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• Nexus One

  19 mars 2010, par Mans — Uncategorized

  I have had a Nexus One for about a week (thanks Google), and naturally I have an opinion or two about it.
  

  Hardware

  With the front side dominated by a touch-screen and a lone, round button, the Nexus One appearance is similar to that of most contemporary smartphones. The reverse sports a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, a Google logo, and a smaller HTC logo. Power button, volume control, and headphone and micro-USB sockets are found along the edges. It is with appreciation I note the lack of a front-facing camera ; the silly idea of video calls is finally put to rest.

  Powering up the phone (I’m beginning to question the applicability of that word), I am immediately enamoured with the display. At 800×480 pixels, the AMOLED display is crystal-clear and easily viewable even in bright light. In a darker environment, the display automatically dims. The display does have one quirk in that the subpixel pattern doesn’t actually have a full RGB triplet for each pixel. The close-up photo below shows the pattern seen when displaying a solid white colour.

  

  The result of this is that fine vertical lines, particularly red or blue ones, look a bit jagged. Most of the time this is not much of a problem, and I find it an acceptable compromise for the higher effective resolution it provides.

  Basic interaction

  The Android system is by now familiar, and the Nexus offers no surprises in basic usage. All the usual applications come pre-installed : browser, email, calendar, contacts, maps, and even voice calls. Many of the applications integrate with a Google account, which is nice. Calendar entries, map placemarks, etc. are automatically shared between desktop and mobile. Gone is the need for the bug-ridden custom synchronisation software with which mobile phones of the past were plagued.

  Launching applications is mostly speedy, and recently used apps are kept loaded as long as memory needs allow. Although this garbage-collection-style of application management, where you are never quite sure whether an app is still running, takes a few moments of acclimatisation, it works reasonably well in day to day use. Most of the applications are well-behaved and save their data before terminating.

  Email

  Two email applications are included out of the box : one generic and one Gmail-only. As I do not use Gmail, I cannot comment on this application. The generic email client supports IMAP, but is rather limited in functionality. Fortunately, a much-enhanced version, K-9, is available for download. The main feature I find lacking here is threaded message view.

  The features, or lack thereof, in the email applications is not, however, of huge importance, as composing email, or any longer piece of text, is something one rather avoids on a system like this. The on-screen keyboard, while falling among the better of its kind, is still slow to use. Lack of tactile feedback means accidentally tapping the wrong key is easily done, and entering numbers or punctuation is an outright chore.

  Browser

  Whatever the Nexus lacks in email abilities, it makes up for with the browser. Surfing the web on a phone has never been this pleasant. Page rendering is quick, and zooming is fast and simple. Even pages not designed for mobile viewing are easy to read with smart reformatting almost entirely eliminating the sideways scrolling which hampered many a mobile browser of old.

  Calls and messaging

  Being a phone, the Nexus One is obviously able to make and receive calls, and it does so with ease. Entering a number or locating a stored contact are both straight-forward operations. During a call, audio is clear and of adequate loudness, although I have yet to use the phone in really noisy surroundings.

  The other traditional task of a mobile phone, messaging, is also well-supported. There isn’t really much to say about this.

  Multimedia

  Having a bit of an interest in most things multimedia, I obviously tested the capabilities of the Nexus by throwing some assorted samples at it, revealing ample space for improvement. With video limited to H.264 and MPEG4, and the only supported audio codecs being AAC, MP3, Vorbis, and AMR, there are many files which will not play.

  To make matters worse, only selected combinations of audio and video will play together. Several video files I tested played without sound, yet when presented with the very same audio data alone, it was correctly decoded. As for container formats, it appears restricted to MP4/MOV, and Ogg (for Vorbis). AVI files are recognised as media files, but I was unable to find an AVI file which would play.

  With a device clearly capable of so much more, the poor multimedia support is nothing short of embarrassing.

  The Market

  Much of the hype surrounding Android revolves around the Market, Google’s virtual marketplace for app authors to sell or give away their creations. The thousands of available applications are broadly categorised, and a search function is available.

  The categorised lists are divided into free and paid sections, while search results, disappointingly, are not. To aid the decision, ratings and comments are displayed alongside the summary and screenshots of each application. Overall, the process of finding and installing an application is mostly painless. While it could certainly be improved, it could also have been much worse.

  The applications themselves are, as hinted above, beyond numerous. Sadly, quality does not quite match up to quantity. The vast majority of the apps are pointless, though occasionally mildly amusing, gimmicks of no practical value. The really good ones, and they do exist, are very hard to find unless one knows precisely what to look for.

  Battery

  Packing great performance into a pocket-size device comes with a price in battery life. The battery in the Nexus lasts considerably shorter time than that in my older, less feature-packed Nokia phone. To some extent this is probably a result of me actually using it a lot more, yet the end result is the same : more frequent recharging. I should probably get used to the idea of recharging the phone every other night.

  Verdict

  The Nexus One is a capable hardware platform running an OS with plenty of potential. The applications are still somewhat lacking (or very hard to find), although the basic features work reasonably well. Hopefully future Android updates will see more and better core applications integrated, and I imagine that over time, I will find third-party apps to solve my problems in a way I like. I am not putting this phone on the shelf just yet.

• Recommendation on the best quality/performance H264 encoder for video encoding ?

  20 août 2013, par kheya

  I am looking for a video encoder that is fast, requires less CPU power and produces very good quality mp4 video.

  The input videos can be in any format and uploaded by users.

  Only thing I know is FFMPEG library.

  Is there anything else that is better ?

  The program must have a batch utility (exe) that I am interested in.

  I would appreciate if you kindly share your knowledge.

  Thanks

• ARM inline asm secrets

  6 juillet 2010, par Mans — ARM, Compilers

  Although I generally recommend against using GCC inline assembly, preferring instead pure assembly code in separate files, there are occasions where inline is the appropriate solution. Should one, at a time like this, turn to the GCC documentation for guidance, one must be prepared for a degree of disappointment. As it happens, much of the inline asm syntax is left entirely undocumented. This article attempts to fill in some of the blanks for the ARM target.
  

  Constraints

  Each operand of an inline asm block is described by a constraint string encoding the valid representations of the operand in the generated assembly. For example the “r” code denotes a general-purpose register. In addition to the standard constraints, ARM allows a number of special codes, only some of which are documented. The full list, including a brief description, is available in the constraints.md file in the GCC source tree. The following table is an extract from this file consisting of the codes which are meaningful in an inline asm block (a few are only useful in the machine description itself).

  f	Legacy FPA registers f0-f7.
  t	The VFP registers s0-s31.
  v	The Cirrus Maverick co-processor registers.
  w	The VFP registers d0-d15, or d0-d31 for VFPv3.
  x	The VFP registers d0-d7.
  y	The Intel iWMMX co-processor registers.
  z	The Intel iWMMX GR registers.
  l	In Thumb state the core registers r0-r7.
  h	In Thumb state the core registers r8-r15.
  j	A constant suitable for a MOVW instruction. (ARM/Thumb-2)
  b	Thumb only. The union of the low registers and the stack register.
  I	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a constant that can be used as an immediate value in a Data Processing instruction. In Thumb-1 state a constant in the range 0 to 255.
  J	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a constant in the range -4095 to 4095. In Thumb-1 state a constant in the range -255 to -1.
  K	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a constant that satisfies the I constraint if inverted. In Thumb-1 state a constant that satisfies the I constraint multiplied by any power of 2.
  L	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a constant that satisfies the I constraint if negated. In Thumb-1 state a constant in the range -7 to 7.
  M	In Thumb-1 state a constant that is a multiple of 4 in the range 0 to 1020.
  N	Thumb-1 state a constant in the range 0 to 31.
  O	In Thumb-1 state a constant that is a multiple of 4 in the range -508 to 508.
  Pa	In Thumb-1 state a constant in the range -510 to +510
  Pb	In Thumb-1 state a constant in the range -262 to +262
  Ps	In Thumb-2 state a constant in the range -255 to +255
  Pt	In Thumb-2 state a constant in the range -7 to +7
  G	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a valid FPA immediate constant.
  H	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a valid FPA immediate constant when negated.
  Da	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_int, const_double or const_vector that can be generated with two Data Processing insns.
  Db	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_int, const_double or const_vector that can be generated with three Data Processing insns.
  Dc	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_int, const_double or const_vector that can be generated with four Data Processing insns. This pattern is disabled if optimizing for space or when we have load-delay slots to fill.
  Dn	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_vector which can be loaded with a Neon vmov immediate instruction.
  Dl	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_vector which can be used with a Neon vorr or vbic instruction.
  DL	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_vector which can be used with a Neon vorn or vand instruction.
  Dv	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_double which can be used with a VFP fconsts instruction.
  Dy	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a const_double which can be used with a VFP fconstd instruction.
  Ut	In ARM/Thumb-2 state an address valid for loading/storing opaque structure types wider than TImode.
  Uv	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a valid VFP load/store address.
  Uy	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a valid iWMMX load/store address.
  Un	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a valid address for Neon doubleword vector load/store instructions.
  Um	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a valid address for Neon element and structure load/store instructions.
  Us	In ARM/Thumb-2 state a valid address for non-offset loads/stores of quad-word values in four ARM registers.
  Uq	In ARM state an address valid in ldrsb instructions.
  Q	In ARM/Thumb-2 state an address that is a single base register.

  Operand codes

  Within the text of an inline asm block, operands are referenced as %0, %1 etc. Register operands are printed as rN, memory operands as [rN, #offset], and so forth. In some situations, for example with operands occupying multiple registers, more detailed control of the output may be required, and once again, an undocumented feature comes to our rescue.

  Special code letters inserted between the % and the operand number alter the output from the default for each type of operand. The table below lists the more useful ones.

  c	An integer or symbol address without a preceding # sign
  B	Bitwise inverse of integer or symbol without a preceding #
  L	The low 16 bits of an immediate constant
  m	The base register of a memory operand
  M	A register range suitable for LDM/STM
  H	The highest-numbered register of a pair
  Q	The least significant register of a pair
  R	The most significant register of a pair
  P	A double-precision VFP register
  p	The high single-precision register of a VFP double-precision register
  q	A NEON quad register
  e	The low doubleword register of a NEON quad register
  f	The high doubleword register of a NEON quad register
  h	A range of VFP/NEON registers suitable for VLD1/VST1
  A	A memory operand for a VLD1/VST1 instruction
  y	S register as indexed D register, e.g. s5 becomes d2[1]