Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (5373)

• Announcing the first free software Blu-ray encoder

  25 avril 2010, par Dark Shikari — blu-ray, x264

  For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools. Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer.

  But Blu-ray has yet to get that treatment. Despite the “format war” between Blu-ray and HD DVD ending over two years ago, free software has lagged behind. “Professional” tools for Blu-ray video encoding can cost as much as $100,000 and are often utter garbage. Here are two actual screenshots from real Blu-rays : I wish I was making this up.

  But today, things change. Today we take the first step towards a free software Blu-ray creation toolkit.

  Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264′s Blu-ray compliance.

  With x264′s powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it’s quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality. With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user.

  To celebrate this achievement, we are making available for download a demo Blu-ray encoded with x264, containing entirely free content !

  On this Blu-ray are the Open Movie Project films Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream, available under a Creative Commons license. Additionally, Microsoft has graciously provided about 6 minutes of lossless HD video and audio (from part of a documentary project) under a very liberal license. This footage rounds out the Blu-ray by adding some difficult live-action content in addition to the relatively compressible CGI footage from the Open Movie Project. Finally, we used this sound sample, available under a Creative Commons license.

  You may notice that the Blu-ray image is only just over 2GB. This is intentional ; we have encoded all the content on the disk at appropriate bitrates to be playable from an ordinary 4.7GB DVD. This should make it far easier to burn a copy of the Blu-ray, since Blu-ray burners and writable media are still relatively rare. Most Blu-ray players will treat a DVD containing Blu-ray data as a normal Blu-ray disc. A few, such as the Playstation 3, will not, but you can still play it as a data disc.

  Finally, note that (in accordance with the Blu-ray spec) the disc image file uses the UDF 2.5 filesystem, which may be incompatible with some older virtual drive and DVD burning applications. You’ll also need to play it on an actual Blu-ray player if you want to get the menus and such working correctly. If you’re looking to play it on a PC, a free trial of Arcsoft TMT is available here.

  What are you waiting for ? Grab a copy today !

  UPDATE : Here is an AVCHD-compliant version of the above, which should work better when burned on a DVD-5 instead of a BD-R. (mirror)
  

  What’s left before we have a fully free software Blu-ray creation toolkit ? Audio is already dealt with ; AC3 audio (aka Dolby Digital), the format used in DVD, is still supported by Blu-ray, and there are many free software AC3 encoders. The primary missing application is a free software Blu-ray authoring tool, to combine the video and audio streams to create a Blu-ray file structure with the menus, chapters, and so forth that we have all come to expect. But the hardest part is dealt with : we can now create compatible video and audio streams.

  In the meantime, x264 can be used to create streams to be authored using Blu-Print, Scenarist, Encore or other commercial authoring tools.

  More detailed documentation on the new Blu-ray support and how to use it can be found in the official commit message. Do keep in mind that you have to export to raw H.264 (not MKV or MP4) or else the buffering information will be slightly incorrect. Finally, also note that the encoding settings given as an example are not a good choice for general-purpose encoding : they are intentionally crippled by Blu-ray restrictions, which will significantly reduce compression for ordinary non-Blu-ray encoding.

  In addition to Blu-ray support, the aforementioned commit comes with a lot of fun extras :

  x264 now has native variable-framerate ratecontrol, which makes sure your encodes get a correct target bitrate and proper limiting of maximum bitrate even if the duration of every frame is different and the “framerate” is completely unknown. This helps a lot when encoding from variable-framerate container formats such as FLV and WMV, along with variable-framerate content such as anime.

  x264 now supports pulldown (telecine) in much the same fashion as it is handled in MPEG-2. The calling application can pass in flags representing how to display a frame, allowing easy transcoding from MPEG-2 sources with pulldown, such as broadcast television. The x264 commandline app contains some examples of these (such as the common 3:2 pulldown pattern).

  x264 now also exports HRD timing information, which is critical for compliant transport stream muxing. There is currently an active project to write a fully DVB-compatible free software TS muxer that will be able to interface with x264 for a seamless free software broadcast system. It will likely also be possible to repurpose this muxer as part of a free software Blu-ray authoring package.

  All of this is now available in the latest x264.

  http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/bluray%20fail.png

• Dreamcast Finds

  15 avril 2022, par Multimedia Mike — Sega Dreamcast

  Pursuant to my recent post about finally understanding how Sega Dreamcast GD-ROM rips are structured, I was able to prepare the contents of various demo discs in a manner that makes exploration easy via the Internet Archive. This is due to the way that IA makes it easy to browse archives such as ZIP or ISO files (anything that 7zip knows how to unpack), and also presents the audio tracks for native playback directly through the web browser.

  These are some of the interesting things I have found while perusing the various Dreamcast sampler discs.

  Multimedia Formats
  First and foremost : Multimedia-wise, SFD and ADX files abound on all the discs. SFD files are Sofdec, a middleware format used for a lot of FMV on Dreamcast games. These were little more than MPEG video files with a non-MPEG (ADPCM instead) audio codec. VLC will usually play the video portions of these files but has trouble detecting the audio. It’s not for lack of audio codec support because it can play the ADX files just fine.
  

  It should be noted that Dreamcast Magazine Disc 11 has an actual .mpg file (as opposed to a .sfd file) that has proper MPEG audio instead instead of ADX ADPCM.

  The only other multimedia format I know of that was used in any Dreamcast games was 4XM, used on Alone In The Dark : The New Nightmare. I wrote a simple C tool a long time to recover these files from a disc image I extracted myself. Rather than interpreting the ISO-9660 filesystem, the tool just crawled through the binary blob searching for ‘4XMV’ file signatures and using length data within the files for extraction.

  Also, there are plentiful PVR files (in reference to the PowerVR2 GPU hardware that the DC uses) which ‘file’ dutifully identifies as “Sega PVR image”. There are probably tools to view them. It doesn’t appear to be a complicated format.

  Scripting
  I was fascinated to see Lua files on at least one of the discs. It turns out that MDK 2 leverages the language, as several other games do. But it was still interesting to see the .lua files show up in the Dreamcast version as well.

  That Windows CE Logo
  Every Sega Dreamcast is famously emblazoned with a logo mentioning Microsoft Windows CE :

  
  
  

  It has confused many folks. It also confused me until this exploratory exercise. Many would wonder if the Dreamcast booted up into some Windows CE OS environment that then ran the game, but that certainly wasn’t it. Indeed, Dreamcast was one of the last consoles that really didn’t have any kind of hypervisor operating system managing everything.

  I found a file called rt2dc.exe on one sampler disc. At first, I suspected that this was a development utility for Windows to convert some “RT” graphical format into a format more suitable for the Dreamcast. Then, ‘file’ told me that it was actually a Windows EXE but compiled for the Hitachi SH-4 CPU (the brain inside the DC). Does the conversion utility run on the Dreamcast itself ? Then I analyzed the strings inside the binary and saw references to train stations. That’s when it started to click for me that this was the binary executable for the demo version of Railroad Tycoon 2 : Gold Edition, hence “rt2dc.exe”. Still, this provides some insight about whether Dreamcast “runs” Windows. This binary was built against a series of Windows CE libraries. The symbols also imply DirectX compatibility.

  Here is a page with more info about the WinCE/DirectX variant for the Sega Dreamcast. It seems that this was useful for closing the gap between PC and DC ports of games (i.e., being able to re-use more code between the 2 platforms). I guess this was part of what made Dreamcast a dry run for the DirectXbox (later Xbox).

  Here is a list of all the Dreamcast games that are known to use Windows CE.

  Suddenly, I am curious if tools such as IDA Pro or Ghidra can possibly open up Windows CE binaries that contain SH-4 code. Not that I’m particularly interested in reverse engineering any algorithms locked up in Dreamcast land.

  Tomb Raider Easter Egg
  The volume 6 sampler disc has a demo of Tomb Raider : The Last Revelation. While inspecting the strings, I found an Easter egg. I was far from the first person to discover it, though, as seen on this The Cutting Room Floor wiki page (look under “Developer Message”). It looks like I am the first person to notice it on the Dreamcast version. It shows up at offset 0xE3978 in the Dreamcast (demo version) binary, if anyone with permissions wants to update the page.

  Web Browser
  Then there’s the Web Browser for Sega Dreamcast. It seemed to be included on a lot of these sampler discs. But only mentioning the web browser undersells it– the thing also bundled an email client and an IRC client. It’s important to remember that the Dreamcast also had a keyboard peripheral.

  I need to check the timeline for when the web browser first became available vs. when the MIL-CD hack became known. My thinking is that there is no way that the web browser program didn’t have some security issues– buffer overflows and the like. It seems like this would have been a good method of breaking the security of the system.

  Ironically, I suddenly can think of a reason why one might want to use advanced reverse engineering tools on Dreamcast binaries, something I struggled with just a few paragraphs ago.

  Odds ‘n Ends
  It’s always fun to find plain text files among video game assets and speculating on the precise meaning… while also marveling how long people have been struggling to correctly spell “length”.

  Internationalization via plain text files.

  Another game (Slave Zero) saw fit to zip its assets. Maybe this was to save space in order to fit everything on the magazine sampler disc. Quizzically, this didn’t really save an appreciable amount of space.

  Finally, all the discs have an audio track 2 that advises that the disc must be played in a Dreamcast console. Not unusual. However, volume 4 also has a Japanese lady saying the same thing on track 4. This is odd because track 4 is one of the GD area audio tracks and is not accessible with normal CD hardware. Further, she identifies the disc as a “Windows CE disc”.

  The post Dreamcast Finds first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• How Funnel for Piwik Analytics enriches your Piwik experience giving you ultimate insights and debugging capabilities

  13 janvier 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  No matter what type of website or app you have, whether you are trying to get your users to sign up for something or sell products, there is a certain number of steps your visitors have to go through. On every step you lose visitors and therefore potential revenue and conversions. Therefore it is critical to know where your visitors actually follow those steps in your website or app, where you lose them and where your visitors maybe get confused. By defining a funnel, you can improve your conversion rates, sales and revenue as you can exactly determine where you lose your visitors in converting your goal or a sale.

  A Funnel defines a series of steps that you expect your visitors to take on their way to converting a goal. Funnels, a premium feature for Piwik developed by InnoCraft, lets you create funnels to get the data you need to improve your websites and mobile apps. Learn more about Funnel.

  In this blog post we will cover the reports the Funnel plugin provides. The next blog post shows you how to configure and validate your funnel in Piwik.

  

  Integration in Goal reports

  At Piwik and InnoCraft, we usually start looking into our goal reports. Funnel integrates directly into each goal reporting page giving you a quick overview how your funnel is doing. This saves us a lot of time as we don’t have to separately look into each funnel page and only takes us maybe an additional second to keep an eye on our funnels. By clicking on the headline or “View funnel report” link, you can directly go to the funnel report to get a more detailed report if you notice any spike in the evolution of the conversions or conversion rate.

  

  Getting an overall Funnel overview

  Next we usually go to the “Funnel Overview” page where it shows a list of all activated Funnels and their performance over time. You will find the look familiar as it is similar to the “Goals Overview” page. If we find something unusual there, for example any spikes, we usually directly click on the headline of the Funnel to go to the detailed Funnel report. You can also choose a funnel from the left reporting menu or search for a funnel by entering the shortcut “f”.

  

  Viewing a funnel report

  A funnel reporting page looks very similar to a Goal reporting page. It starts with an evolution graph and sparklines showing you the performance of your funnel over time.

  

  In the evolution graph you can select the metrics you want to plot. We usually have an eye on the funnel conversion rate and the number of “Funnel entries” or the number of “Funnel conversions”. The conversion rate alone does not show you how your funnel is performing. Imagine the rate is always stable at around 20% and you might think everything is alright, but if the number of visitors that take part in your funnel goes down, you might have a problem as the number of funnel conversions actually decreases even though the rate is the same. So we recommend to not only have a look at the conversion rate. The report will remember the metrics you want to plot each time you open it so you don’t have to re-select them over and over again.

  

  The funnel overview

  In the funnel overview we are giving you more details about the funnel and goal related conversion metrics so you don’t have to switch between the goal and funnel report and compare them easily.

  When you analyze a funnel report, you might not always remember how the funnel is configured. Even though you specify names for each step you sometimes need to know on which pages a certain step will be activated. By clicking on the funnel summary link you can quickly look into the funnel configuration and also see all important metrics at a glance in a simple table without having to scroll.

  

  You might also notice the Visitor Log link which will show you all actions for all visitors that have entered this funnel. This lets you really understand how your visitors navigate through your website and how they proceeded, exited or converted your funnel on a visitor level.

  

  The Funnel visualization

  Below the funnel overview you can visually see where your visitors entered, proceeded, converted and exited your funnel. We kept the UI clean so you can focus on the important things.

  Most tools only give you the pages where visitors have entered your funnel but we do better and also show you the list of external referrers used by visitors to enter your funnel directly (marketing campaigns, search engines or other websites). Also we do not only show only the top 5 pages but up to 100 pages and 50 referrers (more can be configured if needed). When you hover a row, you will not only see the number of hits but also the percentage each row has contributed to the entries. Here you want to look and understand how your visitors enter your funnel and based on the data maybe invest in successful referrers, campaigns and pages. If the pages or referrers you expect to see there don’t show up, your users might not understand the path you had in mind for them.

  

  Next you may notice how many visits have gone through each step, in this case 3487 visits. The green and red bar lets you quickly identify how many of your visitors have proceeded to the next step (green) compared to how many have exited the funnel at this step (red). Ideally, most of the bar is green and not red indicating that more visitors proceed to the next step than they exit.

  

  Now the next feature is really valuable. When you hover the step title or the number of visits, you will notice that two icons appear :

  

  Those two little icons are really powerful and give you even more insights to really dig into all the data. The left icon shows you the visitor log showing all actions of each visitor that have participated in this particular funnel step. This means for each step you get to see all the details and actions of each visitor. This lets you really debug and understand problems in your funnel.

  At InnoCraft, we understand that plain numbers are often not so valuable. Only the evolution over time, when you put the numbers in relation to something else you can really understand how your website is doing. The icon to the right lets you do exactly this, it lets you view the row evolution for each funnel step. We are sure you will enjoy this feature. It lets you explore how each funnel step is doing over time. For example the number of entries for a step or how many proceeded to the next step from here over time. Here you ideally want to see that the “Proceeded Rate” increases over time, meaning more and more visitors actually proceed to the next step instead of exiting it.

  

  We are sure you will really love those features that give you just those extra insights that other tools don’t give you.

  On the right you can find out where your visitors went to, if they did not proceed any further in the funnel. This lets you better understand why they left the funnel and did not proceed any further.

  

  At the end of the funnel report you find again the number of conversions and the conversion rate. Here we recommend looking into the visitor log when you hover the name of the last step as you can analyze how each visitor converted this funnel in detail.

  

  Applying segments

  Funnels lets you apply any Piwik segment to the Funnel report allowing you to dice your visitors multiplying the value you get out of Funnel. For example you may want to apply a segment and analyze the funnel for visitors that have visited your website or mobile app for the first time vs. recurring visitors. Sometimes it may be interesting how visitors from different countries go through your funnel, the possibilities are endless. We really recommend to take advantage of segments to understand your different target groups even better.

  The plugin also adds some new segments to your Piwik letting you segment any Piwik report by visitors that have participated in a funnel or participated in a particular funnel step. For example you could go to the “Visitors => Locations” report and apply a segment for your funnel to see which countries have participated or converted most in your funnel.

  Widgets, Scheduled Reports, and more.

  This is not where the fun ends. Funnels defines new widgets that you can add to your dashboard or export it into a third party website. You can set up scheduled reports to receive the Funnel report automatically via email or sms or download the report to share it with your colleagues. It works also very well with Custom Alerts and you can view the Funnel report in the Piwik Mobile app. You can manage Funnels via HTTP API and also fetch all Funnel reports via the HTTP Reporting API. The plugin is really nicely integrated into Piwik we will need some more blog posts to show you all the ways Funnels advances your Piwik experience and how it lets you dig into all the data so you can increase your conversions and sales based on this data.

  How to get Funnels and related features

  You can get Funnels on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about Funnels you might be also interested in the Funnel User Guide and the Funnel FAQ.

  Similar to Funnels we also offer Users Flow which lets you visualize the flow of your users and visitors across several interactions.