Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes

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• Bye Bye FATE Machine

  4 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server

  This is the computer that performed the lion’s share of FATE cycles for the past 1.5 years before Mans put a new continuous integration system into service. I’ve now decided to let the machine go. I can’t get over how odd this feels since this thing is technically the best machine I own.

  
  
  

  It’s a small form factor Shuttle PC (SD37P2 v2); Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz; 2 GB RAM; 400 GB SATA HD; equipped with the only consistently functional optical drive in my house (uh oh). I used it as my primary desktop from March 2007 – November 2008, at which point I repurposed it for FATE cycles.

  As mentioned, the craziest part is that this is technically the best computer in my house. My new EeePC 1201PN isn’t at quite the same level; my old EeePC can’t touch it, of course; the Mac Mini has a little more RAM but doesn’t stack up in nearly all other areas. But the Shuttle just isn’t seeing that much use since the usurpation. I had it running automated backup duty for multimedia.cx but that’s easy enough to move to another, lower-powered system.

  Maybe the prognosticators are correct and the PC industry has matured to the point where raw computing power simply doesn’t matter anymore. I fancy myself as someone who knows how to put CPU power to work but even I don’t know what to do with the computing capacity I purchased over 3 years ago.

  Where will the Shuttle go? A good home, I trust– I know a family that just arrived in the country and could use a computer.

• Linux Media Player Survey Circa 2001

  2 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Here’s a document I scavenged from my archives. It was dated September 1, 2001 and I now publish it 9 years later. It serves as sort of a time capsule for the state of media player programs at the time. Looking back on this list, I can’t understand why I couldn’t find MPlayer while I was conducting this survey, especially since MPlayer is the project I eventually started to work for a few months after writing this piece.

  For a little context, I had been studying multimedia concepts and tech for a year and was itching to get my hands dirty with practical multimedia coding. But I wanted to tackle what I perceived as unsolved problems– like playback of proprietary codecs. I didn’t want to have to build a new media playback framework just to start working on my problems. So I surveyed the players available to see which ones I could plug into and use as a testbed for implementing new decoders.

  Regarding Real Player, I wrote: “We’re trying to move away from the proprietary, closed-source “solutions”. Heh. Was I really an insufferable open source idealist back in the day?

  Anyway, here’s the text with some Where are they now? commentary [in brackets]:

  ---

  Towards an All-Inclusive Media Playing Solution for Linux

  I don’t feel that the media playing solutions for Linux set their sights high enough, even though they do tend to be quite ambitious.

  I want to create a media player for Linux that can open a file, figure out what type of file it is (AVI, MOV, etc.), determine the compression algorithms used to encode the audio and video chunks inside (MPEG, Cinepak, Sorenson, etc.) and replay the file using the best audio, video, and CPU facilities available on the computer.

  Video and audio playback is a solved problem on Linux; I don’t wish to solve that problem again. The problem that isn’t solved is reliance on proprietary multimedia solutions through some kind of WINE-like layer in order to decode compressed multimedia files.

  Survey of Linux solutions for decoding proprietary multimedia
  updated 2001-09-01

  AVI Player for XMMS
  This is based on Avifile. All the same advantages and limitations apply.
  [Top Google hit is a Freshmeat page that doesn't indicate activity since 2001-2002.]

  Avifile
  This player does a great job at taking apart AVI and ASF files and then feeding the compressed chunks of multimedia data through to the binary Win32 decoders.

  The program is written in C++ and I’m not very good at interpreting that kind of code. But I’m learning all over again. Examining the object hierarchy, it appears that the designers had the foresight to include native support for decoders that are compiled into the program from source code. However, closer examination reveals that there is support for ONE source decoder and that’s the “decoder” for uncompressed data. Still, I tried to manipulate this routine to accept and decode data from other codecs but no dice. It’s really confounding. The program always crashes when I feed non-uncompressed data through the source decoder.
  [Lives at http://avifile.sourceforge.net/; not updated since 2006.]

  Real Player
  There’s not much to do with this since it is closed source and proprietary. Even though there is a plugin architecture, that’s not satisfactory. We’re trying to move away from the proprietary, closed-source “solutions”.
  [Still kickin' with version 11.]

  XAnim
  This is a well-established Unix media player. To his credit, the author does as well as he can with the resources he has. In other words, he supports the non-proprietary video codecs well, and even has support for some proprietary video codecs through binary-only decoders.

  The source code is extremely difficult to work with as the author chose to use the X coding format which I’ve never seen used anywhere else except for X header files. The infrastructure for extending the program and supporting other codecs and file formats is there, I suppose, but I would have to wrap my head around the coding style. Maybe I can learn to work past that. The other thing that bothers me about this program is the decoding approach: It seems that each video decoder includes routines to decompress the multimedia data into every conceivable RGB and YUV output format. This seems backwards to me; it seems better to have one decoder function that decodes the data into its native format it was compressed from (e.g., YV12 for MPEG data) and then pass that data to another layer of the program that’s in charge of presenting the data and possibly converting it if necessary. This layer would encompass highly-optimized software conversion routines including special CPU-specific instructions (e.g., MMX and SSE) and eliminate the need to place those routines in lots of other routines. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
  [This one was pretty much dead before I made this survey, the most recent update being in 1999. Still, we owe it much respect as the granddaddy of Unix multimedia playback programs.]

  Xine
  This seems like a promising program. It was originally designed to play MPEGs from DVDs. It can also play MPEG files on a hard drive and utilizes the Xv extensions for hardware YUV playback. It’s also supposed to play AVI files using the same technique as Avifile but I have never, ever gotten it to work. If an AVI file has both video and sound, the binary video decoder can’t decode any frames. If the AVI file has video and no sound, the program gets confused and crashes, as far as I can tell.

  Still, it’s promising, and I’ve been trying to work around these crashes. It doesn’t yet have the type of modularization I’d like to see. Right now, it tailored to suit MPEG playback and AVI playback is an afterthought. Still, it appears to have a generalized interface for dropping in new file demultiplexers.

  I tried to extend the program for supporting source decoders by rewriting w32codec.c from scratch. I’m not having a smooth time of it so far. I’m able to perform some manipulations on the output window. However, I can’t get the program to deal with an RGB image format. It has trouble allocating an RGB surface with XvShmCreateImage(). This isn’t suprising, per my limited knowledge of X which is that Xv applies to YUV images, but it could also apply to RGB images as well. Anyway, the program should be able to fall back on regular RGB pixmaps if that Xv call fails.

  Right now, this program is looking the most promising. It will take some work to extend the underlying infrastructure, but it seems doable since I know C quite well and can understand the flow of this program, as opposed to Avifile and its C++. The C code also compiles about 10 times faster.
  [My home project for many years after a brief flirtation with MPlayer. It is still alive; its latest release was just a month ago.]

  XMovie
  This library is a Quicktime movie player. I haven’t looked at it too extensively yet, but I do remember looking at it at one point and reading the documentation that said it doesn’t support key frames. Still, I should examine it again since they released a new version recently.
  [Heroine Virtual still puts out some software but XMovie has not been updated since 2005.]

  XMPS
  This program compiles for me, but doesn’t do much else. It can play an MP3 file. I have been able to get MPEG movies to play through it, but it refuses to show the full video frame, constricting it to a small window (obviously a bug).
  [This project is hosted on SourceForge and is listed with a registration date of 2003, well after this survey was made. So the project obviously lived elsewhere in 2001. Meanwhile, it doesn't look like any files ever made it to SF for hosting.]

  XTheater
  I can’t even get this program to compile. It’s supposed to be an MPEG player based on SMPEG. As such, it probably doesn’t hold much promise for being easily extended into a general media player.
  [Last updated in 2002.]

  GMerlin
  I can’t get this to compile yet. I have a bug report in to the dev group.
  [Updated consistently in the last 9 years. Last update was in February of this year. I can't find any record of my bug report, though.]

• 2 GB Should Be Enough For Me

  31 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  My new EeePC 1201PN netbook has 2 GB of RAM. Call me shortsighted but I feel like “that ought to be enough for me”. I’m not trying to claim that it ought to be enough for everyone. I am, however, questioning the utility of swap space for those skilled in the art of computing.

  
  
  Technology marches on: This ancient 128 MB RAM module is larger than my digital camera’s battery charger… and I just realized that comparison doesn’t make any sense
  

  Does anyone else have this issue? It has gotten to the point where I deliberately disable swap partitions on Linux desktops I’m using ('swapoff -a'), and try not to allocate a swap partition during install time. I’m encountering Linux installers that seem to be making it tougher to do this, essentially pleading with you to create a swap partition– “Seriously, you might need 8 total gigabytes of virtual memory one day.” I’m of the opinion that if 2 GB of physical memory isn’t enough for my normal operation, I might need to re-examine my processes.

  In the course of my normal computer usage (which is definitely not normal by the standard of a normal computer user), swap space is just another way for the software to screw things up behind the scenes. In this case, the mistake is performance-related as the software makes poor decisions about what needs to be kept in RAM.

  And then there are the netbook-oriented Linux distributions that insisted upon setting aside as swap 1/2 gigabyte of the already constrained 4 gigabytes of my Eee PC 701′s on-board flash memory, never offering the choice to opt out of swap space during installation. Earmarking flash memory for swap space is generally regarded as exceptionally poor form. To be fair, I don’t know that SSD has been all that prevalent in netbooks since the very earliest units in the netbook epoch.

  Am I alone in this? Does anyone else prefer to keep all of their memory physical in this day and age?

• I Really Like My New EeePC

  29 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Fair warning: I’m just going to use this post to blather disconnectedly about a new-ish toy.

  I really like my new EeePC. I was rather enamored with the original EeePC 701 from late 2007, a little box with a tiny 7″ screen that is credited with kicking off the netbook revolution. Since then, Asus has created about a hundred new EeePC models.

  Since I’m spending so much time on a train these days, I finally took the plunge to get a better netbook. I decided to stay loyal to Asus and their Eee lineage and got the highest end EeePC they presently offer (which was still under US$500)– the EeePC 1201PN. The ’12′ in the model number represents a 12″ screen size and the rest of the specs are commensurately as large. Indeed, it sort of blurs the line between netbook and full-blown laptop.

  
  
  

  Incidentally, after I placed the order for the 1201PN nearly 2 months ago, and I mean the very literal next moment, this Engadget headline came across announcing the EeePC 1215N. My new high-end (such as it is) computer purchase was immediately obsoleted; I thought that only happened in parody. (As of this writing, the 1215N still doesn’t appear to be shipping, though.)

  It’s a sore point among Linux aficionados that Linux was used to help kickstart the netbook trend but that now it’s pretty much impossible to find Linux pre-installed on a netbook. So it is in this case. This 1201PN comes with Windows 7 Home Premium installed. This is a notable differentiator from most netbooks which only have Windows 7 Home Starter, a.k.a., the Windows 7 version so crippled that it doesn’t even allow the user to change the background image.

  I wished to preserve the Windows 7 installation (you never know when it will come in handy) and dual boot Linux. I thought I would have to use the Windows partition tool to divide work some magic. Fortunately, the default installation already carved the 250 GB HD in half; I was able to reformat the second partition and install Linux. The details are a little blurry, but I’m pretty sure one of those external USB optical drives shown in my last post actually performed successfully for this task. Lucky break.

  
  
  The EeePC 1201PN, EeePC 701, Belco Alpha-400, and even a comparatively gargantuan Sony Vaio full laptop– all of the portable computers in the household
  

  So I got Ubuntu 10.04 Linux installed in short order. This feels like something of a homecoming for me. You see, I used Linux full-time at home from 1999-2006. In 2007, I switched to using Windows XP full-time, mostly because my home use-case switched to playing a lot of old, bad computer games. By the end of 2008, I had transitioned to using the Mac Mini that I had originally purchased earlier that year for running FATE cycles. That Mac served as my main home computer until I purchased the 1201PN 2 months ago.

  Mostly, I have this overriding desire for computers to just work, at least in their basic functions. And that’s why I’m so roundly impressed with the way Linux handles right out of the box. Nearly everything on the 1201PN works in Linux. The video, the audio, the wireless networking, the webcam, it all works out of the box. I had to do the extra installation step to get the binary nVidia drivers installed but even that’s relatively seamless, especially compared to “the way things used to be” (drop to a prompt, run some binary installer from the prompt as root, watch it fail in arcane ways because the thing is only certified to run on one version of one Linux distribution). The 1201PN, with its nVidia Ion2 graphics, is able to drive both its own 1366×768 screen simultaneously with an external monitor running at up on 2560×1600.

  The only weird hiccup in the whole process was that I had a little trouble with the special volume keys on the keyboard (specifically, the volume up/down/mute keys didn’t do anything). But I quickly learned that I had to install some package related to ACPI and they magically started to do the right thing. Now I get to encounter the Linux Flash Player bug where modifying volume via those special keys forces fullscreen mode to exit. Adobe really should fix that.

  Also, trackpad multitouch gestures don’t work right away. Based on my reading, it is possible to set those up in Linux. But it’s largely a preference thing– I don’t care much for multitouch. This creates a disparity when I use Windows 7 on the 1201PN which is configured per default to use multitouch.

  
  
  The same 4 laptops stacked up
  

  So, in short, I’m really happy with this little machine. Traditionally, I have had absolutely no affinity for laptops/notebooks/portable computers at all even if everyone around was always completely enamored with the devices. What changed for me? Well for starters, as a long-time Linux user, I was used to having to invest in very specific, carefully-researched hardware lest I not be able to use it under the Linux OS. This was always a major problem in the laptop field which typically reign supreme in custom, proprietary hardware components. These days, not so much, and these netbooks seem to contain well-supported hardware. Then there’s the fact that laptops always cost so much more than similarly capable desktop systems and that I had no real reason for taking a computer with me when I left home. So my use case changed, as did the price point for relatively low-power laptops/netbooks.

  Data I/O geek note: The 1201PN is capable of wireless-N networking — as many netbooks seem to have — but only 100 Mbit ethernet. I wondered why it didn’t have gigabit ethernet. Then I remembered that 100 Mbit ethernet provides 11-11.5 Mbytes/sec of transfer speed which, in my empirical experience, is approximately the maximum write speed of a 5400 RPM hard drive– which is what the 1201PN possesses.

• Optical Drive Value Proposition

  28 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I have the absolute worst luck in the optical drive department. Ever since I started building my own computers in 1995 — close to the beginning of the CD-ROM epoch — I have burned through a staggering number of optical drives. Seriously, especially in the time period between about 1995-1998, I was going through a new drive every 4-6 months or so. This was also during that CD-ROM speed race where the the drive packages kept advertising loftier ‘X’ speed ratings. I didn’t play a lot of CD-ROM games during that timeframe, though I did listen to quite a few audio CDs through the computer.

  
  
  

  I use “optical drive” as a general term to describe CD-ROM drives, CD-R/RW drives, DVD-ROM drives, DVD-R/RW drives, and drives capable of doing any combination of reading and writing CDs and DVDs. In my observation, optical media seems to be falling out of favor somewhat, giving way to online digital distribution for things like games and software, as well as flash drives and external hard drives vs. recordable or rewritable media for backup and sneakernet duty. Somewhere along the line, I started to buy computers that didn’t even have optical drives. That’s why I have purchased at least 2 external USB drives (seen in the picture above). I don’t have much confidence that either works correctly. My main desktop until recently, a Mac Mini, has an internal optical drive that grew flaky and unreliable a few months after the unit was purchased.

  I just have really rotten luck with optical drives. The most reliable drive in my house is the one on the headless machine that, until recently, was the main workhorse on the FATE farm. The eject switch didn’t work correctly so I have to log in remotely, 'sudo eject', walk to the other room, pop in the disc, walk back to the other room, and work with the disc.

  Maybe optical media is on its way out, but I still have many hundreds of CD-ROMs. Perhaps I should move forward on this brainstorm to archive all of my optical discs on hard drives (and then think of some data mining experiments, just for the academic appeal), before it’s too late; optical discs don’t last forever.

  So if I needed a good optical drive, what should I consider? I’ve always been the type to go cheap, I admit. Many of my optical drives were on the lower end of the cost spectrum, which might have played some role in their rapid replacement. However, I’m not sold on the idea that I’m getting quality just because I’m paying a higher price. That LG unit at the top of the pile up there was relatively pricey and still didn’t fare well in the long (or even medium) term.

  Come to think of it, I used to have a ridiculous stockpile of castoff (but somehow still functional) optical drives. So many, in fact, that in 2004 I had a full size PC tower that I filled with 4 working drives, just because I could. Okay, I admit that there was a period where I had some reliable drives.

  That might be an idea, actually– throw together such a computer for heavy duty archival purposes. I visited Weird Stuff Warehouse today (needed some PC100 RAM for an old machine and they came through) and I think I could put together such a box rather cheaply.

  It’s a dirty job, but… well, you know the rest.