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• Announcing the first free software Blu-ray encoder

  25 avril 2010, par Dark Shikari — blu-ray, x264

  For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools. Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer.

  But Blu-ray has yet to get that treatment. Despite the “format war” between Blu-ray and HD DVD ending over two years ago, free software has lagged behind. “Professional” tools for Blu-ray video encoding can cost as much as $100,000 and are often utter garbage. Here are two actual screenshots from real Blu-rays : I wish I was making this up.

  But today, things change. Today we take the first step towards a free software Blu-ray creation toolkit.

  Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264′s Blu-ray compliance.

  With x264′s powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it’s quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality. With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user.

  To celebrate this achievement, we are making available for download a demo Blu-ray encoded with x264, containing entirely free content !

  On this Blu-ray are the Open Movie Project films Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream, available under a Creative Commons license. Additionally, Microsoft has graciously provided about 6 minutes of lossless HD video and audio (from part of a documentary project) under a very liberal license. This footage rounds out the Blu-ray by adding some difficult live-action content in addition to the relatively compressible CGI footage from the Open Movie Project. Finally, we used this sound sample, available under a Creative Commons license.

  You may notice that the Blu-ray image is only just over 2GB. This is intentional ; we have encoded all the content on the disk at appropriate bitrates to be playable from an ordinary 4.7GB DVD. This should make it far easier to burn a copy of the Blu-ray, since Blu-ray burners and writable media are still relatively rare. Most Blu-ray players will treat a DVD containing Blu-ray data as a normal Blu-ray disc. A few, such as the Playstation 3, will not, but you can still play it as a data disc.

  Finally, note that (in accordance with the Blu-ray spec) the disc image file uses the UDF 2.5 filesystem, which may be incompatible with some older virtual drive and DVD burning applications. You’ll also need to play it on an actual Blu-ray player if you want to get the menus and such working correctly. If you’re looking to play it on a PC, a free trial of Arcsoft TMT is available here.

  What are you waiting for ? Grab a copy today !

  UPDATE : Here is an AVCHD-compliant version of the above, which should work better when burned on a DVD-5 instead of a BD-R. (mirror)
  

  What’s left before we have a fully free software Blu-ray creation toolkit ? Audio is already dealt with ; AC3 audio (aka Dolby Digital), the format used in DVD, is still supported by Blu-ray, and there are many free software AC3 encoders. The primary missing application is a free software Blu-ray authoring tool, to combine the video and audio streams to create a Blu-ray file structure with the menus, chapters, and so forth that we have all come to expect. But the hardest part is dealt with : we can now create compatible video and audio streams.

  In the meantime, x264 can be used to create streams to be authored using Blu-Print, Scenarist, Encore or other commercial authoring tools.

  More detailed documentation on the new Blu-ray support and how to use it can be found in the official commit message. Do keep in mind that you have to export to raw H.264 (not MKV or MP4) or else the buffering information will be slightly incorrect. Finally, also note that the encoding settings given as an example are not a good choice for general-purpose encoding : they are intentionally crippled by Blu-ray restrictions, which will significantly reduce compression for ordinary non-Blu-ray encoding.

  In addition to Blu-ray support, the aforementioned commit comes with a lot of fun extras :

  x264 now has native variable-framerate ratecontrol, which makes sure your encodes get a correct target bitrate and proper limiting of maximum bitrate even if the duration of every frame is different and the “framerate” is completely unknown. This helps a lot when encoding from variable-framerate container formats such as FLV and WMV, along with variable-framerate content such as anime.

  x264 now supports pulldown (telecine) in much the same fashion as it is handled in MPEG-2. The calling application can pass in flags representing how to display a frame, allowing easy transcoding from MPEG-2 sources with pulldown, such as broadcast television. The x264 commandline app contains some examples of these (such as the common 3:2 pulldown pattern).

  x264 now also exports HRD timing information, which is critical for compliant transport stream muxing. There is currently an active project to write a fully DVB-compatible free software TS muxer that will be able to interface with x264 for a seamless free software broadcast system. It will likely also be possible to repurpose this muxer as part of a free software Blu-ray authoring package.

  All of this is now available in the latest x264.

  http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/bluray%20fail.png

• Chiptune Database and API

  14 septembre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General

  So I set out to create a website that allows people to easily listen to video game music directly through their web browser. I succeeded in that goal. However, I must admit that the project has limited appeal since the web player is delivered via Chrome’s Native Client technology, somewhat limiting its audience. I’m not certain if anyone really expects NaCl to take off in any serious way, but I still have a few other projects in mind.

  I recently realized that, as a side effect of this project, I accidentally created something of significant value to fans of old video games and associated music– a searchable database of chiptune music and metadata. To my knowledge, no one else has endeavored to create such a thing. I figured that I might as well make the database easily accessible with an API and see where it leads.

  To that end, I created 2 API entry points. First, there is the search API located at http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/api/search/. This can be exercised by ending the URL with a URL-encoded search string, e.g. : http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/api/search/super+mario. This returns JSON data containing an array of results in decreasing order of relevance. Each result has a game title, database ID, media URL, system type, and an SHA-1 hash. This is the same API that the site’s own search page uses.

  The database ID can be plugged into http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/api/metadata/ to retrieve the song’s metadata in JSON format. E.g., the ID for Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES is 161 : http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/api/metadata/161.

  I recently read an article about sins against true RESTful API principles which led me to believe I’m almost certainly doing this web API stuff wrong. I don’t think it’s a huge deal, though, since I don’t think anyone actually listens to chiptunes any more. But if there are offline chiptune music players that are still in service and actively maintained, perhaps the authors would like to implement this API. It would require some type of HTTP networking library, a JSON parser, the embedded XZ decoder, and some new code to parse through my .gamemusic and .psfarchive formats.

  This database could be a significant value-add to chiptune playback software, and could help people experience classic game music much more easily.

• FFMPEG : Decode video in h264rgb/libx264rgb error

  9 février 2018, par Furan

  I did a small program to encode raw images in h264rgb codec with ffmpeg.
  I use this codec because I needed to encode lossless rgb images (not possible with the classic h264 codec).

  But now, I have a problem. I’m not able to decode the video generated with ffmpeg. I did a second small program for that, but I get a segfault when I reach the avcodec_decode_video2() function.

  I did all the initialisation correctly. I didn’t forget the avcodec_register_all() and av_init_packet() functions.

  Here is the code for initialisation :

    _c = NULL;
  
    _frame_nb = 0;
  
  
  
    // Register all formats and codecs
  
    #pragma omp critical
  
    {
  
        avcodec_register_all();
  
    }
  
  
  
    _pkt = new AVPacket;
  
    av_init_packet(_pkt);  // a defaut de pouvoir ecrire : pkt = av_packet_alloc();
  
  
  
    if(!_pkt)
  
        exit(1);
  
  
  
      _codec = avcodec_find_encoder_by_name("libx264rgb");
  
  
  
    if (!_codec) {
  
        fprintf(stderr, "codec not found\n");
  
        exit(1);
  
    }
  
  
  
    _c = avcodec_alloc_context3(_codec);
  
    if (!_c) {
  
        fprintf(stderr, "Could not allocate video codec context\n");
  
        exit(1);
  
    }
  
  
  
    _c->debug = true;
  
    _c->pix_fmt =  (AVPixelFormat)AV_PIX_FMT_RGB24;
  
    _c->width = this->_headerCam[this->_currentCam]->iNbCol;
  
    _c->height = this->_headerCam[this->_currentCam]->iNbLine;
  
  
  
    _picture = av_frame_alloc();
  
    if (!_picture) {
  
        fprintf(stderr, "Could not allocate video _picture\n");
  
        exit(1);
  
    }
  
  
  
    _tmp_picture = av_frame_alloc();
  
    if (!_tmp_picture) {
  
        fprintf(stderr, "Could not allocate video _tmp_picture\n");
  
        exit(1);
  
    }
  
  
  
  
  
        _tmp_picture->format = (AVPixelFormat)AV_PIX_FMT_RGB24;
  
        _tmp_picture->width = this->_headerCam[this->_currentCam]->iNbCol;
  
        _tmp_picture->height = this->_headerCam[this->_currentCam]->iNbLine;
  
        _tmp_picture->linesize[0] = this->_headerCam[this->_currentCam]->iNbCol;
  
  
  
    /* open it */
  
    if (avcodec_open2(_c, _codec, NULL) < 0) {
  
        fprintf(stderr, "could not open codec\n");
  
        exit(1);
  
    }

  And the decode function :

          _pkt->data = NULL;    // packet data will be allocated by the encoder
  
          _pkt->size = 0;
  
  
  
          unsigned char * inbuf;
  
          inbuf = (uint8_t*)av_malloc(w*h*3);
  
  
  
          //! read img size
  
          int size_img;
  
          fread(&size_img, sizeof(int), 1, this->_pFile);
  
          _pkt->size = fread(inbuf, 1, size_img, this->_pFile);
  
  
  
          _pkt->data = (unsigned char*)inbuf;
  
  
  
          if(_pkt->size)
  
          {
  
              len = avcodec_decode_video2(_c, _tmp_picture, &got_picture, _pkt);
  
              ...
  
          }

  Any idea ?