Archive for January, 2010

Looking for a job in a civilised country

Monday, January 25th, 2010

So, I’ve dropped out of my university because I see no use of continuing postgraduate studies I had. Now I’m a free man and should look for a means of living.

My main issue is that I live in third-world country with all consequences it can offer — no suitable work here for me (I’m picky and don’t want to learn PHP and “code” websites or do the same in Java) and no mobility (I don’t see an easy way to move into civilised country; if there was any, who would stay here?). Funny fact: worker salaries here seems to be lower than in China but prices for almost everything but food seems to be European.

Because of that my chances on getting employed by large company abroad are rather slim (or non-existent), so I hope that lesser company can invite me to work abroad. I’d gladly provide my skills and work on almost anything.

Here’s my list of countries I’d like to live and work in:

  • Tier 0 — Sweden
  • Tier 1 — the rest of Scandinavia
  • Tier 2 — any Western European country in Schengen area except warm ones (I feed bad when the temperature tops 25ºC but cold weather is fine)
  • Tier 3 — Canada (maybe the only developed country that welcomes Ukrainians)

If somebody can help me with fulfilling my dream I’d be very grateful. Even useful and not too general advice counts, but not the ones that require lying! Thanks.

Short CV:

  • got bachelor degree in CS and master degree in something, diploma says I’m “an engineer, system analyst”
  • more than 10 years of C experience; varying experience of different platform assemblers (x86, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS) — mostly SIMD for non-x86. I know some other languages too — C++, Pascal, Java, some scripting languages (shells, Perl, Python). I’ve tried functional languages too (Lisp, Prolog, Erlang) and I’m pretty sure I can use them too.
  • more than 5 years of FFmpeg development, started it with reverse-engineering codecs too
  • 3-4 years experience on enterprise development (client-server systems, RDBMS, whatever)

Posted in Useless Rants | 12 Comments »

Some notes on old WMV3

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Vad kan man göra på nyårsafton om han dryck inte alkohol och han är FFmpeg developer också? (Translation: what can man do on evening before New Year if he does not drink alcohol and he is FFmpeg developer?).

Naturally, I spent it hacking at some codec. One of the most annoying issues with it (at least for some people like me) is that it does not support some features, like interlaced VC-1 and decodes only I-frames in old version of WMV3. So I’ve tried to fix the latter.

There is a flag called RES_RTM which tells whether it’s final bitstream format (a.k.a. “release to manufacturer”, hence the name) or not. I’ve tried tracing its effect through binary decoder and it turned out that it only alters transform pattern decoding.

Here’s a brief outline of transform concept: WMV2, WMV3 and VC-1 may partition P or B blocks into 4×8, 8×4 or 4×4 subblocks; each subblock, obviously, may be coded or not, so decoder also needs to extract subblock coding pattern unless transform type specifies it (like “8×4 transform, left half coded”).

It turns out that older version uses different condition for subblock coding pattern reading (for 8×4 and 4×8 transforms only), without checking whether this is transform specified only for current block or for whole macroblock (i.e. group of 6 blocks). Quick hacking has not made FFmpeg decode those old file correctly though, so there is still some work left to figure out correct condition.

Posted in VC-1 | 1 Comment »