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• MPEG DASH SRD : How to properly re-assemble multiple tiles into a single tile [closed]

  21 juin 2024, par ATrashInTheWorld

  I am trying to build a web player that is able to stream MPEG DASH, but with SRD information in the manifest. I have a problem at the "gluing" of the tiles part.

  


  How the data is set :

  


  I have a video of a resolution of XxY, which I've divided in tiles of NxM, meaning that I now have the NxM videos of the same duration as the original one, but which is reduced to a smaller resolution, a portion from the original (seeing only the upper left corner for example).

  


  I have fragmented those tiles for the MPEG DASH streaming format, meaning an init.mp4 and the m4s fragments for each tile. To note that I have the tiles in multiple bitrate, in order to imitate some adaptive streaming.

  


  The "gluing" part :

  


  The gluing part consists of gluing the tile togheter into 1 big tile, aka the original video. The SRD information allows me to know where each tile should be position to reconstruct the original video shape. Once I have the spatial information from the manifest, I use this command to glue the tiles togheter :

  


  ffmpeg.exe -i v1 -i v2 -i v3 -i .v4 -i v5 -i v6 -i v7 -i v8 -i v9 -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v][2:v][3:v][4:v][5:v][6:v][7:v][8:v]xstack=inputs=9:layout=0_0|w0_0|w0+w1_0|0_h0|w3_h0|w3+w4_h0|0_h0+h3|w6_h0+h3|w6+w7_h0+h3" out.mp4


  


  The command above allows me to "glue" together tiles from a grid of 3x3 tiles, into 1 big tile.

  


  The web streaming method :

  


  To stream, I use JavaScript MediaSource, and I am appending the fragments to the buffer continuously, like this reference

  


  The issue :

  


  The issue is that the FFMPEG gluing command only works on proper mp4 videos, not with fragments (m4s). I cannot glue the wanted m4s tiles back into a bigger one. However, the JavaScript player only takes fragments, meaning that I cannot just send continuous mp4 video.

  


  I have tried many things with fragments and full videos, but the only solution I found for this chicken-egg problem is to :

  


  

  1. Create video clips with smaller duration for each tile, at each bitrate.

  


  2. Glue the desired video clips tiles together with the FFMpeg command.

  


  3. Convert that glued video in one big fragment, and send it.

  


  


  However, I feel that it is not a clean method and I fear that I am missing something.
Is there a better solution that I am not aware of ?
Any idea suggestions are welcome.

  


  Thank you for your time.

  


• Parsing The Clue Chronicles

  30 décembre 2018, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  A long time ago, I procured a 1999 game called Clue Chronicles : Fatal Illusion, based on the classic board game Clue, a.k.a. Cluedo. At the time, I was big into collecting old, unloved PC games so that I could research obscure multimedia formats.

  
  
  

  Surveying the 3 CD-ROMs contained in the box packaging revealed only Smacker (SMK) videos for full motion video which was nothing new to me or the multimedia hacking community at the time. Studying the mix of data formats present on the discs, I found a selection of straightforward formats such as WAV for audio and BMP for still images. I generally find myself more fascinated by how computer games are constructed rather than by playing them, and this mix of files has always triggered a strong “I could implement a new engine for this !” feeling in me, perhaps as part of the ScummVM project which already provides the core infrastructure for reimplementing engines for 2D adventure games.

  Tying all of the assets together is a custom high-level programming language. I have touched on this before in a blog post over a decade ago. The scripts are in a series of files bearing the extension .ini (usually reserved for configuration scripts, but we’ll let that slide). A representative sample of such a script can be found here :

  clue-chronicles-scarlet-1.txt

  What Is This Language ?
  At the time I first analyzed this language, I was still primarily a C/C++-minded programmer, with a decent amount of Perl experience as a high level language, and had just started to explore Python. I assessed this language to be “mildly object oriented with C++-type comments (‘//’) and reliant upon a number of implicit library functions”. Other people saw other properties. When I look at it nowadays, it reminds me a bit more of JavaScript than C++. I think it’s sort of a Rorschach test for programming languages.

  Strangely, I sort of had this fear that I would put a lot of effort into figuring out how to parse out the language only for someone to come along and point out that it’s a well-known yet academic language that already has a great deal of supporting code and libraries available as open source. Google for “spanish dolphins far side comic” for an illustration of the feeling this would leave me with.

  It doesn’t matter in the end. Even if such libraries exist, how easy would they be to integrate into something like ScummVM ? Time to focus on a workable approach to understanding and processing the format.

  Problem Scope
  So I set about to see if I can write a program to parse the language seen in these INI files. Some questions :

  1. How large is the corpus of data that I need to be sure to support ?
  2. What parsing approach should I take ?
  3. What is the exact language format ?
  4. Other hidden challenges ?

  To figure out how large the data corpus is, I counted all of the INI files on all of the discs. There are 138 unique INI files between the 3 discs. However, there are 146 unique INI files after installation. This leads to a hidden challenge described a bit later.

  What parsing approach should I take ? I worried a bit too much that I might not be doing this the “right” way. I’m trying to ignore doubts like this, like how “SQL Shame” blocked me on a task for a little while a few years ago as I concerned myself that I might not be using the purest, most elegant approach to the problem. I know I covered language parsing a lot time ago in university computer science education and there is a lot of academic literature to the matter. But sometimes, you just have to charge in and experiment and prototype and see what falls out. In doing so, I expect to have a better understanding of the problems that need to solved and the right questions to ask, not unlike that time that I wrote a continuous integration system from scratch because I didn’t actually know that “continuous integration” was the keyword I needed.

  Next, what is the exact language format ? I realized that parsing the language isn’t the first and foremost problem here– I need to know exactly what the language is. I need to know what the grammar are keywords are. In essence, I need to reverse engineer the language before I write a proper parser for it. I guess that fits in nicely with the historical aim of this blog (reverse engineering).

  Now, about the hidden challenges– I mentioned that there are 8 more INI files after the game installs itself. Okay, so what’s the big deal ? For some reason, all of the INI files are in plaintext on the CD-ROM but get compressed (apparently, according to file size ratios) when installed to the hard drive. This includes those 8 extra INI files. I thought to look inside the CAB installation archive file on the CD-ROM and the files were there… but all in compressed form. I suspect that one of the files forms the “root” of the program and is the launching point for the game.

  Parsing Approach
  I took a stab at parsing an INI file. My approach was to first perform lexical analysis on the file and create a list of 4 types : symbols, numbers, strings, and language elements ([]{}()=., :). Apparently, this is the kind of thing that Lex/Flex are good at. This prototyping tool is written in Python, but when I port this to ScummVM, it might be useful to call upon the services of Lex/Flex, or another lexical analyzer, for there are many. I have a feeling it will be easier to use better tools when I understand the full structure of the language based on the data available.
  
  The purpose of this tool is to explore all the possibilities of the existing corpus of INI files. To that end, I ran all 138 of the plaintext files through it, collected all of the symbols, and massaged the results, assuming that the symbols that occurred most frequently are probably core language features. These are all the symbols which occur more than 1000 times among all the scripts :

     6248 false
     5734 looping
     4390 scripts
     3877 layer
     3423 sequentialscript
     3408 setactive
     3360 file
     3257 thescreen
     3239 true
     3008 autoplay
     2914 offset
     2599 transparent
     2441 text
     2361 caption
     2276 add
     2205 ge
     2197 smackanimation
     2196 graphicscript
     2196 graphic
     1977 setstate
     1642 state
     1611 skippable
     1576 desc
     1413 delayscript
     1298 script
     1267 seconds
     1019 rect
  

  About That Compression
  I have sorted out at least these few details of the compression :

  bytes 0-3    "COMP" (a pretty strong sign that this is, in fact, compressed data)
  bytes 4-11   unknown
  bytes 12-15  size of uncompressed data
  bytes 16-19  size of compressed data (filesize - 20)
  bytes 20-    compressed payload
  

  The compression ratios are on the same order of gzip. I was hoping that it was stock zlib data. However, I have been unable to prove this. I wrote a Python script that scrubbed through the first 100 bytes of payload data and tried to get Python’s zlib.decompress to initialize– no luck. It’s frustrating to know that I’ll have to reverse engineer a compression algorithm that deals with just 8 total text files if I want to see this effort through to fruition.

  Update, January 15, 2019
  Some folks expressed interest in trying to sort out the details of the compression format. So I have posted a followup in which I post some samples and go into deeper details about things I have tried :

  Reverse Engineering Clue Chronicles Compression

  The post Parsing The Clue Chronicles first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• Missing functions in new version of FFmpeg

  25 avril 2013, par Asik

  I am upgrading a wrapper around ffmpeg to the most recent version of the library. Some functions have been renamed or replaced. For the most part I've been able to found equivalents easily, but the following two are giving me trouble :

  av_abort_set_callback
  
  av_abort_default_callback

  I could not find these functions by searching online, so what happened to them and what should they be replaced with now ?

  Here is a copy of the header file "abort.h" where they were located :

  /* 
  
   * This file is part of FFmpeg. 
  
   * 
  
   * FFmpeg is free software; you can redistribute it and/or 
  
   * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public 
  
   * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either 
  
   * version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. 
  
   * 
  
   * FFmpeg is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, 
  
   * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of 
  
   * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU 
  
   * Lesser General Public License for more details. 
  
   * 
  
   * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public 
  
   * License along with FFmpeg; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA 
  
   */
  
  
  
  #ifndef AVUTIL_ABORT_H
  
  #define AVUTIL_ABORT_H
  
  
  
  /** 
  
   * Causes abnormal program termination. By default, av_abort_callback calls 
  
   * abort() from the stdlib. This behavior can be altered by setting a 
  
   * different av_abort callback function. 
  
   */
  
  
  
  void av_abort_internal(void);
  
  void av_abort_set_callback(void (*)(void));
  
  void av_abort_default_callback(void);
  
  
  
  #define av_abort()    do { av_log(NULL, AV_LOG_ERROR, "Abort at %s:%d\n", __FILE__, __LINE__); av_abort_internal(); } while(0)
  
  
  
  #endif /* AVUTIL_ABORT_H */