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• Linux Media Player Survey Circa 2001

  2 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Here’s a document I scavenged from my archives. It was dated September 1, 2001 and I now publish it 9 years later. It serves as sort of a time capsule for the state of media player programs at the time. Looking back on this list, I can’t understand why I couldn’t find MPlayer while I was conducting this survey, especially since MPlayer is the project I eventually started to work for a few months after writing this piece.

  For a little context, I had been studying multimedia concepts and tech for a year and was itching to get my hands dirty with practical multimedia coding. But I wanted to tackle what I perceived as unsolved problems– like playback of proprietary codecs. I didn’t want to have to build a new media playback framework just to start working on my problems. So I surveyed the players available to see which ones I could plug into and use as a testbed for implementing new decoders.

  Regarding Real Player, I wrote : “We’re trying to move away from the proprietary, closed-source “solutions”. Heh. Was I really an insufferable open source idealist back in the day ?

  Anyway, here’s the text with some Where are they now ? commentary [in brackets] :

  ---

  Towards an All-Inclusive Media Playing Solution for Linux

  I don’t feel that the media playing solutions for Linux set their sights high enough, even though they do tend to be quite ambitious.

  I want to create a media player for Linux that can open a file, figure out what type of file it is (AVI, MOV, etc.), determine the compression algorithms used to encode the audio and video chunks inside (MPEG, Cinepak, Sorenson, etc.) and replay the file using the best audio, video, and CPU facilities available on the computer.

  Video and audio playback is a solved problem on Linux ; I don’t wish to solve that problem again. The problem that isn’t solved is reliance on proprietary multimedia solutions through some kind of WINE-like layer in order to decode compressed multimedia files.

  Survey of Linux solutions for decoding proprietary multimedia
  updated 2001-09-01

  AVI Player for XMMS
  This is based on Avifile. All the same advantages and limitations apply.
  [Top Google hit is a Freshmeat page that doesn’t indicate activity since 2001-2002.]

  Avifile
  This player does a great job at taking apart AVI and ASF files and then feeding the compressed chunks of multimedia data through to the binary Win32 decoders.

  The program is written in C++ and I’m not very good at interpreting that kind of code. But I’m learning all over again. Examining the object hierarchy, it appears that the designers had the foresight to include native support for decoders that are compiled into the program from source code. However, closer examination reveals that there is support for ONE source decoder and that’s the “decoder” for uncompressed data. Still, I tried to manipulate this routine to accept and decode data from other codecs but no dice. It’s really confounding. The program always crashes when I feed non-uncompressed data through the source decoder.
  [Lives at http://avifile.sourceforge.net/ ; not updated since 2006.]

  Real Player
  There’s not much to do with this since it is closed source and proprietary. Even though there is a plugin architecture, that’s not satisfactory. We’re trying to move away from the proprietary, closed-source “solutions”.
  [Still kickin’ with version 11.]

  XAnim
  This is a well-established Unix media player. To his credit, the author does as well as he can with the resources he has. In other words, he supports the non-proprietary video codecs well, and even has support for some proprietary video codecs through binary-only decoders.

  The source code is extremely difficult to work with as the author chose to use the X coding format which I’ve never seen used anywhere else except for X header files. The infrastructure for extending the program and supporting other codecs and file formats is there, I suppose, but I would have to wrap my head around the coding style. Maybe I can learn to work past that. The other thing that bothers me about this program is the decoding approach : It seems that each video decoder includes routines to decompress the multimedia data into every conceivable RGB and YUV output format. This seems backwards to me ; it seems better to have one decoder function that decodes the data into its native format it was compressed from (e.g., YV12 for MPEG data) and then pass that data to another layer of the program that’s in charge of presenting the data and possibly converting it if necessary. This layer would encompass highly-optimized software conversion routines including special CPU-specific instructions (e.g., MMX and SSE) and eliminate the need to place those routines in lots of other routines. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
  [This one was pretty much dead before I made this survey, the most recent update being in 1999. Still, we owe it much respect as the granddaddy of Unix multimedia playback programs.]

  Xine
  This seems like a promising program. It was originally designed to play MPEGs from DVDs. It can also play MPEG files on a hard drive and utilizes the Xv extensions for hardware YUV playback. It’s also supposed to play AVI files using the same technique as Avifile but I have never, ever gotten it to work. If an AVI file has both video and sound, the binary video decoder can’t decode any frames. If the AVI file has video and no sound, the program gets confused and crashes, as far as I can tell.

  Still, it’s promising, and I’ve been trying to work around these crashes. It doesn’t yet have the type of modularization I’d like to see. Right now, it tailored to suit MPEG playback and AVI playback is an afterthought. Still, it appears to have a generalized interface for dropping in new file demultiplexers.

  I tried to extend the program for supporting source decoders by rewriting w32codec.c from scratch. I’m not having a smooth time of it so far. I’m able to perform some manipulations on the output window. However, I can’t get the program to deal with an RGB image format. It has trouble allocating an RGB surface with XvShmCreateImage(). This isn’t suprising, per my limited knowledge of X which is that Xv applies to YUV images, but it could also apply to RGB images as well. Anyway, the program should be able to fall back on regular RGB pixmaps if that Xv call fails.

  Right now, this program is looking the most promising. It will take some work to extend the underlying infrastructure, but it seems doable since I know C quite well and can understand the flow of this program, as opposed to Avifile and its C++. The C code also compiles about 10 times faster.
  [My home project for many years after a brief flirtation with MPlayer. It is still alive ; its latest release was just a month ago.]

  XMovie
  This library is a Quicktime movie player. I haven’t looked at it too extensively yet, but I do remember looking at it at one point and reading the documentation that said it doesn’t support key frames. Still, I should examine it again since they released a new version recently.
  [Heroine Virtual still puts out some software but XMovie has not been updated since 2005.]

  XMPS
  This program compiles for me, but doesn’t do much else. It can play an MP3 file. I have been able to get MPEG movies to play through it, but it refuses to show the full video frame, constricting it to a small window (obviously a bug).
  [This project is hosted on SourceForge and is listed with a registration date of 2003, well after this survey was made. So the project obviously lived elsewhere in 2001. Meanwhile, it doesn’t look like any files ever made it to SF for hosting.]

  XTheater
  I can’t even get this program to compile. It’s supposed to be an MPEG player based on SMPEG. As such, it probably doesn’t hold much promise for being easily extended into a general media player.
  [Last updated in 2002.]

  GMerlin
  I can’t get this to compile yet. I have a bug report in to the dev group.
  [Updated consistently in the last 9 years. Last update was in February of this year. I can’t find any record of my bug report, though.]

• VP8 for Real-time Video Applications

  15 février 2011, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)

  With the growing interest in videoconferencing on the web platform, it’s a good time to explore the features of VP8 that make it an exceptionally good codec for real-time applications like videoconferencing.

  VP8 Design History & Features

  Real-time applications were a primary use case when VP8 was designed. The VP8 encoder has features specifically engineered to overcome the challenges inherent in compressing and transmitting real-time video data.
  

  • Processor-adaptive encoding. 16 encoder complexity levels automatically (or manually) adjust encoder features such as motion search strategy, quantizer optimizations, and loop filtering strength.
  • Encoder can be configured to use a target percentage of the host CPU.
    Ability to measure the time taken to encode each frame and adjust encoder complexity dynamically to keep the encoding time per frame constant
  • Robust error recovery (packet retransmission, forward error correction, recovery frame/new keyframe requests)
  • Temporal scalability (i.e., a single video bitstream that can degrade as needed depending on a participant’s available bandwidth)
  • Highly efficient decoding performance on low-power devices. Conventional video technology has grown to a state of complexity where dedicated hardware chips are needed to make it work well. With VP8, software-based solutions have proven to meet customer needs without requiring specialized hardware.

  For a more information about real-time video features in VP8, see the slide presentation by WebM Project engineer Paul Wilkins (PDF file).

  Commercially Available Products

  Millions of people around the world have been using VP7/8 for video chat for years. VP8 is deployed in some of today’s most popular consumer videoconferencing applications, including Skype (group video calling), Sightspeed, ooVoo and Logitech Vid. All of these vendors are active WebM project supporters. VP8’s predecessor, VP7, has been used in Skype video calling since 2005 and is supported in the new Skype app for iPhone. Other real-time VP8 implementations are coming soon, including ooVoo, and VP8 will play a leading role in Google’s plans for real-time applications on the web platform.

  Real-time applications will be extremely important as the web platform matures. The WebM community has made significant improvements in VP8 for real-time use cases since our launch and will continue to do so in the future.

  John Luther is Product Manager of the WebM Project.

  

• Museum of Multimedia Software, Part 2

  16 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Software Museum

  This installment includes a bunch of old, discontinued Adobe software as well as some Flash-related mutlimedia software.

  Screen Time for Flash Screen Saver Factory
  "Create High Impact Screen Savers Using Macromedia Flash."

  
  
  

  Requirements include Windows 3.1, 95 or NT 3.5.1. A 486 computer is required to play the resulting screensavers which are Flash projectors using Macromedia Flash 3.0.

  Monster Interactive Instant GUI 2
  Create eye-popping GUIs more easily for use in Flash. Usability experts would argue that this is not a good thing.

  
  
  

  Adobe Dimensions 3.0
  "The Easy Yet Powerful 3D Rendering Tool." This software was end-of-life’d in late 2004-early 2005 (depending on region).

  
  
  

  Adobe ImageStyler
  "Instantly add style to your Web site." Wikipedia claims that this product was sold from 1998 to 2000 when it was superseded by Adobe LiveMotion (see below).

  
  
  

  Google is able to excavate a link to the Latin American site for Adobe ImageStyler, a page that doesn’t seem to be replicated in any other language.

  Adobe LiveMotion
  "Professional Web graphics and animation." This is version 1, where the last version was #2, released in 2002.

  
  
  

  Adobe Streamline 4.0
  "The most powerful way to convert images into line art." This was discontinued in mid-2005.

  
  
  

  Adobe SuperATM
  "The magic that maintains the look of your documents." This is the oldest item in my collection. A close examination of the back of the box reveals an old Adobe logo. The latest copyright date on the box is 1992.