Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (12395)

• Elacarte Presto Tablets

  14 mars 2013, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I visited an Applebee’s restaurant this past weekend. The first thing I spied was a family at a table with what looked like a 7-inch tablet. It’s not an uncommon sight. However, as I moved through the restaurant, I noticed that every single table was equipped with such a tablet. It looked like this :

  
  
  

  For a computer nerd like me, you could probably guess that I was be far more interested in this gadget than the cuisine. The thing said “Presto” on the front and “Elacarte” on the back. Putting this together, we get the website of Elacarte, the purveyors of this restaurant tablet technology. Months after the iPad was released on 2010, I remember stories about high-end restaurants showing their wine list via iPads. This tablet goes well beyond that.

  How was it ? Well, confusing, mostly. The hostess told us we could order through the tablet or through her. Since we already knew what we wanted, she just manually took our order and presumably entered it into the system. So, right away, the question is : Do we order through a human or through a computer ? Or a combination ? Do we have to use the tablet if we don’t want to ?

  Hardware
  When picking up the tablet, it’s hard not to notice that it is very heavy. At first, I suspected that it was deliberately weighted down as some minor attempt at an anti-theft measure. But then I remembered what I know about power budgets of phones and tablets– powering the screen accounts for much of the battery usage. I realized that this device needs to drive the screen for about 14 continuous hours each day. I.e., the weight must come from a massive battery.

  The screen is good. It’s a capacitive touchscreen, so nice and responsive. When I first spied the device, I felt certain it would be a resistive touchscreen (which is more accurately called a touch-and-press-down screen). There is an AC adapter on the side of the tablet. This is the only interface to the device :

  
  
  

  That looks to me like an internal SATA connector (different from an eSATA connector). Foolishly, I didn’t have a SATA cable on me so I couldn’t verify.

  User Interface
  The interface options are : Order, Games, Neighborhood, and Pay. One big benefit of accessing the menu through the Order option is that each menu item can have a picture. For people who order more by picture than text description, this is useful. Rather, it would be, if more items had pictures. I’m not sure there were more pictures than seen in the print menu.
  
  For Games, there were a variety of party games. The interface clearly stated that we got to play 2 free games. This implied to me that further games cost money. We tried one game briefly and the food came.

  2 more options : Neighborhood– I know I dug into this option, but I forget what it was. Maybe it discussed local attractions. Finally, Pay. This thing has an integrated credit card reader. There is no integrated printer, though, so if you want one, you will have to request one from a human.

  Experience
  So we ordered through a human since we didn’t feel like being thrust into this new paradigm when we just wanted lunch. The staff was obviously amenable to that. However, I got a chance to ask them a lot of questions about the particulars. Apparently, they have had this system for about 5 months. It was confirmed that the tablets do, in fact, have gargantuan batteries that have to last through the restaurant’s entire business hours. Do they need to be charged every night ? Yes, they do. But how ? The staff described this several large charging blocks with many cables sprouting out. Reportedly, some units still don’t make it through the entire day.

  When it was time to pay, I pressed the Pay button on the interface. The bill I saw had nothing in common with what we ordered (actually, it was cheaper, so perhaps I should have just accepted it). But I pointed it out to a human and they said that this happens sometimes. So they manually printed my bill. There was a dollar charge for the game that was supposed to be free. I pointed this out and they removed it. It’s minor, I know, but it’s still worth trying to work out these bugs.

  One of the staff also described how a restaurant doesn’t need to employ as many people thanks to the tablet. She gave a nervous, awkward, self-conscious laugh when she said this. All I could think of was this Dilbert comic strip in which the boss realizes that his smartphone could perform certain key functions previously handled by his assistant.

  Not A New Idea
  Some people might think this is a totally new concept. It’s not. I was immediately reminded of my university days in Boulder, Colorado, USA, circa 1997. The local Taco Bell and Arby’s restaurants both had touchscreen ordering kiosks. Step up, interact with the (probably resistive) touchscreen, get a number, and step to the counter to change money, get your food, and probably clarify your order because there is only so much that can be handled through a touchscreen.

  What I also remember is when they tore out those ordering kiosks, also circa 1997. I don’t know the exact reason. Maybe people didn’t like them. Maybe there were maintenance costs that made them not worth the hassle.

  Then there are the widespread self-checkout lanes in grocery stores. Personally, I like those, though I know many don’t. However, this restaurant tablet thing hasn’t won me over yet. What’s the difference ? Perhaps that automated lanes at grocery stores require zero external assistance– at least, if you do everything correctly. Personally, I work well with these lanes because I can pretty much guess the constraints of the system and I am careful not to confuse the computer in any way. Until they deploy serving droids, or at least food conveyors, there still needs to be some human interaction and I think the division between the human and computer roles is unintuitive in the restaurant case.

  I don’t really care to return to the same restaurant. I’ll likely avoid any other restaurant that has these tablets. For some reason, I think I’m probably supposed to be the ideal consumer of this concept. But the idea will probably perform all right anyway. Elacarte’s website has plenty of graphs demonstrating that deploying these tablets is extremely profitable.

• ffmeg, missing size : Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video : exr, gbrapf32le)

  13 septembre 2022, par RobertSmith

  I’m getting an error message using ffmpeg on Windows (a newer version of ffmpeg from 2022) using exr files. I'm trying to convert the exr to a video. However, I can get the error with just the command below :

  


  ffmpeg.exe -analyzeduration 9223372036854775807 -probesize 9223372036854775807 -i test_501_030_075_cg_testing_v001.1001.exr


  


  Below is the error :

  


  [exr @ 0000026319944c00] Unsupported channel VRayVelocity.Y.
[exr @ 0000026319944c00] Unsupported channel VRayVelocity.Z.
[exr @ 0000026319944c00] Multiple channels with index 2.
[exr @ 0000026319944c00] Wrong or missing size information.
[exr_pipe @ 0000026319932ac0] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: exr, gbrapf32le): unspecified size
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' (9223372036854775807) and 'probesize' (9223372036854775807) options
Input #0, exr_pipe, from 'X: Test_501_030_075_cg_testing_v001.1001.exr':
  Duration: N/A, bitrate: N/A
  Stream #0:0: Video: exr, gbrapf32le, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 25 tbn


  


  When converting to a video, I also got :

  


  2022-09-12 10:39:36:  0: [buffer @ 000001402775ee80] Unable to parse option value "0x0" as image size
2022-09-12 10:39:36:  0: [buffer @ 000001402775ee80] Error setting option video_size to value 0x0.


  


  I'm not sure what's wrong ? I can open the EXR itself. We've also used ffmpeg fine on a bunch of other exrs (which also got those errors about unsupported channels like VRayVelocity, but ffmpeg worked just fine).
I believe I have set analyzeduration and probsize to the highest values allowed ( MaxInt64).

  


  Anyone have any ideas/suggestions ? Thanks !

  


  P.S. If people need more info here, please let me know what info specifically might be helpful. I have done research on this question (setting analyzeduration to highest setting for example) I'm posting here because I'm lost as what to try next and wondering if people have had similar issues

  


• ffmpeg doesnt use all the pictures when creating a video

  9 septembre 2022, par Mikhael Karabas

  I have 75 pictures of the same size for an animation. named 0.png ... 74.png
when running ffmpeg to create a video out of them with 24 fps (commmand and log below) the resulting video instead of expected 75/24 = 3.125 sec. is 2.667 sec in lenght and consists only of first 64 frames(pictures), although ffmpeg tells it has processed 75 frames.
I have checked with

  


  ffmpeg -i output.webm out%%d.png - on the resulting video, it indeed exports 64 first frames and not the rest 11 of them.

  


  Cant undertand what am i doing wrong. please kindly advise.

  


  brief output below.

  


  complete log : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_J7wLPU9PJZ7jztpiJ8g_bZKPZfiK02L/view?usp=sharing

  


  D:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg-64.exe -report -framerate 24 -f image2 -i %01d.png -c:v libvpx-vp9 -pix_fmt yuva420p -crf 10 -b:v 0 output.webm
ffmpeg started on 2022-09-09 at 19:03:15
Report written to "ffmpeg-20220909-190315.log"
Log level: 48
ffmpeg version 2021-12-17-git-b780b6db64-essentials_build-www.gyan.dev Copyright (c) 2000-2021 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 11.2.0 (Rev2, Built by MSYS2 project)
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-static --disable-w32threads --disable-autodetect --enable-fontconfig --enable-iconv --enable-gnutls --enable-libxml2 --enable-gmp --enable-lzma --enable-zlib --enable-libsrt --enable-libssh --enable-libzmq --enable-avisynth --enable-sdl2 --enable-libwebp --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libxvid --enable-libaom --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libvpx --enable-libass --enable-libfreetype --enable-libfribidi --enable-libvidstab --enable-libvmaf --enable-libzimg --enable-amf --enable-cuda-llvm --enable-cuvid --enable-ffnvcodec --enable-nvdec --enable-nvenc --enable-d3d11va --enable-dxva2 --enable-libmfx --enable-libgme --enable-libopenmpt --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-libgsm --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopus --enable-libspeex --enable-libvorbis --enable-librubberband
  libavutil      57. 11.100 / 57. 11.100
  libavcodec     59. 14.100 / 59. 14.100
  libavformat    59. 10.100 / 59. 10.100
  libavdevice    59.  0.101 / 59.  0.101
  libavfilter     8. 20.100 /  8. 20.100
  libswscale      6.  1.101 /  6.  1.101
  libswresample   4.  0.100 /  4.  0.100
  libpostproc    56.  0.100 / 56.  0.100
Input #0, image2, from '%01d.png':
  Duration: 00:00:03.13, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
  Stream #0:0: Video: png, rgba(pc), 300x400, 24 fps, 24 tbr, 24 tbn
File 'output.webm' already exists. Overwrite? [y/N] y
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (png (native) -> vp9 (libvpx-vp9))
Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
[libvpx-vp9 @ 000002dad505c8c0] v1.11.0-62-g7f45e94d9
Output #0, webm, to 'output.webm':
  Metadata:
    encoder         : Lavf59.10.100
  Stream #0:0: Video: vp9, yuva420p(tv, progressive), 300x400, q=2-31, 24 fps, 1k tbn
    Metadata:
      encoder         : Lavc59.14.100 libvpx-vp9
    Side data:
      cpb: bitrate max/min/avg: 0/0/0 buffer size: 0 vbv_delay: N/A
frame=   75 fps=9.9 q=0.0 Lsize=    1056kB time=00:00:02.58 bitrate=3347.2kbits/s speed=0.342x
video:1036kB audio:0kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 1.942318%