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• VP8 Misplaced Plane

  16 octobre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — VP8

  So I’m stubbornly plugging away at my toy VP8 encoder and I managed to produce this gem. See if you can spot the subtle mistake :

  
  
  

  The misplaced color plane resulted from using the luma plane stride where it was not appropriate. I fixed that and now chroma planes are wired to use to the same naive prediction algorithm as the luma plane.

  Also, I fixed the entropy encoder so that end of block conditions are signaled correctly (instead of my original, suboptimal hack to just encode all zeros). I was disappointed to see that this did not result in a major compression improvement. Then again, I’m using the lowest possible quantization settings for this outing, so perhaps this is to be expected.

  Sigh… 4×4 luma prediction is next. Wish me luck.

• 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 ?

• Révision 18522 : Report de r18461 :

  14 septembre 2011, par cedric -

  securite : email_valide() refuse tout ce qui n’est pas une chaine (eviter un full path disclosure sur le preg_match qui suit)