Archive for August, 2017

Three Problems in Supporting Multimedia Formats

Thursday, August 31st, 2017

As you probably don’t care, I’m working on RealMedia demuxer for NihAV. And it’s very straightforward: chunks without nesting, version field to guard against surprises, clean layout. The only peculiarities it has are audio data interleavers and so-called logical stream (the special entry that describes how to select streams for streaming depending on bitrate available). And yet the implementation for this format in libavformat is quite complex and baffling. This observation led me to playing Captain Obvious and stating these three problems:

  1. Following specification. Unless it’s ISO/IEC or ITU codec you usually have quite lacking specification either with details omitted (or as DT$ representatives put it, but we have it in the SDK!. Which helps a lot when you can download only ETSI paper). In some case the original implementation is the only specification you have. I’m no stranger to working with binary specifications but it still quite often doesn’t say what to expect in some cases (and then fuzzing happens…);
  2. Supporting hacks and abuses of specification. Two examples: MP3 and AVI. Or MP3 in AVI. For instance, MP3 has an optional CRC field (so if you don’t want CRC you simply don’t put it there) but I’ve seen samples that put zero checksum instead. Or in AVI you’re supposed to have 42db chunks for uncompressed video frames, 42dc for compressed video frames and 42wb for audio data. In reality you can have dc and db identifiers mixed in the same stream or even 0041 chunks put inside LIST rec chunk (that’s Indeo 4.1 in CivII clips). And of course there are many many more examples that everybody who has encountered them tries to forget.
  3. Seeking. You might wonder how seeking gets here and I’ll tell you how: most formats are not designed for random seeking and even if they are, users would still want to ignore indices, jump to a random position and find a start of the next chunk and timestamp as well. And in libavformat that is performed by a binary search that invokes special read_timestamp function of the demuxer (if present) which is supposed to do exactly that—searching for packet start and reporting a timestamp.

The moral of the story: if you can allow to ignore stupid user requests, do so and cherish the fact that you can. In NihAV I’m going to implement seeking only for formats that allow that (with reading index) or by more generic linear seeking that skips frames. This should be enough for my needs and it’ll keep code simple too.

Now that it’s become a bit colder I might actually resume my work on NihAV and even more important thing—describing Dingo Pictures art style and works.

Posted in Useless Rants | Comments Closed

A Bit About Legendary German Animation

Saturday, August 5th, 2017

If you talk about German films as a foreigner you might know some good ones like influential Fritz Lang movies (for Frau im Mond they’ve hired Hermann Oberth himself and as the result their depiction of space travel looks much more realistic than modern Hollywood flics) or Gojko Miti? adventure features (the Eastern Westerns). But if you’re not from Germany, what German cartoons do you know? Looks like the only German cartoons that got some widespread action are those from Dingo Pictures.

Dingo Pictures is a company located in Taunus that has produced about thirty Hess(l)ich cartoons in the second half of 1990s. Some of those were completely unique and some were ripped off by D*sney and Don Bluth earlier.

Dingo Pictures has their own unique and easily recognizable style. But before I explain it, here are the eponymous animals in one of their cartoons:

So, Dingo Pictures was a pioneer, combining computer drawn animation with 2D drawn background (watercolours no less!). Also like the anime father, Osamu Tezuka, the company had a cast of actors always appearing in every cartoon.

For example:
The Bear (he often changes scenes and complains about everything)

Goldie (named so after the Austrian book Bambi) and Wuschel (the squirrel), Ringo the Hare is not pictured here

And here’s the star of all Dingo Pictures cartoons, the one and only Wabuu:
Wabuu!

In case you didn’t know, Wabuu was so popular that he had his own original cartoon, title song (that can be heard in several other cartoons too) and even audio books! Even now the DVD with his own cartoon costs at least twenty Euro on Amazon and about ten Euro used (for comparison, you can buy almost any other used DVD with Dingo Pictures cartoon for one eurocent).

Anyway, we were talking about the style. It’s hard to express in words what makes Dingo Pictures cartoons so charming but I think phrases “record-mending animation quality”, “copy-pasting everything”, “reusing the same scenes in other cartoons”, “more padding that Star Trek The Motionless Picture” and “dull voice acting” would do.

Here are some shots from one of their longer films, King of the Animals (or Lion King for short), don’t mind the quality, I tried to be lazy:

Title card. One of the best ones, honestly.

Every animal is uniquely redrawn.

The titular king.

Nice backgrounds.

One of moles (as you can guess from its look this mole is Italian).

The story is very typical: the lion rules the jungle full with monkeys, hippos, crocodiles and vultures (and with hares, squirrels and bears—the bear picture above is from this cartoon). One day a monkey finds diamonds but they decide not to mine them in fear of humans coming. With the birth of his son, the lion king loses interest in ruling and the black panther seizes the power with cheating and false promises and exiles the king. Later, with the help of snake, vultures and bear the panther is defeated. If you think you’ve heard this story elsewhere, don’t worry—it has unexpected twists in it.

And in the end we have scenes like this:
The vultures asked for a computer with phone and modem for their help.

The Black Panther is defeated!

BTW the snake enjoys reading books and quotes Shakespeare, Goethe, Karl Marx and Gorbachov. If you find this strange how could you get past the fact the panther’s name is Bocassa?

How one can not enjoy masterpieces like this! Oh, and every time I hear sirens I remember the duck from Animal Football, that’s how much their art has touched me.

There’s a sequel to it, simply called King of the Animals The Second Part but it’s of lesser quality IMO.

The other noteworthy cartoons are Aladdin(the genie there is a famous actor who is not Robin Williams), Animals Football(there they’ve copy-pasted all their animal characters and then some), Bremen Musicians(it has live narrator filmed, not just animation), The Case for Mouse Police(it simply needs to be seen to be believed) and of course Wabuu.

P.S. For some reason DVDs are distributed by P*wer Channel GmbH and don’t mention the original creator anywhere except in the video. They are that modest.

P.P.S. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve heard about any other German cartoons. But these cartoons have reviews in BaidUTube channels of people from countries like Canada and Sweden (the latter is in Swedish of course, actually Wabuu song sounds even better in Swedish than in German).

Posted in Dingo Pictures | 1 Comment »

#chemicalexperiments — Lasagne

Saturday, August 5th, 2017

Let me start with a bit of history.

Normal don’t care much how to eat their pasta—they simply cook it, add whatever they have (even mayo probably or nothing at all) and eat it. Italians are different, they select pasta sauce first and then decide what pasta will go fine with it. In case of meat sauce (or ragù as locals call it) Italians considered that wide plain pasta would go best with it for some reason. So they competed who can use the wider noodles and the guy who simply took the whole plates won. But it was a bit inconvenient to cook them and then mix with sauce so they’ve switched to oven baking the whole thing in sauce instead. And that’s how lasagne was born (probably; Italians have a completely different story to tell but they always do).

Since I’d better avoid meat entirely, I decided to cook my own version with various components (in several tries too) and here’s my short summary:

  • it’s better to use thick sauces;
  • tomato sauce is a definite must, it adds flavour;
  • cheese sauce is good mostly for the lowest layer (to lay lasagne plates on it) and for pouring on top;
  • ricotta and Quark make fine layers too, you can even mix them with some vegetables;
  • sliced boiled eggs would make a nice addition to a layer with tomato sauce;
  • mozzarella is better avoided since it will result in hard chewy chunks contrasting with the texture of the rest of the dish.

Overall, it’s nice dish, would bake again.

Posted in #chemicalexperiments | 2 Comments »

Rust: Optimising Decoder Experience

Thursday, August 3rd, 2017

Okay, I’ve made some changes so hopefully the server will withstand the curiosity of more than two people if it will go like the last time.

So, after implementing Indeo 4/5 decoders for NihAV I nano-benchmarked it and my decoder was about twice as slow compared to libavcodec. And since neither has SIMD optimisations they should be good enough to compare.

The tested file was 00186002.avi — Indeo 4 sample with scalability feature(i.e. luma is split into four bands and uses Haar wavelet to compose the output plane) and duration over ten minutes. The results I got will be given in Linux perf sample counts as those should be representative enough.

avconv — 13.4 seconds, 10K cycles. About 24% spent in luma plane recombination (with Haar wavelet), about 40% of time is taken by bitstream decoding and the rest is mostly transforms and motion compensation.

nihav-tool — 31.6 seconds, 20K cycles. 30% spend in luma plane recombination, 48% of time is taken by bitstream decoding, 11% is for motion compensation and the rest is mostly transforms. Or in samples: recombination — 9900 (against 3300 in libavcodec), bitstream decoding (dirty estimate, it includes some DSP functions inlined) — 15800 against
5600. Motion compensation — 3500 against 1700. Transforms — 1300 against 1500 (they are not equivalent though, my code only transforms the block and output costs are hidden in bitstream decoding). Overall, my code is consistently worse. Is there any way to optimise it a bit?
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Posted in NihAV, Rust, Useless Rants | 12 Comments »