Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

Most of the x86 fate clients i did run, where run as VMs on a aging 2 core Westmere/Clarkdale i5 @ 3.33ghz. As ive added more and more virtual machines and configurations and the list of tests done by fate increased over the last 3 years, the box started to show its age, over these 3 years 1 HDD nearly failed, 1 SSD failed in it and as the amount of tests run kept increasing the time between tests being repeated kept getting longer.
About a week ago i ordered a new box to replace it finally. To my surprise the shop (in germany) refused to ship the HDD&SSD to austria, after a few minutes research on the matter i learned that apparently austromechana threatens german shops who dont pay them a fee on storage media thats sold to someone in austria. I guess one could also say European union & free trade at its finest.

But back to the topic, most of my x86 fate clients now run on a shiny new 6 core haswell @4.3ghz + samsung SSD. So the affected clients should be alot faster now and there are also already more tests being run, ive changed many of my clients to test the 3 currently maintained release branches in addition to git master.
Also, if you have some platform that supports FFmpeg and isnt on fate.ffmpeg.org, and you want to help FFmpeg, please setup a fate client (See the fate documentation).

Its quite a while since ive updated my blog, and indeed ive a few things i wanted to put up but have always had something more important to do, well. Today, ive finally decided to skip doing important things and put up something really unimportant.
A while ago I was reading the manual of a toothbrush, an electric ehm “sonic” toothbrush. It said something like 40000 revolutions per second. Reading that and looking at the humble, el-cheapo toohbrush i didnt belive it, so i had to find out how fast the thing vibrates (it actually doesnt do full revolutions). Using my soundcard was out of question as that wouldnt work above 24khz. So i used a old analoge osciloscope that i got for 15 euro from a local flea market a while before.

You can see on the scope, the vibration of the toothbrush head as well as a 1khz reference square wave. The trick is that the toothbrush head is made of some kind of plastic and by rubbing it against something, it becomes electrostatically charged. Just holding the scope probe near then shows the movement of the head.
We can see on this that in about 6 cycles of the 1khz signal we have 2 cycles of the toothbrush, which would give ~1000/3 hz.
Which is 120 times off from 40000, if one considers both ends of the vibration instead of a full cycle its 60 times off. And at that point i looked at the manual again and realized it said 40000 U/min not sec :)
Which proofs my way of measuring it is quite spot on, but my way of reading the manual isnt.

In the last few weeks FFmpegs huffyuv codec has grown the ability to encode and decode a much broader list of pixel formats. From planar rgb variants 4:4:4 YUV to 4:1:0 YUV and bit depths up to 16bit and alpha support.
One might ask why anyone cares about all this, the awnser is simple

Encoding parameters used:
-an -threads 1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -strict -2 -vcodec ffvhuff -context 1
-an -threads 1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -strict -2 -vcodec ffv1

Encoding parameters used:
-threads 6 -an -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -strict -2 -vcodec ffvhuff -pass 2 test.nut
-threads 6 -an -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -strict -2 -vcodec ffv1 -level 3 -slices 6 test1.nut

As can be seen above huffyuv while it doesnt even get close to ffv1 in terms of compression even though i used per frame huffman tables and 2pass mode in the 2 tests, its simply much faster.

Ive been using gmx since over 12 years for my email. And until recently gmx did a fine job at running a SMTP and a POP3 server. But it appears this is slowly changing. A few month ago their SMTP server stoped accepting mail with the verbose message: “550-Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable\n550 Reject due to policy restrictions.”. It turned out that gmx refused localhost as domain to the EHLO SMTP command. They require a fully qualified domain name now right? no, not really, any random string seems to work just not localhost. My attempt to contact gmx about this, lead to no reaction.

The next thing was this: “550-Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable\n550 invalid DNS A/AAAA resource record”, yes thats right, gmx rejected outgoing mail because the poor guy had not set up a webpage on the domain that he used to receive mail on. This one btw affected multiple people i tried to communicate with, not just one.

But hang on it was just starting, next there was “451 Requested action aborted: local error in processing’ errormsg=’recipient address nicolas george normalesup org not accepted by the server”

Also it has to mentioned that gmx at around that time (maybe 1-2 month before or so) started to randomly put “*** GMX Spamverdacht ***” in the subjects of random received mails even though i always had and have all spam filtering disabled at gmx (mainly because their filters never worked).
So yeah another try at complaining to gmx about that, and yes this time there was a reaction, i got a mail from them “GMX Sicherheit: Vorsorgliche Sicherheitssperre Ihres GMX Postfachs!” they locked my account and provided me with a few tips on how i can scan my windows system for viruses. Hello gmx, i dont use windows.

My next attempt to contact them and now find out why they locked my account lead to just a polite (probably automated) mail with a link to their payed and expensive phone support. Seriously, locking someones account and refusing to tell them why unless they pay. And locked btw means SMTP was not working, POP3 still worked and so did the web interface where one is asked to change ones password which then unlocks the account again. Maybe iam just missing the point but what sense does that have.

Was that all? no, it seems gmx also reduced the maximum size of mails as a 21mb mail i tried to send to 3 people could not be sent over gmxs smtp server and with a different smtp server it bounced from reimar who also uses gmx so it also could not be received. Iam pretty sure i did transfer bigger things years ago.
Ahh and i almost forgot: “5.7.1 : Recipient address rejected: Your MTA is listed in too many DNSBLs; check http://www.robtex.com/rbl/82.165.159.40.html”, Yes thats gmx being in the DNSBL lists at the time that happened. Now just why was i not surprised by that …

Did anyone really read this far down ? Well as gmx slowly goes from well working to something else, iam forced to find alternatives to handle email. So i got this one: michael@niedermayer.cc, iam still using the gmx addy though, feel free to use either if you want to mail or spam me. I guess if these issues with gmx continue then ill have to start updating my mail address everywhere …

2014-01-26 Update

Heres an example of the random marking of mails as spam, the 2 mails where simple git patches send to ffmpeg-devel, sent by me, at the same time from the same computer and their content should be quite similar and should not have triggered any properly trained bayesian filter.

85260 N 0126 2:11 Ronald S. Bultj (1.3K) [FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] vp9: disable use_last_frame_mvs on resolution change (scalable).
85261 N 0126 2:30 Ronald S. Bultj (8.9K) [FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] vp9: fix invalid ref frame w/h on size change.
85262 N F 0126 14:49 To FFmpeg devel (1.2K) [FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 1/2] avcodec/libfdk-aacenc: change MODE_7_1_REAR_SURROUND to map to AV_CH_LAYOUT_7POINT1
85263 N F 0126 14:49 To FFmpeg devel (0.9K) ??>*** GMX Spamverdacht *** [FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 2/2] avcodec/libfdk-aacenc: change MODE_7_1_FRONT_CENTER to map to AV_CH_LAYOUT_7POINT1_WIDE_BACK

Also ive sent gmx a link to the blogpost, no reaction from them so far