Video/Audio Player

I just checked in a reasonably complete audio/video player example using jjmpeg.

It synchronises the video to the audio if it's there, allows one to seek and pause and so on. The pause function is a bit crap - it keeps running any queued up data from the decoder - but that's only a fraction of a second. It uses a JLabel for output via a BufferedImage, which works well enough if the machine is quick. There are some other problems, but it works reasonably well all things considered. It's using JOAL for audio output.

The code is part of the jjmpegdemos sub-project, and is in the au.notzed.jjmpeg.mediaplayer namespace.

This is the one I mentioned I was working on 2 months ago, and since it was reasonably complete (and I don't think i'll be working on it again for a little while) I thought it was about time I checked it in. I have a swathe of stuff for socles I should probably upload at some point too.

matlabotomisation

matlabotomisation- vbTo write or modify a matlab or octave script in order to achieve maximum efficiency in processing time. Thus rendering the algorithm virtually indecipherable to both mathematicians and software engineers alike.

Yes, i'm back to reading matlab scripts again - an unfortunately common task when dealing with research from computer scientists.

matlab (the language) is a really basic scripting language, with a library of routines that make processing mathematical algorithms possible, but not exactly easy. It isn't something that mirrors the mathematical language very concisely, nor maps easily to procedural languages. If that were it's only shortcoming it would be bad enough, but it is also really very slow.

So to get performance out of matlab one has to write code using (multi-dimensional) array types. Writing a loop which generates results one at a time is far too slow, so instead you generate a table of indices and then write a formulae that uses these indices to generate all results at once. This can be fairly concise, and it sort of sounds like functional programming or representing mathematics cleanly, but unfortunately it falls well short of this goal and often the code is off generating complex sets of indices which can be confused with it actually doing work. So you end up with something that might run reasonably quick (for matlab anyway), but is a real brain-ache trying to understand. It neither matches the mathematics, nor the processing steps the cpu takes to form the result.

I prefer when the scientist just gives up and writes simple matlab - for one, it makes my life a lot easier, and as a bonus even a trivial Java conversion will run at least an order of magnitude faster. So it makes me look smarter too!

OpenRaster, SPI, etc.

After poking around ImageZ a bit late last night I thought i'd tackle multi-layer reading/writing.

So I wrote a writer and eventually a saver for OpenRaster format. I decided on OpenRaster since it is so simple, and it was pretty much how I was going to write it anyway - only I was going to avoid the XML. Being a zip file makes things simple om Java too. It seems to interoperate well enough so far (since I only have 'normal' blend mode working anyway), although if you save layers in greyscale or 16 bit formats from ImageZ and then load/save them from MyPaint, everything is converted to RGBA 8 bit.

I still need a float format though - I started looking into OpenEXR last year - but that was about when I stopped working on ImageZ for a chunk of time too - but I hit some walls with the test images. I can't recall where the issue was now though. This isn't really a high priority.

Today I thought I'd work on writing an ImageReaderSpi for the format as well - for example since currently OpenRaster files do not display in the open requester. But i got too side-tracked trying to implement meta-data and other features which in hindsight I probably don't need. I might revisit it again later with reduced requirements and see if I can get it working.

Along the way I also played with JAXB XML (de)serialisation which looks pretty nice - as nice as things can get with XML I guess. In general I try to avoid XML as much as possible because I think it's the phlegm, vomit, and anal leakage of devil's spawn, so this was a pleasant surprise. No surprise that it wasn't originally an apache project though ...

Also started work on a crop tool. This is exposing me once again to issues with the tool overlays, so I should probably think about cleaning that up somehow too. I'm using piccolo2d at the moment, but the way I have the tools track the current zoom is a right pigs breakfast.

mediaz <-- ImageZ

I finally uploaded ImageZ to google code, under a new project mediaz. I'm pre-empting myself somewhat here, but i'm leaving room should I develop some other tools - e.g. if the VideoZ stuff ever goes anywhere.

I didn't get around to cleaning up everything I had intended to, so it's well short of being terribly useful, but that's the way it goes I guess. I didn't really want to spend my Saturday at the computer again, but there's not much else to do - everyone else is out and it's a crappy cold, windy and eventually wet day we're headed for.

Update: I had intended to catch up with a couple of mates for some beer and food this evening but I slept in and then it started pissing down with rain so I ended up stuck inside again (watching Port get totally arse-raped by Collingwood). Then I ended up playing with ImageZ a bit more and realised i'd sold it a bit short - there is quite a lot of functionality there after-all, even if some big and rather important parts are missing. I did a bit of hacking on it as well as some house-keeping on the google code page.

Nvidia opencl 1.1

Yay, so NVidia finally released an opencl 1.1 spec driver. I guess now I should read up more on opencl 1.1 and see if there's anything I can take advantage of - so far It wasn't even on the radar because of their complete lack of support; and i'm happy enough with 1.0 anyway. I'm not sure this is really enough to restore confidence that OpenCL is a first-class citizen on NVidia hardware - their weekly emails haven't mentioned OpenCL for months. We're headed for AMD hardware anyway, if only to try alternatives.

Speaking of AMD, I thought I might try to create a Java binding for the AMD FFT library - I wouldn't mind evaluating it to see if it could replace my current FFT implementation (the apple one, as ported in the jocl demos tree). Unfortunately it uses some types and interfaces which are tricky to wrap in Java, at least in a way which works independent of the architecture's native size. So for now I might put it on the back-burner. (I looked at gluegen briefly but it had trouble parsing something - and the error messages it gives aren't much help).

Mailing Lists

I just set up some mailing lists for jjmpeg and socles.

I can't tell from google-code if there is much interest in the projects, but it seems a better idea to set up a mailing list than to receive direct emails about them.

These are still slow long-burn projects i'm working on when I feel inspired, and inspiration varies greatly from week to week.

Bullies, liars, and arseholes.

Hmm, so my sister in law just got sacked from one of her cleaning jobs. After quite a bit of bullying from a fellow employee and what can only be considered racism/discrimination from upper management (e.g. complaining about her diminutive stature in her first week) they finally found enough of an excuse to fire her. A sham 'explain yourself' meeting that went on for hours, followed by a letter saying that she simply lied about everything in the meeting (which is simply not true).

Filthy liars.

I know hardly anyone reads my blog and even fewer locally, but for those, perhaps complain about the lack of cleanliness next time you're in the central market, or maybe just spit on the floor!

I probably wont bother ever going back there myself - not that I was a regular customer anyway.

Playing with Web Start

After a lot of frobbing around I got a simple java webstart demo working for jjmpeg.jjmpegdemos.jnlp

Assuming you have Java Web Start installed this should launch the application - and after a lot of 'this is untrusted' errors should end up with the application running. It lets you run very simple music player demonstration. It uses JOAL for the audio output and jjmpeg for the decoding.

You also need to have the ffmpeg shared libraries installed. A recent version. Which probably means this wont work with microsoft platforms yet - although I suppose if the ffmpeg librariesthat are available here: http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ are in the path it might work.

On GNU/Linux it will depend on compatible libavcodec/etc versions, I'm using using Fedora 13 and 14, and it worked fine on both with ffmpeg-libs from rpmfusion. I also tested x86 and amd64 platforms.

Anyway this is really just an experiment - I doubt it will work in general on every platform.