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• Long Overdue MediaWiki Upgrade

  5 février 2014, par Multimedia Mike — General

  What do I do ? What I do ? This library book is 42 years overdue !
  I admit that it’s mine, yet I can’t pay the fine,
  Should I turn it in or should I hide it again ?
  What do I do ? What do I do ?

  I internalized the forgoing paean to the perils of procrastination by Shel Silverstein in my formative years. It’s probably why I’ve never paid a single cent in late fees in my entire life.

  However, I have been woefully negligent as the steward of the MediaWiki software that drives the world famous MultimediaWiki, the internet’s central repository of obscure technical knowledge related to multimedia. It is currently running of version 1.6 software. The latest version is 1.22.

  The Story So Far
  According to my records, I first set up the wiki late in 2005. I don’t know which MediaWiki release I was using at the time. I probably conducted a few upgrades in the early days, but that went by the wayside perhaps in 2007. My web host stopped allowing shell access and the MediaWiki upgrade process pretty much requires running a PHP script from a command line. Upgrade time came around and I put off the project. Weeks turned into months turned into years until, according to some notes, the wiki abruptly stopped working in July, 2011. Suddenly, there were PHP errors about “Namespace” being a reserved word.

  While I finally laid out a plan to upgrade the wiki after all these years, I eventually found that the problem had been caused when my webhost upgraded from PHP 5.2 -> 5.3. I also learned of a small number of code changes that caused the problem to go away, thus kicking the can down the road once more.

  Then a new problem showed up last week. I think it might be related to a new version of PHP again. This time, a few other things on my site broke, and I learned that my webhost now allows me to select a PHP version to use (with the version then set to “auto”, which didn’t yield much information). Rolling back to an earlier version of PHP might have solved the problem easily.

  But NO ! I made the determination that this goes no further. I want this wiki upgraded.

  The Arduous Upgrade Path
  There are 2 general upgrade paths I can think of :
  

  1. Upgrade in place on the server
  2. Upgrade offline and put the site back on the server

  Approach #1 is problematic since I don’t have direct shell access, though I considered using something like PHP Shell. Approach #2 involves getting the entire set of wiki files and a backup of the MySQL tables. This is workable since I keep automated backups of these items anyway.

  In fairly short order, I was able to set up a working copy of the MultimediaWiki hosted on a local Linux machine. Now what’s the move ? The MediaWiki software I’m running is 1.6.10. The very latest, as of this upgrade project is 1.22.2. I suppose it’s way too much to hope that the software will upgrade cleanly from 1.6.x straight to 1.22.x, but I guess it’s worth a shot…

  HA ! No chance. Okay, next idea is to march through the various versions and upgrade each in turn. MediaWiki has all their historic releases online, all the way back to the 1.3 lineage. I decided that the latest of each lineage should upgrade cleanly from anything in the previous version of lineage. E.g., 1.6.10 should upgrade cleanly to 1.7.3 (last in the 1.7 series). This seemed to be a workable strategy. So I downloaded the latest of each series, unpacked, and copied all the wiki files over the working installation and ran ‘php update.php’ in the maintenance/ directory.

  The process is tedious and not without its obstacles. I consider this penance for my years of wiki neglect. First, I run into the “PHP Parse error : syntax error, unexpected T_NAMESPACE, expecting T_STRING” issue, the same that I saw years ago after the webhost transitioned from PHP 5.2 -> 5.3. I could solve this by editing assorted files and changing “Namespace” -> “MWNamespace” (which is what MediaWiki did by version 1.13). But I would prefer not to.

  Instead, I downloaded the source for PHP 5.2 and compiled it in a separate directory, then called ‘/path/to/php/5.2/bin/php update.php’. Problem solved.

  The next problem is that a bunch of the database update scripts are specifying “Type=InnoDB”. This isn’t supported by modern MySQL databases. Now, it’s “Engine=InnoDB”. A quick search & replace at the command line fixes this for 1.6.x… and 1.7.x… and 1.8 through 1.12. Finally, at 1.13, it was no longer necessary. As a bonus, at 1.13, I was able to test the installation since Namespace had been renamed to MWNamespace. I would later learn that the table type modifications probably could have been simplified in by changing “$wgDBmysql4 = true ;” to “$wgDBmysql5 = true ;” somewhere in LocalSettings.php.

  Command line upgrading worked smoothly up through 1.18 series when I got a new syntax error :

  <br />
PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function addMessages() on a non-object in /mnt/sdb1/archive/wiki/extensions/Cite.php on line 68<br />

  Best I could do was comment out that line. I hope that doesn’t break anything important.

  In the home stretch, the very last transition (1.21 -> 1.22) failed :

  PHP Fatal error :  Cannot redeclare wfProfileIn() (previously declared in 
  /mnt/sdb1/archive/wiki/includes/profiler/Profiler.php:33) in 
  /mnt/sdb1/archive/wiki/includes/ProfilerStub.php on line 25
  

  Apparently, this problem arises occasionally since 1.18. I found a way around it thanks to this page : Deleted the file StartProfiler.php. Who am I to argue ?

  Upon completing the transition to 1.22, the wiki doesn’t look correct– the pictures aren’t showing up. The solution was to fix the temporary directory via LocalSettings.php.

  Back To Production
  Okay, it all works again ! Locally, that is. How to get it back to the server ? My first idea was that, knowing that this upgrade process can succeed, try stepping through the upgrade process again, but tell the update.php scripts to access the database tables on multimedia.cx. This seemed to be working for awhile, even though the database update phase often took 4-5 minutes. However, the transition from 1.8.5 -> 1.9.6 took 75 minutes and then timed out. According to my notes, “This isn’t going to work.”

  The new process :

  1. Dump the database tables from the local database.
  2. Create a new database remotely (melanson_wiki_ng).
  3. Dump the database table into melanson_wiki_ng.
  4. Move the index.php file out of the wiki files directory temporarily (or rename).
  5. Modify the LocalSettings.php to talk to the new database.
  6. Perform a lftp mirror operation in order to send all the files up to the server.
  7. Send the index.php file and hope beyond hope that everything magically works.

  And that’s the story of how the updated MultimediaWiki came back online. Despite the database dump file being over 110 MB, it only tool MySQL 1m45s to transmit it all to the remote server (let’s hear it for the ‘–compress’ option). For comparison, inserting the tables back into a fresh local database took 1m07s.

  When the MultimediaWiki was first live again, it loaded, but ever so slowly. This is when I finally looked into optimization and found that I was lacking any caching. So as a bonus, the MultimediaWiki should be much faster now.

  Going Forward
  For all I know, I did everything described here in the hardest way possible. But at least I got it done. Unless I learn of a better process, future upgrades will probably look similar to this.

  Additionally, I should probably take some time to figure out what new features are part of the standard MediaWiki distribution nowadays.

• Using LibX265 with FFMPEG to encode YUV to MKV

  11 mars 2014, par Jonathan Lunberg

  I am trying to use libx265 to encode my raw YUV file to a MKV file for the purposes of testing. I am new to video compression and hope I'm making a simple mistake that someone can correct. The current command I'm using is :

  ffmpeg -s 1280:720 -i input.yuv -c:v libx265 -b:v 1000k -c:a copy output.mkv 

  The error that I'm getting reads :

  error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

  I have tried searching for the parameters I need to use but cannot fine anything which works. Any help is greatly appreciated

• LibAV - what approach to take for realtime audio and video capture ?

  26 juillet 2012, par pollux

  I'm using libav to encode raw RGB24 frames to h264 and muxing it to flv. This works
  all fine and I've streamed for more then 48 hours w/o any problems ! My next step
  is to add audio to the stream. I'll be capturing live audio and I want to encode it
  in real time using speex, mp3 or nelly moser.

  Background info

  I'm new to digital audio and therefore I might be doing things wrong. But basically my application gets a "float" buffer with interleaved audio. This "audioIn" function gets called by the application framework I'm using. The buffer contains 256 samples per channel,
  and I have 2 channels. Because I might be mixing terminology, this is how I use the
  data :

  // input = array with audio samples
  
  // bufferSize = 256
  
  // nChannels = 2
  
  void audioIn(float * input, int bufferSize, int nChannels) {
  
      // convert from float to S16
  
          short* buf = new signed short[bufferSize * 2];
  
      for(int i = 0; i < bufferSize; ++i) {  // loop over all samples
  
          int dx = i * 2;
  
          buf[dx + 0] = (float)input[dx + 0] * numeric_limits<short>::max();  // convert frame  of the first channel
  
          buf[dx + 1] = (float)input[dx + 1] * numeric_limits<short>::max();  // convert frame  of the second channel
  
      }
  
  
  
          // add this to the libav wrapper. 
  
      av.addAudioFrame((unsigned char*)buf, bufferSize, nChannels);
  
  
  
      delete[] buf;
  
  }
  
  </short></short>

  Now that I have a buffer, where each sample is 16 bits, I pass this short* buffer, to my
  wrapper av.addAudioFrame() function. In this function I create a buffer, before I encode
  the audio. From what I read, the AVCodecContext of the audio encoder sets the frame_size. This frame_size must match the number of samples in the buffer when calling avcodec_encode_audio2(). Why I think this, is because of what is documented here.

  Then, especially the line :
  If it is not set, frame->nb_samples must be equal to avctx->frame_size for all frames except the last.*(Please correct me here if I'm wrong about this).

  After encoding I call av_interleaved_write_frame() to actually write the frame.
  When I use mp3 as codec my application runs for about 1-2 minutes and then my server, which is receiving the video/audio stream (flv, tcp), disconnects with a message "Frame too large: 14485504". This message is generated because the rtmp-server is getting a frame which is way to big. And this is probably due to the fact I'm not interleaving correctly with libav.

  Questions :

  • There quite some bits I'm not sure of, even when going through the source code of libav and therefore I hope if someone has an working example of encoding audio which comes from a buffer which which comes from "outside" libav (i.e. your own application). i.e. how do you create a buffer which is large enough for the encoder ? How do you make the "realtime" streaming work when you need to wait on this buffer to fill up ?

  • As I wrote above I need to keep track of a buffer before I can encode. Does someone else has some code which does this ? I'm using AVAudioFifo now. The functions which encodes the audio and fills/read the buffer is here too : https://gist.github.com/62f717bbaa69ac7196be

  • I compiled with —enable-debug=3 and disable optimizations, but I'm not seeing any
    debug information. How can I make libav more verbose ?

  Thanks !