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• Death of A Micro Center

  21 septembre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — History

  The Micro Center computer store located in Santa Clara, CA, USA closed recently :

  
  
  

  I liked Micro Center. I have liked Micro Center ever since I first visited their Denver, CO location 10 years ago. I would sometimes drive an hour in each direction just to visit that shop. I was excited to see that they had a location in the Bay Area when I moved here a few years ago (despite the preponderance of Fry’s stores).

  Now this location is gone. I wonder how much of the “we couldn’t come to favorable terms on a lease” was true (vs. an excuse to close a retail store at a time when more business is moving online, particularly in the heart of Silicon Valley). But that’s not what I wanted to discuss. I came here to discuss…

  The Micro Center Window Logos

  The craziest part about shopping the Santa Clara Micro Center location was the logos they displayed on the window outside. Every time I saw it, it made me sentimental for a time when some of these logos were current, or when some of these companies were still in business. Some of the logos on their front window were for companies I’ve never heard of. It reminds me of the nearby 7-11 convenience stores when I was growing up– their walls were decorated with people sporting embarrassingly 1970s styles long after the 1970s had transpired.

  I thought I would record what those front window logos were and try to pinpoint when the store launched exactly (assuming the logos have been their since the initial opening and never changed).

  
  
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  Here we have Lotus, Hewlett Packard/HP, Corel, Fuji, Power Macintosh, NEC, and Fujitsu. Lotus was purchased by IBM in 1995 and still seems to be maintained as a separate brand. The Power Macintosh was introduced as a brand in 1994. Corel’s logo has seen a few mutations over the years but I don’t know when this one fell out of favor.

  Fuji (vs. Fujitsu) appears to refer to Fujifilm, though this logo is also obsolete.

  
  
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  Hayes– I specifically remember reading the Slashdot post accouncing that Hayes is dead (followed by many comments reminiscing about the Hayes command set). Here is the post, from early 1999.

  From Googling, it doesn’t appear IBM still has a presence in the consumer computing space (though they do have something pertaining to software for consumer products). Then there’s the good old rainbow Apple logo, something that went away in 1997. I suspect 1997 was also the last hurrah of the name ‘Macintosh’ (though I remember mistakenly referring to Apple computer products as Macintoshes well into the mid-2000s and inadvertently angering some Apple enthusiasts).

  
  
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  As for the next segment, obviously, both Sony and Toshiba are still very much alive. Iomega was acquired by EMC in 2008 but is still maintained as a separate brand. USRobotics is still around and making — what else ? — 56K modems (and their current logo is slightly different than the one seen here).

  Targus seems to be a case maker (“Leading Provider of Cases, Bags and Accessories for Laptops and Tablets”). I wonder if that’s just their current business or if they had more areas long ago ? It seems strange that they would get brand billing like this.

  Finally, searching for information about Practical Peripherals only produces sites about how they’re long dead (like this history lesson). It’s unclear when they died.

  The interior of this store was also decorated with more technology company logos near the ceiling (I didn’t really register that fact until I had visited many times). Regrettably, I now won’t be able to see how up to date those logos were.

  Based on the data points above, it’s safe to conclude that the store opened between 1995 or 1996 (again, assuming the logos were placed at opening and never changed).

  Epilogue

  Here’s one more curious item still visible from the outside :

  
  
  

  “See the world’s fastest PC !” Featuring an Intel Core 2 Extreme ? That CPU dates back to 2007 and was succeeded by Nehalem in late 2008. So even that sign, which is presumably easier and cleaner to replace than the window logos, was absurdly out of date.

• Limiting video fps with `select` filter

  3 juillet 2023, par Dan

  So this filter supposedly limits a video's FPS to 30 by doing frame selection :
select='eq(n,0)+if(gt(t-prev_selected_t,1/30.50),1,0)

  


  The problem is, when I use this on a 120fps video and output as HLS, the .m3u8 file under-reports the segment lengths by 25%, or rather, ffmpeg seems to be selecting the wrong # of frames per segment because it thinks the video is still 120fps. If I inspect the .ts files in Windows, the metadata suggests the video is still 120fps.

  


  Any ideas how to recalculate the correct fps in ffmpeg without doing additional video processing ?

  


  Otherwise, is there another way to limit the FPS to 30 without a separate ffmpeg/ffprobe command ?

  


• How to convert VP8 track with different frame resolution to h264

  13 septembre 2016, par Nikita

  I have a .webm file with VP8 track, recorded from WebRTC stream by external service (TokBox Archiving). The stream is adaptive, so each frame in track could have different resolution. Most players (in webkit browsers) use video resolution from track description (which is always 640x480) and scale frames to this resolution. Firefox and VLC player uses real frame resolution, changing video resolution respectively.

  I want to achieve 2 goals :

  1. play this video in Internet Explorer 9+ without additional plugin installation.
  2. change frames resolution to one fixed resolution, so the video will look identically in different browsers.

  So, my plan is :

  • extract frames from source webm file to images with real frame resolution (e.g. PNG or BMP) (how could I do that ?)
  • find max width and max height of images
  • add black padding to images, so smaller frames will be in the center of a new frame (of size MAX_WIDHTxMAX_HEIGHT)
  • combine images to h264 track using ffmpeg

  Is all correct ? How can I achieve this ? Can this algorithm be optimized some way ?

  I tried ffmpeg to extract images, but it does not parse real frame resolution, using resolution from track header.
  I think some libwebm functions can help me (to parse frame headers and extract images). Maybe someone has some code snippets to do this ?

  Example .webm (download source, do not play google-converted version) : https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwFZRvYNn9CKcndhMzlVa0psX00/view?usp=sharing

  Official description of adaptive stream from TokBox support : https://support.tokbox.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/206241666-Archived-video-resolution-is-supposed-to-be-720x1280-but-reports-as-640x480