I’m relieved that I … ok, file scavenger (great file recovery tool, BTW) was able to recover the last month of pictures we’ve been taking which includes quarter pipe ramp construction and christmas tree farm fun. They were mysteriously missing from the compact flash card. We’ll get them posted soon!
Major respect to file scavenger as it has saved my bacon twice now. The key abillity of this tool is scan the entire drive for files (vs. the easier undelete by unsetting the deleted flag). The first time the root of the file system of a failing hard drive got corrupted and over a 100GB of data appeared to be lost. A full scan recovered over 95% of the data. This time, it scanned the compact flash card and found over 1800 photos — luckily including the ones we couldn’t find before. I don’t buy much software as I am generally happy with open source software but this is one case where the money was well spent.
Posted by bruce as (un)happy consumer, computing, kids at 11:19 AM UTC
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Since upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid), my audio would occasionally go dead and I’d see "device is busy" type errors. From searches, it seems PulseAudio is the problem and disabling it resolves it. I followed the instructions here and things seem to be back to normal again.
Posted by bruce as computing at 1:01 AM UTC
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It’s the holiday season and that means watching some classic animated TV specials like The Grinch. I’ve captured several over the years and saved them to DVD’s the way they were broadcast (ie. interlaced) but I have an HD projector. I think the interlacing artifacts look awful on the projector and I’m picky about how the interlacing is dealt with.
So, I just did some testing to figure out what exactly is going on with deinterlacing with Xine, totem-xine and gmplayer on Ubuntu 8.10. I tested two animated specials which happened to be in the DVD drive — The Happy Elf, and Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas — but this applies to most animated TV shows.
A Little Background on Animation Broadcast via NTSC
In case you don’t know, most TV animation is produced in 24 frames per second then converted to 60 fields per second using a process called 2:3 pulldown or telecine.The best quality approach to this content is to recover the original 24 fps frames and send those to your projector (or monitor). This is called inverse telecine (IVTC), reverse 2:3 pulldown or sometimes pullup.
For live action shows it’s a bit more complicated as some are shot on film (most primetime dramas) then telecined for broadcast but some (soaps, reality shows, news, sports, etc) were shot with interlacing cameras. For this content, progressive frames are generated using various algorithms (bob, weave, blend, median, etc.) which all have different artifacts. I’m not really going to address this topic here.
Today, many are shot with HD cameras but that doesn’t really make this issue go away since half the formats are interlaced and the other half are progressive. Fortunately, I don’t find 1080i interlacing bothersome probably because the scanlines are so small (relative to scaled up scanlines from NTSC video).
A Note about Animation on Commercial DVDs
The mpeg stream on DVDs can be progressive 24 fps which side steps this whole issue. Almost all mainstream releases in recent times (Pixar, DreamWorks, etc) will be 480p24 (24fps, progressive) on the disk. I do have a couple indie DVDs (Old Man and the Sea comes to mind) which just put the telecine version on the disk so this post applies to them, too. Yuck.
First, I confirmed these were telecined by using the "." key in mplayer or slow-mo in xine to see the individual frames. You’ll see a couple frames are fine then a couple have the interlacing.
Totem (the xine version) is the player I normally use but it looked pretty crummy when I turned on deinterlacing. In particular the edges of the titles looked deterioriated. I couldn’t find any settings for deinterlacing for totem. I’ll keep using this player for progressive content since I like the simple UI but it’s useless for interlaced content.
Xine sets deinterlacing on by default and it looks much better than totem’s algorithm (for animated content, that is). The tooltip claims it detects progressive content and does not deinterlace but I’m not sure what it’s doing there. Unfortunately, it does not appear to detect telecine content as the animated frames appeared to be blended frames. For example, a ball falling was ghosted in two locations. It looks like in the prefs it’s using the tvtime filter. It did a nice job on live action footage so this is probably my choice for interlaced live action content.
Mplayer (and gmplayer) by default does nothing about interlaced content (ie. just shows the interlaced frames) and doesn’t seem to have any option to toggle it on or off. But, of course, there are several filters buit-in which you can enable on the command line. One filter is "pullup" which reverses the 2:3 pulldown (telecine). They recommend chaining it to the "softskip" filter for some buffering or something like that. It works like a charm with my animated content. So, my new preferred player for telecined content is gmplayer with the pullup filter. For example:
gmplayer -vf pullup,softskip dvd://
Oh, and this doesn’t address the conversion from 24fps (original animation) to 60fps (projector) problem. That’s a subject for another post.
Posted by bruce as animation, computing at 1:02 AM UTC
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I just got firefox to show hockey highlights from NHL.com from linux (Ubuntu Edgy) using the mplayer plugin. I was getting a blank white box where the video was supposed to be. In /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, I moved anything player-related (libtotem*, gxineplugin.so) into a disabled folder and restarted firefox. Then the mplayer plugin loaded but no video. I downloaded the codecs from mplayer and extracted them to /usr/lib/win32. Restart firefox again and now I can see video. Looks like it’s cycling through some URLs until I go into fullscreen or back but it’s basically working so I’m happy!
Now to figure out who to draft in our PDI playoff hockey pool…
Posted by bruce as computing, vitality at 11:28 PM UTC
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I installed ResilientWare’s MouseTutor on the kids’ computer so I could disable the right button. While
playing the Curious George flash games at pbskids.org, Miles was
frequently hitting the right button which would popup the flash player
menu which he didn’t know what to do with and would click randomly on a
menu item. Sometimes it would reload the game, other ones essentially
kill it by backing up. The only trick is the software remembers it’s
running and whether the mouse is in one or two button mode. So don’t
change the registry or add it to your Start menu -> Programs ->
Startup folder or you’ll get two copies running the next time you log
in.
This wasn’t a problem with the KidzMouse we had which did the same thing in the driver but that was a mechanical mouse with a wire which ended up being more of an issue for them than I expected. Mostly the wire, actually so the wireless KidzMice weren’t the answer. I replaced it with a boring logitech laptop mouse — small for little hands, wireless and optical.
Posted by Administrator as computing, kids at 11:26 PM UTC
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I just changed photos.livingpixels to create progressive jpegs for the intermediate sized images. I did this to improve the preceived speed of my DSL connection.
The change was in compress_image() in /usr/share/gallery/util.php: I added "-interlace line" to the exec of ImageMagick’s
"convert".
Posted by bruce as computing at 12:15 AM UTC
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With this very helpful article Secure Spam/Virus filtering system with Debian and MailScanner on debian-administration.org, I got MailScanner using SpamAssassin, ClamAV and BitDefender all going on my incoming mail in about an hour. This is pretty good for me.
I’ve been very happy using SpamBayes but it doesn’t catch all of it and it does involve regular sorting of message it’s unsure about. SpamAssassin is supposed to be pretty good at what someone called supreme court spam (what any regular person would see as spam). I’ve read that others have had good success combining the two filters since they have different strengths.
I’ll post my results.
Posted by bruce as computing at 12:48 AM UTC
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Here’s an interesting intro into how people are dealing with our modern multitasking work environment. Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times
Aspects which resonate:
- I’ve always craved more screen space. I’d max out the res of my monitor and/or card. I just bought a huge (for me) LCD monitor (Dell 2405) 1920×1200. I think more screen space makes me more productive but sometimes I doubt it because of the interruptions.
- the last few months I’ve often returned to work after the kids go to bed and love it because it’s several hours of uninterrupted time.
- I use my drafts folder at work to track to do items since many come from emails anyway. And I can prioritize them and see them sorted that way.
Posted by bruce as computing, vitality at 11:06 PM UTC
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An interesting article on Brain Rot forwarded on by a friend after I complained about how annoying educational software is. I was referring to the setup hassles but now I’m starting to look at the actual educational value of the software themselves.
A nice quote:
Technology’s greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things.
Posted by bruce as (un)happy consumer, computing, kids at 6:16 PM UTC
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I tried several months ago to get SMTP Auth working with Postfix-tls on my Debian server but kept getting "SASL authentication failure" errors. After a couple of hours searching and experimenting it was still failing. I found this page and it worked right away with a slight mod!
Since I wanted to auth to the shadow file instead of an IMAP server, the only change I needed to make was to have the following in /etc/default/saslauthd:
MECHANISMS=shadow
Now Mom and Dad can roam the country and still send email.
Update on Mar. 12: It mysteriously stopped working and browsing the page again, someone else noted that /var/run gets cleaned up on reboot which has happened to me (due to power outages). So this page gets extra credit for the solution to the follow-on problem I didn’t know I had!
Posted by bruce as computing at 1:24 AM UTC
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