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• Launch Leech and the History of WMV

  14 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I was combing through my programming archives again and came across an old Perl script called launch-leech.pl. This was a private script I used to maintain for the benefit of myself and a few friends. See, there was this site called Launch.com (URL doesn’t seem to do anything as of this writing but here’s the Wikipedia page). Purchased by Yahoo ! in 2001, Launch still maintained their independent branding. They also carried a lot of music videos, of which I am a huge junkie. launch-leech.pl was the tool I used to download the videos. This was particularly useful since I stubbornly clung to dialup internet access until mid-2004 and it would have been impossible to stream video at any decent quality (though there were 56k streams, so like I said– not possible at any decent quality).

  
  
  

  Technically
  I followed Launch.com for many years. To be honest, I only “followed” in that I figured out where their “latest videos” URL lived and regularly polled it. Each video had either a 6-, 7-, or 8-digit unique ID that could be plugged into the launch-leech.pl script which would then have a conversation with the relevant servers, determine the correct streaming URL with the highest quality, then download and save the URL by handing it off to an external program (first ASFRecorder, though I later switched to mmsclient).

  At one point, I even wrote a crawler that compiled an offline database of all the videos, their IDs and their metadata. I never thought of anything interesting to do with it, though.

  
  
  

  Windows Media Legacy
  During these glory days of leeching, Launch.com streamed using Windows Media. I admit, it’s a bit of a blur now — the site might have used Real or QuickTime, but I was obviously most in tune with the WM side. I remember when I first found the site circa 2000-2001, the videos were in MS MPEG-4v3, and the high quality bitrate was 300 kbits/sec. Eventually, Launch.com would stream WMV7, WMV8, and finally WMV9, with bitrates up to 700 kbits/sec. However, they never broke free of the 320×240 encoding resolution, which was frustrating. When I wasn’t able to notice any substantial difference between 300 and 700 kbits/sec, I felt it might be time to put those extra bits to work on a resolution upgrade.

  At least they were nice enough to re-encode a number of old videos using better codecs and bitrates with each revision, thus prompting me to scan through the site collecting updated video IDs for download.

  
  
  

  Epilogue
  I don’t clearly remember when I stopped visiting Launch.com. Video-wise, the web has been a blur of Flash video ever since about 2006. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time collecting a bunch of music videos in the first half of the decade only to find that pretty much every version of every music video made since the dawn of time is available on demand thanks to YouTube. I have found that this phenomenon manifests in many areas as internet technology marches on.

  The Real Entertainment
  The launch-leech.pl tool represents a recurring pattern for me. I derive as much — if not more — entertainment from creating programs like launch-leech.pl (and implicitly reverse engineering something in the process ; in this case, a website) as I do from the intended entertainment media itself. I seem to have this issue a lot with games, too.

  Is this an issue for anyone else ? Am I the only one who would rather play with the box that a shiny toy comes packaged in ?

• Reduce HLS latency from +30 seconds

  4 juin 2014, par Rick

  Ubuntu 12.04

  nginx 1.2.4

  avconv -version

  avconv version 0.8.10-4:0.8.10-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the Libav developers
  
    built on Feb  6 2014 20:56:59 with gcc 4.6.3
  
  avconv 0.8.10-4:0.8.10-0ubuntu0.12.04.1
  
  libavutil    51. 22. 2 / 51. 22. 2
  
  libavcodec   53. 35. 0 / 53. 35. 0
  
  libavformat  53. 21. 1 / 53. 21. 1
  
  libavdevice  53.  2. 0 / 53.  2. 0
  
  libavfilter   2. 15. 0 /  2. 15. 0
  
  libswscale    2.  1. 0 /  2.  1. 0
  
  libpostproc  52.  0. 0 / 52.  0. 0

  I’m using avconv and nginx to create an HLS stream but right now my latency is regularly well over 30 seconds. After much reading I am aware that HLS has built in latency and that 10s is expected and even preferred but 30s seems quite extreme.

  I’ve seen a lot of discussion on the nginx-rtmp google group, this thread in particular had a lot of suggestions. I have attempted to reduce solve my issue by reducing the hls_fragment and the hls_playlist_length but they haven’t had a significant effect.

  nginx.conf :

  #user  nobody;
  
  worker_processes  1;
  
  
  
  error_log  logs/error.log debug;
  
  
  
  events {
  
      worker_connections  1024;
  
  }
  
  
  
  http {
  
      include       mime.types;
  
      default_type  application/octet-stream;
  
  
  
      sendfile        on;
  
      keepalive_timeout  65;
  
  
  
      server {
  
          listen       8888;
  
          server_name  localhost;
  
  
  
          add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' "*";
  
  
  
          location /hls {
  
              types {
  
                  application/vnd.apple.mpegurl m3u8;
  
                  video/mp2t ts;
  
              }
  
              root /tmp;
  
          }
  
  
  
          # rtmp stat
  
          location /stat {
  
              rtmp_stat all;
  
              rtmp_stat_stylesheet stat.xsl;
  
          }
  
          location /stat.xsl {
  
              # you can move stat.xsl to a different location
  
              root /usr/build/nginx-rtmp-module;
  
          }
  
  
  
          # rtmp control
  
          location /control {
  
              rtmp_control all;
  
          }
  
  
  
          error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
  
          location = /50x.html {
  
              root   html;
  
          }
  
      }
  
  }
  
  
  
  rtmp {
  
      server {
  
          listen 1935;
  
          ping 30s;
  
          notify_method get;
  
  
  
          application myapp {
  
              live on;
  
  
  
              hls on;
  
              hls_path /tmp/hls;
  
              hls_base_url http://x.x.x.x:8888/hls/;
  
              hls_sync 2ms;
  
              hls_fragment 2s;
  
  
  
              #hls_variant _low BANDWIDTH=160000;
  
              #hls_variant _mid BANDWIDTH=320000;
  
              #hls_variant _hi BANDWIDTH=640000;
  
          }
  
      }
  
  }

  avconv command :

  avconv -r 30 -y -f image2pipe -codec:v mjpeg -i - -f flv -codec:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -an -f flv rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/myapp/mystream

• H.264 and VP8 for still image coding : WebP ?

  1er octobre 2010, par Dark Shikari — H.264, VP8, google, psychovisual optimizations

  JPEG is a very old lossy image format. By today’s standards, it’s awful compression-wise : practically every video format since the days of MPEG-2 has been able to tie or beat JPEG at its own game. The reasons people haven’t switched to something more modern practically always boil down to a simple one — it’s just not worth the hassle. Even if JPEG can be beaten by a factor of 2, convincing the entire world to change image formats after 20 years is nigh impossible. Furthermore, JPEG is fast, simple, and practically guaranteed to be free of any intellectual property worries. It’s been tried before : JPEG-2000 first, then Microsoft’s JPEG XR, both tried to unseat JPEG. Neither got much of anywhere.

  Now Google is trying to dump yet another image format on us, “WebP”. But really, it’s just a VP8 intra frame. There are some obvious practical problems with this new image format in comparison to JPEG ; it doesn’t even support all of JPEG’s features, let alone many of the much-wanted features JPEG was missing (alpha channel support, lossless support). It only supports 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, while JPEG can handle 4:2:2 and 4:4:4. Google doesn’t seem interested in adding any of these features either.

  But let’s get to the meat and see how these encoders stack up on compressing still images. As I explained in my original analysis, VP8 has the advantage of H.264′s intra prediction, which is one of the primary reasons why H.264 has such an advantage in intra compression. It only has i4x4 and i16x16 modes, not i8x8, so it’s not quite as fancy as H.264′s, but it comes close.

  The test files are all around 155KB ; download them for the exact filesizes. For all three, I did a binary search of quality levels to get the file sizes close. For x264, I encoded with --tune stillimage --preset placebo. For libvpx, I encoded with --best. For JPEG, I encoded with ffmpeg, then applied jpgcrush, a lossless jpeg compressor. I suspect there are better JPEG encoders out there than ffmpeg ; if you have one, feel free to test it and post the results. The source image is the 200th frame of Parkjoy, from derf’s page (fun fact : this video was shot here ! More info on the video here.).

  Files : (x264 [154KB], vp8 [155KB], jpg [156KB])

  Results (decoded to PNG) : (x264, vp8, jpg)

  This seems rather embarrassing for libvpx. Personally I think VP8 looks by far the worst of the bunch, despite JPEG’s blocking. What’s going on here ? VP8 certainly has better entropy coding than JPEG does (by far !). It has better intra prediction (JPEG has just DC prediction). How could VP8 look worse ? Let’s investigate.

  VP8 uses a 4×4 transform, which tends to blur and lose more detail than JPEG’s 8×8 transform. But that alone certainly isn’t enough to create such a dramatic difference. Let’s investigate a hypothesis — that the problem is that libvpx is optimizing for PSNR and ignoring psychovisual considerations when encoding the image… I’ll encode with --tune psnr --preset placebo in x264, turning off all psy optimizations. 

  Files : (x264, optimized for PSNR [154KB]) [Note for the technical people : because adaptive quantization is off, to get the filesize on target I had to use a CQM here.]

  Results (decoded to PNG) : (x264, optimized for PSNR)

  What a blur ! Only somewhat better than VP8, and still worse than JPEG. And that’s using the same encoder and the same level of analysis — the only thing done differently is dropping the psy optimizations. Thus we come back to the conclusion I’ve made over and over on this blog — the encoder matters more than the video format, and good psy optimizations are more important than anything else for compression. libvpx, a much more powerful encoder than ffmpeg’s jpeg encoder, loses because it tries too hard to optimize for PSNR.

  These results raise an obvious question — is Google nuts ? I could understand the push for “WebP” if it was better than JPEG. And sure, technically as a file format it is, and an encoder could be made for it that’s better than JPEG. But note the word “could”. Why announce it now when libvpx is still such an awful encoder ? You’d have to be nuts to try to replace JPEG with this blurry mess as-is. Now, I don’t expect libvpx to be able to compete with x264, the best encoder in the world — but surely it should be able to beat an image format released in 1992 ?

  Earth to Google : make the encoder good first, then promote it as better than the alternatives. The reverse doesn’t work quite as well.

  [155KB]