The Hunt for a 25 Year Old Video

After getting my hands on a 1996 Sweet Home High School yearbook (courtesy of EBay seller quasimodo) I was able to get some names and start my journey to finding a 1996 Band Trip Video for the Disney Magic Music Days.

If memory serves me correctly the original Guidance Counselor that filmed this trip was John Daken:

High School Yearbook / Staff

I’ve also got the Wind Ensemble and Concert Band, a plethora of names of people to track down and figure out if they have a some copy of the original video.

So, my first goal is to get all these names into a Google Spreadsheet and scan social media and old address books and track everyone down.

Bon voyage à moi!

The Hunt for a 20 Year Old Video [6 Years Ago…]

Editors note: I wrote this back on 7 February 2015

The 1995-1996 school year I was a freshman at Sweet Home High School[a] and had participated in a trip to Walt Disney World to participate in a Band Performance with my peers (Disney Magic Music Days). This entire event, from the loading of the busses to the trip from Buffalo, New York to our destination and back had been recorded on an 8-hour EP video tape.

I had originally possessed this specific video tape as a teenager. Over the course of time, however, I had lost this amazing heirloom as I’m sure a lot of other have. I’m sure that there is a copy of this somewhere that I can acquire so I can digitize it and be able to enjoy it though the future times.

This iswas my tiny blog on my progress in locating this by working back 20 years in my brain.

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How I made Plex work for me

As I’ve written before, I run a Plex Media Server at my home, and have run many different configurations of set ups for almost 4 years. We originally ran the client off of our XBox 360 until the App was obsoleted, and now we enjoy it on desktops, mobiles, and on our Samsung TV, delivering high-quality content to our family.

Our current Plex Media Server is run on a 4-core/4GB laptop with an external USB-attached 6TB hard drive complete with a library of 1708 Movies and 111 TV Shows. It’s not an expensive set up and has paid itself off time and time again.

For the longest time i’ve used plex.tv to access my Plex Media Server remotely, and painfully have had to endure poor quality streaming because I wasn’t really aware about how Plex works behind the scenes. After some time I’ve learned the “why” and the “repairs” to be able to take my remote Plex Viewing up a notch.

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Rylunn Lloyd Charles Thompson, b.16/Jan/2003, d.1/Mar/2021

Rylunn Lloyd Charles Thompson “Ry”, 18, of Jamestown, New York passed away unexpectedly on March 1, 2021. He was born on January 16th, 2003 the son of Michael and Lindsey Thompson in Jamestown, New York.

Rylunn was a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan. He ran track, enjoyed skate boarding, wrestling and was an excellent swimmer and diver. Rylunn adored his sisters and was the best big brother we could’ve asked for. He will forever be their guardian angel.

Rylunn survived by His mother, Lindsey Thompson of Erie Pennsylvania, his father, Michael Thompson of Jamestown, New York, his two sisters, Kiela Rayne and Jade Willow both of Jamestown, New York, his grandma Mary Shaffer and his nana Mary Lou Rodgers both of Jamestown, New York, his paternal grandmother, Debra Everson of Batavia, New York, His aunts and uncles, Peter Nalbone of Jamestown, New York, Jennifer Cejka of Amherst, New York, Shane Thompson of Erie Pennsylvania, Marcy Fanale and Cindy Rodgers, both of Jamestown, New York and Charles Rodgers III of Washington State. He also survived by many great aunts, great uncles, cousins, friends and his lifelong baby-sitter and friend, Nancy McCool.

He was preceded in death by his maternal grandfather Charles Rodgers Jr., his paternal grandfather Donald Thompson and his papa Grant Everson.

Arrangements entrusted to Hubert Funeral Home.

Source: https://hubertfuneralhome.com/tribute/details/1249/Rylunn-Thompson/obituary.html

Smaller mkv with ffmpeg

When you run a Plex Media Server you know that family and friends ask for specific content to be placed on it so they can watch it. It comes down that a “popular” series just finished up all 9 of their episodes and the wanted it to exist on our Plex. I was able to find the asked content, but was a bit surprised when the video content was a spectacular 1080p but the audio content defaulted to Brazilian Portuguese.

Lucky for me there was an English audio stream as well, but I felt it annoying that if I wanted to start watching this and have to swap to the secondary audio track every time. With the power of ffmpeg[static] and a couple smart command-line parameters I was able to re-make my videos with English as the default language and cut out all the unnecessary data.

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