists in its being celebrated with great reverence in harmony with the liturgical directives. This will bring out the spiritual richness and the theological depth of this Missal.
"I now come to the positive reason which motivated my decision to issue this Motu Proprio updating that of 1988. It is a matter of coming to an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church. Looking back over the past, to the divisions which in the course of the centuries have rent the Body of Christ, one continually has the impression that, at critical moments when divisions were coming about, not enough was done by the Church's leaders to maintain or regain reconciliation and unity. One has the impression that omissions on the part of the Church have had their share of blame for the fact that these divisions were able to harden. This glance at the past imposes an obligation on us today: to make every effort to unable for all those who truly desire unity to remain in that unity or to attain it anew. I think of a sentence in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, where Paul writes: "Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return ... widen your hearts also!" (2 Cor 6:11-13). Paul was certainly speaking in another context, but his exhortation can and must touch us too, precisely on this subject. Let us generously open our hearts and make room for everything that the faith itself allows.
"There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church's faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place. Needless to say, in order to experience full communion, the priests of the communities adhering to the former usage cannot, as a matter of principle, exclude celebrating according to the new books. The total exclusion of the new rite would not in fact be consistent with the recognition of its value and holiness.
"In conclusion, dear brothers, I very much wish to stress that these new norms do not in any way lessen your own authority and responsibility, either for the liturgy or for the pastoral care of your faithful. Each bishop, in fact, is the moderator of the liturgy in his own diocese.
"Nothing is taken away, then, from the authority of the bishop, whose role remains that of being watchful that all is done in peace and serenity. Should some problem arise which the parish priest cannot resolve, the local ordinary will always be able to intervene, in full harmony, however, with all that has been laid down by the new norms of the Motu Proprio.
"Furthermore, I invite you, dear brothers, to send to the Holy See an account of your experiences, three years after this Motu Proprio has taken effect. If truly serious difficulties come to light, ways to remedy them can be sought.
"Dear brothers, with gratitude and trust, I entrust to your hearts as pastors these pages and the norms of the Motu Proprio. Let us always be mindful of the words of the Apostle Paul addressed to the presbyters of Ephesus: 'Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the Church of God which he obtained with the blood of his own Son.'
"I entrust these norms to the powerful intercession of Mary, Mother of the Church, and I cordially impart my apostolic blessing to you, dear Brothers, to the parish priests of your dioceses, and to all the priests, your co-workers, as well as to all your faithful."
BXVI-LETTER/MOTU PROPRIO/SUMMORUM VIS 070707 (1860)
MOTU PROPRIO "SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM"
MOTU PROPRIO "SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM"
VATICAN CITY, JUL 7, 2007 (VIS) - Given below is a non-official English-language translation of the Apostolic Letter "Motu Proprio data" of Pope Benedict XVI, "Summorum Pontificum," concerning the use of the Roman liturgy prior to the reform of 1970. The original text is written in Latin.
"Up to our own times, it has been the constant concern of supreme pontiffs to ensure that the Church of Christ offers a worthy ritual to the Divine Majesty, 'to the praise and glory of His name,' and 'to the benefit of all His Holy Church.'
"Since time immemorial it has been necessary - as it is also for the future - to maintain the principle according to which 'each particular Church must concur with the universal Church, not only as regards the doctrine of the faith and the sacramental signs, but also as regards the usages universally accepted by uninterrupted apostolic tradition, which must be observed not only to avoid errors but also to transmit the integrity of the faith, because the Church's law of prayer corresponds to her law of faith.' (1)
"Among the pontiffs who showed that requisite concern, particularly outstanding is the name of St. Gregory the Great, who made every effort to ensure that the new peoples of Europe received both the Catholic faith and the treasures of worship and culture that had been accumulated by the Romans in preceding centuries. He commanded that the form of the sacred liturgy as celebrated in Rome (concerning both the Sacrifice of Mass and the Divine Office) be conserved. He took great concern to ensure the dissemination of monks and nuns who, following the Rule of St. Benedict, together with the announcement of the Gospel illustrated with their lives the wise provision of their Rule that 'nothing should be placed before the work of God.' In this way the sacred liturgy, celebrated according to the Roman use, enriched not only the faith and piety but also the culture of many peoples. It is known, in fact, that the Latin liturgy of the Church in its various forms, in each century of the Christian era, has been a spur to the spiritual life of many saints, has reinforced many peoples in the virtue of religion and fecundated their piety.
"Many other Roman pontiffs, in the course of the centuries, showed particular solicitude in ensuring that the sacred liturgy accomplished this task more effectively. Outstanding among them is St. Pius V who, sustained by great pastoral zeal and following the exhortations of the Council of Trent, renewed the entire liturgy of the Church, oversaw the publication of liturgical books amended and 'renewed in accordance with the norms of the Fathers,' and provided them for the use of the Latin Church.
"One of the liturgical books of the Roman rite is the Roman Missal, which developed in the city of Rome and, with the passing of the centuries, little by little took forms very similar to that it has had in recent times.
"'It was towards this same goal that succeeding Roman Pontiffs directed their energies during the subsequent centuries in order to ensure that the rites and liturgical books were brought up to date and when necessary clarified. From the beginning of this century they undertook a more general reform.' (2) Thus our predecessors Clement VIII, Urban VIII, St. Pius X (3), Benedict XV, Pius XII and Blessed John XXIII all played a part.
"In more recent times, Vatican Council II expressed a desire that the respectful reverence due to divine worship should be renewed and adapted to the needs of our time. Moved by this desire our predecessor, the Supreme Pontiff Paul VI, approved, in 1970, reformed and partly renewed liturgical books for the Latin Church. These, translated into the various languages of the world, were willingly accepted by bishops, priests and faithful. John Paul II amended the third typical edition of the Roman Missal. Thus Roman pontiffs have operated to ensure that 'this kind of liturgical edifice ... should again appear resplendent for its dignity and harmony.' (4)
"But in some regions, no small numbers of faithful adhered and continue to adhere with great love and affection to the earlier liturgical forms. These had so deeply marked their culture and their spirit that in 1984 the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II, moved by a concern for the pastoral care of these faithful, with the special indult 'Quattuor abhinc anno," issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship, granted permission to use the Roman Missal published by Blessed John XXIII in the year 1962. Later, in the year 1988, John Paul II with the Apostolic Letter given as Motu Proprio, 'Ecclesia Dei,' exhorted bishops to make generous use of this power in favor of all the faithful who so desired.
"Following the insistent prayers of these faithful, long deliberated upon by our predecessor John Paul II, and after having listened to the views of the Cardinal Fathers of the Consistory of 22 March 2006, having reflected deeply upon all aspects of the question, invoked the Holy Spirit and trusting in the help of God, with these Apostolic Letters we establish the following:
"Art 1. The Roman Missal promulgated by Paul VI is the ordinary expression of the 'Lex orandi' (Law of prayer) of the Catholic Church of the Latin rite. Nonetheless, the Roman Missal promulgated by St. Pius V and reissued by Bl. John XXIII is to be considered as an extraordinary expression of that same 'Lex orandi,' and must be given due honour for its venerable and ancient usage. These two expressions of the Church's Lex orandi will in no any way lead to a division in the Church's 'Lex credendi' (Law of belief). They are, in fact two usages of the one Roman rite.
"It is, therefore, permissible to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Liturgy of the Church. The conditions for the use of this Missal as laid down by earlier documents 'Quattuor abhinc annis' and 'Ecclesia Dei,' are substituted as follows:
"Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, each Catholic priest of the Latin rite, whether secular or regular, may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962, or the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum. For such celebrations, with either one Missal or the other, the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary.
"Art. 3. Communities of Institutes of consecrated life and of Societies of apostolic life, of either pontifical or diocesan right, wishing to celebrate Mass in accordance with the edition of the Roman Missal promulgated in 1962, for conventual or "community" celebration in their oratories, may do so. If an individual community or an entire Institute or Society wishes to undertake such celebrations often, habitually or permanently, the decision must be taken by the Superiors Major, in accordance with the law and following their own specific decrees and statues.
"Art. 4. Celebrations of Mass as mentioned above in art. 2 may - observing all the norms of law - also be attended by faithful who, of their own free will, ask to be admitted.
"Art. 5. § 1 In parishes, where there is a stable group of faithful who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition, the pastor should willingly accept their requests to celebrate the Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962, and ensure that the welfare of these faithful harmonises with the ordinary pastoral care of the parish, under the guidance of the bishop in accordance with canon 392, avoiding discord and favouring the unity of the whole Church.
§ 2 Celebration in accordance with the Missal of Bl. John XXIII may take place on working days; while on Sundays and feast days one such celebration may also be held.
§ 3 For faithful and priests who request it, the pastor should also allow celebrations in this extraordinary form for special circumstances such as marriages, funerals or occasional celebrations, e.g. pilgrimages.
§ 4 Priests who use the Missal of Bl. John XXIII must be qualified to do so and not juridically impeded.
§ 5 In churches that are not parish or conventual churches, it is the duty of the Rector of the church to grant the above permission.
Art. 6. In Masses celebrated in the presence of the people in accordance with the Missal of Bl. John XXIII, the readings may be given in the vernacular, using editions recognised by the Apostolic See.
"Art. 7. If a group of lay faithful, as mentioned in art. 5 § 1, has not obtained satisfaction to their requests from the pastor, they should inform the diocesan bishop. The bishop is strongly requested to satisfy their wishes. If he cannot arrange for such celebration to take place, the matter should be referred to the Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei".
"Art. 8. A bishop who, desirous of satisfying such requests, but who for various reasons is unable to do so, may refer the problem to the Commission "Ecclesia Dei" to obtain counsel and assistance.
"Art. 9. § 1 The pastor, having attentively examined all aspects, may also grant permission to use the earlier ritual for the administration of the Sacraments of Baptism, Marriage, Penance, and the Anointing of the Sick, if the good of souls would seem to require it.
§ 2 Ordinaries are given the right to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation using the earlier Roman Pontifical, if the good of souls would seem to require it.
§ 2 Clerics ordained "in sacris constitutis" may use the Roman Breviary promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962.
"Art. 10. The ordinary of a particular place, if he feels it appropriate, may erect a personal parish in accordance with can. 518 for celebrations following the ancient form of the Roman rite, or appoint a chaplain, while observing all the norms of law.
"Art. 11. The Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei", erected by John Paul II in 1988 (5), continues to exercise its function. Said Commission will have the form, duties and norms that the Roman Pontiff wishes to assign it.
"Art. 12. This Commission, apart from the powers it enjoys, will exercise the authority of the Holy See, supervising the observance and application of these dispositions.
"We order that everything We have established with these Apostolic Letters issued as Motu Proprio be considered as "established and decreed", and to be observed from 14 September of this year, Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, whatever there may be to the contrary.
" From Rome, at St. Peter's, 7 July 2007, third year of Our Pontificate."
(1) General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 3rd ed., 2002, no. 397.
(2) John Paul II, Apostolic Letter "Vicesimus quintus annus," 4 December 1988, 3: AAS 81 (1989), 899.
(3) Ibid.
(4) St. Pius X, Apostolic Letter Motu propio data, "Abhinc duos annos," 23 October 1913: AAS 5 (1913), 449-450; cf John Paul II, Apostolic Letter "Vicesimus quintus annus," no. 3: AAS 81 (1989), 899.
(5) Cf John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Motu proprio data "Ecclesia Dei," 2 July 1988, 6: AAS 80 (1988), 1498.
BXVI-MP/.../SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM VIS 070707 (1900)
VATICAN CITY, JUL 7, 2007 (VIS) - Given below is a non-official English-language translation of the Apostolic Letter "Motu Proprio data" of Pope Benedict XVI, "Summorum Pontificum," concerning the use of the Roman liturgy prior to the reform of 1970. The original text is written in Latin.
"Up to our own times, it has been the constant concern of supreme pontiffs to ensure that the Church of Christ offers a worthy ritual to the Divine Majesty, 'to the praise and glory of His name,' and 'to the benefit of all His Holy Church.'
"Since time immemorial it has been necessary - as it is also for the future - to maintain the principle according to which 'each particular Church must concur with the universal Church, not only as regards the doctrine of the faith and the sacramental signs, but also as regards the usages universally accepted by uninterrupted apostolic tradition, which must be observed not only to avoid errors but also to transmit the integrity of the faith, because the Church's law of prayer corresponds to her law of faith.' (1)
"Among the pontiffs who showed that requisite concern, particularly outstanding is the name of St. Gregory the Great, who made every effort to ensure that the new peoples of Europe received both the Catholic faith and the treasures of worship and culture that had been accumulated by the Romans in preceding centuries. He commanded that the form of the sacred liturgy as celebrated in Rome (concerning both the Sacrifice of Mass and the Divine Office) be conserved. He took great concern to ensure the dissemination of monks and nuns who, following the Rule of St. Benedict, together with the announcement of the Gospel illustrated with their lives the wise provision of their Rule that 'nothing should be placed before the work of God.' In this way the sacred liturgy, celebrated according to the Roman use, enriched not only the faith and piety but also the culture of many peoples. It is known, in fact, that the Latin liturgy of the Church in its various forms, in each century of the Christian era, has been a spur to the spiritual life of many saints, has reinforced many peoples in the virtue of religion and fecundated their piety.
"Many other Roman pontiffs, in the course of the centuries, showed particular solicitude in ensuring that the sacred liturgy accomplished this task more effectively. Outstanding among them is St. Pius V who, sustained by great pastoral zeal and following the exhortations of the Council of Trent, renewed the entire liturgy of the Church, oversaw the publication of liturgical books amended and 'renewed in accordance with the norms of the Fathers,' and provided them for the use of the Latin Church.
"One of the liturgical books of the Roman rite is the Roman Missal, which developed in the city of Rome and, with the passing of the centuries, little by little took forms very similar to that it has had in recent times.
"'It was towards this same goal that succeeding Roman Pontiffs directed their energies during the subsequent centuries in order to ensure that the rites and liturgical books were brought up to date and when necessary clarified. From the beginning of this century they undertook a more general reform.' (2) Thus our predecessors Clement VIII, Urban VIII, St. Pius X (3), Benedict XV, Pius XII and Blessed John XXIII all played a part.
"In more recent times, Vatican Council II expressed a desire that the respectful reverence due to divine worship should be renewed and adapted to the needs of our time. Moved by this desire our predecessor, the Supreme Pontiff Paul VI, approved, in 1970, reformed and partly renewed liturgical books for the Latin Church. These, translated into the various languages of the world, were willingly accepted by bishops, priests and faithful. John Paul II amended the third typical edition of the Roman Missal. Thus Roman pontiffs have operated to ensure that 'this kind of liturgical edifice ... should again appear resplendent for its dignity and harmony.' (4)
"But in some regions, no small numbers of faithful adhered and continue to adhere with great love and affection to the earlier liturgical forms. These had so deeply marked their culture and their spirit that in 1984 the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II, moved by a concern for the pastoral care of these faithful, with the special indult 'Quattuor abhinc anno," issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship, granted permission to use the Roman Missal published by Blessed John XXIII in the year 1962. Later, in the year 1988, John Paul II with the Apostolic Letter given as Motu Proprio, 'Ecclesia Dei,' exhorted bishops to make generous use of this power in favor of all the faithful who so desired.
"Following the insistent prayers of these faithful, long deliberated upon by our predecessor John Paul II, and after having listened to the views of the Cardinal Fathers of the Consistory of 22 March 2006, having reflected deeply upon all aspects of the question, invoked the Holy Spirit and trusting in the help of God, with these Apostolic Letters we establish the following:
"Art 1. The Roman Missal promulgated by Paul VI is the ordinary expression of the 'Lex orandi' (Law of prayer) of the Catholic Church of the Latin rite. Nonetheless, the Roman Missal promulgated by St. Pius V and reissued by Bl. John XXIII is to be considered as an extraordinary expression of that same 'Lex orandi,' and must be given due honour for its venerable and ancient usage. These two expressions of the Church's Lex orandi will in no any way lead to a division in the Church's 'Lex credendi' (Law of belief). They are, in fact two usages of the one Roman rite.
"It is, therefore, permissible to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Liturgy of the Church. The conditions for the use of this Missal as laid down by earlier documents 'Quattuor abhinc annis' and 'Ecclesia Dei,' are substituted as follows:
"Art. 2. In Masses celebrated without the people, each Catholic priest of the Latin rite, whether secular or regular, may use the Roman Missal published by Bl. Pope John XXIII in 1962, or the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and may do so on any day with the exception of the Easter Triduum. For such celebrations, with either one Missal or the other, the priest has no need for permission from the Apostolic See or from his Ordinary.
"Art. 3. Communities of Institutes of consecrated life and of Societies of apostolic life, of either pontifical or diocesan right, wishing to celebrate Mass in accordance with the edition of the Roman Missal promulgated in 1962, for conventual or "community" celebration in their oratories, may do so. If an individual community or an entire Institute or Society wishes to undertake such celebrations often, habitually or permanently, the decision must be taken by the Superiors Major, in accordance with the law and following their own specific decrees and statues.
"Art. 4. Celebrations of Mass as mentioned above in art. 2 may - observing all the norms of law - also be attended by faithful who, of their own free will, ask to be admitted.
"Art. 5. § 1 In parishes, where there is a stable group of faithful who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition, the pastor should willingly accept their requests to celebrate the Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962, and ensure that the welfare of these faithful harmonises with the ordinary pastoral care of the parish, under the guidance of the bishop in accordance with canon 392, avoiding discord and favouring the unity of the whole Church.
§ 2 Celebration in accordance with the Missal of Bl. John XXIII may take place on working days; while on Sundays and feast days one such celebration may also be held.
§ 3 For faithful and priests who request it, the pastor should also allow celebrations in this extraordinary form for special circumstances such as marriages, funerals or occasional celebrations, e.g. pilgrimages.
§ 4 Priests who use the Missal of Bl. John XXIII must be qualified to do so and not juridically impeded.
§ 5 In churches that are not parish or conventual churches, it is the duty of the Rector of the church to grant the above permission.
Art. 6. In Masses celebrated in the presence of the people in accordance with the Missal of Bl. John XXIII, the readings may be given in the vernacular, using editions recognised by the Apostolic See.
"Art. 7. If a group of lay faithful, as mentioned in art. 5 § 1, has not obtained satisfaction to their requests from the pastor, they should inform the diocesan bishop. The bishop is strongly requested to satisfy their wishes. If he cannot arrange for such celebration to take place, the matter should be referred to the Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei".
"Art. 8. A bishop who, desirous of satisfying such requests, but who for various reasons is unable to do so, may refer the problem to the Commission "Ecclesia Dei" to obtain counsel and assistance.
"Art. 9. § 1 The pastor, having attentively examined all aspects, may also grant permission to use the earlier ritual for the administration of the Sacraments of Baptism, Marriage, Penance, and the Anointing of the Sick, if the good of souls would seem to require it.
§ 2 Ordinaries are given the right to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation using the earlier Roman Pontifical, if the good of souls would seem to require it.
§ 2 Clerics ordained "in sacris constitutis" may use the Roman Breviary promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962.
"Art. 10. The ordinary of a particular place, if he feels it appropriate, may erect a personal parish in accordance with can. 518 for celebrations following the ancient form of the Roman rite, or appoint a chaplain, while observing all the norms of law.
"Art. 11. The Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei", erected by John Paul II in 1988 (5), continues to exercise its function. Said Commission will have the form, duties and norms that the Roman Pontiff wishes to assign it.
"Art. 12. This Commission, apart from the powers it enjoys, will exercise the authority of the Holy See, supervising the observance and application of these dispositions.
"We order that everything We have established with these Apostolic Letters issued as Motu Proprio be considered as "established and decreed", and to be observed from 14 September of this year, Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, whatever there may be to the contrary.
" From Rome, at St. Peter's, 7 July 2007, third year of Our Pontificate."
(1) General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 3rd ed., 2002, no. 397.
(2) John Paul II, Apostolic Letter "Vicesimus quintus annus," 4 December 1988, 3: AAS 81 (1989), 899.
(3) Ibid.
(4) St. Pius X, Apostolic Letter Motu propio data, "Abhinc duos annos," 23 October 1913: AAS 5 (1913), 449-450; cf John Paul II, Apostolic Letter "Vicesimus quintus annus," no. 3: AAS 81 (1989), 899.
(5) Cf John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Motu proprio data "Ecclesia Dei," 2 July 1988, 6: AAS 80 (1988), 1498.
BXVI-MP/.../SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM VIS 070707 (1900)
Nuns in Spokane Break With CMRI
This is interesting. Some nuns in Spokane just broke with the CMRI sedevacantist group and are forming a religious community of their own.
Bishop Skylstad of Spokane by and large never seemed to be very Traditionalist friendly. With the motu proprio just hours away now, I'm wondering if these nuns will be allowed to assist at the Tridentine Mass. This could be a very good thing, but it would be nice for the nuns to have the option of being able to still pray the Traditional Latin Mass.
Bishop Skylstad of Spokane by and large never seemed to be very Traditionalist friendly. With the motu proprio just hours away now, I'm wondering if these nuns will be allowed to assist at the Tridentine Mass. This could be a very good thing, but it would be nice for the nuns to have the option of being able to still pray the Traditional Latin Mass.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Getting Closer
I might be making just one more hardware change with my setup. I'm going to try to use an old Dell Dimension L400c (my very first editor and my first PC in the post-486 era) to play back the MPEG-2 files now. I say this for a few reasons...
- The NEC server that I have is going to need a lot more work than I first anticipated. Not an unreasonable amount of work, but enough that, should I want to use it for Mater Dei Television, it'll push things back even further, which is no longer an option.
- The CenDyne/Real Magic MPEG-2 decoder card will do a few very good things, not the least of which play back a movie full screen through the video out to a TV, which is what I wanted to do all along, and still allow me to manipulate the playlist on the VGA monitor. It also is older technology and was made to run on a slower machine, thus the old Dell. It's not XP compatible, but I don't mind using an old Windows 2000 license hanging around here somewhere.
- It beats buying a new computer right now when I can't afford it and time is of the essence.
I can turn the Dell Precision 420, what was to be the MPEG-2 player, into a Windows Media Encoder of some sort, and probably not have to even reinstall Windows. That way, I'd have everything set and ready to go.
It figures there'd be some last minute thing to deal with. Especially with the motu proprio hours away.
More later, and start praying...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Summorum Pontificum
Summorum Pontificum is the name of the Motu Proprio that will be released on July 7 calling for a greater use of the Tridentine Mass.
When it becomes available, I'll try to put the text to it or link to it up and online. I'm shooting for that to also be the date which the feed will be up. Again, I hope to have it online before I go on vacation...
In the meantime, I'm putting together a computer for a client/friend that's going to be a media box. This is the best PC I've ever put together. Perhaps not the most important, but easily the best; 3.0 GHz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM, and a GeForce 256MB video card, with an NTSC capture card. I'm going to find a nice Media-Center front end on it and have a nice PC. The cool thing is that this will eventually be his backup; the uber-comptuer I'm going to build for him in a few months is going to have HDMI ports, probably Core-Duo processor, similar motherboard, and at least 4GB RAM, with at least a terrabyte of hard drive space. I want to put an HDTV/ATSC card in it too. If this works well, might have to build one up for MDTV as well...
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
When it becomes available, I'll try to put the text to it or link to it up and online. I'm shooting for that to also be the date which the feed will be up. Again, I hope to have it online before I go on vacation...
In the meantime, I'm putting together a computer for a client/friend that's going to be a media box. This is the best PC I've ever put together. Perhaps not the most important, but easily the best; 3.0 GHz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM, and a GeForce 256MB video card, with an NTSC capture card. I'm going to find a nice Media-Center front end on it and have a nice PC. The cool thing is that this will eventually be his backup; the uber-comptuer I'm going to build for him in a few months is going to have HDMI ports, probably Core-Duo processor, similar motherboard, and at least 4GB RAM, with at least a terrabyte of hard drive space. I want to put an HDTV/ATSC card in it too. If this works well, might have to build one up for MDTV as well...
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
FSSP Parish in the Southern Indiana
I knew there was another parish in the southern part of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis that had the Indult Mass, but I had no idea that it was totally an FSSP parish. Sts. Philomena and Cecila Catholic Chuch is all Tridentine, all the time. Looks like there's another possible parish to partner with. There are a few I already have in mind, really; the Basilica down in Covington, KY, Sacred Heart in Cincinnati, and Holy Rosary in Indianapolis are all possibilities at this point. I want to work with all of them in some way shape, or form, even if it's a Rosary or an Angelus.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Motu Proprio Meeting
This came directly from the Vatican Information Service. NOW it's imminent...
MEETING DISCUSSES "MOTU PROPRIO" ON USE JOHN XXIII'S MISSAL
MEETING DISCUSSES "MOTU PROPRIO" ON USE JOHN XXIII'S MISSAL
VATICAN CITY, JUN 28, 2007 (VIS) - Given below is the text of a communique released today by the Holy See Press Office concerning Benedict XVI's forthcoming "Motu Proprio" on the use of the Missal promulgated by Blessed John XXIII in 1962.
"Yesterday afternoon in the Vatican, a meeting was held under the presidency of the Cardinal Secretary of State in which the content and spirit of the Holy Father's forthcoming 'Motu Proprio' on the use of the Missal promulgated by John XXIII in 1962 was explained to representatives from various episcopal conferences. The Holy Father also arrived to greet those present, spending nearly an hour in deep conversation with them.
"The publication of the document - which will be accompanied by an extensive personal letter from the Holy Father to individual bishops - is expected within a few days, once the document itself has been sent to all the bishops with an indication of when it will come into effect."
OP/MOTU PROPRIO/... VIS 070628 (180)
Up All Night...
Once again, I find myself up all night doing some sort of work on a client video, so while it's rendering, I decided to do some Mater Dei Television work in my downtime. Technically, it's not downtime, but seeing the editor is working right now and it doesn't seem to need me for awhile, I can do some other things...
The video feed is still up and going after two days. I saw a little stutter earlier during "The Catholic Hour", but that doesn't seem to have repeated since. I'd say all and all it's doing well. I also but an old 9.1 GB SCSI hard drive into the NEC server, although I don't have it connected up yet. There are a few articles of junk on top of that server that need to go into the trash first, as well as a guitar amp to move, and some VGA F-F connectors to pick up for my KVM switch. Nevertheless, it looks like the encoder is going to be up soon. Looking at the encoder, however, it does seem like it can be done more efficiently. A LOT more efficiently, but it'll have to do until we get something better.
Looks like I pulled some cables on the KVM by mistake. More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
The video feed is still up and going after two days. I saw a little stutter earlier during "The Catholic Hour", but that doesn't seem to have repeated since. I'd say all and all it's doing well. I also but an old 9.1 GB SCSI hard drive into the NEC server, although I don't have it connected up yet. There are a few articles of junk on top of that server that need to go into the trash first, as well as a guitar amp to move, and some VGA F-F connectors to pick up for my KVM switch. Nevertheless, it looks like the encoder is going to be up soon. Looking at the encoder, however, it does seem like it can be done more efficiently. A LOT more efficiently, but it'll have to do until we get something better.
Looks like I pulled some cables on the KVM by mistake. More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
This Just In: Motu Proprio to be Released on July 7
From Gerald over at The Cafeteria is Closed...
"My Austrian friends just emailed me. Kath.net/Die Welt (Klaus Badde) report (my translation:) that the motu proprio liberating the Tridentine Mass for the entire Catholic Church has been given to about 30 bishops from all over the world in the Sala Bologna of the Apostolic Palace by Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone. The bishops had been invited to Rome for that purpose.
At the end of the meeting, in which the motu proprio was introduced together with a letter of explanation by Pope Benedict XVI., Pope Benedict met with the bishops. The document is about three pages long, the accompanying letter about four. From Germany, Cardinal Lehmann (the head of the German bishops conference) had been invited. The circumstances of the procedure make clear that the Pope was very interested to personally inform the bishops, in collegial manner, of the content rather than have them learn about it from the media.
The publication of both documents will take place on July 7th. It emphasizes the unity of the Roman Rite which will consist of an ordinary and an extraordinary form which are supposed to inspire each other. The ordinary/regular form will continue to be the new rite of 1969. The extraordinary form will be the Missal of Bl. John XXIII. of 1962."
Interesting to say the least. This means I need to talk to someone out in California soon. He's not only a diocesan priest who prays the Tridentine Mass, but he's also a video guy like me. And as of July 7, we don't have to have permission to do this stuff anymore (per se).
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
"My Austrian friends just emailed me. Kath.net/Die Welt (Klaus Badde) report (my translation:) that the motu proprio liberating the Tridentine Mass for the entire Catholic Church has been given to about 30 bishops from all over the world in the Sala Bologna of the Apostolic Palace by Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone. The bishops had been invited to Rome for that purpose.
At the end of the meeting, in which the motu proprio was introduced together with a letter of explanation by Pope Benedict XVI., Pope Benedict met with the bishops. The document is about three pages long, the accompanying letter about four. From Germany, Cardinal Lehmann (the head of the German bishops conference) had been invited. The circumstances of the procedure make clear that the Pope was very interested to personally inform the bishops, in collegial manner, of the content rather than have them learn about it from the media.
The publication of both documents will take place on July 7th. It emphasizes the unity of the Roman Rite which will consist of an ordinary and an extraordinary form which are supposed to inspire each other. The ordinary/regular form will continue to be the new rite of 1969. The extraordinary form will be the Missal of Bl. John XXIII. of 1962."
Interesting to say the least. This means I need to talk to someone out in California soon. He's not only a diocesan priest who prays the Tridentine Mass, but he's also a video guy like me. And as of July 7, we don't have to have permission to do this stuff anymore (per se).
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Testing is underway...
Well, the stress testing of the MPEG-2 player is finally underway. I started a playlist last night that runs approximately one hour and put it into a loop. I decided to try VLC Player again, and oddly enough, it worked without any stuttering or freezing. In fact, I've decided that I'm going with it again, at least for the time being, in the MPEG-2 player. I hope to be stress testing it for over the next several days to see how it's going to hold up.
I think the reason it didn't seem to be working properly the first time was that I may have had Windows configured to download and install updates as they became available. This, of course, is problematic. I've now got this configured to be done once a week, when the feed will be taken off-line anyway due to maintenance, like how a regular TV station would operate. As a result, VLC runs nice and smooth right now. The films I'm using with the testing, my first episode of ironically titled "The Catholic Hour" (Total Running Time: 30 min), "Our Lady's Shrine", and "Rome: The Sacred City" among others, so far have looked like I was running these straight off of a DVD player.
Testing will continue, and the next step is building the Windows Media Encoder. If everything goes right, I won't have to use Windows Media Encoder or Windows.
One can hope.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
I think the reason it didn't seem to be working properly the first time was that I may have had Windows configured to download and install updates as they became available. This, of course, is problematic. I've now got this configured to be done once a week, when the feed will be taken off-line anyway due to maintenance, like how a regular TV station would operate. As a result, VLC runs nice and smooth right now. The films I'm using with the testing, my first episode of ironically titled "The Catholic Hour" (Total Running Time: 30 min), "Our Lady's Shrine", and "Rome: The Sacred City" among others, so far have looked like I was running these straight off of a DVD player.
Testing will continue, and the next step is building the Windows Media Encoder. If everything goes right, I won't have to use Windows Media Encoder or Windows.
One can hope.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Monday, June 25, 2007
MPEG-2 Player UP!!!
This should really be titled "A Productive Weekend In Spite of Myself", but that would be way too long...
Here's what went on. This is going to be mostly technical, so if you don't want to be inundated with another geek-post, then feel free to skip this and wait for the next post which will be less geeky in nature.
I spent a lot of time in the office this weekend cleaning it out, and taking my old Dell Precision 420, which used to serve as my main video editor, and turning it into a working MPEG-2 player. It started basically by trying to decide which flavor of linux I was going to use for this, and then I decided to go with Windows instead. You already know that part, since that was the gist of my previous post.
I found out a lot about the nature of AGP cards this weekend. It figures, since the best cards now are PCI-E cards, but if you have to use older technology, then it's good to know these things.
Anywho, here's what happened: A few weeks ago, we went to a garage sale in an eastern suburb of Indianapolis, and I picked up an Nvidia GeForce 6200oc with 256MB RAM onboard. Not a bad deal for ten bucks. I stuck it in my wife's computer a few weeks ago, actually. My editor runs an ATI Radeon 9250, also with 256MB RAM onboard. Last year, someone freecycled to me an ATI Radeon 9600SE with 128MB RAM onboard. The lady who gave it to me said that her kid "didn't like it", so she gave it to me.
Well, I now know why.
I stuck that 9600 in my Dell while building this MPEG-2 player, and after I'd installed the drivers for it and got it to a point where it was ready to go, or so I thought, the video came out black and white. I checked the monitor with one of my cameras. Nope, got color there. Swapped out S-Video cables, but that didn't work either. So I got online and found out that this problem was not unheard of. This kind of frustrated me, so I went ahead swapped it out with the GeForce card that I just had put into the wife's computer. She is only using one monitor, and won't be using the S-Video anytime soon, so it seemed to make sense. When I stuck that GeForce into my Dell, though, all I had to do was reinstall XP and away we went. I'd tried VLC Player to playback source video, but the video looked real choppy. I wound up using Ulead DVD player to play it back, and it looked real nice; not choppy and very stable.
I plan on the official stress test on this tonight and tomorrow (I'm going to get an hour of programming on a loop and see how it looks), but I have every reason to believe that we just took a gigantic step to getting Mater Dei Television on the air. It's not quite the way I wanted to do it, as I want to use a professional video card that will allow output independent of the AGP card (a Blackmagic Intensity HDMI card would be nice), but this will get us going.
The Windows Media Encoder will be next, and I may try it in my NEC server, for which I need an Ultra-Wide SCSI hard drive. I don't need a large one, since I'm just running the encoder, but I need something. Even an adapter which would allow me to use an existing SCSI drive that I already have would work. The downside is that it's an old server; Pentium Pro grade. The upside is that it's a quad-processor and it's got approximately 320MB RAM already installed, and it's the older style RAM, so coming across it via freecycle shouldn't be a problem. It can go upto 4GB RAM, which in this day and age is still high-end, although when this server was built, it was unheard of. This server may wind up running VLC Player to capture and stream video out to Peercast. Ideally, we can still use a linux distribution that will do that, with VideoLinux, Absolute, Slackware, and Dyne:Bolic being at the top of the list.
Sorry for such a long and technical post, but it is good news nevertheless.
One quick program note: I was actually thinking about doing a program on some of the older Church buildings here in Indianapolis. I'm going to run this by some friends of mine to see what they think.
Until next time...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Here's what went on. This is going to be mostly technical, so if you don't want to be inundated with another geek-post, then feel free to skip this and wait for the next post which will be less geeky in nature.
I spent a lot of time in the office this weekend cleaning it out, and taking my old Dell Precision 420, which used to serve as my main video editor, and turning it into a working MPEG-2 player. It started basically by trying to decide which flavor of linux I was going to use for this, and then I decided to go with Windows instead. You already know that part, since that was the gist of my previous post.
I found out a lot about the nature of AGP cards this weekend. It figures, since the best cards now are PCI-E cards, but if you have to use older technology, then it's good to know these things.
Anywho, here's what happened: A few weeks ago, we went to a garage sale in an eastern suburb of Indianapolis, and I picked up an Nvidia GeForce 6200oc with 256MB RAM onboard. Not a bad deal for ten bucks. I stuck it in my wife's computer a few weeks ago, actually. My editor runs an ATI Radeon 9250, also with 256MB RAM onboard. Last year, someone freecycled to me an ATI Radeon 9600SE with 128MB RAM onboard. The lady who gave it to me said that her kid "didn't like it", so she gave it to me.
Well, I now know why.
I stuck that 9600 in my Dell while building this MPEG-2 player, and after I'd installed the drivers for it and got it to a point where it was ready to go, or so I thought, the video came out black and white. I checked the monitor with one of my cameras. Nope, got color there. Swapped out S-Video cables, but that didn't work either. So I got online and found out that this problem was not unheard of. This kind of frustrated me, so I went ahead swapped it out with the GeForce card that I just had put into the wife's computer. She is only using one monitor, and won't be using the S-Video anytime soon, so it seemed to make sense. When I stuck that GeForce into my Dell, though, all I had to do was reinstall XP and away we went. I'd tried VLC Player to playback source video, but the video looked real choppy. I wound up using Ulead DVD player to play it back, and it looked real nice; not choppy and very stable.
I plan on the official stress test on this tonight and tomorrow (I'm going to get an hour of programming on a loop and see how it looks), but I have every reason to believe that we just took a gigantic step to getting Mater Dei Television on the air. It's not quite the way I wanted to do it, as I want to use a professional video card that will allow output independent of the AGP card (a Blackmagic Intensity HDMI card would be nice), but this will get us going.
The Windows Media Encoder will be next, and I may try it in my NEC server, for which I need an Ultra-Wide SCSI hard drive. I don't need a large one, since I'm just running the encoder, but I need something. Even an adapter which would allow me to use an existing SCSI drive that I already have would work. The downside is that it's an old server; Pentium Pro grade. The upside is that it's a quad-processor and it's got approximately 320MB RAM already installed, and it's the older style RAM, so coming across it via freecycle shouldn't be a problem. It can go upto 4GB RAM, which in this day and age is still high-end, although when this server was built, it was unheard of. This server may wind up running VLC Player to capture and stream video out to Peercast. Ideally, we can still use a linux distribution that will do that, with VideoLinux, Absolute, Slackware, and Dyne:Bolic being at the top of the list.
Sorry for such a long and technical post, but it is good news nevertheless.
One quick program note: I was actually thinking about doing a program on some of the older Church buildings here in Indianapolis. I'm going to run this by some friends of mine to see what they think.
Until next time...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Sunday, June 24, 2007
An Epiphany of Sorts...
This morning, I had an epiphany of sorts (thus the title of this entry)...
I came to the conclusion that, while I'd like to use linux in some way, shape or form, it seems like every time I try to use it, at least in the early stages, something goes wrong and it doesn't work right. One installed fine, then unmounted the DVD-ROM drive when you put something in, others installed fine but then were next to impossible to upgrade (aka find the correct software to run MPEG-2), others wouldn't even install all the way. I came to this painful conclusion...
Install Windows.
At least in the playback stage. When I have my MPEG-2 player going, I'm sure I'm going to need linux for the MPEG-TS encoder and perhaps even use it for Windows Media, forgoing Windows in that stage. In this stage, though (the MPEG-2 player), I don't think I was supposed to use linux. Maybe the MPEG-2 decoder card I have wouldn't take it anyway. There's got to be some reason...
We'll find out soon enough; after I tore everything apart to put this desk up in the last week or two, I couldn't get the video monitor to extend my desktop on my editor for some reason. Maybe this monitor is supposed to be what I monitor the MPEG-2 box with.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
I came to the conclusion that, while I'd like to use linux in some way, shape or form, it seems like every time I try to use it, at least in the early stages, something goes wrong and it doesn't work right. One installed fine, then unmounted the DVD-ROM drive when you put something in, others installed fine but then were next to impossible to upgrade (aka find the correct software to run MPEG-2), others wouldn't even install all the way. I came to this painful conclusion...
Install Windows.
At least in the playback stage. When I have my MPEG-2 player going, I'm sure I'm going to need linux for the MPEG-TS encoder and perhaps even use it for Windows Media, forgoing Windows in that stage. In this stage, though (the MPEG-2 player), I don't think I was supposed to use linux. Maybe the MPEG-2 decoder card I have wouldn't take it anyway. There's got to be some reason...
We'll find out soon enough; after I tore everything apart to put this desk up in the last week or two, I couldn't get the video monitor to extend my desktop on my editor for some reason. Maybe this monitor is supposed to be what I monitor the MPEG-2 box with.
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Technical and Production Notes
Since my last update, I've been playing some with Slackware Linux, largely because of it's ability to be configured and it's ability to run multi-processor servers. Yes, I know Windows has been doing that since NT, but this is reasonably current, and of course, free. I also moved the server down into my office last night so I can commence work on on it.
I also pickup my satellite dish today. Please pray that all goes well in the move.
I also have decided that, due to gas prices and whatnot, I really need to start finding out the cool things about our faith that are already close to me, and I've found some good ones. St. Francis Xavier in Vincennes, IN is one (I wish there was a better picture in this link). Back in the day, before the Diocese (and eventually Archdiocese) of Indianapolis was HQed in Indianapolis, it was actually the Diocese of Vincennes. Now, all that territory has since been ceded to ArchIndy and the Diocese of Evansville (and probably quite a few other dioceses, for that matter). This particular parish is of note because it actually is the first parish in the entire state of Indiana, predating every current diocese within the state. Indiana used to be part of the Dioceses of Quebec, Baltimore, and Bardstown, KY before the Diocese of Vincennes was erected with Bishop Simon Brute as the first ordinary. His cause for sainthood is currently being investigated by ArchIndy. In any case, there's an interesting museum that's attached to St. Francis Xavier and it really looks like a good source of footage.
There are other things, too; Society for the Preservation of Roman Catholic Heritage in Dayton, OH and the Chapel in the Meadow down at Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, IN, just to name a couple, but the point is that I should be getting as much footage from around me as I can first, then exhausting that, move on as I can. There are a few Indult parishes to which to travel not far away either, and I can guarantee that shooting footage around them will happen soon. I don't rule out trips to Cincinnati, Covington, KY, or Lexington either. There are plenty of places to get footage for good Traditional Catholic programs within a day's drive from here, and I'm going to make sure I hit each one.
Until then, though, I get to get this server up. Pray that all goes well.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
I also pickup my satellite dish today. Please pray that all goes well in the move.
I also have decided that, due to gas prices and whatnot, I really need to start finding out the cool things about our faith that are already close to me, and I've found some good ones. St. Francis Xavier in Vincennes, IN is one (I wish there was a better picture in this link). Back in the day, before the Diocese (and eventually Archdiocese) of Indianapolis was HQed in Indianapolis, it was actually the Diocese of Vincennes. Now, all that territory has since been ceded to ArchIndy and the Diocese of Evansville (and probably quite a few other dioceses, for that matter). This particular parish is of note because it actually is the first parish in the entire state of Indiana, predating every current diocese within the state. Indiana used to be part of the Dioceses of Quebec, Baltimore, and Bardstown, KY before the Diocese of Vincennes was erected with Bishop Simon Brute as the first ordinary. His cause for sainthood is currently being investigated by ArchIndy. In any case, there's an interesting museum that's attached to St. Francis Xavier and it really looks like a good source of footage.
There are other things, too; Society for the Preservation of Roman Catholic Heritage in Dayton, OH and the Chapel in the Meadow down at Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, IN, just to name a couple, but the point is that I should be getting as much footage from around me as I can first, then exhausting that, move on as I can. There are a few Indult parishes to which to travel not far away either, and I can guarantee that shooting footage around them will happen soon. I don't rule out trips to Cincinnati, Covington, KY, or Lexington either. There are plenty of places to get footage for good Traditional Catholic programs within a day's drive from here, and I'm going to make sure I hit each one.
Until then, though, I get to get this server up. Pray that all goes well.
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Technical Update
I trust all the fathers out there had a good Father's Day. It was an interesting Father's Day from a technical standpoint. I got a satellite dish.
Not one of those trite DSS dishes. I mean a real satellite dish.
What a lot of people don't realize, thanks to the digital satellite and cable providers, is that there is still free unscrambled programming up on "the birds" as TV engineers like to call them. If you get onto eBay and check for "Free To Air DVB", you'll see listings for the equipment pop up, and it's reasonably cheap, too.
There are two main kinds of satellite frequencies, C-Band and Ku-Band. There are some differences in the two, but if you're not a TV guy, these will be of no interest to you. The bottom line is this: Ku-Band Free to Air equipment is cheaper, but the only Catholic TV station you can get on that is TV-TRWAM, which will do you no good unless you speak Polish. C-Band is where the Free to Air signals for both EWTN and Familyland TV both reside, and you can use the same receiver as you can with the KU-Band signal. The caveat is this: You need a big dish.
So I got one. A nine foot Winegard dish from someone from my Freecycle list...
Don't worry - the neighbors have been warned. Never know - perhaps Mater Dei Television can earn a little money on the side in the downlinking business...
In other news, as the office is coming along fantastically now, I started working more on the playlist computer, and I've been playing with a few linux distros to see what they can do. I've decided for the time being I'm going with Fedora Core. That way, I can get used to it and use it as a basis for my very own distro...
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
Not one of those trite DSS dishes. I mean a real satellite dish.
What a lot of people don't realize, thanks to the digital satellite and cable providers, is that there is still free unscrambled programming up on "the birds" as TV engineers like to call them. If you get onto eBay and check for "Free To Air DVB", you'll see listings for the equipment pop up, and it's reasonably cheap, too.
There are two main kinds of satellite frequencies, C-Band and Ku-Band. There are some differences in the two, but if you're not a TV guy, these will be of no interest to you. The bottom line is this: Ku-Band Free to Air equipment is cheaper, but the only Catholic TV station you can get on that is TV-TRWAM, which will do you no good unless you speak Polish. C-Band is where the Free to Air signals for both EWTN and Familyland TV both reside, and you can use the same receiver as you can with the KU-Band signal. The caveat is this: You need a big dish.
So I got one. A nine foot Winegard dish from someone from my Freecycle list...
Don't worry - the neighbors have been warned. Never know - perhaps Mater Dei Television can earn a little money on the side in the downlinking business...
In other news, as the office is coming along fantastically now, I started working more on the playlist computer, and I've been playing with a few linux distros to see what they can do. I've decided for the time being I'm going with Fedora Core. That way, I can get used to it and use it as a basis for my very own distro...
More later...
ICTM,
Chuck, MI
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