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• 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 Wikipedia claims that this product was sold from 1998 to 2000 when it was superseded by Adobe LiveMotion (see below).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.

  
  
  

• On ALAC’s Open Sourcing

  1er novembre 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Codec Technology

  Apple open sourced their lossless audio codec last week. Pretty awesome ! I have a theory that, given enough time, absolutely every codec will be open source in one way or another.

  I know I shouldn’t bother reading internet conversation around any news related to multimedia technology. And if I do read it, I shouldn’t waste any effort getting annoyed about them. But here are some general corrections :

  • ALAC is not in the same league as — nor is it a suitable replacement for — MP3/AAC/Vorbis or any other commonly used perceptual audio codec. It’s not a matter of better or worse ; they’re just different families of codecs designed for different purposes.
  • Apple open sourced ALAC, not AAC– easy mistake, though there’s nothing to ‘open source’ about AAC (though people can, and will, argue about its absolute ‘open-ness’).
  • There’s not much technical room to argue between ALAC and FLAC, the leading open source lossless audio compressor. Both perform similarly in terms of codec speeds (screamingly fast) and compression efficiency (results vary slightly depending on source material).
  • Perhaps the most frustrating facet is the blithe ignorance about ALAC’s current open source status. While this event simply added an official “open source” status to the codec, ALAC has effectively been open source for a very long time. According to my notes, the ALAC decoding algorithm was reverse engineered in 2005 and added into FFmpeg in March of the same year. Then in 2008, Google — through their Summer of Code program — sponsored an open source ALAC encoder.

  From the multimedia-savvy who are versed in these concepts, the conversation revolves around which would win in a fight, ALAC or FLAC ? And who between Apple and FFmpeg/Libav has a faster ALAC decoder ? The faster and more efficient ALAC encoder ? I contend that these issues don’t really matter. If you have any experience working with lossless audio encoders, you know that they tend to be ridiculously fast to both encode and decode and that many different lossless codecs compress at roughly the same ratios.

  As for which encoder is the fastest : use whatever encoder is handiest and most familiar, either iTunes or FFmpeg/Libav.

  As for whether to use FLAC or ALAC — if you’ve already been using one or the other for years, keep on using it. Support isn’t going to vanish. If you’re deciding which to use for a new project, again, perhaps choose based on software you’re already familiar with. Also, consider hardware support– ALAC enjoys iPod support, FLAC is probably better supported in a variety of non-iPod devices, though that may change going forward due to this open sourcing event.

  For my part, I’m just ecstatic that the question of moral superiority based on open source status has been removed from the equation.

  Code-wise, I’m interested in studying the official ALAC code to see if it has any corner-case modes that the existing open source decoders don’t yet account for. The source makes mention of multichannel (i.e., greater than stereo) configurations, but I don’t know if that’s in FFmpeg/Libav.

• VLC libx264 streaming muxed as FLV

  24 mars 2012, par Jan Novák

  I have a question on streaming output of libx264. My scenario is that Iam capturing video from webcam, encoding with x264 and then streaming data to flash, muxed as FLV. For muxing, Im using output/flv_bitstream.h, included in libx264 budle. The only modification of muxer, that I made, is that instead of fwrite() im usig send() to transfer data via socket... Encoding library is working fine. If I save output (even muxed), vlc player is able to play it. But, when it goes to data transfer via socket, vlc and flash are not cooperating. The weird thig is, that if Im sending data to vlc player thru socket, it waits till transmission end and then plays video from buffer. But what I need is to play live stream.

  I also tryed to read flv file and send it to vlc of flash tag by tag and it is working fine.

  Any suggestions ?