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• Merge commit '6c916192f3d7441f5896f6c0fe151874fcd91fe4'

  9 avril 2017, par Clément Bœsch

  Merge commit '6c916192f3d7441f5896f6c0fe151874fcd91fe4'
  * commit '6c916192f3d7441f5896f6c0fe151874fcd91fe4' :
  
    mimic : Convert to the new bitstream reader
  
    metasound : Convert to the new bitstream reader
  
    lagarith : Convert to the new bitstream reader
  
    indeo : Convert to the new bitstream reader
  
    imc : Convert to the new bitstream reader
  
    webp : Convert to the new bitstream reader
  This merge is a noop, see
  
  http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2017-April/209609.html
  Merged-by : Clément Bœsch <u@pkh.me>
  

• Writing A Dreamcast Media Player

  6 janvier 2017, par Multimedia Mike — Sega Dreamcast

  I know I’m not the only person to have the idea to port a media player to the Sega Dreamcast video game console. But I did make significant progress on an implementation. I’m a little surprised to realize that I haven’t written anything about it on this blog yet, given my propensity for publishing my programming misadventures.

  
  
  

  This old effort had been on my mind lately due to its architectural similarities to something else I was recently brainstorming.

  Early Days
  Porting a multimedia player was one of the earliest endeavors that I embarked upon in the multimedia domain. It’s a bit fuzzy for me now, but I’m pretty sure that my first exposure to the MPlayer project in 2001 arose from looking for a multimedia player to port. I fed it through the Dreamcast development toolchain but encountered roadblocks pretty quickly. However, this got me looking at the MPlayer source code and made me wonder how I could contribute, which is how I finally broke into practical open source multimedia hacking after studying the concepts and technology for more than a year at that point.

  Eventually, I jumped over to the xine project. After hacking on that for awhile, I remembered my DC media player efforts and endeavored to compile xine to the console. The first attempt was to simply compile the codebase using the Dreamcast hobbyist community’s toolchain. This is when I came to fear the multithreaded snake pit in xine’s core. Again, my memories are hazy on the specifics, but I remember the engine having a bunch of threading hacks with comments along the lines of “this code deadlocks sometimes, so on shutdown, monitor this lock and deliberately break it if it has been more than 3 seconds”.

  Something Workable
  Eventually, I settled on a combination of FFmpeg’s libavcodec library for audio and video decoders, xine’s demuxer library, and xine’s input API, combined with my own engine code to tie it all together along with video and output drivers provided by the KallistiOS hobbyist OS for Dreamcast. Here is a simple diagram of the data movement through this player :

  
  
  

  Details and Challenges
  This is a rare occasion when I actually got to write the core of a media player engine. I made some mistakes.

  xine’s internal clock ran at 90000 Hz. At least, its internal timestamps were all in reference to a 90 kHz clock. I got this brilliant idea to trigger timer interrupts at 6000 Hz to drive the engine. Whatever the timer facilities on the Dreamcast, I found that 6 kHz was the greatest common divisor with 90 kHz. This means that if I could have found an even higher GCD frequency, I would have used that instead.

  So the idea was that, for a 30 fps video, the engine would know to render a frame on every 200th timer interrupt. I eventually realized that servicing 6000 timer interrupts every second would incur a ridiculous amount of overhead. After that, my engine’s philosophy was to set a timer to fire for the next frame while beginning to process the current frame. I.e., when rendering a frame, set a timer to call back in 1/30th of a second. That worked a lot better.

  As I was still keen on 8-bit paletted image codecs at the time (especially since they were simple and small for bootstrapping this project), I got to use output palette images directly thanks to the Dreamcast’s paletted textures. So that was exciting. The engine didn’t need to convert the paletted images to a different colorspace before rendering. However, I seem to recall that the Dreamcast’s PowerVR graphics hardware required that 8-bit textures be twiddled/swizzled. Thus, it was still required to manipulate the 8-bit image before rendering.

  I made good progress on this player concept. However, a huge blocker for me was that I didn’t know how to make a proper user interface for the media player. Obviously, programming the Dreamcast occurred at a very low level (at least with the approach I was using), so there were no UI widgets easily available.

  This was circa 2003. I assumed there must have been some embedded UI widget libraries with amenable open source licenses that I could leverage. I remember searching and checking out a library named libSTK. I think STK stood for “set-top toolkit” and was positioned specifically for doing things like media player UIs on low-spec embedded computing devices. The domain hosting the project is no longer useful but this appears to be a backup of the core code.

  It sounded promising, but the libSTK developers had a different definition of “low-spec embedded” device than I did. I seem to recall that they were targeting something along with likes of a Pentium III clocked at 800 MHz with 128 MB RAM. The Dreamcast, by contrast, has a 200 MHz SH-4 CPU and 16 MB RAM. LibSTK was also authored in C++ and leveraged the Boost library (my first exposure to that code), and this all had the effect of making binaries quite large while I was trying to keep the player in lean C.

  Regrettably, I never made any serious progress on a proper user interface. I think that’s when the player effort ran out of steam.

  The Code
  So, that’s another project that I never got around to finishing or publishing. I was able to find the source code so I decided to toss it up on github, along with 2 old architecture outlines that I was able to dig up. It looks like I was starting small, just porting over a few of the demuxers and decoders that I knew well.

  I’m wondering if it would still be as straightforward to separate out such components now, more than 13 years later ?

  The post Writing A Dreamcast Media Player first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• New proposed ePrivacy Regulation and why Piwik might not need tracking consent compared to Google Analytics & co

  11 janvier 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  The EU is proposing new ePrivacy Regulations. The proposed Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications will increase the protection of people’s private life and open up new opportunities for business.

  

  The new ePrivacy Regulation proposal

  The proposal mentions several changes for example to the “Cookie Law” where no longer a cookie consent will be needed when the cookies improve the user’s internet experience, for example to remember the shopping cart history or when completing a form over several pages.

  However, consent to track a user’s behaviour may be needed in the future, unless the analytics data collection is hosted on the first-party website.

  From TheRegister : O’Neil noted a minor change in which visitors to a website for analytics purposes do not require consent, as long as any personal data collected is only processed by the first party.

  

  First party Analytics respecting privacy

  Piwik is an open-source analytics platform that is used on more than 1 million websites and apps in over 150 countries, and available in more than 50 languages. The difference with other analytics solutions is that you can download and install Piwik on your own infrastructure. Websites and mobile apps tracking users with their own Piwik very likely won’t require a consent from their users if these regulations become reality.

  We have regularly written about why privacy matters, or more recently 11 ways Piwik Analytics helps you to protect your visitors privacy.

  Besides the standard Piwik features, there are Premium Features that let businesses and organizations further maximize their success based on the tracked data. Need help in hosting Piwik on premise ? InnoCraft are THE Piwik experts and know it best as it is the company of the makers of Piwik. InnoCraft provides support subscriptions and enterprise packages to help you setting up, configuring and maintaining Piwik on your infrastructure as well as offer training and custom development.

  

  We’re excited to be building the best digital analytics platform which respects our privacy on the Internet.

  Thank you for being a valued member of the Piwik community !