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• Demo of WebM Running on TI OMAP 4 Processor

  15 octobre 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)

  Texas Instruments has made a video of HD-resolution (1080p) VP8 (WebM) video playing on their new TI OMAP™ 4 processor, in both Android and Ubuntu.

  (If you have a WebM-enabled browser and are enrolled in the YouTube HTML5 beta the video will play in WebM HTML5, otherwise it will play in Flash Player.)

  For more info about the OMAP 4 and the IVA 3 video accelerator that enables low-power HD playback of VP8 on the chip, see the TI web site.

  

• Launch Leech and the History of WMV

  14 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I was combing through my programming archives again and came across an old Perl script called launch-leech.pl. This was a private script I used to maintain for the benefit of myself and a few friends. See, there was this site called Launch.com (URL doesn’t seem to do anything as of this writing but here’s the Wikipedia page). Purchased by Yahoo ! in 2001, Launch still maintained their independent branding. They also carried a lot of music videos, of which I am a huge junkie. launch-leech.pl was the tool I used to download the videos. This was particularly useful since I stubbornly clung to dialup internet access until mid-2004 and it would have been impossible to stream video at any decent quality (though there were 56k streams, so like I said– not possible at any decent quality).

  
  
  

  Technically
  I followed Launch.com for many years. To be honest, I only “followed” in that I figured out where their “latest videos” URL lived and regularly polled it. Each video had either a 6-, 7-, or 8-digit unique ID that could be plugged into the launch-leech.pl script which would then have a conversation with the relevant servers, determine the correct streaming URL with the highest quality, then download and save the URL by handing it off to an external program (first ASFRecorder, though I later switched to mmsclient).

  At one point, I even wrote a crawler that compiled an offline database of all the videos, their IDs and their metadata. I never thought of anything interesting to do with it, though.

  
  
  

  Windows Media Legacy
  During these glory days of leeching, Launch.com streamed using Windows Media. I admit, it’s a bit of a blur now — the site might have used Real or QuickTime, but I was obviously most in tune with the WM side. I remember when I first found the site circa 2000-2001, the videos were in MS MPEG-4v3, and the high quality bitrate was 300 kbits/sec. Eventually, Launch.com would stream WMV7, WMV8, and finally WMV9, with bitrates up to 700 kbits/sec. However, they never broke free of the 320×240 encoding resolution, which was frustrating. When I wasn’t able to notice any substantial difference between 300 and 700 kbits/sec, I felt it might be time to put those extra bits to work on a resolution upgrade.

  At least they were nice enough to re-encode a number of old videos using better codecs and bitrates with each revision, thus prompting me to scan through the site collecting updated video IDs for download.

  
  
  

  Epilogue
  I don’t clearly remember when I stopped visiting Launch.com. Video-wise, the web has been a blur of Flash video ever since about 2006. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time collecting a bunch of music videos in the first half of the decade only to find that pretty much every version of every music video made since the dawn of time is available on demand thanks to YouTube. I have found that this phenomenon manifests in many areas as internet technology marches on.

  The Real Entertainment
  The launch-leech.pl tool represents a recurring pattern for me. I derive as much — if not more — entertainment from creating programs like launch-leech.pl (and implicitly reverse engineering something in the process ; in this case, a website) as I do from the intended entertainment media itself. I seem to have this issue a lot with games, too.

  Is this an issue for anyone else ? Am I the only one who would rather play with the box that a shiny toy comes packaged in ?

• Easy Tricks for Finding WebM Videos in YouTube

  9 août 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)

  Since the WebM project launch, YouTube has been encoding videos uploaded at 720p or higher resolution in the WebM format. Today, the one million most popular videos of any size on YouTube are also available in the WebM format.

  We have instructions on our project site for finding these videos but they require adding a special parameter onto the end of each search query. All of the browsers that support WebM can create search shortcuts with custom parameters, however, so we’ve compiled instructions for making it very simple to search for WebM videos in YouTube.

  Important : First, make sure you have a supported browser and are enrolled in the YouTube HTML5 beta by going to http://youtube.com/html5 and clicking Enter the HTML5 Beta.

  Creating a WebM Search Shortcut

  Firefox 4 Beta :
  

  1. Select Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks. A bookmark manager dialog opens.
  2. In the left column, choose a location for the new bookmark you’re creating. Next, choose Organize > New Bookmark (on MacOS click the gear icon). The new bookmark dialog opens.
  3. In the Name box, type WebM.
  4. In the Location box, type http://youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&webm=1.
  5. In the Keyword box, type webm.
  6. Click Add.

  Google Chrome Early Release Channel :
  

  1. On Windows and Linux, click the Chrome wrench icon in the toolbar and select Options. On MacOS, select Chrome > Preferences.
  2. On the Basics tab, click the Manage button in the Default Search section.
  3. On Windows and Linux, click Add. On MacOS X, click the plus (+) button.
  4. In the Name box, type WebM.
  5. In the Keyword box, type webm.
  6. In the URL box, type http://youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&webm=1.
  7. Click OK.

  Opera 10.60 and later :
  

  1. Go to http://youtube.com.
  2. Right-click in the YouTube search box at the top of the page and select Create Search. On MacOS, use Ctrl+click if you don’t a secondary mouse button enabled.
  3. In the Name box, type WebM.
  4. In the Keyword box, type webm.
  5. In the Address box, type http://youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&webm=1.
  6. Click OK.

  
  

  
  Now you’re ready to search. In the location box of the browser, type webm monster trucks. The YouTube search results page will open with a selection of monster truck videos encoded in the WebM format. When watching a video, look for the HTML5 WebM indicator in the player control bar.

  If you can’t find WebM videos it is most likely a browser cookie problem. Your enrollment in the YouTube HTML5 beta test is stored in a browser cookie (not in your YouTube or Google account), and that cookie can expire. Visit http://youtube.com/html5 and opt-in again to re-set the cookie.

  Directly Accessing WebM Videos by URL

  To find out if any YouTube video is available in WebM, simply add &html5=True (make sure True is capitalized) to the end of the video URL. If there is a WebM version of the video, it will open instead of the Flash version. For example :
  

  • Flash version : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6gFokvOr0
  • WebM version : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6gFokvOr0&html5=True