Brim Tme
Me and my horse Brim Time. For those interested in horse breeding (maybe not too many visitors of this site but anyway): Brim Time’s sire is Irco Marco, a successful Swedish show jumper. Irco Marco’s grand-sire in turn was one of the foundation sires of modern Dutch horse breeding, Marco Polo. Brim Time, like his sire and grand-sire, I reluctantly admit, is a somewhat inelegant horse. Olle Kjellander, the National Studmaster at Flyinge at that time, in fact said the first time Irco Marco was presented that he would never license him (for breeding according to the Swedish Warmblood stud book) since “he wasn’t even a sport horse”. Fortunately, he later came to change his mind. Irco Marco came to sire many horses that have competed in the Olympics and on Grand Prix level. What the Marcos lack in size and elegance, they compensate with agility, fearlessness and an extraordinary will to jump.

This site is about software and hardware for sound and video on a PC. Most of the recent blog posts concern my work in the MPC-HC FLOSS project. The goal is to give it the capability to render perfectly smooth video. I also do a fair amount of recording and editing of video in the AVCHD format.

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The domain name and the name of my first video player, the GothPlayer, are related to the Swedish county in which I live, Ostrogothia (Östergötland in Swedish. For details, see Ostrogothia on Wikipedia.) Ostrogothia is by many scholars believed to be the origin of the Goths who sometime before or during the 1:st century A.D. migrated from Scandinavia to today’s Poland and further and in the 3:rd and 4:th centuries ravaged the Roman Empire. (To confuse things, the Ostrogoths are not associated with Ostrogothia but are a group of Goths that emerged several centuries after the exodus of the Goths from Scandinavia.)

Ostrogothia lies in the heart of a land that the historian Jordanes in his The Origin and Deeds of the Goths refers to as Scandza and which he describes thus: “If wolves cross over to these islands when the sea is frozen by reason of the great cold, they are said to lose their sight. Thus the land is not only inhospitable to men but cruel even to wild beasts.”

Jordanes exaggerated. Ostrogothia is in fact a rather pleasant and peaceful place to live for humans and for beasts, like the two specimen on the photo.

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I acknowledge the rights of music artists and the movie industry to a fair compensation for their products. I pay for my Spotify annual subscription and therefore have access to all the music I want in a lawful way. I buy my DVDs and Blu-ray discs and I don’t share movies or music on-line.

I do want to be able to play my music and my movies with a player of my choice though, including my own. I believe this kind of freedom is what drives technological development and therefore ultimately the wealth of our nations.

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The skyline in the heading belongs to San Francisco, one of my previous home towns (and the one with the prettiest skyline). I took the photo during a business trip there in 2009.