Here's some really great news - Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Monument has moved a big step closer to expading and becoming a national park. The Denver Post reports that the Nature Conservancy, with some help from Yale University, has agreed to buy the 97,000-acre ranch adjacent to the dunes. I visited the Great Sand Dunes last summer and I'm very glad to see the plans to go from monument to park take action. I get a lot of mail asking me to donate money to various environmental and wilderness causes, but knowing this is the kind of thing the Nature Conservancy does will probably help me with any future money-giving decisions. Until then, I'm just a poor college student who had fun one day playing in the sand. :)
Effects of Handbrake presets and RF quality settings across AV1, H.265, and H.264
"Fantastic!" Every once in a great while, I dive deep down the rabbit hole of media formats and the codecs 1 that encode and decode them. Sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's audio, and this time it's video. I'm no expert in these things, but rather an enthusiast who (a) likes to create and organize digital media and (b) likes knowing that the formats I'm choosing are going to meet my present and future needs. In the past few months I've been adding Blu-ray movies to my media server. I've relied on H.264/AVC as my video format for a long time (more than a decade, maybe?), but with H.265/HEVC now pretty mainstream and AV1 emerging, I figured it was time to refresh my knowledge and get to know how these different tools might serve me. This is going to be a long post, so I'm going to take a moment here to establish the four considerations I make whenever I'm encoding media, whether it's video, audio, or photos. The four consider...