Using the right decoder for your video content
Dec/090
One thing that appears obvious to us after more than 10 years of working with the various solutions that can be used on Mac and Windows to decompress video is that not all solutions are equal.
We believe that our users should be able to play almost any kind of media with the ArKaos software and at the same time we do everything a team of developer can to get the best performance on the platforms supported.
Practically the ArKaos software can play media files through the following decoders: QuickTime, FFmpeg, the Flash plugin, Quartz Composer and Windows Media Player. Currently (December 2009) we don’t allow the user to decide through which solution a media will be decoded, instead we try to make the best decision based on our many years of experience and tests. In the case where several video codecs (such as Mpeg4) can be played through different decoders like QuickTime, FFmpeg and Windows Media Player, we always prefer, no matter the platform, to first try to handle those codecs with FFmpeg as we have always had the best results with FFmpeg during our tests, and here’s why..
Showing the extreme…
Aug/091
There’s a certain point where it becomes very hard to demonstrate to a large audience what you do. As we strive towards the limits of the extreme, it becomes more and more difficult to demonstrate in a simple way the results of our work.
Last couple of month, we’ve been working very intensively on the new release of MediaMaster (version 1.1 – which should be out very soon). One of our goals for this release was to improve radically our engine to be able to run a couple of movies at monitor rate with no frame drops.
60 fps that is.
And we did it.
This means that you will be able – of course depending on the computer and the movies you are displaying – to run movies perfectly locked to the monitor sync.
The result is brilliant – even for movies at 30 fps – because your eye directly catches the smoothness of the playback.
But let’s go back to the beginning of our article. How do you show that ? If we want to show you a smooth 60fps stream, every step of the chain needs to be perfect.
New video codec based on texture compression
Jul/091
When it comes to media playback, at ArKaos we always fight to get the best out of current computer configuration.
When you are in the show industry and try to find out the best way to compress your content it’s still a little bit of black magic. While some codec are able to compress video very well they are heavy to handle for the machines, even more, the codec that does the best job at compressing while keeping a good quality such as H264 are very bad when you need to scratch your media.
The best codec for users that need to interact a lot with the content should allow to play forward and backward easily and should allow to jump into the content quickly.
Recently, I’ve heard about experiments with a file format designed by graphic card manufacturers and based on texture compression DXT1 DXT3 or DXT5 and I was wondering how hard it would be to add support for such a format to QuickTime through a new codec. Being programing for the QuickTime API since it’s version 1.0 beta I was considering the challenge fun and interesting.
Software performance analysis
Jun/094
When your frame rate goes down, and the video starts lagging, it is important to be able to analyse where it can come from. Today we’re going to look at some information we can use to troubleshoot this.
Roughly, the way our application works is the following: at each pass, we read a video frame from the disk if needed, decode it and then send it to the GPU (the Graphic card’s CPU) together with all blending and effect operations. Then we ask the graphic card to flush all operations (that is actually processing all pending graphical instructions) and present it to the display.
Ctrl Alt Shift : exploring VJ Culture
Jun/092
Here’s a very interesting found on Vimeo, Ctrl Alt Shift is a documentary exploring VJ Culture created by Dean G Moore & Simon Lane from V.I.A – (Visually Impaired Artists).
It features Interviews and Footage from The Light Surgeons, D-Fuse, Hexstatic, Vj Anyone, Addictive TV, Vector Meldrew and Fatamorgana.
New sync experiments at WWDC
Jun/091
Fraktus used the opportunity of having the compatibility lab at WWDC to put his synced visual network player at test with Snow Leopard and 6 computers (1 server, 5 clients). The clients are some low end Macs, Mac Mini, iMacs and a MacBook Pro.
Here is the result:
Visuals synced over a network of players
May/094
Here’s the latest idea from Fraktus (our Code Guru); a way to distribute visual content over a network of players. Note that it’s just a prototype and will not necessarily become a software feature or product.
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