brief review of machine transcription - old recording to text

Tried out automated speech recognition from Google. Though there is a lot of improvement over the last couple of decades, still a long way to go. 

1. Google's paid product is priced at around Rs. 100 per hour, with the first hour free. https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/
 Google's version first:

Followed by my transcript.

You can see that it has made quite a few mistakes, and more importantly, missing entire sections. The skipping of sections would be the big  no-no for me. (I take around 3 minutes to transcribe one minute of English from this old recording).

2. Using Google Docs "voice typing" free feature - 

Node.js related link dumps

VulcanJS - Install the latest (LTS) node.js using nvm as given at https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-node-js-on-ubuntu-16-04

Apache and node - https://www.ionos.com/community/server-cloud-infrastructure/nodejs/set-up-a-nodejs-app-for-a-website-with-apache-on-ubuntu-1604/

https://forums.meteor.com/t/npm-bcrypt-and-meteor-npm-bcrypt-madness/28714/21

trying

meteor add npm-bcrypt
meteor add accounts-password

Did not work, abandoning.

Remove node - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47240567/uninstalling-the-currently-active-version-of-node-js-with-nvm/47251263

some simple light-weight webservers

On linux - lighttpd is available widely, for example in ubuntu's repos. Some examples given at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/32182/simple-command-line-http-server are SimpleHTTPServer in Python, node.js (lightweight compared to apache) and many many others. And for windows, this page lists tinyweb which can even run cgi.

trial embed of audio and pdf

Testing an embedded audio file with two embedded pdfs. All hosted on Google Drive, with embed code obtained from More items -> Open in New Window -> More items -> Embed.

Indic input enabled using Google Acccount Settings -> Language -> Input Tools -> Edit
https://www.google.com/inputtools/services/products/account-central.html
Then choose File -> Language to choose the required language within Google Docs.

warping on Linux - initial ffmpeg trials without a final solution

I still use the tool made in 2014 to pre-warp fulldome planetarium shows for our planetarium's Blu-ray-player-based playout system. But that tool's main limitation seems to be that it works only on Windows XP. It does not seem to work even on Windows 7 - I tested with RS's laptop.

In the search for alternatives for future-proofing, I had a look at ffmpeg's Remap filter. If a suitable map is made, it should be possible to use this filter to do the warping in a platform independent way.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/RemapFilter

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30832248/is-there-a-way-to-remove-gopro-fisheye-using-ffmpeg

http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/ffmpeg/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38360837/ffmpeg-remap-filter-not-found 

ffmpeg -i /path/input.mp4 -i front_kodak_sp360_1440_xmap.pgm -i front_kodak_sp360_1440_ymap.pgm -lavfi remap out.mp4

Preliminary test went at around 8 fps, 1 minute video took 4 minutes to encode.

out.mp4 was of a similar format to input file, but not exactly.

mediainfo out.mp4

Testing to see if opengl will be faster, tried with just re-encoding to divx,

ffmpeg -i /path/input.mp4 -c:v libxvid out.mp4

did the 1 minute video in 2 minutes, but quite low quality for the highly changing scenes. That would be 15 fps.

ffmpeg -i /path/input.mp4 -c:v libxvid -qscale:v 100 out.mp4

did not make much of a difference.

Some info about OpenGL filters with ffmpeg

https://nervous.io/ffmpeg/opengl/2017/05/15/ffmpeg-pbo-yuv/

https://nervous.io/ffmpeg/opengl/2017/01/31/ffmpeg-opengl/

In case conversion has a problem,

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53357909/ffmpeg-remap-with-video

Piping to screen works, albeit not in realtime, 0.25x perhaps.

ffmpeg -i /path/input.mp4 -i front_kodak_sp360_1440_xmap.pgm -i front_kodak_sp360_1440_ymap.pgm -lavfi remap -f matroska - | ffplay -

inspired by

https://superuser.com/questions/322216/how-can-i-pipe-output-of-ffmpeg-to-ffplay

 https://superuser.com/questions/685022/how-can-i-pipe-data-losslessly-to-and-from-ffmpeg

Using rawvideo, (raw RGB is not supported in matroshka, so using NUT), went to 0.68x, but in black and white!

ffmpeg -i /path/input.mp4 -i front_kodak_sp360_1440_xmap.pgm -i front_kodak_sp360_1440_ymap.pgm -lavfi remap -c:v rawvideo -f NUT - | ffplay -

with AVI instead of NUT, colours are mismatched and not antialiased?!

Later, went to try avisynth instead. That is described in another post.

shared folder new behaviour

Now when I move something out of a shared windows folder from our Linux server, I get this message:

mv: listing attributes of ‘THE_FILE_NAME.mp3’: Numerical result out of range

After the file is moved to a local drive on the Linux server, moving it elsewhere doesn't give this error. Maybe this behaviour is something to do with this,

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/File_permissions_and_attributes

"mv silently discards extended attributes when the target file system does not support them."

Edit: Most probably this message is due to group name or user name not being mapped to GID or UID properly, I guess - as discussed at https://serverfault.com/questions/811997/mounting-a-cifs-share-fails-with-numerical-result-out-of-range

link dump - possible ways to port to GL_warp2Avi

Exploring ways to port my old tool GL_warp2Avi to cross-platform code - 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6495523/ffmpeg-video-to-opengl-texture

https://github.com/datenwolf/aveasy

https://eklitzke.org/rendering-videos-from-opengl

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Advanced-Video-options

https://web.archive.org/web/20060212173939/http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons/lesson.asp?lesson=35

links to Linux version, which uses avifile >=0.60

https://web.archive.org/web/20060212173939/http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/lessons/linux/lesson35.tar.gz

Edit - a few months later, I've created GL_warp2mp4 using OpenCV and GLUT and the generalized OCVWarp based on OpenCV which can do what GL_warp2Avi could do.

virtual tours with 360 photos, and panoramas

Thought about creating a virtual tour of the planetarium with the Insta360 Air camera. This camera works reasonably well in good light, but cannot capture in low light as is the case inside the planetarium theatre - severely pixelated with the lights on, and completely dark when trying to capture the live planetarium show.

Saw some tutorials using cupix and google tour creator, then made one with google tour creator,
https://poly.google.com/view/6fr4ibdUbv0

Added the same images (after resizing to 4K) to google street view using the street view app. To change the directions in which the 360 images are pointed, under Edit location, the photo can be rotated by swiping while keeping another finger on the directions (N, NE, E etc.) shown below, to keep the directions steady. A bit fiddly. Positioning was also a bit fiddly, since the zoom level on the positioning map was not sufficient in my case.

Made a couple more panoramas, both using the Panorama feature in the stock camera app on my LG Q6 Android phone and using the street view app. The street view app tries to stitch it into a 360 image, so requires a very large number of photos.

Shot with the Google Street View App, which needs you to align the phone to a shown circle and click repeatedly.

Shot with the Panorama feature of the phone's camera App, which needs you to just wave your phone from left to right or vice versa. 

Also shot with the Panorama feature on the phone camera. A passerby created an artifact, so repeated below. 

stackoverflow gyaan on when to use GPU

https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/37013/good-heuristic-point-where-sending-fft-to-gpu-is-computationally-worth-it

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8158632/is-it-worth-offloading-fft-computation-to-an-embedded-gpu

getting a human being with HDFC phonebanking

It seems a bit difficult to get a human being using the HDFC bank tollfree number. One possible workaround is - choose the "Loans" option. If that option does not appear on the first menu, try the "Report stolen card" option, and when they ask for confirmation, choose "2 for any other services" and then "Loans". After a human being answers, you could tell them what you want, and if they say that they need to transfer your call, agree.