Monthly Archives: April 2006

MySQL Disaster Recovery Works

I just want to briefly recognize MySQL for its resilience and robustness. Even in the event that a table gets corrupted, as happened today with the tables driving the MultimediaWiki, ‘CHECK TABLE’ and ‘REPAIR TABLE’ can diagnose and fix the problem and have your MySQL-backed application up and running in short order. Of course, I also have an automated script backing up the database tables off-site, every night, just for good measure.


MySQL Logo

I just want any current or future contributors to be secure in the knowledge that the data is safe.

Lagarith And MSU

While raiding Wikipedia for scant pieces of multimedia information they might have that are not yet in the MultimediaWiki, I learned of 2 new lossless video codecs– Lagarith and MSU Lossless Video. I’ve heard people grumble about how lossless video codecs just don’t perform. I know of one grumbler in particular — you know who you are — who claims that FLAC actually outperforms the nominal special-purpose lossless video codec. I am expecting a full report from you on how these new codecs stack up. The MSU technology is proprietary but I have started to document the GPL’d Lagarith codec in the Wiki. The author contributed a write-up of the surface details. I am trying to plod through the control flow. It’s a bit slow-going though since many of the crucial functions are written in MMX-optimized ASM.

In other Wiki news, I finally found a logo:


MultimediaWiki Logo

It is the same one seen on Wikipedia’s multimedia entry and apparently comes from a set of KDE icons made here. I like it.

Sustainability Of Digital Formats

I was searching for some comprehensive registry of FourCCs when I happened upon Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections. They host an interesting, and recently updated, survey of all manner of multimedia formats including containers, video codecs, audio codecs, and text formats.

Also, I eventually found the Microsoft’s official list of registered AVI video FourCCs (and 16-bit audio codec identifiers): The IANA hosts it: http://www.iana.org/assignments/wave-avi-codec-registry. There is some very interesting stuff in there. Did you know that Dolby had an AC2 codec? And that their listed address is spelled incorrectly? (I know since their office is about 2 blocks away from where I work.)