GilesBathgate

Here is how one can crudely stream video over the network.

On the server run:

nc -l -p 5500 < video.mpg

And on the client run:

nc 192.168.55.8 5500 | mplayer -cache 8192 -

Human: Ed is a duck.
Computer: Ok ed is a duck.
Human: Ducks can fly.
Computer: Ok ducks can fly.
Human: Can Ed fly?
Computer: Yes.
Human: But Ed is dead.
Computer: Ok Ed is dead.
Human: Can Ed Fly?
Computer: Yes.
Human: Dead things cannot fly.
Computer: Ok dead things cannot fly.
Human: Can Ed fly?
Computer: No.

Computers are stupid, they do not have any common sense. You or I would know that ed cannot fly as soon as we were told that ed is dead, but a computer lives in a closed world and as such cannot make any assumptions. This is a good thing because the world would be a very different place if computers did make assumptions. However to make a computer give intelligable answers to questions you need a rules engine.

A Rules engine could consist of a set of processes, i.e a process for each rule that you want to assert to be true. The process could consist of reading some information from a system and then making decisions based on the information. In other words procedural programming.

However, this approach is rather tedious. What you might rather do is describe the set of constraints that must hold true, and have a set of processes generated automatically.

Well that sounds nice, but is it even possible? Well actually yes, and that is what Rules Engines, Constraint based programming 5GL’s are all about.

I wanted to view youtube videos on my phone, but unfortunately the mobile youtube site seems to have less content than the full site. So I decided to make my own mobile phone compatible video files and upload it to my phone. First things first I needed to get the flash video file from the youtube URL, which can be done with this handy site. Next i needed to convert the flash video into a .3gp file that is compatible with my mobile phone. This can be done using ffmpeg (I used a windows version of ffmpeg)

I converted the flash video using the following command.

ffmpeg -i movie.flv -s qcif -r 12 -b 30k \
-ar 8000 -ac 1 -ab 12.2k movie.3gp

Finally I copied the files into the video folder on my phone using standard USB Storage Media drivers in windows, which simply present my phone to me as if it were a Hard Drive.

I recently decided to try to transcode an .mp4 (quicktime) movie to burn on to a dvd. Using a windows version of MPlayer and following these instructions I started the transcoding process.

mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf \
-vf scale=720:432,expand=720:576,harddup -srate 48000 -af \
lavcresample=48000 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:\
vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:keyint=15:vstrict=0:acodec=ac3:\
abitrate=192:aspect=16/9 -ofps 25 -o movie.mpg movie.mp4

This was not the end of the story however. The next step was to convert the output MPG file info a DVD filesystem. This was done using DVDAuthour fortunately version 0.6.9 comes in precompiled windows binaries. The documentation for DVDAuthour was a little flakey however the easiest way was to create the XML file

<dvdauthor>
     <vmgm />
     <titleset>
         <titles>
             <video format="pal" aspect="16:9" resolution="720x576"/>
             <pgc>
                 <vob file="movie.mpg" />
             </pgc>
         </titles>
     </titleset>
 </dvdauthor>

And then build the dvd filesystem using

dvdauthor -o ./dvd -x dvdauthour.xml

Finally I have to burn the files to disk using the windows version of growisofs (which requires mkisofs) Using the command

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z e: -dvd-video -V "VIDEO_DVD" ./dvd

I decided to install wordpress. It was surprisingly easy once I had checked that my server supported the requirements, (which was the hardest part) and that I could overlay the WordPress database tables into the wiki database. It was a doddle.

Oh wouldn’t it be nice if propellerheads had more modes for its ECF-42 Filter module.

While I was at university I remember a mate of mine showing me this software called Reason. He was making some amazing dark drum and bass sounds using it, and I remember thinking how cool it was that the software basically tries to simulate a series of rack based synhesisers. Unfortunately his copy of Reason 1.0 was a demo version which had the limitation that he could not save, and that after 20 minutes the program was forced to close.

Not wanting to be contrained by these limitations I decided to download a copy of the full version of reason using the file sharing tool Emule. I of course do intend to buy the software at some point because propellerheads deserve to have my money for writing such an excellent piece of software, and the only way they can make the software better is if they have customers buying it.

This is my new laptop, it is a Sony Vaio PCG-FX805. I will shortly be receiving as a birthday/graduation gift. I know I am getting it, as my Dad and I were looking for the best price. We ordered it online from simply.co.uk.