Entries tagged with history - Channel 10

Geek Gadgets of Yesteryear

nhodge — Wed, 21 May 2008 03:41:00 GMT

Did Geeks exist in the 19th Century? They sure did. Did they have Geek gadgets. Oh, yes they did!

Telephones, typewriters, calculators: all blossomed through the 19th Century.

The screen capture is of a unique device called a Curta Calculator. Invented by Curt Herzstark, a survivor of Buchenwald, it looks like a pepper-grinder but is in fact a small calculator.

In this episode of The Geek Stories, see Matthew Connell, Curator of Mathematics and Computing at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, give a quick snoop through their secret storage area.

A 19th Century Geek

nhodge — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:18:00 GMT

Did Geeks, as we know them today: polymaths, introverted, shy with the opposite sex exist in earlier times? They sure did.

Matthew Connell from The Powerhouse Museum introduced me to a William Stanley Jevons. A true geek of the 19th Century.

Who is Jevons?

He lived at the same time as Babbage, and invented the Logic Piano amongst many other geeky things. An early amateur photographer, he photographed an early Australia with an unique eye.

In this episode of The Geek Stories, hear and see a story of a true 19th Century Geek.

Email to the Future

nhodge — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:47:00 GMT

Social networks are not new. Humans throughout our existence communicate, connect and correspond with like minded humans.

Written documents are the evidence trail that historians and museum curators, such as Matthew Connell from Sydney’s Powerhouse Musuem, use to decipher the lives of famous people.

To aid future historians, it is important that this digital generation store our correspondence. The Powerhouse Museum and Ninemsn Australia joined forces in a project called Email Australia.

In this episode of The Geek Stories, I trek into the archives of the Powerhouse Museum and see documents exchanged between Lady Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage and a Brunel.

Their correspondence illustrates why we must email the future. The social networks of now must not be fleeting, otherwise our history is lost.

I'm a Streaming Media All-Star!

benwaggoner — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:09:00 GMT

This is the 10th anniversary of the Streaming Media organization, with its eponymous web site, trade shows, and magazine.

In celebration of this, they've started an annual "Streaming Media All-Stars" list. In their own words:

Streaming Media magazine is proud to announce the selection of the first annual Streaming Media All-Stars—the unsung heroes who’ve worked behind the scenes to move the online video industry forward over the past ten years. From more than 130 nominations, Streaming Media editors picked the 25 people who’ve had the most significant impact in the field, be it due to technological innovation, business acumen, or a selfless commitment to helping others learn what online video could do for them, long before it had become mainstream.

“We weren’t interested in giving attention to the people who’ve already gotten credit in the eyes of the public,” says Streaming Media editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen. “Instead, we wanted to honor the people who’ve been doing the work in the trenches, the ones who’ve been around since the beginning and stuck with online video even when it was an uphill battle.” While future All-Star teams will highlight current leaders in the industry, the magazine’s staff wanted the inaugural team to reflect a historical perspective.

“I suppose if you extend the baseball metaphor, these 25 people would really make up the streaming media hall of fame,” says Schumacher-Rasmussen.

I was pleasantly surprised to find I made the list. It's an auspicious one with a lot of familiar faces from the last decade (I've had beers in the hotel bar at a Streaming Media show with at least half of them, and worked on projects with a third). It's humbling to be so recognized by my peers, and even more so thinking of all the heroes of the industry who aren't on there.

Check out the official announcement. There's a mini-interview with each All-Star and a baseball picture of each. It's well worth reading everyone's thoughts about what's changed in the last decade, and what today's challenges are. There's a lot of consensus, and some interesting divergences.

The full list is:

Stephen Condon, VP of Marketing, VeriSign
Dave Gardy, Chairman & CEO, TVWorldwide
Bernard Gershon, SVP Business Development & Technology, The Walt Disney Co.
Rob Glaser, Founder, Chairman & CEO, RealNetworks
Mike Gordon, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Limelight Networks
Todd Herman, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer, Technomedia Trends
Chris Hock, SVP, Product Management, BlackArrow, Inc.
Tony Klejna, Director of Educational Technology, Daemen College
George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer, NBC Universal
Christopher Levy, CEO & Founder, BuyDRM
Tom Leighton, Chief Scientist & Co-Founder, Akamai Technologies (also to Co-Founder Daniel Lewin, in memoriam)
Mike Lorenz, Chief Technology Officer, Accordent Technologies, Inc.
Steve Mack, Principal, LUX Media, Inc.
Rich Mavrogeanes, Founder, Chief Evangelist & CTO, VBrick Systems, Inc.
Doug McIntyre, Editor-in-Chief, 24/7 Wall St.
Nico McLane, CTO & Director of Interactive Marketing, Imagine 360
Don Michels, Chief Technology Officer, Medialink Worldwide
Craig Moehl, Managing Director, Groovy Gecko
Andrew Olson, SVP, Comcast Interactive Media and COO, thePlatform
Neal Page, CEO, Inlet Technologies
Patty Perkins, VP and Special Products Manager, Wachovia Bank
Greg Pulier, CTO and Founder, Interactive Video Technologies, Inc.
Nick Rockwell, EVP and CTO, Digital Technology, MTV Networks
Tom Streeter, Application Specialist, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
Ben Waggoner, Principal Video Strategist, Silverlight, Microsoft.

My info and baseball card is at the bottom of this page.

And there's this amusingly over-the-the top video of all the All-Stars. Although it looks like rate control is getting thrown off during the card fly-ins, making the image really blurry. I'll see if I can get the source and do it right in VC-1.

I hope to see a number of the other All-Stars at the NAB Compressionist's Party on Tuesday.

And hopefully lots of people at the upcoming Streaming Media events. They really are some of my favorite trade shows of the year, with a nice focused audience where it's really possible to get business done without the overwhelming din of NAB. I've been to most of the US shows they've had, and have long participated in the excellent Streaming Media Advanced list.

Streaming Media has a page for me listing some of the articles, panels, and webcasts I've done for them over the years. For a real blast from the past, check out this video from 1999. Oh, to be young again :).

I've been elected to the Board of Directors of the DVD Association

benwaggoner — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:38:00 GMT

The DVD Association (DVDA) has just held its election, and I've been elected as a member of the Board of Directors. I feel very honored to be invited into such August company, led by Sonic's Jim Taylor and my old colleague Bruce Nazarian. Bruce gives a great overview of where the DVDA is going here.

It's hard to believe it's been 10+ years of DVD as a format and for me. I was a student in the first DVD authoring class in history at the Vancouver Film School in the summer of 1997, running an extremely pre-release version of Scenarist on the SGI O2. My old friend Halstead York and I also worked with Intel to build what we believe was the first ever DVD authored end-to-end DVD created on the desktop, using one of the first DVD-R for Authoring burners in the country.

It was amazing how quickly we went from scary big iron solutions to something that consumers could knock out for themselves over the weekend. And here we are again, with things going even faster in the HD era.

Hands-on with the Temporary Insanity trailer

benwaggoner — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 07:20:00 GMT

Ancient History

Compression, although an obsession with me since I was 19, didn't appear to be a career option until many years after that. My years at Hampshire College were spent essentially majoring in neuropsychology, minoring in computer science, and spending my evening and weekends helping out my film student buddies. It all seemed hopelessly random to my parents and advisors, but turned out to be the perfect background for what I do now (after all, what's compression but extremely applied neuropsychology?).

After college and a couple of science internships under my belt I decided I didn't want to spend my life writing grant proposals or doing lab work so I started a video production company with my friends, including my recent interviewer Halstead York. The plan was to use emerging technology to be able to produce and post independent films from our own scripts. We thought we had a financing deal lined up back in 1994, and purchase a NLE: (a PowerMac 8100/80 with a Radius VideoVision card, and 4GB SledgeHammer RAID) was purchased for doing video editing. The idea was we could rent it out before and after post in order to cover some of the costs. Then there were two big problems:

The infamous defective BART chip in those early PowerMacs meant it couldn't keep sync for more than a few minutes.
Our financing fell through.

So, there we were, with a script, no money, a bunch of debt, and a NLE that couldn't edit video. However, we found a nice market using shorter clips with looser sync requirements: CD-ROM video! And so we were launched in the heady early days of multimedia. Journeyman Digital was a full service production company for digital media, and we did all the screenwriting, production, and post that we dreamed of, but not for our own projects. But we kept writing screenplays on the side. We got as far as a few meetings with Sony Pictures on one, but like nearly all screenplays, nothing really happened in the end. And while I liked doing the work, when it came down the the fundamental gut check of moving to LA and rolling the dice, I didn't NEED to do it. Instead I got married and soon enough had three little kids, and rather ran out of time for side projects.

Halstead is only recently married and currently kidless, and had time. So he and many members of the old gang dusted off one of our old screenplays, Temporary Insanity and darn if it they didn't actually shoot the whole thing in HD! Halstead just finished up the trailer. Quite an experience seeing jokes I wrote a decade ago there on the screen. And it's amazing to see how it's finally possible to make movies on a hobbyists budget, even with high-end techniques. Check out this post on color correction in the home office.

I didn't have time to work on the production itself (I was busy having that third child get born and joining Microsoft), but I certainly wasn't going to let anyone else compress the trailers (now available for download)!

The project

And so, after all that ramble, we're back to talking about hands-on compression.

Halstead had a pretty typical 2x2 matrix for encoding: two formats at two data rates each:

Formats

MPEG-4 compatible with QuickTime/AppleTV/iPod
Windows Media compatible with Windows Media Player/Flip4Mac/Xbox/Zune/Silverlight

Data rates

3 Mbps for a 720p30 HD version compatible with Xbox360/AppleTV
300 Kbps for a low data rate download, which would also be portable media player compatible (iPod for .mp4, Zune for .wmv)

Workflow

The source was provided as a 730p30 .AVI file using the CineForm Aspect HD codec. It was video-only - audio was provided in a separate .wav file.

HD WMV encoding was easy - I was able to use the source as is. And the current WMCmd.vbs supports specifying a separate .wav file as source for the audio track.

HD .MOV was harder. I wanted to use QuickTime's H.264 encoder to output, since it uses a complexity-constrained mode that is well tuned for computer playback via QuickTime, on both Intel and PPC (and there's a lot of G4 PowerBooks out there among Indie film fans). While it won't offer the same compression efficiency as a highly-tuned H.264 encoder from another encoder, it'll also playback well on more machines.

However, QuickTime, even QuickTime for Windows, can't read AVI files using the standard DirectShow API! Now that we've added support for the QuickTime API in Expression Media Encoder, it's only fair for Apple to support DirectShow now :). So, I used Rhozet Carbon to encode my .avi and .wav source files into a single Photo-JPEG compressed .MOV file that QuickTime could then read (believe it or not, there's no lossless Y'CbCr 4:2:0 encoder in QuickTime for Windows). I wound up doing that compression on my G5, so I could do it in parallel with the WMV encoding on my Windows box.

For the mobile versions, I used VirtualDub to make me a nice 320x180 version of the .AVI and Carbon again to make a 320x180 JPEG .mov.

As an alternative (and what I would have done if this was going to be a high-volume process and not just a one-off) would be to using Carbon to encode all four outputs from the single source. Also, using the "multipass" mode with Carbon and other tools other than QuickTime Player Pro itself results in very, very slow rendering time, since it reruns preprocessing for the entire clip for each pass, although only a small part of the file might be adjusted per pass. So in a high-volume workflow, probably only the 1-pass mode would have been used.

Windows Media Settings

WMV HD @ 3 Mbps:

cscript "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\WMCmd.vbs" -input "G:\Temp Insanity\Trailer 1 timed v5 720.avi" -output "Trailer 1 720p 3M 192.wmv" -a_input "G:\Temp Insanity\Trailer 1.wav" -a_codec WMASTD -a_mode 4 -a_setting 128_48_2 -v_codec WVC1 -v_mode 4 -v_keydist 5 -v_bitrate 2870000 -v_peakbitrate 6000000 -v_peakbuffer 4000 -v_performance 80 -v_bframedist 1 -v_dquantoption 2 -v_loopfilter 1 -v_mmatch 0 -v_mslevel 4 -v_msrange 0 -v_percopt 2

Pretty standard stuff, with the same basic settings as my previous encodes. A few items of note:

Not excessive vertical motion and HD, so I didn't bother constraining the number of threads.
Since the source was just stereo, I used WMA instead of WMA Pro, in order to preserve Silverlight 1.0 compatibility.
Note the use of the -a_input flag to specify a different audio source.

WMV mobile @ 300 Kbps:

cscript "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\WMCmd.vbs" -input "Trailer 1 timed v5 320x180.avi" -output "Trailer 1 280 Zune.wmv" -v_codec WMV9 -v_mode 4 -v_keydist 10 -v_bitrate 235000 -v_peakbitrate 600000 -v_peakbuffer 4000 -v_performance 80 -v_bframedist 1 -v_loopfilter 1 -v_overlap 1 -v_mmatch 0 -v_mslevel 2 -v_msrange 0 -v_percopt 2 -v_numthreads 1 -a_codec WMASTD -a_mode 4 -a_setting 48_44_2 -a_peakbitrate 160000

Pretty much identical to the Zune encoding settings I posted last week, except with lower data rates to hit the 300 Kbps total.

The audio was pretty simple, so 48 Kbps was enough when using VBR mode (again VBR audio is a very underused and very useful feature for downloadable files).
the data rate was so low, I went to the max and used -mslevel 2 (full floating point chroma search) and -v_numthreads 1 (single-thread encode). Even with those, this encoded much quicker than the HD version, since the frame size was so much smaller.
Main Profile is required by Zune, and thus I can't use DQuant.

QuickTime Settings

QuickTime's advanced settings aren't available via command-line, so I'll include screen shots of my MPEG-4 settings.

I matched the WMV settings as closely as appropriate.

MPEG-4 Main Profile @ 3 Mbps

The "Current" mode passes through the source frame size and frame rate (Note it would have said 1280x720 (Current) above - I had a different source loaded when I took the screen shot).
"Optimize for Download" is the equivalent of our 2-pass VBR modes. However it lacks the ability to specify a peak buffer rate or duration.
QuickTime specifies keyframe rate in terms of total frames between keyframes, not total seconds.
The "Better" mode for audio encoding quality is optimal for 16-bit sources. The "Best" mode only improves >16-bit sources
The Multi-pass mode improves quality, but can make encoding time very unpredictable. The WMV versions encoded quite a bit faster on a similar era machine (Dual 3.4 GHz "NetBurst" Xeon versus dual 2.0 GHz G5). My main compression box, a quad AMD, was busy doing some other work.
QuickTime lacks a true 2-pass VBR audio mode. For MPEG-4 exports, I only get 1-pass CBR. With a QuickTime export, I could have gotten a 1-pass VBR encode, but only in a MP3 style "range" encode, where the final file size could vary substantially. For soundtracks in downloadable files, this makes WMA a more efficient codec.
Main Profile is compatible with AppleTV, and uses B-frames. The "Extended" profile is theoretically for streaming, but it's been grayed out in QuickTime since H.264 support launched in QuickTime 7.0, and I've never seen a H.264 Extended Profile stream in the wild.

The mobile encode was the same, except with the lower video and audio data rate, and its use of the Baseline profie, required for iPod compatibility.

Differences

So, how did the two encodes come out?

For the most part, they both looked and sounded good (or at least accurate - the audio mix will be improved in a later version). The biggest difference was in flatter areas, especially with shadows. That's where the VC-1 Differential Quantization and Perceptual Optimization come in, plus the ability to use different block sizes(4x4, 4x8, 8x4, and 8x8), to better compress the edges and interiors of flat areas. The Baseline and Main Profiles of H.264 are limited to 4x4 blocks only, and H.264 doesn't have an equivalent mechanism to DQuant to compress flat areas of the image less.

Again, another H.264 encoder could have done a better job here, although at the cost of higher decode requirements, by using features like CABAC and multiple reference frames. High Profile, and hence 8x8 blocks, are not compatible with QuickTime's H.264 decoder, nor those in the AppleTV or iPod. The iPod-required Simple Profile doesn't support B-frames or CABAC.

Here's some samples from the available clips that show different levels of banding. Sorry the luma levels don't quite match - it's surprisingly difficult to get exact level screen grabs out of the QuickTime and DirectShow pipelines. If anything, these minimize the banding seeing in the clips when looking at them in QuickTime on a Mac (2.2 to 1.8 gamma correction issue?).

H.264:

VC-1:

H.264:

VC-1:

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together at D

Jesse — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:34:00 GMT

Did you feel the depression in space and time on Wednesday night? At around 10pm Pacific Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat down together for their first public joint interview at the D: All Things Digital conference. In one of the most exciting moments for anyone following the personal computing industry, these two titans carried on together in a way no one expected; as friends and equals. Their conversation was earnest and pleasant, and an incredibly satisfying history lesson. Engadget’s transcript is a great in-the-moment read, and the entire conversation video is online at the D website.

Windows Mobile: A most difficult development story

Jesse — Fri, 11 May 2007 21:04:00 GMT

The insight you’ll come away with after reading, “Dogfood Doesn’t Always Taste Good,” by Mike Calligaro for the Windows Mobile Team Blog is nothing short of astounding. The boys and girls in WinMo have one of the most difficult jobs at Microsoft; developing software for devices must fight to get access to while attempting to meet the expectations of both customers and wireless carriers. Mike goes into great depth on the history of development starting with the release of PocketPC 2000 and wrapping up with the just completed Windows Mobile 6.

Attack on Pearl Harbor trailer released

Tina — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:30:00 GMT

Swedish publisher Legendo Entertainment today released the first in a series of trailers for Attack on Pearl Harbor, an arcade-style air combat game for the PC set in World War II's Pacific Theatre.

View the trailer at the game's website: www.pearlharbor-game.com Attack on Pearl Harbor provides players a perspective on history’s greatest armed conflict by playing as either the USA or Japan.

The PC game will feature four solo campaigns as well as some multiplayer dogfight action with up to twelve players. The game is slated to come out in Q1 of 2007. It should look real pretty on Vista! :)