Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

What A Nerdy Place

It’s a nerdy place to live, this northern California region commonly known as Silicon Valley. In 20 minutes of driving around on a Sunday afternoon, I saw the license plates ‘UID ZRO’ and ‘GNU FAN’. For fun, I searched and found a reference to a ‘UID ZRO’ license plate. The post refers to a truck, but it was also written 9 years ago. I guess that’s the kind of vanity plate that one holds onto. However, the blog’s picture depicts the Atlanta, GA skyline. This would imply that there are 2 different geeks in 2 different states that had the same geeky idea for a nerdy license plate.

Then there was the time I saw the Ferrari in this region with the license place ‘TREO’.

And while I’m rambling about geeked-out license plates, I would be remiss if I did not mention once seeing ‘666-FSF’ in my old town. It’s highly likely that this was just a standard issue sequential plate that had an unfortunate number. But there’s also the outside chance that the automobile owner wanted to make a statement about the Free Software Foundation.

Tracking Test Coverage

I have been working this evening on a MultimediaWiki page that specifically aims to track the extent to which FATE tests FFmpeg’s features: FATE Test Coverage. This helps highlight the areas that still need coverage.

I took it for granted that any format covered by a regtest in FFmpeg’s Makefile (search for ‘regtest’ and you will see the list) has test coverage for both encoding and decoding. Also, I think that the full regression suite covers a lot more of the PCM formats, but I am too tired to verify right now.

Actively Seeking Malicious Code

In a comment, Martin Lindhe drew my attention to a new effort in Wine called The Patch Watcher. It’s an idea that someone else had once proposed to me in relation to my other automated testing efforts. The conversation went something like this:

them: Maybe you should write a program that monitors ffmpeg-devel for patches and for each individual patch, detach it, apply it to current FFmpeg SVN, build the tree, and report the status back to the list.

me: That’s a great idea! I’ll write a program that actively seeks out arbitrary, possible malicious code that anyone can post to a public mailing list and dutifully executes it on my own computers.

The reason I bring this up is because the people behind The Patch Watcher obviously had the same misgivings. But they thought that this idea was beneficial enough that they worked hard to solve the brazen security concern. The Patch Watcher code is open source. If anyone wants to try to apply it to FFmpeg, that would be heroic. I sort of have my plate full with making sure that existing, official FFmpeg code works.