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

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

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

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

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

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

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