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• What’s new in Piwik 2.16.0 ?

  1er février 2016, par Matthieu Aubry — About, Development, Uncategorized

  In this blog post we showcase what is new in Piwik 2.16.0 and why you should upgrade your Piwik to this latest release !

  Piwik 2.16.0 is currently in Release Candidate and you can already use it by following these simple instructions. Piwik 2.16.0 will be officially released in a few days.

  To see the list of all 250+ changes, read the Piwik 2.16.0 changelog.

  Long Term Support for Piwik 2.X

  Piwik 2.16.0 is our Long Term Support version for Piwik 2. Learn more about Piwik LTS.

  New : Custom Dimensions feature

  With Custom Dimensions you can assign any custom data to your visitors or actions (like pages, events, …) and then visualize the reports of how many visits, conversions, pageviews, etc. there were for each Custom Dimension. They are similar to Custom Variables see the comparison of Custom Dimensions and Custom Variables.

  The new Custom Dimensions plugin is available on the Piwik Marketplace.

  Learn more about creating, tracking, reporting, managing, segmenting custom dimensions in the Custom Dimensions user guide.

  

  

  

  View the list of all visitors who reached a specific goal

  All Goal reports now include a link below the Goal report summary, that lets you see in one click all users that have converted any of your Goals :

  

  Events reports : option to view all columns : min, max and avg values

  By default in Actions > Events report, the columns displayed are “Total events” (Total number of events) and “Total value” (the sum of event values). It is now possible to click on the footer icon to view more detailed columns about event values : minimum event value, maximum event value, and average event value.

  

  Allow zoom to country in realtime visitor map

  In the real time map in Piwik (which displays your users activity appearing in real time !), it is now possible to zoom on a given country :

  

  Export all Records : new ‘all’ option in the Row limit selector

  It is now possible to export all of the data in your reports directly from the user interface ! Select ‘all’ in the row limit selector before exporting your data reports :

  

  New themes on the Marketplace !

  Feel like a change of colors ? Try out the new community submitted Piwik Themes on the Marketplace ! Learn how to install a new theme in Piwik (in only a few clicks).

  

  Let Super User view and edit segments created by other users

  As a Super User of Piwik, it can be very useful to view all Custom Segments created by all users. Starting in Piwik 2.16.0 any Super User can now view all Segments for a given website in the Segment selector :

  • Segments that are shared with All users will now appear below a section “Shared with you :” (a segment can be shared to all users by any admin user by selecting “This segment is visible to All Users” in the Segment editor)
  • Segments that are not shared with anyone are now also visible under the section “Visible to you because you have Super User access :”

  

  New segment ‘deviceBrand’ to segment by Device Brand

  You can now segment by device brands such as Apple, Samsung, LG, Google, Nokia, Sony, Lenovo, Alcatel, etc. The complete list of device brands you can use is listed on the Segmentation developer guide.

  

  New segment ‘actionType’ to view only particular Actions types (pagesviews, downloads, outlinks, events…)

  Use the new “Action type” segment to view only particular actions such as : pageviews, contents, sitesearches, events, outlinks and downloads.

  

  New segment : ‘actionUrl’ to view any actions that matches a given URL

  Use the new “Action URL” segment to view any action that matches a given URL, whether they are Pageviews, Site searches, Contents, Downloads or Events.

  

  New segment operators : “Starts with” and “Ends with”

  The new segment operators “Starts with” and “Ends with” can come handy when creating Custom Segments, and complement well the existing segment operators : Contains, Does not contain, Equals, Not equals, Greater than or equal to, Less than or equal to.

  

  Learn more about Segmentation in our user guides or in the Segmentation developer guide.

  Making Piwik more accessible

  Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to applications or websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.

  In Piwik 2.16.0, and with the help of high school students from the Catalyst Academy, we have made several improvements that make Piwik more accessible :

  • Menu now include the ARIA metadata (to make menus easier to navigate and use)
  • Page titles and various key tooltips have been improved (to give a better context to the data)
  • Keyboard access has been much improvement and Piwik is starting to be usable with the keyboard ! (this is very useful as many users are not able to use a mouse, and they should be able to view Piwik reports with the keyboard only)
  • ‘Skip to main content’ link (when pressing the TAB key) now skips the cursor to the page content.
  • Search bar was further improved : try it by pressing the ‘f’ key (useful to open any Piwik report or page without using the mouse)

  New user preference : display times either as 24h format or AM/PM format

  Users can now select whether times should be displayed in 24h format (16:20) or in AM/PM format (4:20pm)

  

  Other admins and Super Users are not visible to users with ‘admin’ permissions anymore

  Piwik 2.16.0 just became even more respectful of your privacy : any user you created and assigned an “admin” permission will not be able to view all other usernames anymore. This change was requested by many Piwik users who rightfully preferred not to disclose all usernames to any ‘admin’ user.

  As a result of this change, when a user with ‘admin’ permission (admin user) wants to give additional permission to another user (target user), the admin user will now need to know the target username and enter it in the Manage Users interface :

  

  New Config file viewer

  A new menu entry Administration > Diagnostics > Config file, lets Super Users view all config values in the UI :

  This new screen serves several purposes :

  • help Piwik administrators discover and learn about all the possible config file settings that Piwik offers.
  • let Super Users and Admins easily view any overridden config.ini.php INI setting without having to open the config file on the server.

  

  New report ‘Personal settings > Custom Variables’ displays custom variable usage

  A new report visible to Super Users lets you see how your Custom Variables slots are being used, which ones are still unused, and how many times a given custom variable name was used.

  

  Learn more about Custom Variables.

  Improvements to Heartbeat feature to accurately count time spent on the last page

  The heartbeat feature which lets you accurately track how long do visitors spend on your website, has been improved in 2.16.0. If you would like to measure how long do people spend on your pages (even if they don’t interact with your website or app), then consider using the heartbeat feature. Learn more in our guide Accurately measure the time spent on each page.

  

  New AnonymousPiwikUsageMeasurement plugin
  

  AnonymousPiwikUsageMeasurement plugin was created for those who would like to measure how their Piwik services is being used. This plugin also sends anonymised tracking data to our demo-anonymous.piwik.org which will help us learn how your Piwik is used and how we could improve the application. Learn more about AnonymousPiwikUsageMeasurement plugin.

  

  Show a warning when Piwik is used as a SuperUser via HTTP

  It is highly recommended to use HTTPS (SSL) for your Piwik server. If you are logged in as a Super User and viewing any Administration pages, you will now see a warning notification message at the top of the screen inviting you to use HTTPS :

  

  MySQL 5.7+ support

  The awesome Piwik community has helped us identify several issues with MySQL 5.7 support and Piwik is now fully compatible with the latest MySQL version 5.7+. Piwik is officially compatible with MySQL >= 4.1 and up to Mysql 5.7 ! Piwik is also compatible with MariaDB.

  

  Better detection of new devices and robots

  Our Device Detector library can now detect many new types of devices : smart TVs, new tablets and mobile phones, and more. New bots were added to our list of bots to keep your analytics report meaningful.

  Learn more : What Device Detector is able to detect, About Device Detector.

  New Referrer Spammers

  Every week we keep updating our community-list of referrer spammers. More than 50 new spammers were added since the last Piwik release !

  Note that the list of referrer spammer is automatically updated every week in your Piwik, so you need to wait at most one week to benefit from the very latest list.

  Learn more about Stopping Referrer Spam in Analytics reports.

  

  Ability to support new SMS providers to send Scheduled Reports by text message

  When you create scheduled reports in Piwik, you can specify one or several email addresses (to send reports by email) and you can also configure phone numbers (so your reports are sent to your phone via text message). So far we only support one SMS Provider “Clockwork SMS” but it is now possible for anyone to create a very simple plugin that adds a new SMS Provider to Piwik.

  A new SMS Provider plugin was released on the Marketplace : FreeMobileMessaging. If you have a favorite SMS Provider, we encourage you to create a new plugin for it !

  Piwik Consulting mentions

  A few new mentions of Piwik Consultants were added into Piwik to let users know that they can get Professional Help, and additional services and products. For example a new widget was added to the default dashboard. If you provide your Piwik service to your own clients, maybe you would like to remove the Professional services widget and other ads, see this FAQ : How do I remove from Piwik the links to “Piwik Consultants” or to “Professional Services” ?

  Stability, Reliability and Performance

  Dozens of other bugs were fixed (including several Major bugs) and many small improvements are included in this release. All these changes make Piwik more stable and reliable, as well as easier to troubleshoot and maintain. We are proud to be able to offer Piwik 2.16.0 as our Long Term Support release !

  If you have any feedback, questions, suggestion, or bug to report, please join our Piwik Community Forums.

  We hope you will love this 2.16.0 release as much as we loved making it.

  Happy Analytics !

• Ode to the Gravis Ultrasound

  1er août 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  WARNING : This post is a bunch of nostalgia. Feel free to follow along if you recall the DOS days of the early-mid 1990s.

  I finally let go of my Gravis Ultrasound MAX sound card a little while ago. It felt like the end of an era for me, even though I had scarcely used the card in recent memory.

  
  
  

  The Beginning
  What is the Gravis Ultrasound ? Only the finest PC sound card from the classic DOS days. Back in the day (very early 1990s), most consumer PC sound cards were Yamaha OPL FM synthesizers paired with a basic digital to analog converter (DAC). Gravis, a company known for game controllers, dared to break with the dominant paradigm of Sound Blaster clones and create a sound card that had 32 digital channels.
  
  I heard about the GUS sometime in 1992 through one of the dominant online services at the time, Prodigy. Through the message boards, I learned of a promotion with Electronic Arts in which customers could pre-order a GUS at a certain discount along with 2 EA games from a selected catalog (with progressive discounts when ordering more games from the list). I know I got the DOS version of PowerMonger ; I think the other was Night Shift, though that doesn’t seem to be an EA title.

  Anyway, 1992 saw many maddening delays of the GUS hardware. Finally, reports of GUS shipments began to trickle into the Prodigy message forums. Then one day in November, 1992, mine arrived. Into the 286 machine it went and a valiant attempt at software installation was made. A friend and I fought with the software late into the evening, trying to make this thing work reasonably. I remember grabbing a pair of old headphones sitting near the computer that were used for an ancient (even for the time) portable radio. That was the only means of sound reproduction we had available at that moment. And it still sounded incredible.

  After graduating to progressively superior headphones, I would later return to that original pair only to feel my ears were being physically assaulted. Strange, they sounded fine that first night I was trying to make the GUS work. I guess this was my first understanding that the degree to which one is a snobby audiophile is all a matter of hard-earned experience.

  Technology
  The GUS was powered by something called a GF1 which was supposed to use a technology called wavetable synthesis. In the early days, I thought (and I wasn’t alone in this) that this meant that the GF1 chip had a bunch of digitized instrument samples stored in the ASIC. That wasn’t it.

  However, it did feature 32 digital channels at a time when most PC audio cards had 2 (plus that Yamaha FM synthesizer). There was some hemming and hawing about how the original GUS couldn’t drive all 32 channels at a full 44.1 kHz ("CD quality") playback rate. It’s true— if 14 channels were enabled, all could be played at 44.1 kHz. Enabling more channels started progressive degradation and with all 32 channels, each was only playing at around 19 kHz. Still, from my emerging game programmer perspective, that allowed for 8-channel tracker music and 6 channels of sound effects, all at the vaunted CD level of quality.

  Games and Compatibility
  The primary reason to have a discrete sound card was for entertainment applications — ahem, games. GUS support was pretty sketchy out of the gate (ostensibly a major reason for the card’s delay). While many sound cards offered Sound Blaster emulation by basically having the same hardware as Sound Blaster cards, the GUS took a software route towards emulating the SB. To do this required a program called the Sound Blaster Operating System, or SBOS.

  Oh, how awesome it was to hear the program exclaim "SBOS installed !" And how harshly it grated on your nerves after the 200th time hearing it due to so many reboots and fiddling with options to make your games work. Also, I’ve always wondered if there’s something special about sampling an ’s’ sound — does it strain the sampling frequency range ? Perhaps the phrase was sampled at too low a bitrate because the ’s’ sounds didn’t come through very clearly, which is something you notice after hundreds of iterations when there are 3 ’s’ sounds in the phrase.

  Fortunately, SBOS became less relevant with the advent of Mega-Em, a separate emulator which intercepted calls to Roland MIDI systems and routed them to the very capable GUS. Roland-supporting games sounded beautiful.

  Eventually, more and more DOS games were released with native Gravis support, sometimes with the help of The Miles Sound System (from our friends at Rad Game Tools — you know, the people behind Smacker and Bink). The library changelog is quite the trip down PC memory lane.

  An important area where the GUS shined brightly was that of demos and music trackers. The emerging PC demo scene embraced the powerful GUS (aided, no doubt, by Gravis’ sponsorship of the community) and the coolest computer art and music of the time natively supported the card.

  Programming
  At this point in my life, I was a budding programmer in high school and was fairly intent on programming video games. So far, I had figured out how to make a few blips using a borrowed Sound Blaster card. I went to great lengths to learn how to program the Gravis Ultrasound.

  Oh you kids today, with your easy access to information at the tips of your fingers thanks to Google and the broader internet. I had to track down whatever information I could find through a combination of Prodigy message boards and local dialup BBSes and FidoNet message bases. Gravis was initially tight-lipped about programming information for its powerful card, as was de rigueur of hardware companies (something that largely persists to this day). But Gravis eventually saw an opportunity to one-up encumbent Creative Labs and released a full SDK for the Ultrasound. I wanted the SDK badly.

  So it was early-mid 1993. Gravis released an SDK. I heard that it was available on their support BBS. Their BBS with a long distance phone number. If memory serves, the SDK was only in the neighborhood of 1.5 Mbytes. That takes a long time to transfer via a 2400 baud modem at a time when long distance phone charges were still a thing and not insubstantial.

  Luckily, they also put the SDK on something called an ’FTP site’. Fortunately, about this time, I had the opportunity to get some internet access via the local university.

  Indeed, my entire motivation for initially wanting to get on the internet was to obtain special programming information. Is that nerdy enough for you ?

  I see that the GUS SDK is still available via the Gravis FTP site. The file GUSDK222.ZIP is dated 1998 and is less than a megabyte.

  Next Generation : CD Support
  So I had my original GUS by the end of 1992. That was just the first iteration of the Gravis Ultrasound. The next generation was the GUS MAX. When I was ready to get into the CD-ROM era, this was what I wanted in my computer. This is because the GUS MAX had CD-ROM support. This is odd to think about now when all optical drives have SATA interfaces and (P)ATA interfaces before that— what did CD-ROM compatibility mean back then ? I wasn’t quite sure. But in early 1995, I headed over to Computer City (R.I.P.) and bought a new GUS MAX and Sony double-speed CD-ROM drive to install in the family’s PC.

  
  
  

  About the "CD-ROM compatibility" : It seems that there were numerous competing interfaces in the early days of CD-ROM technology. The GUS MAX simply integrated 3 different CD-ROM controllers onto the audio card. This was superfluous to me since the Sony drive came with an appropriate controller card anyway, though I didn’t figure out that the extra controller card was unnecessary until after I installed it. No matter ; computers of the day were rife with expansion ports.

  
  
  The 3 different CD-ROM controllers on the GUS MAX
  

  Explaining The Difference
  It was difficult to explain the difference in quality to those who didn’t really care. Sometime during 1995, I picked up a quasi-promotional CD-ROM called "The Gravis Ultrasound Experience" from Babbage’s computer store (remember when that was a thing ?). As most PC software had been distributed on floppy discs up until this point, this CD-ROM was an embarrassment of riches. Tons of game demos, scene demos, tracker music, and all the latest GUS drivers and support software.

  Further, the CD-ROM had a number of red book CD audio tracks that illustrated the difference between Sound Blaster cards and the GUS. I remember loaning this to a tech-savvy coworker who disbelieved how awesome the GUS was. The coworker took it home, listened to it, and wholly agreed that the GUS audio sounded better than the SB audio in the comparison — and was thoroughly confused because she was hearing this audio emanating from her Sound Blaster. It was the difference between real-time and pre-rendered audio, I suppose, but I failed to convey that message. I imagine the same issue comes up even today regarding real-time video rendering vs., e.g., a pre-rendered HD cinematic posted on YouTube.

  Regrettably, I can’t find that CD-ROM anymore which leads me to believe that the coworker never gave it back. Too bad, because it was quite the treasure trove.

  Aftermath
  According to folklore I’ve heard, Gravis couldn’t keep up as the world changed to Windows and failed to deliver decent drivers. Indeed, I remember trying to keep my GUS in service under Windows 95 well into 1998 but eventually relented and installed some kind of more appropriate sound card that was better supported under Windows.

  Of course, audio output capability has been standard issue for any PC for at least 10 years and many people aren’t even aware that discrete sound cards still exist. Real-time audio rendering has become less essential as full musical tracks can be composed and compressed into PCM format and delivered with the near limitless space afforded by optical storage.

  A few years ago, it was easy to pick up old GUS cards on eBay for cheap. As of this writing, there are only a few and they’re pricy (but perhaps not selling). Maybe I was just viewing during the trough of no value a few years ago.

  Nowadays, of course, anyone interested in studying the old GUS or getting a nostalgia fix need only boot up the always-excellent DOSBox emulator which provides remarkable GUS emulation support.

• Why does ffplay read both video and keyboard input from stdin ?

  27 janvier 2016, par cxrodgers

  I’m trying to compress a video feed from a webcam while simultaneously displaying it, using ffmpeg and ffplay. I do actually have this working, but I want to disable the ffplay window from interpreting keyboard presses.

  It took me a while to figure this out but here’s what I’m using :

  ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 -vcodec mpeg4 -f rawvideo - \
  
    | tee output.mkv \
  
    | ffplay -fflags nobuffer -

  (Actually I am doing all of this from a Python script using the subprocess module. Here I have represented it as a straightforward terminal command because the result is the same.)

  So this actually works and does everything I want. The only thing is that if the ffplay window is active, it interprets keypresses (like "F" for fullscreen). Instead I want it to completely ignore all keypresses.

  My questions :

  1. How is this even possible ? I thought I was redirecting video input to stdin, and then telling ffplay to read video from stdin. How can keypresses be multiplexed on the same pipe ?
  2. How can I disable this behavior ? I tried "-nostdin" but it doesn’t work with my version.

  # ffplay -nostdin output.mkv

  ffplay version N-77455-g4707497 Copyright
  (c) 2003-2015 the FFmpeg developers built with gcc 4.8 (Ubuntu
  4.8.4-2ubuntu1 14.04)

  ...

  Failed to set value ’output.mkv’ for option ’nostdin’ : Option not
  found