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• Diamond Rio Artifacts

  30 août 2012, par Multimedia Mike — Multimedia History

  Remember the Diamond Rio PMP300 ? It’s credited with being the very first portable MP3 player, released all the way back in 1998 (I say ‘credited’ because I visited an audio museum once which exhibited a Toshiba MP3 player from 1997). I recently rescued a pristine set of Rio artifacts from a recycle pile.

  
  
  

  I wondered if I should scan the manual for posterity. However, a Google search indicates that a proper PDF (loaded with pleas to not illegally copy music) isn’t very difficult to come by. Here are the other items that came with the unit :

  
  
  Click for larger image
  

  Ah, more memories (of dialup internet) : A tie-in with another Diamond product, this time a modem which claims to enable the user to download songs at up to 112 kilobits per second. I wonder if that was really possible. I remember that 56k modems were a stretch and 33.6k was the best that most users could hope for.

  There is also a separate piece of paper that advises the buyer that the parallel port adapter might look a bit different than what is seen in the printed copy. Imagine the age of downloading to your MP3 player via parallel port while pulling down new songs via dialup internet.

  The artifacts also included not one, but two CD-ROMs :

  
  
  Click for larger image
  

  One is a driver and software disc, so no big surprise there. The other has a selection of MP3 files for your shiny new MP3 player. I’m wondering if these should be proactively preserved. I was going to process the files’ metadata and publish it here, for the benefit of search engines. However, while metadata is present, the files don’t conform to any metadata format that FFmpeg/Libav recognize. The files mention Brava Software Inc. in their metadata sections. Still, individual filenames at the end of this post.

  Leftovers :
  A few other miscellaneous multimedia acquisitions :

  
  
  

  I still want to study all of these old multimedia creation programs in depth some day. Theatrix Hollywood is a creative writing game, Wikipedia alleges (I’m a bit rigid with my exact definition of what constitutes a game). Here is an example movie output from this software. Meanwhile, the Mad Dog Multimedia CD-ROM apparently came packaged with a 56X CD-ROM drive (roughly the pinnacle of CD-ROM speeds). I found it has some version of Sonic Foundry’s ACID software, thus making good on the “applications” claim on the CD-ROM copy.

  Diamond Rio MP3 Sampler
  These are the names of the MP3 files found on the Diamond Rio MP3 sampler for the benefit of search engines.

  13_days.mp3
  albert_einstein_dreams.mp3
  a_man_of_many_colours.mp3
  anything_for_love.mp3
  a_secret_place.mp3
  bake_sale.mp3
  bigger_than_the_both_of_us.mp3
  boogie_beat.mp3
  bring_it_on.mp3
  buskersoundcheck_hippo.mp3
  charm.mp3
  chemical_disturbance.mp3
  coastin.mp3
  credit_is_due.mp3
  dance_again.mp3
  destiny.mp3
  dig_a_little_deeper.mp3
  diplomat6_bigmouthshut.mp3
  dirty_littlemonster.mp3
  dirty.mp3
  drivin.mp3
  Eric_Clapton_Last_Train.mp3
  etude_in_c_sharp_minor_op_42_n.mp3
  everybody_here.mp3
  freedom_4_all.mp3
  grandpas_advice.mp3
  groove.mp3
  heartland.mp3
  he_loved_her_so.mp3
  highway_to_hell.mp3
  hit_the_ground_runnin.mp3
  i_feel_fine_today.mp3
  im_not_lost_im_exploring.mp3
  into_the_void.mp3
  its_alright.mp3
  i_will_be_there.mp3
  i_will_pass_this_way_again.mp3
  juiceboxwilly_hepcat.mp3
  just_an_illusion.mp3
  keepin_time_by_the_river.mp3
  king_of_the_brooklyn_delta.mp3
  lovermilou_ringingbell.mp3
  middle_aged_rock_and_rollers.mp3
  midnight_high.mp3
  mr_schwinn.mp3
  my_brilliant_masterpiece.mp3
  my_gallery.mp3
  on_the_river_road.mp3
  pouring_rain.mp3
  prayer.mp3
  rats_in_my_bedroom.mp3
  razor_serpent_and_the_dub_mix.mp3
  ruthbuzzy_pleasestophangin.mp3
  secret_love.mp3
  ships.mp3
  silence_the_thunder.mp3
  sleeping_beauty.mp3
  slow_burn.mp3
  standing_in_my_own_way.mp3
  take_no_prisoners.mp3
  takin_up_space.mp3
  Taylor_Dayne_Unstoppable.mp3
  the_laundromat_song.mp3
  the_old_dun_cow.mp3
  the_people_i_meet.mp3
  trip_trigger_avenue.mp3
  tru-luv.mp3
  unfortunate_man.mp3
  vertigo.mp3
  when_she_runs.mp3
  where_do_we_go_from_here.mp3
  words_of_earnest.mp3
  

• Python-FFMPEG Corruption Problems

  11 juillet 2023, par Gabriel Ruben Guzman

  I'm repurposing some python code to generate gifs/mp4s showcasing nba player movements dot form. (With the 'frames' used in the gifs being generated by matplotlib).

  


  The repo comes with two different functions for generating the gifs, watch_play and animate_play. Both of which use python command line functionalities to run ffmpeg and generate the mp4s.
I've been able to use the watch_play succesfully, bot every time I try using animate_play, which according to the documention is meant to be significantly faster than watch play, I run into the error showcased here.(I printed the cmd string being passed into the pipe, in the hopes it would make debugging easier)

  


  I've tried generating gifs/mp4s of various size and added a decent bit of code to lessen the volume of data being processed. (I'm essentially repurposing the code just to generate clips, so I've been able to remove a lot of the pbp/tracking data logs to speed up the run time) But no matter what I've done, gotten some variation of the screenshotted error.

  


  pipe: : corrupt input packet in stream 0&#xA;[rawvideo @ 0x55ccc0e2bb80] Invalid buffer size, packet size 691200 < expected frame_size 921600&#xA;Error while decoding stream #0:0 : Invalid argument

  &#xA;

  The code for animate_play

  &#xA;

  def animate_play(self, game_time=None, length=None, highlight_player=None,
                 commentary=True, show_spacing=None):
    """
    Method for animating plays in game.
    Outputs video file of play in {cwd}/temp.
    Individual frames are streamed directly to ffmpeg without writing them
    to the disk, which is a great speed improvement over watch_play

    Args:
        game_time (int): time in game to start video
            (seconds into the game).
            Currently game_time can also be an tuple of length two
            with (starting_frame, ending_frame)if you want to
            watch a play using frames instead of game time.
        length (int): length of play to watch (seconds)
        highlight_player (str): If not None, video will highlight
            the circle of the inputed player for easy tracking.
        commentary (bool): Whether to include play-by-play commentary in
            the animation
        show_spacing (str) in ['home', 'away']: show convex hull
            spacing of home or away team.
            If None, does not show spacing.

    Returns: an instance of self, and outputs video file of play
    """
    if type(game_time) == tuple:
        starting_frame = game_time[0]
        ending_frame = game_time[1]
    else:
        game_time= self.start +(self.quarter*720)
        end_time= self.end +(self.quarter*720)
        length = end_time-game_time
        # Get starting and ending frame from requested 
        # game_time and length
        print('hit')
        print(len(self.moments))
        print(game_time)
        print(end_time)
        print(length)
        print(game_time+length)
        
        print(self.moments.game_time.min())
        print(self.moments.game_time.max())

        sys.exit()
        starting_frame = self.moments[self.moments.game_time.round() ==
                                      game_time].index.values[0]
        ending_frame = self.moments[self.moments.game_time.round() ==
                                    game_time + length].index.values[0]

    # Make video of each frame
    filename = "./temp/{game_time}.mp4".format(game_time=game_time)
    if commentary:
        size = (960, 960)
    else:
        size = (480, 480)
    cmdstring = ('ffmpeg',
                 '-y', '-r', '20',  # fps
                 '-s', '%dx%d' % size,  # size of image string
                 '-pix_fmt', 'argb',  # Stream argb data from matplotlib
                 '-f', 'rawvideo','-i', '-',
                 '-vcodec', 'libx264', filename)
    #print(pipe)
    #print(cmdstring)
    
    

    # Stream plots to pipe
    pipe = Popen(cmdstring, stdin=PIPE)
    print(cmdstring)
    for frame in range(starting_frame, ending_frame):
        print(frame)
        self.plot_frame(frame, highlight_player=highlight_player,
                        commentary=commentary, show_spacing=show_spacing,
                        pipe=pipe)
    print(cmdstring)
    pipe.stdin.close()
    pipe.wait()
    return self


  &#xA;

  The code for watch play

  &#xA;

  def watch_play(self, game_time=None, length=None, highlight_player=None,
               commentary=True, show_spacing=None):

    """
    DEPRECIATED.  See animate_play() for similar (fastere) method

    Method for viewing plays in game.
    Outputs video file of play in {cwd}/temp

    Args:
        game_time (int): time in game to start video
            (seconds into the game).
            Currently game_time can also be an tuple of length
            two with (starting_frame, ending_frame) if you want
            to watch a play using frames instead of game time.
        length (int): length of play to watch (seconds)
        highlight_player (str): If not None, video will highlight
            the circle of the inputed player for easy tracking.
        commentary (bool): Whether to include play-by-play
            commentary underneath video
        show_spacing (str in ['home', 'away']): show convex hull
            of home or away team.
            if None, does not display any convex hull

    Returns: an instance of self, and outputs video file of play
    """
    print('hit this point ')
    warnings.warn(("watch_play is extremely slow. "
                   "Use animate_play for similar functionality, "
                   "but greater efficiency"))

    if type(game_time) == tuple:
        starting_frame = game_time[0]
        ending_frame = game_time[1]
    else:
        # Get starting and ending frame from requested game_time and length
        game_time= self.start +(self.quarter*720)
        end_time= self.end +(self.quarter*720)
        length = end_time-game_time


        starting_frame = self.moments[self.moments.game_time.round() ==
                                      game_time].index.values[0]
        ending_frame = self.moments[self.moments.game_time.round() ==
                                    game_time + length].index.values[0]
    #print(self.moments.head(2))
    #print(starting_frame)
    #print(ending_frame)
    print(len(self.moments))
    # Make video of each frame
    title = str(starting_frame)+'-'+str(ending_frame)
    for frame in range(starting_frame, ending_frame):
        print(frame)
        self.plot_frame(frame, highlight_player=highlight_player,
                        commentary=commentary, show_spacing=show_spacing)
    command = ('ffmpeg -framerate 20 -start_number {starting_frame} '
               '-i %d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf '
               '"scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" {title}'
               '.mp4').format(starting_frame=starting_frame,title=title)
    os.chdir('temp')
    os.system(command)
    os.chdir('..')

    # Delete images
    for file in os.listdir('./temp'):
        if os.path.splitext(file)[1] == '.png':
            os.remove('./temp/{file}'.format(file=file))

    return self'


  &#xA;

• My SBC Collection

  31 décembre 2023, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Like many computer nerds in the last decade, I have accumulated more than a few single-board computers, or “SBCs”, which are small computers based around a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that nearly always features an ARM CPU at its core. Surprisingly few of these units are Raspberry Pi units, though that brand has come to exemplify and dominate the product category.

  Also, as is the case for many computer nerds, most of these SBCs lay fallow for years at a time. Equipped with an inexpensive lightbox that I procured in the last year, I decided I could at least create glamour shots of various units and catalog them in a blog post.

  While Raspberry Pi still enjoys the most mindshare far and away, and while I do have a few Raspberry Pi units in my inventory, I have always been a bigger fan of the ODROID brand, which works with convenient importers around the world (in the USA, I can vouch for Ameridroid, to whom I’ve forked over a fair amount of cash for these computing toys).

  As mentioned, Raspberry Pi undisputedly has the most mindshare of all these SBC brands and I often wonder why… and then I immediately remind myself that it has the biggest ecosystem, and has a variety of turnkey projects and applications (such as Pi-hole and PiVPN) that promise a lower barrier to entry — as well as a slightly lower price point — than some of these other options. ODROID had a decent ecosystem for awhile, especially considering the monthly ODROID Magazine, though that ceased publication in July 2020. The Raspberry Pi and its variants were famously difficult to come by due to the global chip shortage from 2021-2023. Meanwhile, I had no trouble procuring these boards during the same timeframe.

  So let’s delve into the collection…
  

  Cubieboard
  The Raspberry Pi came out in 2012 and by 2013 I was somewhat coveting one to hack on. Finally ! An accessible ARM platform to play with. I had heard of the BeagleBoard for years but never tried to get my hands on one. I was thinking about taking the plunge on a new Raspberry Pi, but a colleague told me I should skip that and go with this new hotness called the Cubieboard, based on an Allwinner SoC. The big value-add that this board had vs. a Raspberry Pi was that it had a SATA adapter. Although now that it has been a decade, it only now occurs to me to quander whether it was true SATA or a USB-to-SATA bridge. Looking it up now, I’m led to believe that the SoC supported the functionality natively.

  Anyway, I did get it up and running but never did much with it, thus setting the tone for future SBC endeavors. No photos because I gave it to another tech enthusiast years ago, whose SBC collection dwarfs my own.

  ODROID-XU4
  I can’t recall exactly when or how I first encountered the ODROID brand. I probably read about it on some enthusiast page or another circa 2014 and decided to try one out. I eventually acquired a total of 3 of these ODROID-XU4 units, each with a different case, 1 with a fan and 2 passively-cooled :

  

  Collection of ODROID-XU4 SBCs

  This is based on the Samsung Exynos 5422 SoC, the same series as was used in their Note 3 phone released in 2013. It has been a fun chip to play with. The XU4 was also my first introduction to the eMMC storage solution that is commonly supported on the ODROID SBCs (alongside micro-SD). eMMC offers many benefits over SD in terms of read/write speed as well as well as longevity/write cycles. That’s getting less relevant these days, however, as more and more SBCs are being released with direct NVMe SSD support.

  I had initially wanted to make a retro-gaming device built on this platform (see the handheld section later for more meditations on that). In support of this common hobbyist goal, there is this nifty case XU4 case which apes the aesthetic of the Nintendo N64 :

  

  ODROID-XU4 N64-style case

  It even has a cool programmable LCD screen. Maybe one day I’ll find a use for it.

  For awhile, one of these XU4 units (likely the noisy, fan-cooled one) was contributing results to the FFmpeg FATE system.

  While it features gigabit ethernet and a USB3 port, I once tried to see if I could get 2 Gbps throughput with the unit using a USB3-gigabit dongle. I had curious results in that the total amount of traffic throughput could never exceed 1 Gbps across both interfaces. I.e., if 1 interface was dealing with 1 Gbps and the other interface tried to run at 1 Gbps, they would both only run at 500 Mbps. That remains a mystery to me since I don’t see that limitation with Intel chips.

  Still, the XU4 has been useful for a variety of projects and prototyping over the years.

  ODROID-HC2 NAS
  I find that a lot of my fellow nerds massively overengineer their homelab NAS setups. I’ll explore this in a future post. For my part, people tend to find my homelab NAS solution slightly underengineered. This is the ODROID-HC2 (the “HC” stands for “Home Cloud”) :

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS

  It has the same guts as the ODROID-XU4 except no video output and the USB3 function is leveraged for a SATA bridge. This allows you to plug a SATA hard drive directly into the unit :

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS uncovered

  Believe it or not, this has been my home NAS solution for something like 6 or 7 years now– I don’t clearly remember when I purchased it and put it into service.

  But isn’t this sort of irresponsible ? What about a failure of the main drive ? That’s why I have an external drive connected for backing up the most important data via rsync :

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS backup enclosure

  The power consumption can’t be beat– Profiling for a few weeks of average usage worked out to 4.5 kWh for the ODROID-HC2… per month.

  ODROID-C2
  I was on a kick of ordering more SBCs at one point. This is the ODROID-C2, equipped with a 64-bit Amlogic SoC :

  

  ODROID-C2

  I had this on the FATE farm for awhile, performing 64-bit ARM builds (vs. the XU4’s 32-bit builds). As memory serves, it was unreliable and would occasionally freeze up.

  Here is a view of the eMMC storage through the bottom of the translucent case :

  

  Bottom of ODROID-C2 with view of eMMC storage

  ODROID-N2+
  Out of all my ODROID SBCs, this is the unit that I long to “get back to” the most– the ODROID-N2+ :

  

  ODROID-N2+

  Very capable unit that makes a great little desktop. I have some projects I want to develop using it so that it will force me to have a focused development environment.

  Raspberry Pi
  Eventually, I did break down and get a Raspberry Pi. I had a specific purpose in mind and, much to my surprise, I have stuck to it :

  

  Original Raspberry Pi

  I was using one of the ODROID-XU4 units as a VPN gateway. Eventually, I wanted to convert the XU4 to something else and I decided to run the VPN gateway as an appliance on the simplest device I could. So I procured this complete hand-me-down unit from eBay and went to work. This was also the first time I discovered the DietPi distribution and this box has been in service running Wireguard via PiVPN for many years.

  I also have a Raspberry Pi 3B+ kicking around somewhere. I used it as a Steam Link device for awhile.

  SOPINE + Baseboard
  Also procured when I was on this “let’s buy random SBCs” kick. The Pine64 SOPINE is actually a compute module that comes in the form factor of a memory module.

  

  Pine64 SOPINE Compute Module

  Back to using Allwinner SoCs. In order to make this thing useful, you need to place it in something. It’s possible to get a mini-ITX form factor board that can accommodate 7 of these modules. Before going to that extreme, there is this much simpler baseboard which can also use eMMC for storage.

  

  Baseboard with SOPINE, eMMC, and heat sinks

  I really need to find an appropriate case for this one as it currently performs its duty while sitting on an anti-static bag.

  NanoPi NEO3
  I enjoy running the DietPi distribution on many of these SBCs (as it’s developed not just for Raspberry Pi). I have also found their website to be a useful resource for discovering new SBCs. That’s how I found the NanoPi series and zeroed in on this NEO3 unit, sporting a Rockchip SoC, and photographed here with some American currency in order to illustrate its relative size :

  

  NanoPi NEO3

  I often forget about this computer because it’s off in another room, just quietly performing its assigned duty.

  MangoPi MQ-Pro
  So far, I’ve heard of these fruits prepending the Greek letter pi for naming small computing products :

  • Raspberry – the O.G.
  • Banana – seems to be popular for hobbyist router/switches
  • Orange
  • Atomic
  • Nano
  • Mango

  Okay, so the AtomicPi and NanoPi names don’t really make sense considering the fruit convention.

  Anyway, the newest entry is the MangoPi. These showed up on Ameridroid a few months ago. There are 2 variants : the MQ-Pro and the MQ-Quad. I picked one and rolled with it.

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro pieces arrive

  When it arrived, I unpacked it, assembled the pieces, downloaded a distro, tossed that on a micro-SD card, connected a monitor and keyboard to it via its USB-C port, got the distro up and running, configured the wireless networking with a static IP address and installed sshd, and it was ready to go as a headless server for an edge application.

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro components, ready for assembly

  The unit came with no instructions that I can recall. After I got it set up, I remember thinking, “What is wrong with me ? Why is it that I just know how to do all of this without any documentation ?”

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro in first test

  Only after I got it up and running and poked around a bit did I realize that this SBC doesn’t have an ARM SoC– it’s a RISC-V SoC. It uses the Allwinner D1, so it looks like I came full circle back to Allwinner.

  

  MangoPi MQ-Pro with more US coinage for scale

  So I now have my first piece of RISC-V hobbyist kit, although I learned recently from Kostya that it’s not that great for multimedia.

  Handheld Gaming Units
  The folks at Hardkernel have also produced a series of handheld retro-gaming devices called ODROID-GO. The first one resembled the original Nintendo Game Boy, came as a kit to be assembled, and emulated 5 classic consoles. It also had some hackability to it. Quite a cool little device, and inexpensive too. I have since passed it along to another gaming enthusiast.

  Later came the ODROID-GO Advance, also a kit, but emulating more devices. I was extremely eager to get my hands on this since it could emulate SNES in addition to NES. It also features a headphone jack, unlike the earlier model. True to form, after I received mine, it took me about 13 months before I got around to assembling it. After that, the biggest challenge I had was trying to find an appropriate case for it.

  

  ODROID-GO Advance with case and headphones

  Even though it may try to copy the general aesthetic and form factor of the Game Boy Advance, cases for the GBA don’t fit this correctly.

  Further, Hardkernel have also released the ODROID-GO Super and Ultra models that do more and more. The Advance, Super, and Ultra models have powerful SoCs and feature much more hackability than the first ODROID-GO model.

  I know that the guts of the Advance have been used in other products as well. The same is likely true for the Super and Ultra.

  Ultimately, the ODROID-GO Advance was just another project I assembled and then set aside since I like the idea of playing old games much more than actually doing it. Plus, the fact has finally crystalized in my mind over the past few years that I have never enjoyed handheld gaming and likely will never enjoy handheld gaming, even after I started wearing glasses. Not that I’m averse to old Game Boy / Color / Advance games, but if I’m going to play them, I’d rather emulate them on a large display.

  The Future
  In some of my weaker moments, I consider ordering up certain Banana Pi products (like the Banana Pi BPI-R2) with a case and doing my own router tricks using some open source router/firewall solution. And then I remind myself that my existing prosumer-type home router is doing just fine. But maybe one day…

  The post My SBC Collection first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.