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• Salty Game Music

  31 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Have you heard of Google’s Native Client (NaCl) project ? Probably not. Basically, it allows native code modules to run inside a browser (where ‘browser’ is defined pretty narrowly as ‘Google Chrome’ in this case). Programs are sandboxed so they aren’t a security menace (or so the whitepapers claim) but are allowed to access a variety of APIs including video and audio. The latter API is significant because sound tends to be forgotten in all the hullabaloo surrounding non-Flash web technologies. At any rate, enjoy NaCl while you can because I suspect it won’t be around much longer.

  After my recent work upgrading some old music synthesis programs to user more modern audio APIs, I got the idea to try porting the same code to run under NaCl in Chrome (first Nosefart, then Game Music Emu/GME). In this exercise, I met with very limited success. This blog post documents some of the pitfalls in my excursion.

  
  
  

  Infrastructure
  People who know me know that I’m rather partial — to put it gently — to straight-up C vs. C++. The NaCl SDK is heavily skewed towards C++. However, it does provide a Python tool called init_project.py which can create the skeleton of a project and can do so in C with the '-c' option :

  ./init_project.py -c -n saltynosefart
  

  This generates something that can be built using a simple ‘make’. When I added Nosefart’s C files, I learned that the project Makefile has places for project-necessary CFLAGS but does not honor them. The problem is that the generated Makefile includes a broader system Makefile that overrides the CFLAGS in the project Makefile. Going into the system Makefile and changing "CFLAGS =" -> "CFLAGS +=" solves this problem.

  Still, maybe I’m the first person to attempt building something in Native Client so I’m the first person to notice this ?

  Basic Playback
  At least the process to create an audio-enabled NaCl app is well-documented. Too bad it doesn’t seem to compile as advertised. According to my notes on the matter, I filled in PPP_InitializeModule() with the appropriate boilerplate as outlined in the docs but got a linker error concerning get_browser_interface().

  Plan B : C++
  Obviously, the straight C stuff is very much a second-class citizen in this NaCl setup. Fortunately, there is already that fully functional tone generator example program in the limited samples suite. Plan B is to copy that project and edit it until it accepts Nosefart/GME audio instead of a sine wave.

  The build system assumes all C++ files should have .cc extensions. I have to make some fixes so that it will accept .cpp files (either that, or rename all .cpp to .cc, but that’s not very clean).

  Making Noise
  You’ll be happy to know that I did successfully swap out the tone generator for either Nosefart or GME. Nosefart has a slightly fickle API that requires revving the emulator frame by frame and generating a certain number of audio samples. GME’s API is much easier to work with in this situation — just tell it how many samples it needs to generate and give it a pointer to a buffer. I played NES and SNES music play through this ad-hoc browser plugin, and I’m confident all the other supported formats would have worked if I went through the bother of converting the music data files into C headers to be included in the NaCl executable binaries (dynamically loading data via the network promised to be a far more challenging prospect reserved for phase 3 of the project).

  Portable ?
  I wouldn’t say so. I developed it on Linux and things ran fine there. I tried to run the same binaries on the Windows version of Chrome to no avail. It looks like it wasn’t even loading the .nexe files (NaCl executables).

  Thinking About The (Lack Of A) Future
  As I was working on this project, I noticed that the online NaCl documentation materialized explicit banners warning that my NaCl binaries compiled for Chrome 11 won’t work for Chrome 12 and that I need to code to the newly-released 0.3 SDK version. Not a fuzzy feeling. I also don’t feel good that I’m working from examples using bleeding edge APIs that feature deprecation as part of their naming convention, e.g., pp::deprecated::ScriptableObject().

  Ever-changing API + minimal API documentation + API that only works in one browser brand + requiring end user to explicitly enable feature = … well, that’s why I didn’t bother to release any showcase pertaining to this little experiment. Would have been neat, but I strongly suspect that this is yet another one of those APIs that Google decides to deprecate soon.

  See Also :

  • I eventually got a second wind and made this work using the C interface.

• Anomalie #2240 (Nouveau) : Chaînes de langue manquantes

  21 août 2011, par Johan Pustoch

  Dans la dist : dans rubrique.html, mot.html, recherche.html et modeles/plan.html (chaîne de langue de l’extension breves a priori : ) dans inclure/forum.html, 2 fois. (chaîne de langue de l’extension forum a priori ) Dans lapartie privée : info_email dans (...)

• VP8 Codec SDK "Aylesbury" Release

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

  Today we’re making available "Aylesbury," our first named release of libvpx, the VP8 codec SDK. VP8 is the video codec used in WebM. Note that the VP8 specification has not changed, only the SDK.

  What’s an Aylesbury ? It’s a breed of duck. We like ducks, so we plan to use duck-related names for each major libvpx release, in alphabetical order. Our goal is to have one named release of libvpx per calendar quarter, each with a theme.

  You can download the Aylesbury libvpx release from our Downloads page or check it out of our Git repository and build it yourself. In the coming days Aylesbury will be integrated into all of the WebM project components (DirectShow filters, QuickTime plugins, etc.). We encourage anyone using our components to upgrade to the Aylesbury releases.

  For Aylesbury the theme was faster decoder, better encoder. We used our May 19, 2010 launch release of libvpx as the benchmark. We’re very happy with the results (see graphs below) :
  

  • 20-40% (average 28%) improvement in libvpx decoder speed
  • Over 7% overall PSNR improvement (6.3% SSIM) in VP8 "best" quality encoding mode, and up to 60% improvement on very noisy, still or slow moving source video.

  

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  The main improvements to the decoder are :
  

  • Single-core assembly "hot spot" optimizations, including improved vp8_sixtap_predict() and SSE2 loopfilter functions
  • Threading improvements for more efficient use of multiple processor cores
  • Improved memory handling and reduced footprint
  • Combining IDCT and reconstruction steps
  • SSSE3 usage in functions where appropriate

  On the encoder front, we concentrated on clips in the 30-45 dB range and saw the biggest gains in higher-quality source clips (greater that 38 dB), low to medium-motion clips, and clips with noisy source material. Many code contributions made this possible, but a few of the highlights were :
  

  • Adaptive width and strength alternate reference frame noise suppression filter with optional motion compensation.
  • Transform improvements (improved accuracy and reduction in round trip error)
  • Trellis-based quantized coefficient optimization
  • Two-pass rate control and quantizer changes
  • Rate distortion changes
  • Zero bin and rounding changes
  • Work on MB-level quality control and bit allocation

  We’re targeting Q1 2011 for the next named libvpx release, which we’re calling Bali. The theme for that release will be faster encoder. We are constantly working on improvements to video quality in the encoder, so after Aylesbury we won’t tie that work to specific named releases.

  WebM at Streaming Media West

  Members of the WebM project will discuss Aylesbury during a session at the Streaming Media West conference on November 3rd (session C203 : WebM Open Video Project Update). For more information, visit www.streamingmedia.com/west.

  John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.