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• 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.

• FFmpeg - Past Duration Too Large

  14 avril 2018, par Nimble

  I’m having an issue with the warning "Past Duration Too Large" being spammed in my console. There has been quite a bit of discussion about this "warning" online but I have yet to find an actual solution to get rid of it.

  Many just say silence your console, but then I can’t see my segments and other things like warnings, it’s really not a good solution. Another suggests using the fps filter but I have found it creates stutter in the end files...

  Very strangely for reasons completely unknown to me if I double the input framerate and then specify the actual framerate for the output file the warning disappears. Example :

  ffmpeg - y -thread_queue_size 9999 -indexmem 9999 -guess_layout_max 0 -f dshow -video_size 3440x1440 -rtbufsize 2147.48M ^
  
  -framerate 200 -pixel_format nv12 -i video="Video (00 Pro Capture HDMI 4K+)":audio="SPDIF/ADAT (1+2) (RME Fireface UC)" ^
  
  -map 0:0,0:1 -map 0:1 -flags +cgop -force_key_frames expr:gte(t,n_forced*2) -c:v h264_nvenc -preset: llhp -pix_fmt nv12 ^
  
  -b:v 250M -minrate 250M -maxrate 250M -bufsize 250M -c:a aac -ar 44100 -b:a 384k -ac 2 -r 100 ^
  
  -af "atrim=0.038, asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS, aresample=async=250" -vsync 1 -ss 00:00:01.096 -max_muxing_queue_size 9999 ^
  
  -f segment -segment_time 600 -segment_wrap 9 -reset_timestamps 1 C:\Users\djcim\Videos\PC\PC\PC%02d.ts

  As you can see I have -framerate on the input at 200 and -r on the output at 100, believe it or not this gets rid of the warning completely and the resulting file has no issues. However... this is not something you can pull off with any capture card, the only reason I can do this with the Magewell is because under certain resolutions it can record 200fps. Therefore FFmpeg allows me to set it, even though it is double what the card actually allows at the resolution I’m recording. So when I record my camera with a card from Elgato I can’t pull that off :

  ffmpeg -y -thread_queue_size 9999 -indexmem 9999 -guess_layout_max 0 -f dshow -video_size 1920x1080 -rtbufsize 2147.48M ^
  
  -framerate 60 -pixel_format yuyv422 -i video="Game Capture HD60 Pro (Video) (#01)":audio="ADAT (5+6) (RME Fireface UC)" ^
  
  -map 3:0,3:1 -map 3:1 -flags +cgop -r 60 -force_key_frames expr:gte(t,n_forced*2) -c:v h264_nvenc -preset: llhp ^
  
  -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 40M -minrate 40M -maxrate 40M -bufsize 40M -c:a aac -ar 44100 -b:a 384k -ac 2 ^
  
  -af "pan=mono|c0=c0, adelay=112|112, aresample=async=250" -vsync 1 -max_muxing_queue_size 9999 -f segment ^
  
  -segment_time 600 -segment_wrap 9 -reset_timestamps 1 C:\Users\djcim\Videos\PC\Camera\CPC%02d.ts 

  When I try to set the -framerate to 120 is just throws an error and wont start recording. Also, while I really wish I could just double the framerate and be done with it, it is pretty clear that that is not a conventional or "actual" solution. That really shouldn’t get rid of the message... The only solution I have come up with besides buying another Magewell is to modify the if statement in the code and compile FFmpeg myself.

  Also I’d like to mention that at times the message is spammed so much that it actually crashes the console, so it’s a real issue not just a warning...

  Any help would be appreciated.

• Programming Language Levels

  20 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Programming

  I’ve been doing this programming thing for some 20 years now. Things sure do change. One change I ponder from time to time is the matter of programming language levels. Allow me to explain.

  The 1990s
  When I first took computer classes in the early 1990s, my texts would classify computer languages into 3 categories, or levels. The lower the level, the closer to the hardware ; the higher the level, the more abstract (and presumably, easier to use). I recall that the levels went something like this :

  • High level : Pascal, BASIC, Logo, Fortran
  • Medium level : C, Forth
  • Low level : Assembly language

  Keep in mind that these were the same texts which took the time to explain the history of computers from mainframes -> minicomputers -> a relatively recent phenomenon called microcomputers or "PCs".

  Somewhere in the mid-late 1990s, when I was at university, I was introduced to a new tier :

  • Very high level : Perl, shell scripting

  I think there was some debate among my peers about whether C++ and Java were properly classified as high or very high level. The distinction between high and very high, in my observation, seemed to be that very high level languages had more complex data structures (at the very least, a hash / dictionary / associative array / key-value map) built into the language, as well as implicit memory management.

  Modern Day
  These days, the old hierarchy is apparently forgotten (much like minicomputers). I observe that there is generally a much simpler 2-tier classification :

  • Low level : C, assembly language
  • High level : absolutely every other programming language in wide use today

  I find myself wondering where C++ and Objective-C fit in this classification scheme. Then I remember that it doesn’t matter and this is all academic.

  Relevancy
  I think about this because I have pretty much stuck to low-level programming all of my life, mostly due to my interest in game and multimedia-type programming. But the trends in computing have favored many higher level languages and programming paradigms. I woke up one day and realized that the kind of work I often do — lower level stuff — is not very common.

  I’m not here to argue that low or high level is superior. You know I’m all about using the appropriate tool for the job. But I sometimes find myself caught between worlds, having the defend and explain one to the other.

  • On one hand, it’s not unusual for the multitudes of programmers working at the high level to gasp and wonder why I or anyone else would ever use C or assembly language for anything when there are so many beautiful high level languages. I patiently explain that those languages have to be written in some other language (at first) and that they need to run on some operating system and that most assuredly won’t be written in a high level language. For further reading, I refer them to Joel Spolsky’s great essay called Back to Basics which describes why it can be useful to know at least a little bit about how the computer does what it does at the lowest levels.
  • On the other hand, believe it or not, I sometimes have to defend the merits of high level languages to my low level brethren. I’ll often hear variations of, "Any program can be written in C. Using a high level language to achieve the same will create a slow and bloated solution." I try to explain that the trade-off in time to complete the programming task weighed against the often-negligible performance hit of what is often an I/O-bound operation in the first place makes it worthwhile to use the high level language for a wide variety of tasks.

    Or I just ignore them. That’s actually the best strategy.