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• Physical Calculus Education

  2 septembre 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I have never claimed to be especially proficient at math. I did take Advanced Placement calculus in my senior year of high school. While digging through some boxes, I found an old grade report from that high school year. I wondered what motivated me to save it. Maybe it’s because it offered this clue as to why I can’t perform adequately in math class :

  
  
  

  Mystery solved : I did not wear proper P.E. attire to calculus class.

• Revisiting the Belco Alpha-400

  26 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Relieved of the primary FATE maintenance duties, I decided to dust off my MIPS-based Belco Alpha-400 and try to get it doing FATE cycles. And just as I was about to get FATE running, I saw that Mans already got his MIPS-based Popcorn Hour device to run FATE. But here are my notes anyway.

  
  
  

  Getting A Prompt
  For my own benefit, I made a PDF to remind me precisely how to get a root prompt on the Alpha-400. The ‘jailbreak’ expression seems a little juvenile to me, but it seems to be in vogue right now.

  alpha-400-jailbreak.pdf

  Toolchain
  When I last tinkered with the Alpha-400, I was trying to build a toolchain that could build binaries to run on the unit’s MIPS chip, to no avail. Sometime last year, MichaelK put together x86_32-hosted toolchains that are able to build mipsel 32-bit binaries for Linux 2.4 and 2.6. The Alpha-400 uses a 2.4 kernel and the corresponding toolchain works famously for building current FFmpeg (--disable-devices is necessary for building).

  FATE Samples
  Next problem : Making the FATE suite available to the Alpha-400. I copied all of the FATE suite samples onto a VFAT-formatted SD card. The filename case is not preserved for all files which confounds me since it is preserved in other cases. I tried formatting the card for ext3 but the Alpha-400 would not mount it, even though /proc/filesystems lists ext3 (supporting an older version of ext3 ?).

  Alternative : Copy all of the FATE samples to the device’s rootfs. Space will be a little tight, though. Then again, there is over 600 MB of space free ; I misread earlier and thought there were only 300 MB free.

  Remote Execution
  To perform FATE cycles on a remote device, it helps to be able to SSH into that remote device. I don’t even want to know how complicated it would be to build OpenSSH for the device. However, the last time I brought up this topic, I learned about a lighter weight SSH replacement called Dropbear. It turns out that Dropbear runs great on this MIPS computer.

  Running FATE Remotely
  I thought all the pieces would be in place to run FATE at this point. However, there is one more issue : Running FATE on a remote system requires that the host and the target are sharing a filesystem somehow. My personal favorite remote filesystem method is sshfs which is supposed to work wherever there is an SSH server. That’s not entirely true, though– sshfs also requires sftp-server to be installed on the server side, a program that Dropbear does not currently provide.

  I’m not even going to think about getting Samba or NFS server software installed on the Alpha-400. According to the unit’s /proc/filesystems file, nfs is a supported filesystem. I hate setting up NFS but may see if I can get that working anyway.

  Residual Weirdness
  The unit comes with the venerable Busybox program (BusyBox v1.4.1 (2007-06-01 20:37:18 CST) multi-call binary) for most of its standard command line utilities. I noticed a quirk where BusyBox’s md5sum gives weird hex characters. This might be a known/fixed issue.

  Another item is that the Alpha-400′s /dev/null file only has rwxr-xr-x per default. This caused trouble when I first tried to scp using Dropbear using a newly-created, unprivileged user.

• Naive Sorenson Video 1 Encoder

  12 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — General

  (Yes, the word is “naive” — or rather, “naïve” — not “native”. People always try to correct me when I use the word. Indeed, it should actually be written with 2 dots over the ‘i’ but who has a keyboard that can easily do that ?)

  At the most primitive level, programming a video encoder is about writing out a sequence of bits that the corresponding video decoder will understand. It’s sort of like creating a program — represented as a stream of opcodes — that will run on a given microprocessor or virtual machine. In fact, reading a video codec bitstream specification will reveal a lot of terminology along the lines of “transmitting information to the decoder” or “signaling the decoder to do xyz.”

  Creating a good encoder that will deliver decent quality at a reasonable bitrate is difficult. Creating a naive encoder that produces a technically compliant bitstream, not so much.

  
  
  

  When I wrote an FFmpeg encoder for Sorenson Video 1 (SVQ1), the first step was to just create a minimally compliant bitstream. The coarsest encoding mode that SVQ1 allows is to encode the average (mean) of each 16×16 block of samples. So I created an encoder that just encoded the mean of each block. Apple’s QuickTime Player was able to play the resulting video in all of its blocky glory. The result rather reminds me of the Super Nintendo’s mosaic effect.

  Level 5 blocks (mean-only 16×16 encoding) :
  

  
  
  

  Level 3 blocks (mean-only 8×8 encoding) :
  

  
  
  

  It’s one thing for your own decoder (in this case, FFmpeg’s own decoder) to be able to decode the data. The big test is whether the official decoder (in this case, Apple QuickTime Player) can decode the file.

  
  
  

  Now that’s a good feeling. After establishing that sort of baseline, it’s possible to adapt more and more features of the codec.