Somebody has managed to found Dingo Pictures media conceptual work Perseus in German and some of their video stories were discovered too—Siegfried and some Christmas story with a subtitle Max’s Wonderful Present (somebody even notified me of this one earlier). All of them are available at the usual video hosting.
I still want to see Humpie the Whale Explores the World one day though.
I wanted to write this post for a while but I guess AV1.1 is that cherry on top of the whole mess called AV1 that made me finally do this.
Since the time I first heard about AV1 I tried to follow its development as much as it’s possible for a person not subscribed to their main mailing list. And unfortunately while we all expected great new codec with cool ideas we got VP10 instead (yes, I still believe that AV1 is short for “A Vp 1(0) codec”). Below I try to elaborate my view and present what facts I know that formed my opinion.
It all started with ITU H.EVC and its licensing—or rather its inability to be licensed. In case you forgot the situation here’s a summary: there are at least three licensing entities that claim to have patents on HEVC that you need to license in order to be using HEVC legally. Plus the licensing terms are much greedier than what we had for H.264 to the point where some licensing pool wanted to charge fees per streaming IIRC.
So it was natural that major companies operating video in Internet wanted to stay out of this and use some common license-free codec. Resorting to creating one if the need arises.
That was a noble goal that only HEVC patent holders may object to, so the Alliance for Open Media (or AOM for short) was formed. I am not sure about the details but IIRC only organisations could join and they had to pay entrance fee (or be sponsored—IIRC VideoLAN got sponsored by Mozilla) and the development process was coordinated via members-only mailing list (since I’m not a member I cannot say what actually happened there or how and have to rely on second- or third-hand information). And that is the first thing that I did not like—the process not being open enough. I understand that they might not wanted some ideas leaked out to the competitors but even people who were present on that list claim some decisions were questionable at best.
In the beginning there were three outlooks on how it will go:
And looks like all those opinions were wrong. AV1 is not that great especially considering its complexity (we’ll talk about it later); its features were not always selected based on the merit (so most of Daala stuff was thrown out in the end—but more about it later); and looks like the main goal was to interest hardware manufacturers in its acceptance (again, more on it later).
Anyway, let’s look what main feature proposals were (again, I could not follow it so maybe there was more):
libvpx with current development snapshot of VP10;But it started with a scandal since Baidu tried to patent ANS-based video codec (essentially just an idea of video codec that uses ANS coding) after accepting ANS inventor’s help and ignoring his existence or wishes afterwards.
And of course they had to use libvpx as the base because. Just because.
So after the initial gathering of ideas it was time to put them all to test to see which ones to select and which ones to reject.
Of course since organisations are not that happy with trying something radically new, AV1 was built on the existing ideas with three main areas where new ideas were compared:
I don’t think there were attempts to change the overall codec structure. To clarify: ITU ITU H.263 used 8×8 DCT and intra prediction consisted of copying top row or left column of coefficients from the reference block, ITU H.264 used 4×4 integer transform and tried to fill block from its neighbours already reconstructed pixel data, ITU H.265 used variable size integer transform (from 4×4 to 32×32), different block scans and quadree coding of the blocks. On the other hand moving from VP9 to AV1 did not involve such significant changes.
So, for prediction there was one radically new thing: combining Thor and Daala filter into single constrained directional enhancement filter (or CDEF for short). It works great, it gives image quality boost at small cost. And another interesting tool is predicting chroma from luma (or CfL for short) that was a rejected idea for ITU H.EVC but later was tried both in Thor and Daala and found good enough (the history is mentioned in the paper describing it). This makes me think that if Cisco joined efforts with Xiph foundation they’d be able to produce a good and free video codec without any other company. Getting it accepted by others though…
Now coefficient coding. There were four approaches initially:
ANS-based coding was rejected probably because of the scandal and that it requires data to be coded in reverse direction (the official reasoning is that while it was faster on normal CPU it was slower in some hardware implementations—that is a common reason for rejecting a feature in AV1).
Daala approach won, probably because it’s easier to manipulate a multi-symbol model than try to code everything as context-dependent binarisation of the value (and you’ll need to store and/or code a lot of context probabilities that way). In any case it was clear winner.
Now, transforms. Again, I cannot tell how it went exactly but all stories I heard were that Daala transforms were better but then Baidu had to intervene citing hardware implementation reasons (something in the lines that it’s hard to implement new transforms and why do that since we have working transforms for VP9 with tried hardware design) so VP9 transforms had been chosen in the end.
In April 2018 AOM has announced long-awaited bitstream freeze which came as a surprise to the developers.
In June it was actually frozen and AV1.0 was released along with the spec. Fun fact: the repository for av1-spec on baidusource.com that once hosted it (there are even snapshots of it from June in the Web Archive) now is completely empty.
And of course because of some hardware implementation difficulties (sounds familiar yet?) now we have AV1.1 which is not fully compatible with AV1.0.
This all started as a good intent but in the process of developing AV1.x it raised so many flags that I feel suspicious about it:
And by “not very good result” I mean that the codec is monstrous in size (tables alone take more than megabyte in source form and there’s even more code than tables) and its implementation is slow as pitch drop experiment.
Usually people trying to defend it say the same two arguments: “but it’s just a reference model, look at JM or HM” and “codecs are not inherently complex, you can write a fast encoder”. Both of those are bullshit.
First, comparing libaom to the reference software of H.264 or H.265. While formally it’s also the reference software there’s one huge difference. JM/HM were the plain C/C++ implementations with no optimisation tricks (beside transform speed-up by decomposition in HM) while libaom has all kinds optimisations including SIMD for ARM, POWER and x86. And dav1d decoder with rather full set of AVX optimisations is just 2-3 times faster (more when it can use threading). For H.264 optimised decoders were tens of times faster than JM. I expect similar range for HM too but two-three times faster is very bad result for unoptimised reference (which libaom is not).
Second, claiming that codecs are not inherently complex and thus you can write fast encoder even is the codec is more complex than its predecessor. Well, it is partly true in the sense that you’re not forced to use all possible features and thus can avoid some of combinatorial explosion by not trying some coding tools. Well, there is certain expectation built in into any codec design (i.e. that you use certain coding tools in certain sequence omitting them only in certain corner cases) and there are certain expectations on compression level/quality/speed.
For example, let’s get to the basics and make H.EVC encoder encode raw video. Since you’re not doing intra prediction, motion compensation or transforms it’s probably the fastest encoder you can get. But in order to do that you still have to code coding quadtrees and transmit flags that it has PCM data. In result your encoder will beat any other on speed but it will still lose to memcpy() because it does not have to invoke arithmetic coder for mandatory flags for every coded block (which also take space along with padding to byte boundary, so it loses in compression efficiency too). That’s not counting the fact that such encoder is useless for any practical purpose.
Now let’s consider some audio codecs—some of them use parametric bit allocation in both encoder and decoder (video codecs might start to use the same technique one day, Daala has tried something like that already) so such codec needs to run it regardless on how you try to compute better allocation—you have to code it as a difference to the implicitly calculated one. And of course such codec is more complex than the one that transmits bit allocation explicitly for each sample or sample group. But it gains in compression efficiency and that’s the whole point of having more complex codec in the first place.
Hence I cannot expect of AV1 decoders magically being ten times faster than libaom and similarly while I expect that AV1 encoders will become much faster they’ll still either measure encoding speed in frames per month minute or be on par with x265 in terms on compression efficiency/speed (and x265 is also not the best possible H.265 encoder in my opinion).
Late Sir Terence Pratchett (this world is truly sadder place without his presence) used a phrase “ladies of negotiable hospitality” to describe certain profession in Discworld. And to me it looks like AV1 is a codec of negotiated design. In other words, first they tried to design the usual general purpose codec but then (probably after seeing how well it performs) they decided to bet on hardware manufacturers (who else would make AV1 encoders and more importantly decoders perform fast enough especially for mobile devices?). And that resulted in catering to all possible objections any hardware manufacturer of the alliance had (to the point of AV1.1).
This is the only way I can reasonably explain what I observe with AV1. If somebody has a different interpretation, especially based on facts I don’t know or missed, I’d like to hear it and know the truth. Meanwhile, I hope I made my position clear.
Looks like it’s been about two months since I last wrote anything about NihAV but that does not mean I did not have anything to write about. On the contrary, I’m glad to report about significant progress in RealAudio support.
Previously I’ve reported about RealVideo 3 and 4 support (as for RealVideo 1/2 and ClearVideo before), so video part was covered quite well but audio part was missing and I went on to rectify the situation.
Now NihAV supports RealAudio 1.0 (speech codec), RealAudio 2.0 (speech codec), RealAudio DNET (a bit about it later), RealAudio 4.0 (speech codec from Sipro), RealAudio Cook (this one deserves a separate post so the next one should be about this codec) and RealAudio Lossless. So there are only three codecs missing now: RealAudio 8 (ATRAC3), RealAudio 9/10 (AAC) and RealVideo 6(HD). Of course I’m going to add support for those as well.
This is actually a good time to implement those. As you might know, there is a Holy Trinity of Licensors: D.vX, D*lby and DT$. They are famous for ‘nice’ licensing terms. While I’ve never had to deal with them, I’ve heard from people who did that they like licensing single product they’re most famous for at outrageous prices (i.e. it’ll cost you a magnitude more per unit using their technology than e.g. H.264 decoder) and it’s a viral license too because if you sell stuff not oriented for consumers then you have to force your customers into the same deal (it’s GPL—Greedy Private License) and you have to report your sales to them for obvious reasons. Funny how two of the companies were bought out already. Now let’s look at them in some details:
A C and 3 (I heard rumours that it does not like its trademarks mentioned so I’d better avoid directly naming it). At least the last patents for that format has expired and support for it can be implemented freely. And it also owns a company that manages licensing of AAC. Fun fact is that patents for MPEG2 NBC are expired so I can implement AAC-LC decoder just fine but that does not stop them for licensing it. How they do it? By refusing to license the separate parts and forcing a whole package of AAC-LC, HE-AACv1, HE-AACv2 and xHE-AAC onto you. I guess if the situation won’t change in twenty years all current stuff will expire but they’ll still license it along with Ultra-Enhanced-Hyper-Expanded-Radically-Extended High-Efficiency AAC (which will have nothing to do with all those previous formats).And I want to talk a bit more about my RealAudio DNET decoder. Internally it’s called ts102366 for obvious reasons and I have just a primitive implementation for it (i.e. it seems to work and should handle multichannel fine but no extended features). The extension for more than 5.1 channels also seems to be HD-DVD/Blu-ray only so I don’t care, it’s quite rare in RealMedia format and other containers seem to contain it as contiguous stream so I’d need to introduce support for NAElementaryStream in demuxing code and also proper parser to split it into frames. Not worth the effort for me at this moment. Another fun fact is that bitstream comes in 16-bit words that can have any endianness. In my case I just had to detect the proper endianness from first two bytes and simply initialise bitstream reader in BE or LE16 mode depending on it (again, it’s funnier with DT$ format where you have three different bitstream reading modes and you might need two modes simultaneously in some cases; again, good thing I don’t have to care about that stuff). Also it’s still one of two codecs I currently have that support multichannel audio (Cook is the second of course and AAC will be third).
And finally some words about Rust issues I had to deal with.
Rust as a language is more or less fine but compiler sucks. I’ve ran into several issues while writing code.
First, I had a fixed array of Codebooks to initialise in RALF decoder (one of 15 codebooks, another one of 125 codebooks and yet another one of 10×11 codebooks). If I use simply mem::uninitialized() with filling it up it works fine. In debug mode. In release mode it segfaults at the end. Probably I should’ve used ptr::write() instead of assigning and it would work fine but I gave up and used a vector instead of an array even if it’s not as efficient. Obviously it’s all my fault and not Rust issue but still that was weird.
Second, when I tried to create a generic codebook reader that would accept table of codes of any primitive type (u8, u16 or u32) I ran into funnier issue of Rust compiler spewing weird errors like “cannot convert u16 to u32 because it’s not a primitive type”. Obviously it’s my mistake and it’s caught by a tool (that is still not in stable) so the developers don’t care (yes, Luca even bothered to file an issue on that). Still, I’d rather have a clearer error message in that case (e.g. “… because it’s X and not a primitive type”).
And finally, an example that is definitely rustc stupidity and not mine. Again, developers don’t consider this to be an issue but I do (and Luca seemed to agree with me since he opened an issue about it). Essentially, there is a thing called DCE (dead code elimination), so when compilers see that certain block won’t be executed they might print a warning and just check inside code for syntactic validity. Current rustc might ignore condition value and optimise code inside even if it clearly makes no sense (to the point where it crashed because of that on some nightly version, see the issue for details). And while you argue that one should not write such code, I had quite plausible use case for it: a macro that took 2- or 3-element array and did something to its values so if third value was present it had to do something special with it. But of course compilation failed because you tried to do if ARR.len() > 2 { a = ARR[2]; } with two-element array. But when I tried to check whether I got indexing correct by using large constants as indices, cargo check passed just fine—probably because const propagation did not go that deep inside my code (it was in a function called from a long chain in some sub-sub-sub-module and standalone example errors out fine). This feels quite unpolished to me.
Oh, and final final fun thing: the calls like foo.bar(foo.baz) would still fail borrow check probably because they can’t (I guess) formalise function calling convention i.e. “if function is called then first its arguments are evaluated and copied if needed in certain order, then function address is evaluated and called with the arguments”. BTW you still have the situation like this:
struct Foo { foo: u8 }
impl Foo {
fn bar(&mut self) -> u8 { self.foo += 1; self.foo }
}
fn fee(a: u8, b: u8) {
println!("{} {}", a, b);
}
fn main() {
let mut foo = Foo { foo: 42 };
fee(foo.bar(), foo.bar());
}
And if you don’t know what’s wrong here I’ll tell you: in C argument evaluation is implementation-defined because back in the day there were very different calling conventions and thus compiler needed to start with evaluating from last argument to first to store them in order instead of widespread pushing arguments in order to stack. So depending on ABI the function would be called either as fee(43, 44) or as fee(44, 43).
Now I see two ways out of it: either detect such situation where the same object is mutably called several times and give an error or, which is better IMO, make formal calling convention so the code won’t be undefined. And fix borrow checker while doing that.
Overall, Rust is a nice experience so far since it allows code to structure much better but sometimes you hit such silly issues that spoil all the fun.
Anyway, next post should be about RealAudio Cook, the Opus of its era.
Since today is the state holiday (some time ago two Germanies united into one—which looks more and more like DDR for some reason) why not look at Zoidberg of German lands—Saarland? Well, you might have many reasons (first, it being Saarland) but today I’ve completed my voyage on all of their accessible railways and hence this post.
First, a bit of history. As you all remember, after World War II Germany was split into four occupation zones and while I haven’t heard anything in particular about British occupation zone, the rest of occupation forces were behaving not nice at all: USA installed their military bases everywhere (and most of them are still there—at least it meant less military expenses for West Germany back in the day), USSR tried to convert its piece of Germany into a copy of itself (partly successfully, hopefully it will recover) and France was not satisfied with mere occupation and also tried to seize the part of Germany as its own but it bit more than it could chew and so back in 1957 Saarland was reunited with the rest of Germany (and that day is the state holiday too but I doubt many think of 1st of January as of Saarland reunification day).
Second, a bit of railway network overview. Essentially you can think about it as a cross: there’s a main East-West line going from Mannheim to Trier (or Alt-Chemnitz) via Homburg and Saarbrücken, there’s a North-South line going from Bad Kreuznach to Saarbrücken, there’s a line going South from Saarbrücken to France (and another one served by tram but more about it later), there is a branch Dillingen—Niedaltdorf, there’s a line from Rohrbach to Pirmasens, there’s line Trier—Perl—Metz that goes partly through Saarland and there are several parallel lines connecting Homburg and Saarbrücken. Let’s count: Homburg—Rohrbach—Saarbrücken (that’s what trains from Mannheim to Saarbrücken use), Homburg—Neunkirchen—Saarbrücken (part of it is Nahetalbahn to Bad Kreuznach), Homburg—Neunkirchen—Merchweiler—Saarbrücken (serviced by regional trains Homburg—Illingen and Saarbrücken—Lebach) and finally there’s Homburg—Neunkirchen—Lebach—Saarbrücken via tram line that goes all the way from Lebach to Saarbrücken to Saargemünd (or Sarreguemines as some people write it).
Yes, there’s a tram line in Saarland that essentially crosses half of it. And it’s impossible to confuse it since there’s only one tram line and one tram route in Saarland.
Also I’ve found mentions of three museum lines but looks like only one is functioning: Ottweiler—Schwarzerden line (or Ostertalbahn for short). And I’ve tried it as well. Unlike many other museum lines, this one uses diesel locomotives from the 1960s (but hopefully they’ll manage to rebuild the steam locomotive from the parts they have one day). It was what can be experienced in Ukrainian regional trains—going at about 30km/h while sitting on wooden benches and enjoying looking at the nature outside. At least they boast that they work in any weather (while other museum lines close in Autumn they keep running trains in winter too).
There are many weird things there I’d like to talk about but I’ll leave them to the time when I finish travelling on all railways of Rheinland-Pfalz (should be done next year unless they decide not to open Zellertalbahn again) but here are some of them for now.
First, the train service Saarbrücken—Lebach-Jabach. Fischbachtalbahn (Saarbrücken—Wemmetsweiler) and Primstalbahn from Wemmetsweiler to Illingen are electrified (in Illingen only track 41 is electrified, track 51 is not). Then only a bit of track at Lebach is electrified but about fourteen kilometres in-between are not. We had similar situation here with Bruhrainbahn (between Graben-Neudorf and Germersheim) being not electrified so train Karlsruhe—Mainz ran mostly on electrified rails but still had to be a diesel one. At least this was fixed in 2011 by electrifying the missing piece.
Second, it’s the only tram line in Germany I know that has exit directions repeated in French too.
And third, to make Saarland feel even more like Switzerland, they have the same cryptic booking system: when I bought a ticket from Saargemünd to Lebach it offered me to choose one of three or four possible alternatives—just like buying a rail ticket in Switzerland! Come to think of it, Swiss rail system is exactly like German regional system:
So despite all local jokes about Saarland being very backward place (some even call it “rear end of Germany”) it’s quite European place in some aspects. And remember that it has a real Schengen border (i.e. it borders with Luxembourg where town of Schengen known for some treaty is located).
Originally I wanted to to write about NihAV progress but some kind soul has uploaded the final missing piece of Dingo Pictures art collections so I have no other choice but to talk about it.
So, Arischa the Little Witch (…on the visit to the Magic Forest).
(more…)
I wanted to write this post for several months since in July I finally had a chance to travel on some of the important Swedish railways.
Well, as anybody knows, I love Sweden and railways. And Swedish railways too. And obviously I’d like to ride them all and recently I’ve moved much closer to that goal.
There are this important railways in Sweden (sorry if I forgot some but this list should cover the most important ones):
And I want to talk about those railways and my experience there.
(more…)
So it has come to this. Let’s talk about a stuff one usually finds in sweets: various kinds of cream (and my experience with it).
I can divide the cream I’ve encountered or made so far into three categories:
Swedish cream is very easy to make: whip cream, optionally sprinkle cinnamon on top. It’s found in virtually every Swedish cake and serves as a base for some other cream variants. In Germany it’s common to use Sahnesteif—essentially a mix of starch and dextrose—that makes whipped cream stay thick and not runny longer.
Lazy cream is essentially a mix of some dairy product with powdered sugar and maybe something else for flavour (I use lemon juice): it can be butter, mascarpone, quark or something else. You simply mix those two ingredients together and use immediately. I believe the other term for this kind of cream is butter-cream.
And custards is the trickiest one since you have to cook it. It’s essentially a mix of egg yolks and milk with some thickening agent (can be starch or less commonly gelatine). When making it you have to keep in mind that if you simply put yolks into the hot milk they’ll curdle and you’ll end with a very runny omelette so you have to be extra careful and mix them (first you mix yolks with sugar and starch) by pouring a thin stream of one ingredient into another and mixing (some say you should first add some hot milk to yolks and then pour the mix back to milk, others claim it’s enough to pour yolks into milk). Afterwards you have to let it cool in a sealed container and maybe mix with whipped cream. It can be used in tarts, cakes, smaller pastry or eaten as it (preferably with something else though like berries or biscuits).
There’s a variation of it called Bavarian cream which you make by mixing yolks and milk, adding gelatine and mixing with whipped cream after it’s half-set (and then waiting even more hours until it’s fully set). The result is good as a standalone dessert but I heard it can be used in cakes too.
Overall I find all those cream varieties good but it’s better to eat them with something else and in moderation (or you’ll end having my shape).
One of the Rust language features is explicit object lifetimes that help compiler correctly track memory usage and free objects without using garbage collector. A neat idea but it leads to lifetime specifiers being used everywhere including places where compiler should be smart enough to deal with them without explicit mentions in every place.
Maybe I’m using Rust wrong but in most of the cases I create objects that have no need for lifetime specifier or the objects that have the same lifetime for both its members and itself. Thus I argue that in addition to generic lifetime specifier 'a (or whatever the name you give it) and obviously named 'static there should be 'self that specifies the lifetime to be exactly the same as the object itself.
So, instead of current:
Saarland still honours France
struct Foo<'a> {
myref: &'a [u8],
subobj: Bar<'a>,
}
impl<'a> Foo<'a> {
pub fn new(myref: &'a [u8], subobj: Bar<'a>) -> Self { ... }
}
it should be possible to write:
struct Foo {
myref: &'self [u8],
subobj: Bar,
}
impl Foo {
pub fn new(myref: &'self [u8], subobj: Bar) -> Self { ... }
}
I am not sure whether compiler needs to perform some additional things in such objects compared to objects without no lifetime specifier but it should be easy to assign proper lifetime after parsing the structure definition anyway and I’m pretty sure the compiler does something like this anyway.
And I see only these reasons why this has not been done yet:
So all in all I’d be happy to either hear why it cannot be done (beside the compatibility with the existing code) or see it implemented. But most likely this will be ignored (and I’m fine with that too).
So I had a chance to visit Belgium and Netherlands and what I’ve seen there makes me write this post.
Luxembourg
I visited it some years ago and it looked quite decent to me, nothing particularly strange.
Belgium
Previously I only went to Brussels for FOSDEM but this time I travelled around a bit and saw places outside the capital too.
So, they have nice touches like typeface used for station names, various kinds of trains (though I haven’t seen their outdated train that used to go between Liege and Aachen) and very interesting rail station in Antwerpen.
The only strange thing is that they hang out timetables for workdays and weekdays separately (at least in Bruxelles Nord).
The only stupid thing I saw is ticket machines having a special button for international trains and when you press it it tells you that you can’t buy an international train ticket there. And Belgium is such a small country that it’s hard to travel in any direction for an hour and not cross some border (or get into the sea). One would expect that buying tickets to neighbouring lands would be easier, especially for such close countries like Belgium and Netherlands.
Netherlands
Now this country looks like everything there was designed by idiots.
First, trains. By themselves they are not that bad but they have the best counterintuitive designed door open buttons. First, they are labelled the same: half-opened (or half-closed) doors with small arrows showing opening or closing. So if you have not a very good sight (like me) you’ll be confused. But buttons are colour-coded! Yes, and while on German trains it’s intuitive green—open, red—close (or just a single button for open/close), Dutch trains have yellow button for opening doors and green (or blue for random Japanese) button for closing. Honestly, it should be intuitive to have green button to open doors so you can go. And I’d like to hear a reason behind this beside “well, cannabis is legal in Netherlands”.
Next, timetables. Those are confusing as well. At least in Rotterdam timetables are hanged separately for each fork (well, it should be a line but most of them are drawn as forks which probably means the train parts separate at some point and head in two different directions)—maybe it’s this convoluted system made them invent InterCity Direct too (don’t ask me how that’s different from normal InterCity). And the separate timetable for international trains. Confusing.
And since that was not enough stupidity, they decided to install turnstiles in Rotterdam Centraal so in order to enter or leave the station you need to scan your ticket (yes, it’s like what you have in underground systems but in this case for rail station). And it might be the only station there with such a feature, I saw nothing like that in Amsterdam C when I visited couple of years ago or in The Hague two days ago.
Speaking of The Hague, they have the stupid station name—Den Haag HS where last two letters stay for Hollands Spoor or Dutch Rail. I know only two cases where such naming makes sense:
And as far as I know none of this applies to The Hague. I suspect it happened because they have built a new station later (more than a century later) that they designated as central one and could not make a good name for the old station. It’s like in Germany they’d rename station Hamburg-Altona to Hamburg Hbf and Hamburg Hbf to Hamburg DB. In other words, pointless and stupid.
Overall, it was an interesting experience travelling Belgium and Netherlands but I did not expect that much stupidity from the latter. Anyway, the next post should be about Rust.
Since I don’t have enough time to visit proper country I went to bad substitute of Sweden that’s much more accessible—Switzerland (it should be obvious why I cannot call it poor or cheap substitute). Since it happened on Easter (April 1-2), the environment was resembling Sweden: snow, mountains, deer and log sheds. And of course I could ride trains in new locations!
Rhaetian railways is a narrow-gauge railway system in canton Graubünden (which symbol uncannily resembles the one from Gävle), a fractal part of Switzerland occupying its south-east corner (fractal in the sense that canton shape looks almost exactly like the shape of whole Switzerland). Trains run in a picturesque scenery with dreadful names like Fhtagn (or Ftan in Swiss-Cthüelsch) or SaaS (they really have a station with such name!), going up to the mountains (in 1-2 km above sea level range) and I spent couple of days travelling around.
But while the scenery is okay, the railways are some unholy mix of Berlin S-Bahn, Czech and German railways:
Overall, FFS or RhB is not very friendly to a traveller: you should have a definite idea where are you going to, when (at which time and such) and how (i.e. where to transfer) if you want to buy a ticket. For example, I was at the station Chur-West and wanted to go to Scuol-Tarasp. The ticket vending machine offered me to choose from three options: via Samedan, via Chur-Samedan (i.e. go first to Chur main station and from there to Samedan and then to Scuol) or via Vereina. The last option is actually a tunnel and not a station name!
In Germany when you travel with long distance trains you actually choose one of the provided connection possibilities (e.g. InterCity from A to B, RegioBahn from B to C and ICE from C to D or InterCity from A to E and then from E to D) or you can use the provided functionality for route planning even if you don’t buy a ticket. SBB ticket machines simply allow you to buy ticket from A to B maybe with cryptic route midpoint and that’s all! That’s exactly how German ticket vending machines for regional transport work. And there’s yet another point of annoyance: Swiss rail timetables fail to include arrival time for the final destination so if you care about it (like I sometimes do) you have to find it out via other means. It’s plain stupid.
Oh, and the snow-related problem: when you buy a ticket you can’t be sure the train will go there because the only cryptic warning I got is when ticket machine said my ticket will be valid on April 1st-April 9th period (and much later in the train too). In Germany it actually shows warnings when there’s some problem with a train or it’s cancelled entirely (since you can use it later). I actually had a situation when one segment of my travel was served by a train that broke down and I had to take another train later instead. So it feels like you should rather use smartphone and buy ticket online where you can see the actual route and warnings (and probably use bahn.de instead of cff.ch too where possible).
Overall, travelling with Rhaetian railways was both a pleasant and exciting experience in some aspects (i.e. when I was inside the train) and confusing and frustrating experience in others (i.e. when I actually tried to buy a ticket). They also boast how some parts of the system are the third railway in UNESCO World Heritage Railways (the second after India, I guess) and how picturesque some parts are (they are almost as interesting as Sauschwänzlebahn indeed) but as I’ve seen it all there’s no reason to return there (and the reliable source says there are better places in Switzerland to wait over heat waves too).