Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

PCM WAV Not Supported

I recently had to help a colleague get audio output working on his stock Fedora Core Linux system (I fail to recall which version). To establish a baseline I downloaded a reliable (because I made it) raw PCM WAV file and searched for a pre-installed program that should be able to handle it. I found that savior of open source multimedia — Helix Player — was installed. Helix Player was unequipped, in its default installation state, to play the raw PCM WAV file.

I was embarrassed for the program. I eventually just did what comes naturally and downloaded and installed xine. Although I recognize that if xine were installed by default it would be horribly crippled, I believe it should still be able to play raw PCM WAV files (perhaps the simplest multimedia file in the domain).

While we’re on the subject of crippled multimedia programs: Commercial Linux distributions (SuSE Linux, I’m looking in your direction)– Is it really that useful to distribute multimedia playback apps that are crippled to the point of abject uselessness? Instead of distributing crippleware out of legal paranoia, do you think your resources might be better spent and your users better served by some helpful system that could advise your users on how to download and install full-featured multimedia players from the official websites? Maybe I’m just bitter about the number of SuSE users that post to the xine-user list reporting, “I just installed SuSE with the xine package and it doesn’t play squat! What’s wrong?”

I (Heart) Autotools

Oh, autotools– what would I do without you? Recognizing your utility places me in a minority. I know you are woefully underappreciated and catch a lot of flack for your apparent complexity. But this is largely because many programmers refuse to face up to the fact that the complexity of building a program is commensurate with the complexity of the program itself. They might not like you but don’t take it personally as they are invariably at a loss to produce a superior solution. You do most everything that developers need from a build system– they just need to find a decent tutorial, reference, or –best of all — another source package that implements the same feature they need; there must be thousands of examples to choose from.

First Linux-Based HD DVD Player

Remember my musing about assorted goals involved in developing HD DVD support for Linux? Several people have written me to point out that Toshiba has already beaten us to it– in the flagship HD DVD device. In case you get all your geek and/or multimedia news from this blog, this article at CDFreaks has a number of juicy details. It is reportedly a high-end PC board that runs a Red Hat-based Linux distribution on an M-Systems Disk-On-Chip (essentially a flash memory component that looks like an IDE drive in from the PC’s perspective). Of course, the most important component is the ATAPI HD DVD drive that can be removed and connected to your desktop PC, as the pioneer in this story demonstrates in a video.

See? What did I tell you in Ever-Emerging Digital Theater Technology? It’s just a PC; everything is.

This raises some interesting questions. I have yet to hear whether the launch discs actually used anything more advanced than stock MPEG-2 for video coding. There was some speculation that the discs were not using VC-1 yet. A player like this is trivally upgradeable in the field. So the software support for VC-1 may or may not be there. I still have to wonder if this was some kind of a “Plan B” device in order to beat Sony’s Blu Ray to market. This strikes me as rather unorthodox, not to mention costly. Maybe Toshiba could not get all of the custom ASICs (ideally lower cost than a off-the-shelf, general PC components) done in time but had a separate team working on this in parallel “just in case”.

Everything You Want To Know About Digital Theaters

After reading my post last week regarding emerging digital theater technology, Baptiste Coudurier did some legwork and located the — quite public — v1 specs for the Digital Cinema System. You can download the exhaustively-detailed PDF here. The 2 general supported video resolutions are dubbed 2K and 4K which refer to 2048×1080 and 4096×2160, respectively. Section 7.5.3 specifies exactly how much storage a compliant unit is expected to have ready (a lot), and why. Video in fact is compressed, with JPEG 2000 and uses a 36 bit/pixel XYZ colorspace. Audio is uncompressed and subtitles are PNG. How did all of these open formats make it into the mix? Strange. Also, the container format is specified as MXF. Encryption is, of course, handled by AES (that thing sure caught on in a hurry).