Sureyyasoft Shira Player mini review update

In my earlier post about the Shiraplayer, I had mentioned the warp quality issues it carried forward from its stellarium base. Now the developer has added a better warp functionality in the latest release 1.5.1 - a custom warp data file module.

Initially, on using this version, I got blockiness, as in the screenshot below.

The developer suggested I restart the application after choosing the warp file, and try again, this time it worked fine. So, no more warp quality issues.

Unfortunately my PC (Athlon 1.9 GHz laptop) is not fast enough for realtime usage of shiraplayer with warping.

The Shiraplayer process with the new warping mode takes approximately as much cpu as the warping vlc player produced by Paul. But Shiraplayer has two processes running, one with the video and one with the other features. The process with the other features takes up nearly 50% cpu on my system. So, Shiraplayer stutters while playing even those videos which play OK on Paul's realtime player. For eg, even the 1.2K videos which take up 30% cpu on Paul's player, playing back at full 30 fps, are played back only at 15 fps on Shiraplayer.

But probably all these will not be an issue for those with more powerful PCs. Probably a decently specced machine from the last two years should be able to handle it just fine.

video editing with After Effects

Since the blender methods for cross-fades were quite cumbersome, tried out After Effects instead. What I have is AE 4.1. For fades, need to set opacity keyframes for the upper track. For previewing audio, have to scrub the timeline with Ctrl pressed. Audio doesn't play when the time controls are used. Menu items Composition -> Preview -> RAM preview or Audio preview can make the audio play. Will try this, check if this is better than installing my old copy of Adobe Premiere. 

video editing with blender

Following the steps given at this post. Basically, choose Video Editing in the Choose Screen Layout drop-down just to the right of the menus, and change the default Graph editor window into a Properties windows when you want to do the export.

Right-click and drag to move clips. K to cut. Shift Right-click on two clips to select both of them, then choose bottom menu item Add -> Effect Strip... -> Gamma Cross to cross fade. Have to enable AV sync if needed, default is no sync.

And as this tip says, to move a view-port to a different monitor, shift+left click on the upper right corner of the view port to make it a separate window.

To get rid of a view port, as mentioned here, move the cursor near the border with the next area till it becomes a double-sided arrow, right-click and choose join areas.

The scroll bar handles can be used to expand/contract the timeline view in the Video Sequence editor.

Mouse scroll wheel also zooms in and out. Middle mouse button to pan. Full details are at the Blender wiki.

Select a clip and hit k to cut. Right-click and drag on the arrows at either end of clip to trim.

another audio cleanup tool-chain - Reaper for noise reduction

In previous posts, I've mentioned using Cool Edit Pro and Sound Forge for audio cleanup. For audio with a lot of hiss, noise reduction with Cool Edit Pro produces a lot of artifacts. Reaper's ReaFir filter in Subtract mode is useful in such situations. For an old recording taken from a VHS tape, the following steps were used.

NR and gating in Reaper,

Then sweetening the sound using the EQ setting "30-band Punch and Sparkle" in Cool Edit Pro,

and finally RMS normalizing to -10 dB RMS with Sound Forge, choosing regions of roughly equal loudness.

Edit: 13 Feb 2020 - adding a couple of videos to demonstrate choosing regions of equal loudness by visual inspection.

and then normalizing them with keyboard shortcut Ctrl Y to speed up the process.  

taking screenshots on Mac OS X

This wikihow article has seven methods of taking Mac OS X screenshots.

Command-Shift-4  -> screenshot region of interest, saved on desktop

Command-Shift-3  -> grab full screen, saved on desktop

Command-Shift-4-Spacebar  -> grab an open window, by clicking on it, saved on desktop.

Adding Ctrl like Command-Ctrl-Shift-3 etc copies to clipboard instead.

Applications -> Utilities -> Grab application is also available. Some extra tools are also mentioned.

more details of Reaper-BUTT broadcast setup

My post on the setup for live broadcasts using Jack OS X was a bit skimpy on the Reaper setup details. These screenshots below tell the story of the setup on the Reaper side.

I've got sends going to a full-mix recording track as well as the broadcast track, so that I can use them without interruption even when I 'solo' any of the tracks to listen to that mic - the 'solo' happens by muting all other tracks in the mix which goes to the headphone (outputs 1-2). The mix which is recorded goes to outputs 3-4. I also have another Jack setup where output 4 gets a compressed signal from the broadcast channel below - which could be sent to the video team, for example.

On this broadcast track, I have a high pass filter to cut out rumble, knee at 100 Hz, an aggressive compressor, and the insert from Jack. The insert's return is used as input for BUTT using Jack routing.

VLC-based Warp-on-the-fly player from Paul Bourke - mini review

Paul has now released the VLC-based Warp-on-the-fly player. Here was my mini-review for the beta test done on Oct 4.

As Paul mentions, there are some performance issues. Relatively low bitrate / lower resolution files are OK. The sample1.mov file  - 1280x1280, 6.4 Mbps with avc1 codec - plays smoothly. A 2K file I encoded with Xvid codec, 9.8 Mbps, plays at something like 15 fps, with more frames being dropped where the scenes are more complex. Seems to be CPU limited in my case, so people with beefier CPUs should be OK. Mine is an Athlon 64 X2 dual core processor at 1.9 GHz, with Nvidia Geforce 9100 M Graphics.

CPU usage -

1280x1280, 6.4 Mbps with avc1 codec with warp - 55% with beginning peak of 75%

1280x1280, 6.4 Mbps with avc1 codec without warp - 40%

2048 x 2048 Xvid codec, 9.8 Mbps with warp - hits 99, 100%, hence frames dropped to 15 fps or so.

2048 x 2048 Xvid codec, 9.8 Mbps without warp - 65%, with peaks of 75% for complex scenes.

Another issue for me is that the snapshot feature, or the convert feature, does not capture the warped file, but instead captures the input frame. Perhaps there is some setting which I should do in order to capture / export the warped frames from this player? If I can get the capture / export working, then the performance issues will be moot......

Sureyyasoft Shira Player mini review

Tried out the Shira Player from Sureyyasoft - a player modified from a Stellarium base. At first it crashed, the developer sent me a shader file to put in the data folder, after which it works. Interestingly, it does on the fly warping of fisheye movies using the spheric mirror distortion built into Stellarium. But as mentioned in my previous post on Stellarium, the output image quality when warped is not so great, especially when I use image capture and compare with the other warping tools.

Image obtained from the avisynth plugin, using Flipvertical():

Image obtained from Shiraplayer:

Additionally, there seems to be some sort of up-down flipping involved: Flipvertical() was used in the avisynth script to get a similar image.

Update: Newer version of Shiraplayer with these issues solved, discussed here.

infection on Studio network

Our IP address was blacklisted on the CBL due to an infection of one of the machines. Apparently CBL detected a trojan on our network, trying to connect to other machines via UDP. So, even though our network was not sending spam, CBL blacklisted the ip address. 

First, PB changed the IP address of outgoing http and connections other than mail, to another ip address which he had available. Then, CBL blacklisted the new ip, with the additional info that no spam was detected, only the presence of the trojan:

IP Address x.y.z.a is listed in the CBL. It appears to be infected with a spam sending trojan, proxy or some other form of botnet.
It was last detected at 2013-10-17 11:00 GMT (+/- 30 minutes), approximately 16 hours, 30 minutes ago.
This IP address is infected with, or is NATting for a machine infected with the ZeroAccess botnet, also known as Sirefef. More information can be found from Wikipedia. It is most often used for bitcoin mining or click fraud, but as it contains a downloader portion, it can do anything.
If this IP address is a NAT gateway, it should be possible to find which computer on your internal network is infected by implementing a filter on your firewall to detect and log attempts to send UDP packets to the Internet with a destination port number of 16471. 

In Cyberoam, System -> Diagnostics -> Connection List tab,  port number of 16471 was seen in the destination section. That machine was cleaned up using Norton Power Eraser as recommended by CBL. Issue resolved for now.

beware of distributed brute-forcing

An interesting article about distributed brute-forcing by bad guys - 

https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-hail-mary-cloud-and-lessons-learned.html

So, for SSH we can use key-based auth for protection, and it would be safer to use two-factor auth for other things like wordpress.

connecting to our ssh server via mobile internet

Due to various power outage issues in the region, I've had to fall back on ConnectBot to connect to our servers. The ip addresses for Airtel 2G seem to be all over the place, as given at https://as.robtex.com/as45609.html#bgp

So, instead of white-listing all the ip ranges 106.0.0.0/8, 223.0.0.0/8, 27.0.0.0/8, 171.0.0.0/8, 182.0.0.0/8, and so on, just added our Voxel server's key to authorized_keys, and added its ip to the allowed range.

Took me an extra ten minutes to do this. First,
host media.radiosai.org
gave me the wrong ip address to allow - the Cloudflare CDN's ip address! Then, the copy-paste of the id_rsa.pub added newlines, so I got errors like error: key_from_blob: can't read
as seen in /var/log/messages of the server. Removed the unnecessary newlines, got it working - there is no need to restart sshd when adding keys. 

saiwaves not booting - manual boot choice needed

With all the power issues we face, we've had to shutdown our servers quite a number of times. saiwaves refused to come up - and the following was PB's solution.

These links helped....

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/t/19464480.aspx

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2042306.html

use F11 - Boot Menu  

In the boot menu select Hard Drive C: 

then select Slot 2 (Virtual Disk)

Cloudflare optimizations break javascript

Our web-based audio player seemed to have broken all of a sudden. Strange symptoms - working on Safari, but not on Chrome or IE or Firefox. Checking the source, found some Cloudflare injected code. Tried pausing cloudflare, that solved the issue. Then found that Cloudflare optimizations are known to break javascript, jquery and so on. Turned off optimizations, made the settings CDN only, modified the rules for media.radiosai.org also to omit the optimizations, then all is well.

The search box on every page of radiosai.org also had broken due to the javascript issues - removing Cloudflare optimizations solved that issue also. 

saving a video with effects applied via vlc

In my previous post, I failed to save a video with effects. But now, this page showed me how to do it. The gui-based method is:

1. Show all settings (and not Simple) from Tools -> Preferences -> Interface settings
2. In Preferences, under Stream Output -> Sout -> Transcode, choose appropriate filter
3. From main menu, Media -> Convert/Save
4. Add input files, and choose Convert at bottom convert/save drop-down.
5. After doing required conversion, Tools -> Preferences -> Reset Preferences

Unfortunately, this method did not work out of the box with the vlc-based warp player made by Paul Bourke - the filter is not explicitly shown.

Windows solution for warping - avisynth filter

Cross-posted on small_planetarium yahoo group.

Glad to announce yet another Windows solution for warping. This is an implementation as an avisynth plugin called Planetarium, which is listed at

http://www.avisynth.nl/users/vcmohan/

My short review: Takes around 40 sec for video to load into virtualdub using level=7 (documentation is athttp://www.avisynth.nl/users/vcmohan/Planetarium/Planetarium.html )

On my machine, rendering proceeds at nearly 2 fps as against 3 seconds per frame taken by jpgwarper (the older Windows solution at http://www.lochnessproductions.com/software/imgwarper/iww.html )

There is a slight difference in anti-aliasing quality, which I have to explore with different "level" settings.

Where this can be useful: for situations where a pre-rendered video is needed, like playing back from a Blu-ray player instead of a PC and so on. 

( http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/small_planetarium/conversations/messages/2434 )

occasional smb connection issues at studio

Occasionally, the Linux smb share becomes inaccessible, not seen in the list of shares, to some of the Mac users in the Studio.

Solution: When not able to save to the shared folder, do the following:

Open Finder.

Choose Go Menu, Connect to Server.

Type smb://

in the server address box. 

Click connect. When it asks to connect as what user, choose the Guest option. Then you will be able to open the shared folders on that machine.

using connectbot on Android

ConnectBot is an Android SSH client which runs on older versions of Android also. It could import the RSA key pair once I copied it to memory card from my Linux desktop's .ssh directory. In order to use Ctrl, Esc, Func and arrow keys, it uses the trackball.

ESC = press trackball twice

CTRL = press trackball once.

Tab = CTRL + i

Function key - CTRL + number

Arrow keys = move trackball right/left/up/down

vlc preliminary trials - fail

Paul Bourke mentioned that a VLC plugin for warping is under development. Tried out exporting a filtered video using VLC as given at this forum thread,
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=55449&f=14

Unfortunately, the output doesn't seem to have the filter applied. Code used was
vlc -I dummy stellarium_movie.avi -v --video-filter="wave" --file-caching="20000"  --sout="#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=8192,scale=1,
deinterlace, audio-sync,acodec=mp4a,ab=128, channels=2}:duplicate{dst=standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst=test\output3wave.mpg}}"

I tried --vout-filter also, as given in the forum, but no go. Output video does not have the filter applied.

vlc -I dummy stellarium_movie.avi -v --vout-filter="wave" --file-caching="20000"  --sout="#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=8192,scale=1,
deinterlace,audio-sync,acodec=mp4a,ab=128, channels=2}:duplicate{dst=standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst=test\output3wave.mpg}}"

Edit: Solution is here.

reviving the old Mac as an internet radio

This is going to be a long post.

It all started with the idea of using the old mac as an internet radio. As its screen had become damaged and showed up scratches, and it was underpowered for most tasks, this seemed a good idea. The final solution was to enable booting to console by installing a base install from mini cd of Ubuntu 12.04 and running a script on login. Network connectivity via the built-in ethernet port. Efforts to use a USB wifi adapter were not successful in the sense that the wifi was not reliable, would come up sometimes and not at other times. This post will chronicle the entire story.

Final working solution:

The internal CD drive was not reading. So the easiest way to upgrade to a new distro, booting from CD, could not be used. An external USB CD drive was also not recognized as a CD to boot from, by pressing C at boot time. The netboot procedure for using a Windows machine as TFTP server was used, with the files needed for the netboot being listed at the bottom of this page. For Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, the PPC netboot files are at http://ports.ubuntu.com/dists/precise/main/installer-powerpc/current/images/powerpc/netboot/

For doing the netboot, after setting up tftpd with the required files as above, the Mac needs to be booted into open firmware by pressing Alt+Command+o+f at boot, and the command

  boot enet:0

needs to be entered at the Open Firmware prompt. The Ubuntu netboot installer works, but stops at "getting installer components" with a blank screen, and continues after 15 minutes! The whole base install takes an hour or so, downloading required files online took around 15 minutes with our 2 Mbps shared link.

The machine was made to auto-login to the user shell by editing /etc/init/tty1.conf. An interactive bash shell script was the choice for running the "radio" - a simple bash case statement with a while loop asking for input to change streams. Changing streams by killall mpg123 followed by the relevant mpg123 stream-url. This was made to start on boot by putting it in .bash_profile. Then the system boots up and starts playing in 90 seconds.

To prevent sleep when lid closed, used the tip given at http://mrob.com/pub/ibook.html and put a plastic CD case between the lid and the bottom half.

Ease of shut-down - the Ctrl-Al-Delete method given here was adapted, editing /etc/inittab and changing the shutdown -r to shutdown -h to halt the system instead of reboot on Ctrl-Alt-Del. On the Mac keyboard, the keypress for del needs Fn+Delete, since Backspace is labelled as Delete.

Mis-steps:

In hindsight, the final result above could have been accomplished in around 10 minutes' time. Instead, a week was spent in various explorations. Many things were learnt, which are listed below.

Initially, the idea was to upgrade the running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to 12.04, so that the newer kernel would have built-in support for the USB wifi device. Upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04 went off OK, via

#apt-get update

#apt-get upgrade

#apt-get dist upgrade

#do-upgrade-release

But 10.04 to 12.04 failed.

At this point, I'd tried to get a console-only install by removing all X related stuff. The tasksel method did not work, nor did apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop. But using wildcards and aptitude, removed ~ngnome , ~nxorg and so on, till finally the system booted to a simple bash shell and no X. Getting a list of all installed packages would sometimes be useful.

Perhaps this was because of not doing the
#apt-get update ? Software sources were manually changed archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu to ports.ubuntu.com , and then doing the above,  do-release-upgrade worked. But at the end of the install, some errors were reported, and on reboot, the system went into a loop and refused to boot. Single user recovery console was the only working option, and ifupdown etc seemed to be borked. So, a fresh install was attempted.

USB disk install as given at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick did not work. But then, it was done using the mini.iso, and that page says mini older than 13 does not boot from USB. Then the netboot option mentioned at the top of this post was tried, and worked.

Several times when the Mac was booted without an ethernet connection, the date and time were off. Apparently these iBooks don't have a BIOS battery, and only use a capacitor and the main battery. The capacitor as well as the main battery seem to be dead in this case. Resetting PMU and PRAM etc did not help.

Possibly due to the power constraints of the USB 1.1 port on this iBook, sometimes booting with the DWA-131 USB wifi adapter would cause repeated errors scrolling by every second, complaining unable to enumerate usb device on port 1 - connecting via a USB hub stopped this issue. After the driver was detected, removing the hub also did not cause this problem to recur.

In this case, lsusb showed the appropriate device name, and checking the driver for it, googled 07d1:3303 D-Link System DWA-131 wireless n nano adapter linux and found the driver was
https://wiki.debian.org/rtl819x

also googled 07d1:3303 D-Link System DWA-131 wireless n nano adapter ubuntu and found via
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1392153.html

that the command to be used to connect via wifi is iwconfig and not ifconfig.

Also, found that on listing drivers, lsmod was listing the driver rtl819x as loaded, so probably it should work.

So, did
#apt-get install wireless-tools

and tried to connect, as given at this post - in that page, in the "Make it a script" section, perhaps the first line should be ifconfig wlan0 up

Anyway, tried it, did not work. Finally found via this thread that iwconfig works only for WEP, and that wpa-supplicant has to be used for WPA. Tried the methods given here, did not work, so tried to install ubuntu desktop. This was in Ubuntu 13.10 - but starting X was causing a segmentation fault. Even after googling and trying to remove other errors, and following the steps given here, X still seg-faulted when a window manager was installed.

So, went back to 12.04 to try the procedure given at this post to load X - but before doing the X install, thought of trying to connect with commandline using wicd and found this post. This method succeeded! Except in the last line, it was dhclient wlan0 and not dhcpd wlan0 in my case.

# ifconfig wlan0 up  

# iwconfig wlan0 essid "my_network"  

# wpa_supplicant -B -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf  

# dhclient wlan0

Then used this method to make it come up at boot, editing /etc/network/interfaces. But the wifi connection was erratic. Sometimes would not connect at all on boot. Sometimes would connect if the time was set using open firmware with

decimal dev rtc 09 34 13 28 08 2013 set-time

but sometimes not. Would sometimes connect if ethernet cable was connected, sometimes not. Tried going to WEP instead of WPA, and it seemed to work as per the iwconfig method given above, and seemed to connect OK even when the time was off, even when ethernet was off. But a cold reboot the next day showed that the wifi connection was still erratic, and so wired was the way to go.

Testing the networks with wicd, needed to enter wlan0 in Preferences of wicd-curses as per this post.

mpg123 failed to open module  etc errors as non-root user. Installed alsa, rebooted, fixed.
#apt-get install alsa alsa-tools

Then, choosing amixer set Master 45 seems to be a good volume level to set.

After all this, needed to install ntpd, otherwise time is off
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/NTP.html

blogger post editor broken on IE 8

Probably part of Google's "older browsers not supported" campaign. The post editor seems to be working only in html mode and not in compose mode when using IE 8. Tried clearing cache, still no go. So finally it's time to say goodbye, I suppose, and use Opera or Chrome instead, as a secondary browser. Or I can post like this, using email.

youtube video to mp3

There are quite a few services offering conversion of youtube videos to mp3. vidtomp3.com did a reasonably good job, doing an hour long video in less than 10 minutes. Ad supported, of course. Some other sites have size limits, this one seems to be free of duration restrictions.

DD links and bug in Description form

While adding links to the Descriptions for Divine Discourses found that the form for adding Descriptions which we use internally has some bugs, with erratic behaviour for filenames which have spaces and or other characters. Have alerted PB on this. Meanwhile, the links were added without quotes, since the form again needs special treatment for quotes, and various bash csv export scripts may misbehave with quotes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that even target=_blank works without quotes.

mysql db table repair for phplist

As a follow-up to this earlier post on table repair, PB suggested the following:
He found that the following one line command checks, repairs and optimizes all the databases.

 mysqlcheck -u root -p --auto-repair -c -o --all-databases

This could be used  in situations where we are not sure of which tables have crashed or needs repair.....

easily importing Nokia contacts into other apps with vcf support

Guest post from V:

Create a back up of contacts using application on the Nokia phone. By default it will be saved as Backup000.NBF. The extension looks strange, but the file is similar to an archived file like .zip

Open Backup000.NBF using any archive manager and navigate to /predefhiddenfolder/backup/WIP/32/contacts Extract the folder containing all contacts as .vcf files to another location

Open Terminal and navigate to the folder containing the .vcf files. [Alternate method: sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal adds a right-click “Open Terminal” option into the Nautilus File Manager in Ubuntu.]

Once inside the folder on Terminal, use: cat *.vcf > combined.vcf to combine all .vcf files into a single file.

This file can now be easily imported into Google Contacts or any other application that accepts .vcf files

Edit: There is one more elaborate method of VCF multiple contact import given at http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum/showthread.php?p=488142

sharing audio links - sharethis custom link

One of the requests from our listeners was an easy way to share audio links. Exploring the different ways to share, found that sharethis.com does support custom urls and custom text, as given in their documentation. But directly plugging this into the Download.php page would make it a bit ugly, with a separate email for each download link. Something better needs to be designed.

More Seeker bugs

Seeker Theater Edition, Build 828 as per the startup splash screen - The items under Help menu don't seem to be working - Help -> Manual... , Help -> Support... , Help -> About Seeker don't have any effect.

Also, the 'Solar System Map' doesn't seem to be working. When it is enabled, the Sun and planets (if they were visible) disappear. But the map as such does not appear.

Edit: The About Seeker and Solar System Map work when not in "Fulldome" mode, and when the flat screen version of "None" is selected in Settings -> Dome Projection. More info in the post on further experiments with Seeker. 

Software Bisque Theater Suite trials

Trying out the Seeker Theater Edition, found that my machine is not capable enough to do realtime rendering of hi-res - 1920x0180 or more - accelerated video. Frame rates hover around 5 fps. Offline rendering is good, though. Offline rendering of the "Grand Tour" into warped 1920x1080 movies averaged around
5.5 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov
4 fps for targa frames (slowed down by hard disk)
2 fps for PNG frames (slowed down by compression)
2 fps for H.264 codec mov (slowed down by compression)

and so on.

JPG frame export fails - the files are written as 0 kB files.

Offline rendering of 2K movies averaged
3 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov

2 fps for targa frames (slowed down by hard disk)
1 fps for PNG frames (slowed down by compression)

Offline rendering of 4K went at around 1 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov.

Noted that the anti-aliasing option under Settings -> Graphics setup don't seem to affect the offline rendering. The offline rendering seems to be done without anti-aliasing. Sample parts of the 4K frame, zoomed in and cropped,

But the whole frame by itself looks good,

Interestingly, the stars render much smaller in relative size in the 4K frame as compared to a 1K frame, as below:

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any setting option to control the size of the stars. They seem to render the same size whatever be the size of the entire frame, so in a lower resolution frame, the stars are too clunky. So, if the stars look too big, I have to render as large fisheye masters - 3K or 4K - and then warp them down to our 1920x1080 warped files.

Now, all this was about Seeker. The Theater Suite also has Mojo, Syzygy and SkyX Theater Edition. Mojo doesn't seem to do realtime warping - just makes a timeline of multiple video files. Syzygy launches all the components of the Theater Suite in a multi-monitor configuration. SkyX has similar capabilities to Stellarium and accepts map files for warping. Probably I'll be using only Seeker, and doing offline renders.

Edit: More Seeker bugs are reported here, as well as on bisque.com (login required). Also, documentation is lacking on script commands like WAYPOINT2.

bug fixes to audio search

V had come over for Gurupoornima, and kindly helped bug-fix the radiosai audio search results page.

The first bug was displayed when searching for Discourses: if the description is exactly the same, in the search result, only one of the DDs is displayed, even though there are two different versions in different languages. Solution was simple - changed line

$dataQuery.= " group by description ";
to
$dataQuery.= " group by description, language ";

The next bug was harder. If the search result had a very large number of files within a single line, i.e. with the same description, clicking the download button used to fail, or give a truncated list. Checking out the database calls one by one by giving echo statements, V found that the truncation was happening at the group_concat sql command. Apparently mysql has a group_concat default size limit of 1 kB. The blob returned is truncated to 1024 bytes. Googling found the answer. Since we don't have system-wide access on that server, we had to change the size limit for the particular session. Just adding the line

$inc_result= mysql_query("SET @@group_concat_max_len = 512000;");

just before the relevant queries were fired did the trick. The @@ means for this session.

online buying of physical products from overseas

Found out the hard way about Indian customs laws when we ordered the Theater Suite from Software Bisque. The package, sent via UPS, was detained at customs, and the Indian UPS partner asked us for IEC code. Luckily in our case the University has import licence (and duty exemption) so we got the package cleared, even the process took a month. But other institutions may not be so lucky.

Google Reader shutdown - Google player widget no longer up

HMHV blog had all player code hot-linked to the google audio player at
http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf

 Google Reader shut down on the 1st of July 2013 and along with it all its allied services. So I was asked for a simple solution. I suggested:

https://sites.google.com/site/mori79/html-gadgets/media-players/google-reader-player

Where it says upload on your own site, you could use sites.google.com or something like that.

The solution preferred was a direct HTML5 embed, like
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_audio.asp

But of course this has mp3 embeds, which did not work on Firefox. But the latest versions of FF on Windows do support this.

HDMI to VGA convertor

V wanted to use the Toshiba AC-100 smartbook for his presentations. Since the projector did not have a HDMI port, he had to convert to VGA. We ordered this product, and tried it out. First testing with the Blu-ray player, did not work. Probably the Blu-ray player does not supply enough power via HDMI. Tried with the AC-100, worked fine. Default output is 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz. Saw the output both with the LG Studioworks 221U monitor as well as with the Optoma TX1080 projector.

catalogue of astronomy software

Some of these would be useful for those interested in hands-on astronomy, and there are some for PC-based simulations also. But the list is a bit old, some of the links have to be looked up on archive.org's wayback machine. But very interesting and very long list of astronomy software, many of them freeware to do particular tasks - listed at www.pierpaoloricci.it/download/downloadsoftware_eng.htm

Categories like 3D Simulation, Planetarium, Astrophotography, Atlases, Ephemeris, Planets, Satellites and so on.

multiple videos on dome

Checking out different ways to do multiple videos on the dome.

1. Tried making a three-video wide panel, and using DMProjector to warp it for the dome. Using avisynth overlay, something like
video1=Audiodub(Overlay(bg1, top, 834, 771), audio)
video2=Audiodub(Overlay(video1, top2, 234, 771), audio2)
video3=Audiodub(Overlay(video2, top3, 1434, 771), audio3)

resulted in a clip like this after appropriate cropping: 

Using DMProjector to show it onscreen with 40 degrees vertical field of view starting with the horizon (altitude of 20 deg) resulted in a dome master like this,

As you can see, the side videos have been squished. When I used gimp and duplicated the middle video, rotating it and pasting it on the two sides to get

Although the videos are supposed to be identical, on the dome the side videos came out much bigger than the centre video. That's all for now, probably I'll revisit this theme later.

some limitations of certain tools

While doing some renders, found the following:

1. Virtualdub (at least my version, 1.8.8) does not work well with 24 bit wav files  when a wav file needs to be added to the video. Needs to be converted to 16 bit to avoid extreme noise in the avi.

2. DMProjector (version 1.05) does not work with tga input files with alpha channel. So, while exporting the clip for use with DMProjector from After Effects, had to choose "Millions of colours" instead of "Millions of colours +" in the advanced settings.

3. For 1920x1080 input files, DMProjector takes around 3 seconds per frame.

note about restoring Android to Toshiba AC-100

V wanted to use the Toshiba AC-100 smartbook for projecting with its HDMI out. The Ubuntu 12.04 which I had loaded for him did not work with the Nvidia driver. Tried Lubuntu 12.10, with the proprietary driver. But system would hang when I used arandr to set output to HDMI only, no display on the projector. So tried restoring back to Android.

As noted earlier, used the technique and the files as given earlier, and went back to Andoid. At first, I tried restoring only partitions 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 12 - the first few, and the biggest ones. But when the AC100 booted up, it went back to Lubuntu. Then I saw that in my previous post I mentioned partition 6 is the boot partition. So I restored partition 6, and hey presto, Android booted up.

With Android also, the HDMI out was not displaying on the Optoma projector. Suspecting the cable and order of switching on of devices, got the working HDMI cable from upstairs, switched off and disconnected both devices, connected the cable, powered on the projector and booted Android. Then the display came on flawlessly. Hopefully Documents to go will serve V's projection needs.

review of DMProjector from pineappleware

Pineappleware.com has a set of fulldome tools. Trial versions are available for download, unfortunately the contact email for pricing info and purchase elicited no reply. The trial versions are limited to 1K resolution. Passable for our dome, not optimal. The tools save Alpha channel, so stitching together multiple frames with different images on them easier.

DMPanorama has nice features like fill upward, for filling the "sky" part of the panorama automatically.

DMProjector exports a single image (or an image sequence) to a specific part of the dome. Perhaps I can try it for video sequences - doing this would be faster than rendering in blender.

Field of view in DMProjector can be specified either vertically or horizontally. Giving a  vertical field of view double the altitude makes the image just touch the horizon at the bottom, since the altitude is defined at the centre of the image. Anti-Aliasing with a sample level of 3 gave good results for me.

Choosing a panoramic image and a 120 degree field of view gave similar results from DMProjector as with DMPanorama, except without the "fill upward". But DMProjector doesn't seem to do panoramas bigger than that properly.

filing income tax return online in 2013

My previous posts on filing the Indian IT return online dealt with the gotchas for Assessment year 2012-13. For this Assessment year 2013-14, the technical issues regarding email attachments of last year are solved, but there was a new issue.

I had downloaded the excel utility from the IT efiling website and started the process of filling it in May. It had the feature of importing previous year's return, so I could avoid typing in lots of info. There was a small confusion regarding salary income, since at first we had been issued only part A of Form-16 - employer's TDS form and salary certificate. Once part B was issued, my queries were answered.

Then the excel utility was used to generate the xml file which we upload. But after uploading, got an error, complaining of wrong country code.

Tried generating the xml with another version of MS Office, still the same issue. Finally called their tollfree helpline, immediately got the answer, that an updated excel utility has been uploaded, I can download that and use it to generate the xml, since the country code for India had been changed from 11 to 91. OK, tried a shortcut of just editing the xml file to make that change, it worked. :)

probable reason for live broadcast problems

Once or twice, while starting the live broadcast in a hurry, BUTT has shown no input. Restarting the system had been the solution. Today also I experienced the issue, but instead of restarting the machine, tried restarting BUTT and then reloading the JackPilot saved session - no go. Restarted Reaper and reloaded JackPilot saved session - that worked.

So I surmise that the problem is caused when BUTT starts to broadcast before Reaper has focus, when Reaper is in the background. At that time, the Reaper output to Jack is probably not available, and later when Reaper gets focus, it does not connect to Jack for some reason. So the solution is to restart Reaper and reload the Jack session.

Edit Dec 2013: One more possible reason: if Reaper is paused - audio does not come out even from live mics through the insert send! Either REC or STOP or PLAY is needed.

updated Twitter widget

Our schedule page and on-demand audio page Twitter widgets stopped working a couple of days ago. Apparently Twitter API changed. Updated with their new widget. Unfortunately font size is a bit too big, and is not configurable.

frame blending for low frame-rate clips with avisynth

Finally got a solution for frame blending with avisynth. Using Convertfps after importing the clip at the required low framerate, when no "zone" parameter is added, frames are automatically blended.

Imagesource("Sequence_%05d.png", 00163, 00251, 5)

#This is at 5 fps

Convertfps(30)

distorting video using After Effects instead of Blender

Checking out if I can use After Effects to distort flat videos to be projected onto the dome (wihout buying the Fulldome plugin, of course :) - found this tutorial which does a bezier warp, which is probably what I need. Unfortunately this effect is not available in AE 4.2 which I have. AE 4.2 does have a "Basic 3D" effect, which can make the video trapezoidal.

I can make do with that for some videos at some locations, I suppose. Will explore using a "Cosmic Colors" frame as a reference.

moving the Sun and Moon against the fixed stars in Stellarium

Wanted to mimic the "Annular motion" of the planetarium instrument, where the stars remain fixed, but the Sun and Moon move across the Zodiac along the ecliptic. Googled Stellarium move sun moon fixed stars and so on, finally hit upon the setDate("+1 days sidereal")

function, which moves the time ahead by one sidereal day, i.e. stars will be at the same spot. Keyboard shortcut Alt + + and Alt + -

Trying it out, found that my Stellarium version 0.10.2 is quite finicky. If a function call is wrong, the script just doesn't run. setDate is case sensitive, and can be in the format
core.setDate("1926:11:23T04:21:01");

as also "2008-03-24T13:21:01" as given in the documentation. But got it working, finally, copying the syntax from the working landscapes.ssc script.

selecting a single constellation in Stellarium

Tried out the single constellation display option. My Stellarium version 0.10.2 behaves as follows when I choose the "Select single constellation only" option in Configuration/Tools :

When I select Sirius, Canis Major constellation lights up. If I then click on Betelgeuse, both Orion and Canis Major light up. Then if I select something which is not in any constellation, like the Moon, all the constellations light up. Next, if I click on Betelgeuse again, only Orion lights up. So, if I click on one star after another in successive constellations like in the zodiac, only those constellations will light up.

using After Effects instead of Blender for post-processing

In an earlier post, I'd mentioned using Blender for rotating fulldome frames. The rendering times for 2K frames with Blender was around 22 seconds per frame. Decided to try out Adobe After Effects instead. Dug out the old AE 4.1 box set which we'd purchased in 1999 or so. AE did the render of the 2K frame rotate faster than 1fps, since it's not doing any ray-tracing and instead just doing 2d transforms. Definitely a timesaver.

fulldome frame from celestia using the cube2dome method

Inspired by Ryan Wyatt's article about making fisheye frames from partiview using 6 cube faces, and with the help of code from Selden to display the six different fields of view top, down, left, right, front and back, hacked out a series of screenshots from Celestia and stitched them together to make a fulldome domemaster fisheye image with the help of the archived version of Paul Bourke's cube2dome_linux. On my first try, the registration was not perfect:

Then I thought maybe this was because the frames were not perfectly square. In order to get exactly square pixels, I had to resize the Celestia window to get exactly equal width and height. The getscreendimension function gives the x and y, but there is no "setscreendimension". So I just used the example script at for getscreendimension and kept calling it after tweaking the window size till I got 1002 x 1002 - it could have been any square size, I suppose. Taking those screenshots and making a domemaster, this time it meshed perfectly:

But this is just one frame! So I have to decide whether to pursue this time-consuming route or just purchase the Software Bisque Theater edition as suggested as one of the alternatives to Uniview by Paul Bourke.

exporting clips from Celestia

Tried exporting video clips from Celestia. Running it on secondary display at 1920x1080, tried exporting at 1280x720 with Xvid codec and as uncompressed avi. The Xvid codec version seemed to be better, more quality rendering, at around 11 fps. The look on the dome of course would be the final test. The idea is to warp the exported video after cropping it to a square shape and see if lower third centre view would be good for globes and such.

list of astronomy software

This page has a useful list of Astronomy and Planetarium related software:

http://astronomyonline.org/astronomysoftware.asp

offline rendering of fulldome fisheye frames using partiview

Ryan Wyatt has documented how he rendered fulldome content using partiview and Paul Bourke's tga2dome - http://numerology.ryanwyatt.net/

Seems a bit process intensive. First rendering 6 TGA cubes per angular fisheye frame, then creating the fisheye, and then in our case, warping the fisheye. Probably easier for me to use pre-rendered content as of now. Would be interesting to do a study of whether this process takes more or less time than the Blender render method which was around 1-2 minutes per frame.

There are other partiview resources listed at http://virdir.ncsa.illinois.edu/partiview/

Celestia seems to be able to render multi-view images as given in this old forum post but is limited by the resolution of the output screen.

planetarium systems review

Over the last two days, I could see two different planetariums. Interacted with the staff, saw their features, equipment. Different feature sets, different costs.

Bangalore Planetarium - single projector mirrordome system. Mitsubishi UD8400 projector gives 6500 lumens. Unidirectional seating is achieved through leaving two-thirds of the 15 m theatre empty, seating only 120 instead of 200. They have fulldome shows as well as traditional shows using the star projector, but demand is more for the former. They are making new shows with the help of an animation studio in 3DS Max.

Their website is www.taralaya.org

Calicut Planetarium - Upgraded just last week to Carl Zeiss Powerdome fulldome setup, with all the bells and whistles including a hybrid opto-mechanical system which is supposed to come in a few months. They use 9 JVC DLA-RS65 projectors with the Powerdome system featuring Uniview which can render astronomical objects in realtime, and also save sequences, and allows for show creation by dragging and dropping sequences into a timeline. They drive their HDMI ports over fiber, with the control systems in a rack in another room. They have converted their seating to unidirectional, and are able to seat 200 in their 15 m dome.

Their website is www.rscpcalicut.org

Subjective review: I saw Dawn of the Space Age at Bangalore, and Realm of Light at Calicut. In both cases I was near the rear of the theatre. In both cases, I felt the brightness was quite adequate, though in Calicut I thought some of the dark parts were too dark - like the whale swimming part. Maybe some gamma issue. Could not make out any great improvement in clarity over the single projector setup at Bangalore, except for the area behind the audience - when we use a mirror-dome setup, the area immediately around the mirror is somewhat washed-out, distorted. When observed close to the screen, the pixelation is evident at Bangalore, as it is at our planetarium, but for most of the audience, it is not visible. This pixelation is not seen in the 9 projector setup. I could make out some boundary artifacts of the 9-projector stitch boundaries during the fade-to-black parts. The overall sharpness was probably limited by the 4k dome master, or maybe by all the realtime slicing done to send 9 separate video feeds. Our Space Opera show is quite comparable in terms of audience wow-factor :)

From the audience point of view, the 100x times more costly setup does not deliver that much extra bang for the buck. But from the planetarium executive's point of view, compelling show creation tools are a great asset. Being able to create detailed flythroughs in realtime is a great boon. But patience is a virtue, and if uniview can be licensed and used to export offline for a reasonable cost, we can get most of the advantages of that setup, too. Something like a front-end for the process intensive method of rendering using partiview described here.

wavegain for normalizing

Useful for people who want all the songs in their self-mastered album to sound similar in volume:
http://www.rarewares.org/others.php#wavegain

Simple commandline utility with a GUI frontend that creates batch files for use with the utility. Drawback is that it does not do what I do with SoundForge - normalize to arbitrary RMS values applying limiter/compressor transparently. It does have a -6 dB limiter option, but the way it works seems to be very different from what I'm used to - a much softer limiter, perhaps...

Tata photon backup network device for live audio stream

Plugging in the Tata photon to USB on the Mac in mandir causes problems with the USB midi device and so on. But connecting the tata photon to the USB port before booting, and leaving it connected to the USB throughout, is troublefree.

When I tried to switch back from Photon to LAN, BUTT did not reconnect. Also, I had to disconnect the LAN cable for the Photon to connect. So, if LAN does not work, the way out would be to use Photon till the end.

icecast bandwidth under-reported by awstats

Looks like the icecast bandwidth is under-reported by awstats.

Shoutstats is quite accurate, since it reports the number of connected listeners at any point of time.

Checking out the area under the curve as seen right now, even though yesterday was Sunday and shows less traffic as is usual on Sundays,

If we take the 1 hour units, we have the approximate numbers as the following list from left to right:

300
300
300
300
300
300

400
500
400
400
350
300

300
250
250
200
250
250

250
300
350
550
650
400

That comes to 8150 listener hours. Since our 1 hour of 24 kbps stream filesize is 10.8 MB, taking 11 MB per hour, this comes to 87.5 GB per day on a slow day. The numbers reported by awstat seem to be around half of this.

calculate the disk space based on file date

Contributed by PB:

du -h (current usage)

du -ch `find /path/to/files/ -mtime -365` (last one year)

du -ch `find /path/to/files/ -mtime -730` (last two years)


etc.

viewing our live streams on Android

There was a request from the team preparing a customized android tablet for radiosai to consider changing our embedded player to something based on html5 so that Android would play it. They suggested videojs.

But according to this stackoverflow post, it looks like videojs does not work with our Wowza server: a test page I made also did not work. Our jwplayer embed does have a html5 option, but that seems to work only on iOS devices - "Cupertino streaming".

Wowza forums recommend using RTSP for streaming to Android, and when I made a link like they suggested, that worked fine on my HTC Wildfire for recorded streams. So, perhaps the rtsp urls
rtsp://[our-server-ip-address]:1935/live/myStream
(where myStream is the stream name)
or
rtsp://[our-server-ip-address]:1935/vod/flv:our-filename.flv
is the way to go for Android.

using WinDirStat for disk cleanup

Earlier, I had FolderSize installed on my system, but it was sometimes troublesome in taking up system resources when I did not need it to be running and so on. So, uninstalled it, and now installed WinDirStat. Since it is a standalone application, I can run it only when I need to see the sizes of folders. Collects statistics reasonably fast, all local drives scanned in the time it took to write this post.

problem with HDMI output

Unfortunately, the cable which V gave me to test was probably not meant for HDMI -> VGA. I think it is meant for VGA -> HDMI. I connected my player to my projector with that cable, did not work, and when I put back my old cable which used to work, still not working. Had to run shows from laptop VGA out for a couple of days.

Borrowed a Mac mini from studio to test HDMI projector input, found it working. The Mac mini can play the video at 720p on the HDMI out without any glitches, but with 1080p, the video drops frames, runs at around 15 fps or so. Then, tried the bluray player once again, found it working now! Probably the issue was a loose cable.

ubuntu panel disappearing

V tried to install the Nvidia accelerated driver on the Toshiba AC100 Smartbook running Ubuntu 12.04, and his desktop panel disappeared, though clicking in the relevant place still opened the correct apps. He did not want to change to 12.10 since he preferred the Unity interface to the Lubuntu interface on 12.10.

Problem and solution seems to be described here.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/162854/launcher-icons-invisible-still-work-in-12-04

But it gets stuck as given below,
http://askubuntu.com/questions/146456/cant-restore-unity-desktop

So I just re-flashed and re-installed 12.04.

migration of codeigniter-based site to godaddy

Successfully migrated a site based on the codeigniter framework from a generic server with CPanel to Godaddy. Went smoother than expected, though both servers were Linux servers.

While exporting database, the information_schema database is actually not supposed to be exported or imported. One has to choose the other database and then export. On godaddy, the database has to be created first, and godaddy's control panel fixes that the superuser name (of the db) and the dbname have to be the same. After this was done, came across this "No input file specified" error. The answer, via stackoverflow, was in the github docs. Followed those steps of changing the config file (in two places - in the public folder as well as the admin folder) and changing the htaccess file, choosing to save it in Unix LF style using PsPad, and problem fixed.

Edit: The admin area was broken. To fix it, had to modify the htaccess file in the admin folder, change
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [QSA,L]
to
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /admin/index.php?$1 [QSA,L]

and also change the admin/config/config.php file, had to set the URI protocol to Auto in order for auth to work.
$config['uri_protocol']    = 'AUTO';

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope for fulldome

The Microsoft WorldWide Telescope has planetarium features - fulldome projection, warped view as well as fisheye, and the option to use custom warp files in Paul Bourke's format. Unfortunately the tours are bandwidth hungry, and render on the fly, so that many landscapes etc are seen blurry and partly downloaded when played. The "Render to video" feature for the Tours has an option to "wait for downloads to complete" but the feature seems buggy. When I try to render a dome master, it shows the files being written, but no files are seen in the chosen folder. When I try to render low res files, like 640x480, the files do render, but apparently the file write is not able to keep up with the video being played in realtime, so the app crashes instead of doing an async render. This test was done with version 3.0.76.1

This version also crashed on my WinXP machine when doing full screen in full dome fisheye format. But later, after a system restart, full-screen mode did not crash. But it does show visible "stitch boundaries" - quite spoils the night sky look!

Since my main interest in checking out MS WWT was to try and render fulldome masters, and it does not seem to be doing that for me, I'll uninstall it for now.

online resources for fulldome production

Tried out a few options of the many many resources available on the internet, like the ones mentioned in the Small Planetarium Yahoo Group.

1. Tried the dome-masters available at spacetelescope.org - unfortunately, only one of them is a bonafide animation - others seem to be just a single hubble image rotated around the centre of the dome. I can do simple rotations myself!
2. The Science on a Sphere program links to many hi-res movies - 2048x2048 on the public ftp site ftp://public.sos.noaa.gov - these movies are generally suitable only for projection on the sphere as designed, but some parts of some of the movies can perhaps be adapted for fulldome, like animations of LCROSS hitting the surface of the moon etc. In most cases, such animations may be available for fulldome from other sources, so it may not be worth the hassle to try this out. An interesting sidelight while downloading deserves a separate post.
3. Some youtube videos like the ones from jakimsuk are available in 720p and seem to be prewarped for 4x3 projection. But the material is probably copywrited, like Spitz trailers and so on.

downloading large files over ftp

When downloading files from ftp://public.sos.noaa.gov the connection was timing out, and the server did not seem to resume downloads correctly. So I tried downloading from our dedicated server, and then transferring from there to our machine using sftp. Worked like a charm. A 1.3 GB file downloaded in 6 minutes - 40 Mbps! Later, sftp transfer to our local machine took 3 hours or so.

1535001090 bytes received in 359.52 secs (4169.5 kB/s)

using stellarium screenshots in planetarium shows

Tried out various options on the dome -

1. taking screenshots from within stellarium using the Ctrl-S shortcut key or using scripting
2. saving screen-grabs as movies using Fraps and Taksi

The difference in quality is glaring. The best quality is seen with the screenshots captured from withing Stellarium without warping. That is, when the Spheric mirror distortion option is chosen, the quality degrades.

So, I will have to go with first creating screenshots in fisheye mode, then cropping them and distorting them.