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• How Media Analytics for Piwik gives you the insights you need to measure how effective your video and audio marketing is – Part 1

  31 janvier 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  Do you have video or audio content on your website or in your app ? If you answered this with yes, you should continue reading and learn everything about our Media Analytics premium feature.

  When you produce video or audio content, you are either spending money or time or often both money and time on your content in the hope of increasing conversions or sales. This means you have to know how your media is being used, when it is used, for how long and by whom. You can simply not afford not to know how this content affects your overall business goals as you are likely losing money and time by not making the most out of it. Would you be able to answer any of the above questions ? Do you know whether you can justify the cost and time for producing them, which videos work better than others and how they support your marketing strategy ? Luckily, getting all these insights is now so trivial it is almost a crime to not measure it.

  Getting Media Analytics and Installation

  Media Analytics can be purchased from the Piwik Marketplace where you find all sorts of free plugins as well as several premium features such as A/B Testing or Funnel. After the purchase you will receive a license key that you can enter in your Piwik to install and update the plugin with just one click.

  The feature will in most cases automatically start tracking your media content and you don’t even need to change the tracking code on your website. Currently supported players are for example YouTube, Vimeo, HTML 5, JW Player, VideoJS and many more players. You can also easily extend it by adding a custom media player or simply by letting us know which player you use and we will add support for it for you.

  By activating this feature, you get more than 15 new media reports, even more exportable widgets, new segments, APIs, and more. We will cover some of those features in this blog post and in part 2. For a full list of features check out the Media Analytics page on the Piwik Marketplace.

  Media Overview

  As the name says, it gives you an overview over your media usage and how it performs over time. You can choose any media metrics in the big evolution graph and the sparklines below give you an overview over all important metrics in a glance.

  

  It lets you for example see how often media was shown to your users, how often users start playing your media, for how long they watched it, how often they finished it, and more. If you see some spikes there, you should definitely have a deeper look at the other reports. When you hover a metric, it will show you a tooltip explaining how the data for this is collected and what it means.

  Real-Time Media

  On the Real-Time page you can see how your content is being used by your visitors right now, for example within the last 30 minutes, last 60 minutes and last 24 hours.

  It shows you how many plays you had in the last minutes, for how long they played it, and it shows you currently most popular media titles. This is great to discover which media content performs best right now and lets you make decisions based on user behaviour that is happening right now.

  

  Below you can see our Audience Real-Time Map that shows you from where in the world your media is being played. A bigger circle indicates that a media play happened more recently and of course you can zoom in down to countries and regions.

  

  All the reports update every few seconds so you can always have a look at it and see in just a second how your content is doing and how certain marketing campaigns affect it. All these real-time reports can be also added as widgets to any of your Piwik Dashboards and they can be exported for example as an iframe.

  Video, Audio and Media Player reports

  Those reports come with so many features, we need a separate blog post and cover this in part 2.

  Events

  Media Analytics will automatically track events so you can see how often users pressed for example play or pause, how often they resumed a video and how often they finished a video. This helps you better understand how your media is being used.

  

  For example in the past we noticed a couple of videos with lots of pause and resume events. We then had a look at the Audience Log – which we will cover next – to better understand why visitors paused the videos so often. We then realized they did this especially for videos that were served from a specific server and because the videos were loading so slow, users often pressed pause to let the media buffer, then played the media for a few seconds and then paused it again as they had to wait for the video to load. Moving those videos to another, faster server showed us immediate results in the number of pauses going down and on average visitors watched the videos for much longer.

  Audience Log

  At InnoCraft, we understand that not only aggregated metrics matter but also that you often need the ability to dig into your data and “debug” certain behaviours to understand the cause for some unusual high or low metrics. For example you may find out that many of your users often pause a video, then you wonder how each individual user behaved so you can better understand the why.

  

  The audience log shows you a detailed log of every visitor. You can chronologically see every action a visitor has performed during their whole visit. If you click on the visitor profile link, you can even see all visits of a specific visitor, and all actions they have ever performed on your website.

  This lets you ultimately debug and understand your visitors and see exactly which actions they performed before playing your media, which media they played, how they played your media, and how they behaved after playing your media.

  The visitor log of course also shows important information about each visitor like where they came from (referrer), their location, software, device and much more information.

  Audience Map

  The Audience Map is similar to the Real-Time Map but it shows you the locations of your visitors based on a selected date range and not in real time. The darker the blue, the more visitors from that country, region or city have interacted with your media.

  

  Coming in part 2

  In the next part we will cover which video, audio and media player reports Media Analytics provides, how segmenting gives you insights into different personas, and how nicely it integrates into Piwik.

  How to get Media Analytics and related features

  You can get Media Analytics on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about this feature, you might be also interested in the Media Analytics User Guide and the Media Analytics FAQ.

• Translating Return To Ringworld

  17 août 2016, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  As indicated in my previous post, the Translator has expressed interest in applying his hobby towards another DOS adventure game from the mid 1990s : Return to Ringworld (henceforth R2RW) by Tsunami Media. This represents significantly more work than the previous outing, Phantasmagoria.

  
  
  Return to Ringworld Title Screen
  

  I have been largely successful thus far in crafting translation tools. I have pushed the fruits of these labors to a Github repository named improved-spoon (named using Github’s random name generator because I wanted something more interesting than ‘game-hacking-tools’).

  Further, I have recorded everything I have learned about the game’s resource format (named RLB) at the XentaxWiki.

  New Challenges
  The previous project mostly involved scribbling subtitle text on an endless series of video files by leveraging a separate software library which took care of rendering fonts. In contrast, R2RW has at least 30k words of English text contained in various blocks which require translation. Further, the game encodes its own fonts (9 of them) which stubbornly refuse to be useful for rendering text in nearly any other language.

  Thus, the immediate 2 challenges are :
  

  1. Translating volumes of text to Spanish
  2. Expanding the fonts to represent Spanish characters

  Normally, “figuring out the file format data structures involved” is on the list as well. Thankfully, understanding the formats is not a huge challenge since the folks at the ScummVM project already did all the heavy lifting of reverse engineering the file formats.

  The Pitch
  Here was the plan :

  • Create a tool that can dump out the interesting data from the game’s master resource file.
  • Create a tool that can perform the elaborate file copy described in the previous post. The new file should be bit for bit compatible with the original file.
  • Modify the rewriting tool to repack some modified strings into the new resource file.
  • Unpack the fonts and figure out a way to add new characters.
  • Repack the new fonts into the resource file.
  • Repack message strings with Spanish characters.

  Showing The Work : Modifying Strings
  First, I created the tool to unpack blocks of message string resources. I elected to dump the strings to disk as JSON data since it’s easy to write and read JSON using Python, and it’s quick to check if any mistakes have crept in.

  The next step is to find a string to focus on. So I started the game and looked for the first string I could trigger :

  
  
  

  This shows up in the JSON string dump as :

    
      "Spanish" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle.",
      "English" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle."
    ,
  

  As you can see, many of the strings are encoded with an ID key as part of the string which should probably be left unmodified. I changed the Spanish string :

    
      "Spanish" : " !0205Hey, is this thing on ?",
      "English" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle."
    ,
  

  And then I wrote the repacking tool to substitute this message block for the original one. Look ! The engine liked it !

  
  
  

  Little steps, little steps.

  Showing The Work : Modifying Fonts
  The next little step is to find a place to put the new characters. First, a problem definition : The immediate goal is to translate the game into Spanish. The current fonts encoded in the game resource only support 128 characters, corresponding to 7-bit ASCII. In order to properly express Spanish, 16 new characters are required : á, é, í, ó, ú, ü, ñ (each in upper and lower case for a total of 14 characters) as well as the inverted punctuation symbols : ¿, ¡.

  Again, ScummVM already documents (via code) the font coding format. So I quickly determined that each of the 9 fonts is comprised of 128 individual bitmaps with either 1 or 2 bits per pixel. I wrote a tool to unpack each character into an individual portable grey map (PGM) image. These can be edited with graphics editors or with text editors since they are just text files.

  Where to put the 16 new Spanish characters ? ASCII characters 1-31 are non-printable, so my first theory was that these characters would be empty and could be repurposed. However, after dumping and inspecting, I learned that they represent the same set of characters as seen in DOS Code Page 437. So that’s a no-go (so I assumed ; I didn’t check if any existing strings leveraged those characters).

  My next plan was hope that I could extend the font beyond index 127 and use positions 128-143. This worked superbly. This is the new example string :

    
      "Spanish" : " !0205¿Ves esto ? ¡La puntuacion se hace girar !",
      "English" : " !0205Your quarters on the Lance of Truth are spartan, in accord with your mercenary lifestyle."
    ,
  

  Fortunately, JSON understands UTF-8 and after mapping the 16 necessary characters down to the numeric range of 128-143, I repacked the new fonts and the new string :

  
  
  Translation : “See this ? The punctuation is rotated !”
  

  Another victory. Notice that there are no diacritics in this string. None are required for this translation (according to Google Translate). But adding the diacritics to the 14 characters isn’t my department. My tool does help by prepopulating [aeiounAEIOUN] into the right positions to make editing easier for the Translator. But the tool does make the effort to rotate the punctuation since that is easy to automate.

  Next Steps and Residual Weirdness
  There is another method for storing ASCII text inside the R2RW resource called strip resources. These store conversation scripts. There are plenty of fields in the data structures that I don’t fully understand. So, following the lessons I learned from my previous translation outing, I was determined to modify as little as possible. This means copying over most of the original data structures intact, but changing the field representing the relative offset that points to the corresponding string. This works well since the strings are invariably stored NULL-terminated in a concatenated manner.

  I wanted to document for the record that the format that R2RW uses has some weirdness in they way it handles residual bytes in a resource. The variant of the resource format that R2RW uses requires every block to be aligned on a 16-byte boundary. If there is space between the logical end of the resource and the start of the next resource, there are random bytes in that space. This leads me to believe that these bytes were originally recorded from stale/uninitialized memory. This frustrates me because when I write the initial file copy tool which unpacks and repacks each block, I want the new file to be identical to the original. However, these apparent nonsense bytes at the end thwart that effort.

  But leaving those bytes as 0 produces an acceptable resource file.

  Text On Static Images
  There is one last resource type we are working on translating. There are various bits of text that are rendered as images. For example, from the intro :

  
  
  

  It’s possible to locate and extract the exact image that is overlaid on this scene, though without the colors :

  
  
  

  The palettes are stored in a separate resource type. So it seems the challenge is to figure out the palette in use for these frames and render a transparent image that uses the same palette, then repack the new text-image into the new resource file.

  The post Translating Return To Ringworld first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• mov/avi to mp4 using ffmpeg for video tag

  22 octobre 2016, par Pranav Unde

  I have lot of videos in database tables. Mostly they have extensions mp4,mov and few are avi. Previously I tried to use html5 video tag in order to play that video on browser. It works best for mp4,ogg,webm formats. But question is how can I handle mov & avi formats. More research shows me that we have external libraries like ffmpeg that do the conversion. But question arises whether its useful for large number of data.Also i am bit confusing while implementing for ffmpeg. Can I get sample code for ffmpeg in php program. Not command line.
  Also suggest good solution for converting the videos to html5 video tag supported extensions.