digital home of MacSlow

On a more friendly side of things (trying to fight a bad mood) I wanted some more bling. This is the result:

Video with style (click for high-res)

Video with more style (click for high-res)

I only wish those kind of things were a bit easier to achieve.

Over the last couple of weeks I received some flak regarding my way with going about lowfat. Some bits I cover in the added FAQ-section of it. Thank god I also got encouraging notes from people, but the negative parts always weight heavier than the positive parts. This takes the motivation to spend your spare-time on it down considerably. Trying to see only the positive feedback and mask out the negative never works so well… at least for me. How do others deal with that “dark side” of community-reactions?

First of all a bunch of greetings from my side go to the readers of planet-gstreamer. By chance I figured out that probably Christian “Uraeus” Schaller added my blog to the sink (is this pun?) that is planet-gstreamer. Thanks for that! With being visible at planet-gnome and planet-gstreamer, does this mean I’ve to behave like an adult now? *g*

While still fooling around and learning gstreamer, I’ve built me a special pipleline that let’s me use H.264-encoded quicktime clips as video-textures. For some faad-related bug (gstreamer-bugzilla 340762 or launchpad 3236) I currently cannot use the vanilla playbin or decodebin under ubuntu dapper. Here you see a 480p HD trailer of “Superman Returns” rendered in an odd way:

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~5.1 MBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~4.6 MBytes)

The code-sample doing this can be downloaded from here. It has major shortcomings, but still might be useable for someone. I’m putting this online mainly because I hope that some gstreamer-savvy people will point me to solutions for the still inefficient parts that are found in this code. Thanks in advance! Some facts about the provided code:

• conversion to RGB done via pad-filter (slow), should be done with fragment-shader (fast)… too lazy right now
• too much hardcoded values, way too many globals… but hey it’s try-stuff-time
• superfluous copy of decoded video-frame to main-thread-local memory, no clue how to avoid that yet
• almost zarro comments

Yipiee! After some hard work and bugging the experts in #gstreamer on irc.freenode.net now and then, I’ve managed to implement video-textures mixing OpenGL and gstreamer. I know that togra already achieves something like this, but it is python-based and a whole scripting-framework. Thus it is of no use to me, because I will need video-textures in lowfat, which is not using python but C++. Also I would not want to pull a complete additional framework into lowfat.

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~3.2 MBytes)

I’ll upload another example screencast (showing off a bit more… like some H.264-quicktime twirling around) when I find the time.

Not everything in my world revolves about IT, OpenSource, Linux and listening to podcasts made by strange animals like this…

named Jono Bacon among others *g*

Martial-arts (more specifically capoeira) and tricking (note: capoeira != tricking and tricking != capoeira) is a way to rock my world outside of Linux and OpenSource. It is always cool to see a god-like athlete like Sesshoumaru, who packs so much artistic style in his routine, perform. Almost rocketing hissing in the air with each jump, flip and twist this show-cases an ability, which could fill his pocket-book quite easily. I am wondering when folks like him are going to land some advertising-contract with the likes of Nike, adidas or whoever or will be featured in the next flick from Jackie Chan.

On the weekend-trip to our capoeira-groups anual batizado (in Berchem, Belgium) we listened to a few nice boogaloo-, forro- and capoeira-tunes to get in the right mood for two days full of roda, flipping and generally a good time. With the rush we were in, when getting started on saturday, I forgot to take my berimbau with me. No chance to practise playing music with some of the experts. Damn! There were many guests from all over europe visiting this event… some even from as far as down under, the land of eyers-rock, koalas, kangaroos and digeridoos.

I finally learnt to get this macaquinho-movement down. I’ve been trying to learn to pull off correctly for almost a year now.

I hope to get some photos and videos of this batizado uploaded here soon.