Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

What has happened in the last ehm week since the previous weekly news, well alot …

• some ffserver-IPv6-linux fix by Nicolas George
• some ffserver-IPv6-macosx fix by Ronald S. Bultje
• flv files with invalid headers work again after a fix by me
• a vorbis decoder crash after “floor0 dec: booknumber too high” has been fixed by me
• make ffmpeg stop if writing fails instead of continuing by me
• split adx into adxenc.c and adxdec.c by aurel
• improvements to the mpeg-ps detection which fix several mp3 files which where misdetected as mpeg-ps, by me
• make the NellyMoser decoder use our generic mdct, finding out how to do this and doing it by fabrice
• Electronic Arts XAS ADPCM decoder by peter ross and aurel
• Electronic Arts .cdata demuxer by peter ross and aurel
• RICE2 entropy coding and variable block size for flac support by Josh Coalson
• reorder codec registration to prefer native implementations by diego
• Warn user if bitrate parameter is too low by ramiro (using 100 instead of 100k was a pretty common cause of silly bug reports …)
• List enabled code in configure output by ramiro
• Remove libvorbis Vorbis decoding support by diego (our vorbis decoder IS bugfree :) at least as far as we know)
• fix interlaced_frame flag for h.264 by jeff downs and Reinhard Nissl
• dont send hundreads of RTCP packets by luca abeni
• adpcm-ima encoder bugfix by Timofei V. Bondarenko
• some of the MMS patches by Björn Axelsson hit svn, still quite a few to go
• various h.264 fixes by Jeff Downs
• Musepack SV8 demuxer and decoder by kostya
• a-law/mu-law/16bit PCM support in SDP by luca abeni
• ipv6/ipv4 udp cleanup by luca abeni
• MPEG2 in RTP muxer support by luca abeni
• split audio and video grabbing code into libavdevice by luca abeni
• split wmv2 in its own files by aurel
• intrax8 decoder by “someone”, now finally we can decode all wmv2 files
• export top_field_first flag for h.264 by Reinhard Nissl
• our own ogg muxer written by Baptiste, now finally you can store your music and videos in the worst container ever designed without having to depend on libogg
• remove libogg support by Baptiste
• 44.1kHz support and various other small improvements for our nellymoser decoder by alex
• flv v9 32bit pts support by alex
• remove important functions from snow by diego
• mpegts demuxer segfault fix by jeff
• Optimize memory management and some cleanup of the rm demuxer by roberto
• remove perror() usage and take meassures against its reintroduction by luca abeni
• dynamically allocate ByteIOContext in AVFormatContext so changes to it dont break the ABI by Björn Axelsson
• VC-1 MMX DSP functions by Christophe GISQUET
• part of the RV30/RV40 patchset from kostya hit svn, the rest should likely hit svn soon as well assuming i and kostya arent too lazy
• pcm_s16le_planar support for electronicarts files by aurel
• some stuff needed for OS/2 support by Dave Yeo
• split vc1dsp_mmx out into its own compilation unit by aurel
• MLP/TrueHD parser by Ian Caulfield
• pause/play/seek support for the protocol API by Björn Axelsson
• wma sound artefact fix by reimar
• change british english to amerikan by diego and others, yes we all hate british english :)
• make our rm muxer generate files playable by realplayer by kostya, i guess this once worked already in the past …
• dnxhd 720p encoding and decoding support by baptiste
• improvments to the mp3 detection by me
• fix asf muxer so that asf files work better on win ce by me
• Adpcm_swf regressions tests by benjamin
• several segfault fixes in the mov demuxer by baptiste and takis
• Many small fixes by various people ive been too lazy to list

Missing things, duplicated entries and wrong entries as well as spelling errors are unintended, if you find anything missing/wrong/duplicated tell me and ill fix it, dont bother telling me that every second word contains a typo i do know that already :)

Well after lots of looking around, reading reviews and all that, i finally realized that all compact cameras which are available currently suck. So my choices where down to getting an old analog camera or a DSLR, now “analog” film is just too inconvenient for my lazy self so i choose a DSLR, more precissely the EOS 400D, thats also what mans recommanded though mans recommandition was not really why i choose it. The EOS 400D is certainly not perfect but there arent many options, many cameras are just too expensive for my taste and then there are: sony alpha (crappy noisy sensor) pentax (non functional IS and IS is the only advantage over cannon), olympus (too small sensor), nikon (lens compatibility with their cheap DSLRs is no good and no real advantage over canon)

So is the EOS400D good? Well its not bad, it could be smaller and lighter, its viewfinder could be bigger and brighter, at least ive no problem using the viewfinder with glasses but manual focus at large apertures is not possible with it because the viewfinder limits the view to f/4 or so . I wonder if one of these 3rd party focusing screen replacements would help here?

The EOS400D also sadly doesnt have live view, that is viewing what you shoot on the LCD, but there arent many DSLRs which do, the 40D being one but its too large, heavy and expensive for this small extra feature, and note the only reason why i care about live view would be better manual focus ability

Lenses, well, getting a good lens for my DSLR turned out so far to be quite a bit more tricky than i thought. First lenses are expensive, it seems they are all sold at 10 times their production cost. Second you cant just read reviews and buy a lens based on that, the lenses provided to reviewers seem handpicked and perfectly adjusted by the manufactors, what you buy in a shop is not. But i didnt know that or rather i underestimated the sample variation some people claimed exists with lenses so i bought a 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 Tamron lens, according to reviews and images there (as well as other reviews) this lens has better image quality than for example canons 17-85 IS USM and it of course has a much larger focalength range though its not that good at the larger focal lengths but then having all that range in a single lens seemed quite convenient. Well to make a long story short the 18-250 lens i got was so bad it went back where it came from at the first oppertunity. At 100mm one side was so much more blurry than the other it was immedeately vissible at 1024×786, there was no need to zoom in and look at pixels 1:1

Luckily i also bought a 50mm f/1.8 lens from canon, one of canons cheapest lenses but still vastly outperforming the 6 times as expensive crap 18-250 tamron i received, so the sample images below are all shot with that 50mm lens. Also note that i had to recompress the images to lower quality as wordpress refused the files due to their filesize

For a long time that flower was on my balcony, now its in my grandmothers garden, and it doesnt seem to do that well as you can see :(

Strange tiny tree, we bought a while ago, its needles are completely soft instead of sharp and it doesnt seem to grow

Some random weed i think

One of my grandmothers unique plants, this one is quite representative for many of them though not all, some are breathtakingly beautifull like her roses …
My mother said its a oleander, my grandmother disagreed, i dont remember if she said what it is

Birds, overexposed IMO, it was very dark and rainy, also they dont look good at f/1.8 aperture

second try at f/4, sadly most birds where gone already, also the image looks worse then the origial before the recompression needed to make wordpress happy filesize wise

My mother wanted to take a (few) picture(s) as well, well, she tried, and tried but it didnt work, half pressing the shutter button, waiting for the autofocus and then full pressing it apparently isnt that easy, so the above image was taken by my mother with manual focus. What i learned out of that, well the EOS400D shutter button is very well build as it still worked after my mother was finished.

After you fight your way through thickets you find in a corner of the garden some firewood perfectly protected from rain to dry, currently my grandmothers only means to heat her house as her more modern heaters broke down (not counting electricity based ones). Somehow i suspect the firewood will still be there in the spring and the heaters will still be broken and the electricity bill will be near 0. In normal houses you need to wear warm closes when you leave in my grandmothers house you need warm clothes when you enter.

Tasty looking apples (emphasis here is on looking)

My mother identified it as parasol mushroom and said its edible, my grandmother said its poissionous (thats what my grandmother says about all mushrooms), i tried to convice them to try it ;)
btw, iam a little curious what it is, i am almost certain its not a parasol

White roses (in the rain like everything else on that day)

After the extreemly popular recent changes in ffmpeg blog post, here are the next news, precissely 1 well something ;) afterwards

Note, errors and ommissions are unintended and if you spot any tell me and ill fix them (except spelling and grammer i wont bother fixing these)

• More work and patches by ronald and luca to get the IPv6 related code closer to being functional
• diego removed Metrowerks Codewarrior support due to it being unmaintained, broken and making the code more ugly (also not a single person complained so there is likely no one using it)
• Altivec runtime detection fix/cleanup and messup
• The remaining H.264 PAFF patches from jeff downs hit svn, sadly this also caused a slowdown of the decoder, so this needs more work to prevent this slowdown
• reimar removed the extreemly broken SIGILL based cpu extension detection code, the SIGILL code should have never been commited in the first place …
• luca barbato added support for a user specifyable maximum number of frames per RTP packet
• a optimized VP3 IDCT for blackfin by marc hoffman
• mans changed configure to use pr instead of cat -n as later is not standard, this will likely cause some minor annoyance to some users of non standard systems well fix your system, dont expect every lib and application to workaround it!
• a DNxHD (SMPTE VC-3) encoder by baptiste
• DNxHD 10 bit depth and 36mbit decoding support by baptiste
• user specifyable zlib compression level for PNG by reimar
• ogg seeking simplification and bugfix by reimar
• a very small part of the MMS patch hit svn
• some minor h.264 optimization by jeff downs
• infinite loop and negtive memcpy in the ac3 and aac parser fix by myself
• RC4, DES and encrypted asf support by reimar
• VP6 with huffman encoded blocks support by aurel
• deblocking for H.264 PAFF fix by Martin Zlomek
• nellymoser ASAO decoder by a840bda5870ba11f19698ff6eb9581dfb0f95fa5, 539459aeb7d425140b62a3ec7dbf6dc8e408a306, 520e17cd55896441042b14df2566a6eb610ed444
  Loic Minier and Benjamin Larsson
• support for electronic arts demuxer and decoders by aurel and peter ross
• speling, gramer and warning fixed by diego
• streaming to XBox360 fix by patric stout
• a regression fix related to url_split() by ronald
• display and sample aspect ratios display by michel
• WMV3 FASTTX=0 fix by kostya
• AVProgram API to export mpeg ts program information to the user app by nico
• rm demuxer changed to output frames instead of slices by kostya and roberto, this simplifies alot of related code
• Beam Software SIFF demuxer and video decoder by kostya
• support for reading duration from Xing and VBRI tag in mp3 files by andreas
• more flac encoding optimizations by loren
• moving the framecrc muxer to its own file by aurel
• and theres a patch for a MLP/TrueHD decoder by Ian Caulfield on ffmpeg-dev which i should review
• many other things ive missed …

The image stabilization, well ive done more testing, 10 images without IS, 10 at continous mode, 10 at shot only mode, all at the wide angle side at 1/4 sec 12mp, quick summary the IS does not help, find the 2 best looking croped images for each of the 3 cases in the table below:

IS:off
IS:continous
IS:shot only

Random low iso images








and in case anyone is wondering how i reached a image number of above 6000 in a few days testing, well thats what happens if you switch sd cards around randomly one thing i learned from that though was the FD50fd had no problems displaying images made with the IXUS though it did not play my naively made mjpeg in AVI :( it did not even play its own video after it was remuxed but i didnt investigate this any further …

I wanted a small compact digicam which is better at taking pictures in bad light than my ixus30, has full manual controls, a wider angle lens, … well no such camera exists currently. So i decided to try the F50fd, it has aperture and shutter priority modes, can take images at up to ISO 6400 and has a image stabilizer.

Size and weight: Well its a bit bigger and heavier than my ixus30 but it still is small enough to fit in my pocket

The image stabilizer: Well, what can i say, i took many images at the telezoom side at 1/5sec shutter with it in continous mode, with it in shot only mode and with it disabled, no single image was useable. Repeating the test at the wide angle side of the zoom at 1/5sec some images where ok others where not, the stabilizer again didnt make much of a difference, sadly ive lost patience and didnt take more than about 5 images each with stabi in mode 1 in mode 2 and without stabi so i dont have statistically significant data for that part. What i can say though is that the stabi did not help me take a single useable image at a shutter speed at which i wouldnt be able to take a good one with a few tries without the stabi

The manual control: Well it does work, and even quite well, you can change the aperture with a single button press, the exposure correcton as well can be changed with a single button press (after you switched the buttons into the right mode which needs 1 button press). Very sadly to change the ISO you have to press at least 3 buttons (4 after the camera is turned on). On the ixus30 you need 1 button press to cange ISO and exposure correction if you are in the correct menu (yes you can take images without leaving the menu on the ixus this doesnt work with the f50 ISO menu), you need 2 button presses to change between the ISO and exposure menues and 2 to reach the exposure and 4 for the ISO menu after power on on the ixus, so in summary the manual control could be made available more directly on both cameras.

Arbitrary limitations: There where a few surprises for me as i was playing around with the camera, first the aperture priority mode is limited to a shutter of 1/4sec at the long side, the shutter priority mode though can be used with up to 1sec. Longer exposures (up to 8 sec) are possible but only at ISO 100

Deleting images: I was mildly annoyed that i had to press 3 buttons to delete an image, but what was much more annoying was that the deletion comes with a nice animaton which you cant disable and which you have to let finish before you can do anything else. That is, its not hard to press the 3 button sequence a few times while the animation plays sadly it has no effect

Auto focus: This one does work better than on the ixus in low light with the focus assist lamp disabled

High ISO image quality: Well i hoped that the F50 would be a lot better at taking images at high ISO, sadly the difference is not that large, but see yourself:
F50 ISO3200 1/4sec f/2.8 Now how does one compare this to the IXUS30 which just has ISO400 well one (mis)uses the exposure correction to get the exposure one wants and then fixes the brightness/contrast in software
IXUS30 ISO400 -2EV 1/5sec f/2.8 (way too dark yes)
after -vf ow=7:8:16 and gimp to fix levels So which looks better? teh F50 one of course, lets compare it to a longer exposure of the IXUS
ISO400 -1EV 1/2sec f/2.8
fixed up levels in gimp
and with -vf ow=7:8:16 With the 2x longer exposure i would say the IXUS is at least as good as the F50 (with the shorter exposure). And there would be thumbnail images if wordpress would generate them or i knew how to upload several images at once instead of each one individually …

ISO values: well the more i played with the F50 the more i noticed that its ISO values dont match the IXUS ones, that is the IXUS30 at ISO400 seems to match approximately ISO600 on the F50 (matching here means same shutter, aperture and equally bright final images)

Colors: well the F50 is about as (in)accurate as the IXUS30 though they are different

Will i keep the F50? Probably not the improvement is too small over the IXUS30 also i dont like the heavy noise reduction the camera does, it becomes noticeable already at ISO400, the IXUS30 doesnt do this though more recent IXUS versions seem to also follow the trend of butchering images with noise reduction

Ill upload more pictures tommorow …

Pictures from my balcony to fullfill mikes request of wasting more bandwidth ;)

I bought one of these a few years ago and now my balcony is full of them … so I for one welcome our new plant overlords and iam sorry that the ixus overexposed your mighty petals ;)

if only thouse bees would wait until i got out of the sun to be able to see anything on the display of the ixus30 then navigated through 2 menus to set the EV and went back …

This one would have been nice if it where focused properly

properly focused this time

Fluffy ball ;) is moving too fast for the 1/200 shutter, why did ixus choose f/5.6 here instead of f/2.8 with a shorter exposure? and why doesnt it support aperture priority :(

Maybe you wonder what is currently happening in ffmpeg development, no nothing special i just thought to summarize what i remember and maybe i or someone else could/should write some weekly whats new report from now on? :)

• heaps of flac encoder optimizations by loren
• a H.264 PAFF patch, so dont give up hope yet, maybe we soon will have that in svn
• amv audio and video support
• IPv6 related fixes by ronald
• some minor h.264 optimizations by andreas
• some experimental h.264 multithreading code which splits entropy coding into its own thread by andreas, though dont expect that in svn in the near future
• a MMS patch ohh darn i just realize i forgot about that one :(
• various improvements and bugfixes in the rt(s)p code by the luca brothers ;) (sorry couldnt resist)

To continue the late series of totally off topic postings and to waste some bandwidth with big images ive recorded what ive cooked today (no still with my canon ixus 30 as ive got no new cam yet …)

First an onion and the mandatory safety goggles one needs to work with onions

After peeling and washing the thing:

After choping it up in cubes and realizing that its a little more than i expected: (i wish i had an image stabilizer or would have checked the image or have taken more as both i took turned out blured)

A choped up halfed and fried onon:

1kg potatos, well almost:

Iam hungry, better more than too little :)

Peeled, washed and choped up potatos in the cauldron with the onions …

Added water, putting it on the fire. And now as i see it cursing that i thought the ixus 30 could take images at iso100 a meter under a 100w light bulb, besides that why is the damn thing not displying the shutter speed, if i knew it was 1/8 sec i would have done something about it …

Sausage (extrawurst in that case), lord ixus though focused on the wrong end and yes i did try to focus on the other side, dont ask why i didnt check half of the images right after taking them …

Sausage cut up in small cubes and added to the pot, again 1/8 shutter and all blurry. And normally one should fry the sausage unless one is afraid of nitrosamines …

Adding hot paprika made in hungary, majoran and a soup cube, lord ixus now choose 1/6sec and even though i took 4 images of this they are all blurred argh, next ill cook the ixus or maybe i should cook myself for being to stupid to not realize that iso100 wont work for this

mixed …

closed and the image is quite ok even though its 1/6sec handheld

15min later …

Finished :)

As you certainly have (not) noticed, ive enabled spam karma2, mike melanson worked hard on installing a few anti spam plugins for me, spam karma2 being one of them. thanks mike!

Until now spam was stoped by a simple word list and anything containing a link was as well blocked. On my side procmail sorted the large amount of moderated comments into certain spams and uncertain as well as non spam comments i then from time to time deleted spams which where missed and approved what was blocked incorrectly. That worked quite well actually … but you know if it aint broken then break it ;)

Spam karma2 should hopefully catch all spams and not block legitimate comments ;) It even has the ability to display a captcha if its not certain, just an hour ago it did that for a spamer who tried to sell some “herbs” for long “legs” it didnt help though i had to delete that by hand after the spamer or his script passed the captcha check

If you write a comment and it gets blocked with no captcha or other tests then please send me an email!

Comments welcome!

A few days ago i came up with the idea of replacing my several years old canon digital ixus 30 with something newer and better. Maybe with a more recent canon ixus (called elph SD+somenumber outside europe), heres a summary of what ive found that has changed:

So seems like 3 years isnt enough for canon to improve their (ultra) compact cameras. What about the powershot A series? well i had the A95 for a week but it was simply way too heavy and big also its light sensitivity was not any better than the much smaller canon ixus IIRC. Though at least it had manual controls so the camera did what i wanted. And the fuji F30/F31fd? Well fuji stoped producing them and their replacment the F50fd produces vertical stripes with a nice green magenta gradient over its images, making high ISO unuseable without some cleanup. (noise is one thing but stripes even if they are fainter than the noise just isnt something i want in my images) Also the f50fd is noisier than the f31fd though still significantly less noisy then anything produced by its competitors in that size and weight range that i found.

So suggestions welcome, but it looks like i wont buy any new camera. Capitalism has once again demonstrated that it doesnt work, its not as if the consumer would know which product is best and would thus force the industry to produce better products, its rather that the industry prints irrelevant numbers (megapixels) on the cameras and the consumer buys based on that ignoring all relevant parameters. So the industry just needs to exchange the CCD with one with more megapixels and paint the camera differently instead of improving anything relevant.