About the site and the videos

(i.e. patting myself on the back ;-)

About the website

HTML

It´s W3C conform. Meaning it uses only valid HTML. Thus it won´t work as it should when using mediocre browsers as MS Internet Explorer (6, that is. 7 is quite OK, took them only several years anyway).
I say this so that you understand why it may look different in IE than, for example, in Firefox. IE doesn´t support half of CSS2, which is an important part of my site. I will try to fix it, but there are limits to my efforts. Last time I tried for about an hour to fix some design issues with IE, but had no luck.
Thus, my recommendation is to use FireFox. I did the switch some time ago(namely when I found that many useful features of CSS(2) aren´t supported by IE - didn´t have any serious troubles since then. Once you´re used to the different design, everything´s fine.).
Right now, I´m using HTML 4.01 Strict - sooner or later I´ll upgrade to XHTML 1.1 . Hopefully your browser can handle it. I´m not sure IE can, since it can´t even do CSS2 - of course, CSS2 is mere 6 years old, so...

As a side note, I´m also using SSI, which means that I don´t have to edit one huge file, but several small files that are combined into one - server-side, so that the client(i.e. your browser) doesn´t know of it. That´s the reason the files end with Shtml, btw.
It makes maintaining the site alot easier, and I don´t have to use junk like frames.
As you perhaps have noticed, no link on my site will spawn a new window. I did that for several reasons - for one, it´s against the STRICT standard, for another, the viewer should be able to decide wether to open in a new window/tab or not. (Also, since I´m using FireFox, it´s easier to just use the middle button to spawn links in new tabs.)

The name

As you know, my site´s called "SuvwI' van bom"(though I refer to it as "my site" ;-). The name is historical by now, from way back when all it featured was indeed the klingon anthem.
By now, several other videos have accompanied it, together with a program(The Klingon Language Lab Light, a size-reduced version of KLL from KCD).
Even though the content may change, I intend on keeping the name - for one, it´s only a name, for another it´s nice, IMO.

The content

New content is added once in a while, recently most updates were either design-based, or for the tlhIngan mu'tay, the vocabulary.
Other videos may follow, especially remakes of those already available - I now have a better source and am working(yes, really, even though I always keep saying it...) to polish them enough to make ´em useable. The main problem is that they´re either not smooth enough, or too smooth. Unfortunately, too much detail will hinder compression - meaning you´d have to download huge files, which you surely don´t want...

Most content on my page comes exclusively from KCD, however, I think about adding other klingon-related videos as well. Cuts from the movies and such.
Recently I´ve acquired a copy of a comic entirely in Klingon - I already uploaded a scan of an advertisement found in it - for be'yula Qe'.
Once I´m done, I´ll add a complete scan of the comic. If you like it, don´t hesitate to BUY it. It´s not supposed to be a replacement of the real thing(not that it could). Neither are the videos a replacement of the game, buy it, if you have the chance. It´s well worth the price, IMO.

The layout

Well, it´s rather simple, I grant that. However, I did put much thought into it. My site´s not supposed to be a playground, it´s not something to look at, it´s mostly for downloads.
That´s the main reason why almost all content is put into one single page - even though it increases loading time, it also means you don´t have to click through numerous pages to get to the files. I think it´s a good trade-off. Besides, the site´s made to be loaded fast - every picture has predefined dimensions, so that your browser will be able to display the site while pictures are loaded.
I tried to make the entire page as dynamic as possible - so that it should fit any screen resolution. If not, feel free to drop me a line. I´ll try to correct it, if possible.

About the videos

How I got them

As you know, most of the videos are from the game Star Trek: Klingon. Once I played it, I had the desire to do something with it - fortunately, the video files were in AVI format, a format I knew and had some experience with.
The videos use a rather rare CoDec, called DUCK Truemotion. I have searched for long to find it, and didn´t find it to this day.
Fortunately, someone told me where to get it ;-)
Once I had it, the first thing I did(after installing it) was to try it. It worked.
The audio streams were encoding using a seemingly proprietery DUCK format as well, DK3 it´s called. It turned out to be no more than ADPCM with some bits shifted, though. A simple program was able to fix that, so that I could include audio as well.
Since then, I´ve been busy extracting clips from the game, creating downloadable versions. My first videos are rather ugly, mostly because I used the PC version, which uses badly treated videos, dithered(color-reduced) and squished to death(one-side resize). All new clips are taken from the Mac-Version, which seems to feature the unprocessed(with the exception of dithering) videos, thus looking much better. The only exception are the videos of Gowron, from the mu'tay - there is no difference between PC and MAC version, aside frome the container used(AVI for PC, MOV for Mac. Same codec, though, no difference in video).

What I did with them

Although the Mac-version has far better graphics, it´s still suffering from structured dithering - a process where colors are reduced in a structed way, kinda like overlaying the picture with a grid, to reduce the number of colors(think of a billboard - single dots making up colors that didn´t exist before).
The color reduction is no problem, but the grid is - for one it´s ugly to look at, for another it seriously hinders compression.
A test showed that an unprocessed video, compared with an oversmoothed one, took twice as much size.
I have yet to find the best way to eliminate as much of the grid, without destroying the details. It´ll never look really good, but I hope to make it better than it´s now. There´ll be serious loss of detail, though.
Maybe Paramount is kind enough to send me the master tapes ;-)

Tools for editing

At first I only used VirtualDub, though recently I started to use AviSynth as well, since it offers more video processing options.
For encoding and cutting, though, I still use VDub. It´s simply easier to do with a nice GUI ;-) I even do some filterin with VDub - as usual, one tool alone isn´t as good as two together. I´d like to put up a list of filters I used, but since I haven´t found the best combination yet, I can´t. You can contact me and I´ll send you a list of filters I´m using.

Codec and Container

Unless noted otherwise, all videos are encoded using DivX for video and MP3 for audio.
Container-wise, I´m currently doing a balance-act - I´m creating AVI files as well as MKV files.
MKV, or Matroska, is my favorite, for reasons listed on my Matroska page. Shortly put, MKV is more versatile than AVI.
However, for those still using AVI, I always create a version as well - usually it´s lower quality, because I hardsub it(that is, the subtitle text becomes part of the video - and is encoded with it, causing encoding artifacts). The MKV files contain a separate subtitle stream, as well as any non-standard font required to view them(for example the Klingon IPA Font.
I´ll continue to create AVI files for a long time, but I won´t promise it´ll be forever. The MKV files usually are smaller, even, so there is no reason not to use it.


Ok, that´s all. Still here? Got nothing to do, eh? ;-)
Any recommendations or wishes?.