Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

BadVista vs. BadLinux

So the Free Software Foundation has launched badvista.org, ostensibly a clearinghouse for informing computer consumers just how harmful Microsoft’s impending Windows Vista is for their digital and online health. To be honest, I haven’t really examined the literature too thoroughly, mostly because I just don’t personally care about Vista (“Yadda yadda, Microsoft bad, proprietary software implicitly wrong and evil, ad nauseum”). Though it did finally get me to thinking about the multimedia-related implications of the new OS upgrade. Per my reading, there will be no new actual multimedia container formats, video codecs, or audio codecs. But there are supposed to be layers upon layers of new DRM and associated rules encapsulating the existing formats and determining where/when/how a user can consume a particular piece of media.

Strange, but with my experiences using Linux over the last year, and particularly in the last week, I could set up a similar site about various shortcomings of Linux (as if that hasn’t been done to death already). But I notice that badlinux.org does not appear to be taken as of this writing.

Freaky Ghosts

Sometimes, while using the the Xv hardware YUV interface with xine, the program briefly displays the ghost of some other image momentarily as it creates a new video window. Typically, the ghost depicts images that were recently shown in my Firefox web browser. So memory isn’t zeroed out somewhere along the line. That all makes sense.


Ghost Image

What puzzles me is something I saw last week: I was working in Linux, rebooted into Windows and worked for a little while, then rebooted back into Linux. When I started xine, I saw an image that I had previously brought up in my web browser before I had rebooted into Windows. That image had staying power.

I realized that, though all of this, I had never actually cut power to the machine, only did warm reboots. Thus, I suspect the data was left over in an area of video RAM that Windows never had occasion to touch.

You’re Dead To Me, Gentoo

You crossed the line this time, Gentoo. I stuck with you through the tough times, even through this humiliation. But when you specifically tell me to do something that renders my computer completely useless, that warrants a big, sloppy, kiss of death. I might be able to recover from this latest disaster but why should I have to put up with it?


Dead Gentoo

The only question that remains is whether there is another Linux distribution that supports x86_64 as well as Gentoo. Maybe I should just run in a pure 32-bit mode. Stuff is better supported for x86_32 anyway.

Real Linkage Part II

Pursuant to yesterday’s Real Linkage experiment, I decided to repeat the same experiment only using the regular inverse transform as opposed to the one for handling the optimized case of only a non-zero DC coefficient. Thankfully, the results were exactly the same as the DC-only I-transform when the general I-transform is fed a DC-only matrix. A little guru told me that the 169 constant (a.k.a. 132) is also a characteristic of the SVQ3 I-transform. I would like to run some sample vectors through both transforms to see if they arrive at the same output. But I am not sure how to instrument the SVQ3 4×4 I-transform to print before and after data sets.

So, still working on that. Then deciding where else to take this project afterwards.