Monthly Archives: August 2005

PAVC: Palette Tricks

Looking forward to the intercoding portion of this codec, it is very common for palettized graphic animations to use palette tricks to achieve certain graphical effects. One of the most prevalent such uses is screen fades– rather than suddenly showing the entire screen, set all the palette colors to 0 and then draw the graphics. After a certain time delta, adjust the palette to dim colors, wait, set the palette a little brighter, and repeat until the screen is at full color. Perform the inverse process for a fade out effect.

fade-in frame #1

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Trash Music Videos

I have mirrored an old website of music video reviews called eMpTyV. Seems like an odd thing to do, I know. But if this is the strangest thing you see on the internet, friend, you are not searching hard enough. These reviews seemed to be popular when I mirrored them on another server some time ago and they are back up now. Check them out and have a good laugh at some ridiculous music videos from years past. I particularly enjoy the October 23, 2001 entry for which I supplied the classic 1980s videos.

New Anti-Piracy PSA

According to an IMDb Studio Briefing news item last week, the Video Software Dealers Association has chosen a winner. To wit:

VSDN Picks Student Anti-Piracy Film As Winner of Its Contest
“… has named ‘Taken Away,’ a short film by Joshua Smith … as the winning entry … for an anti-piracy public service announcement.”

I can not even find a website for this VSDN group. I only mention this because I hope the new PSA is as entertaining as Caught In The Act. If you have not yet seen Caught In The Act, a mainstay in my Trash Multimedia presentations, I certainly encourage you to take in all its campy glory.

PAVC Crashes Linux Kernel

I was trying to prototype some coding ideas for the new PAVC codec. Specifically, I decided to run the palettized keyframe data through the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) followed by a move-to-front (MTF) encoder and a Golomb encoder. Why BWT? I guess because I do not see it used in video compression at all and I wanted to see how it stacked up. In comparison to the least-bit approach in the last experiment, the results were a little better on my NES sample and significantly better for my SNES sample:

Super Castlevania IV, SNES

A serious problem, however, is that my AMD64 Linux PC kept crashing during the encoding. Eventually, I tried upgrading the kernel but that procedure also crashed. Per my understanding, these things are not supposed to happen during normal operation. I thought maybe my computer was too hot on this August night. So I am typing this in Windows XP on the same machine and no problem has manifested yet. Maybe I should try the Doom 3 demo…