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Rage

is an overnight, Australian, music video show that's been running since 1987. No annoying hosts, just interesting selections of videos. Always had a low-budget DIY feel. You could make a video, put it on a Betamax tape, and get it played some time Friday night.

The best part is the guest programmers; a band or artist of whatever comes in and play whatever videos they want for a few hours on Saturday nights. Then they schedule a bunch of their videos after. Used to love taping them as a teen, hoping the three-hour limit would catch everything good.

Great to watch after a night out. Would play a game where you say if none of the next three videos are any good you'd go to bed.

Memories

  • Seeing the video for Loverman with the vague Memory that Nick Cave was Australian, and being surprised about it and how wild it was.
  • A live version of a Bee Gees song that was sung so badly by Barry it had an amazing sweaty punk atmosphere. In my memory it was at a festival with a big screen behind, but I've found a 1976 TV special with the same white outfits I remember and sweaty, straining falsetto that is probably it. Might be conflating it with the 1988 Nelson Mandela concert. Might be this '99 one too—
  • Seeing, and instantly falling in love with, Like an Eagle by Dennis Parker in 2012(?)
  • Plus all those anti-memories: videos I saw once, was fascinated by, and never saw again.

DIY Rage

Always wanted to be a guest programmer on Rage when I was a teen, wanted to look through that big book of music videos.

Easiest way to grab videos is to use Yt-dlp to download things from Youtube.

Credits

I created a subtitle file (.ass) that mimics the artist/titles credits Rage puts on videos:

music-video-credit.ass
[Script Info]
Title: Default Aegisub file
ScriptType: v4.00+
WrapStyle: 0
ScaledBorderAndShadow: yes
YCbCr Matrix: TV.601
; 1:1
PlayResX: 480
; 4:3
PlayResX: 640
; 3:2
PlayResX: 720
; 5:3
PlayResX: 800
; 5:4
PlayResX: 384
; 16:9 (853.33)
PlayResX: 853
PlayResY: 480
 
[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Rage-artist,Eurostile,30,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,-1,0,0,0,100,170,0,0,1,0.5,4,1,60,10,80,1
Style: Rage-title,Eurostile,30,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,-1,0,0,0,100,130,0,0,1,	0.5,4,1,60,10,35,1
 
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:15.00,0:00:25.00,Rage-artist,,0,0,0,,ARTIST
Dialogue: 0,0:00:15.00,0:00:25.00,Rage-title,,0,0,0,,Title

It's not perfect, but close enough for me. Wish I could get the line spacing closer :(
I was trying to avoid that dopey .ass file extension, but I needed to use it to mess with the font dimensions a bit. I should've used a better base resolution, but oh well.

At Home

You could make a big playlist in VLC, I guess. But I've been slowly setting up Kodi (which I already use for watching movies) as a music video jukebox kinda thing. This way you can add tags and genres and things.

See: kodi#music_video

With Kodi you'll need to install any fonts you want to use. In my case I had to put them in /usr/share/fonts. And make sure you're not overriding ssa/ass subtitle fonts in Settings>Player Settings/Language/Override ASS / SSA subtitles fonts
In newer versions of Kodi you can put the fonts in the ~/.kodi/media/Fonts directory, I believe. Current Kodi versions support other font types, but I had to use TTF.

Steaming

I haven't tried this (yet), just noting some useful software / methods.

Basic process is:

  1. Have a source of videos. Could be fixed, could change over time.
  2. Use something to send the output somewhere. Could be capturing the screen, could be sending a stream of files.
  3. Have somewhere to send it. Either host yourself, or use something like Twitch, Peertube, or OwnCast.
  • Make a playlist in something like VLC, use OBS to capture, send to

Trivia

  • The font use for the logo is maybe an edit of 'American Typewriter'?: Anyone know this font? It is from Rage on ABC in Australia.. Info I got from the ABC is just that it's a custom font.
  • I also asked about the font used for the captions, and was told that it's Eurostile. I've ended up using Eurostile round, bolded it, and narrowed it a little. The rounded versions adds a little softness that fits better with my analogue-tinged memories.actually in Kodi it's way too bold, so switch back to the not-round version. Regular Eurostile seems to be used in the credits though, without any condensing.

See Also

rage.txt · Last modified: 2023/11/29 03:14 by rjt