{"id":565,"date":"2008-05-21T20:43:07","date_gmt":"2008-05-22T04:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/fate-testers-wanted\/"},"modified":"2008-05-21T22:12:23","modified_gmt":"2008-05-22T06:12:23","slug":"fate-testers-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/fate-testers-wanted\/","title":{"rendered":"FATE Testers Wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This evening, I finally got my fate-client.py script minimally ready for general consumption. fate-client.py is the unimaginatively named program I threw together some time ago to allow me to validate test specs before I activate them so that <a href=\"http:\/\/fate.multimedia.cx\/\">FATE<\/a> will automatically test them. It works like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>download the script (<a href=\"http:\/\/fate.multimedia.cx\/fate-client.py\">http:\/\/fate.multimedia.cx\/fate-client.py<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>rsync the FATE suite of samples that live on mphq: &#8216;rsync -aL rsync:\/\/rsync.mplayerhq.hu:\/samples\/fate-suite\/ samples&#8217; (without the quotes, of course) &#8212; this presently amounts to ~150 MB<\/li>\n<li>build FFmpeg as normal<\/li>\n<li>&#8216;.\/fate-client.py -f &lt;\/path\/to\/ffmpeg-binary&gt; -s &lt;\/path\/to\/fate-suite\/samples&gt;&#8217;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it. The script will ask the FATE server for a set of test specifications and run through them. You may also need to specify -l\/&#8211;libpath= if you built and installed FFmpeg with shared libraries. Naturally, &#8216;.\/fate-client.py -h&#8217; will spell out all the options.<\/p>\n<p>You would do well to make sure that all the options are valid or else suffer Python bailout exceptions. I just added the command line options tonight and have not made them very resilient. I have been promising this utility for a long time and I wanted to get something out there sooner than later.<\/p>\n<p>Remember that I&#8217;m still a rank amateur at Python, so don&#8217;t be afraid to call me out if I&#8217;m doing anything in the worst Pythonic way imaginable.<\/p>\n<p>Ideas for future improvement:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Better logging&#8211; Instead of dumping to stdout, maybe dump all the results to a CSV file (for spreadsheet analysis) and\/or an HTML file for easy viewing<\/li>\n<li>Proper versioning&#8211; I track the script via a local git repository, but how do I communicate the current version? Would this be version dd394ef8f3dad056c39ab4e1c76951190621cf8b?<\/li>\n<li>Robust error handling<\/li>\n<li>Range testing (run all tests up to ID n, or run all tests after ID n, or from IDs m to n)<\/li>\n<li>Skip a list of tests (for example, it would be useful to skip <a href=\"http:\/\/fate.multimedia.cx\/index.php?test_spec=128\">test #128<\/a> &#8212; the internal FFmpeg regression test &#8212; since it&#8217;s not that helpful in this particular scenario)<\/li>\n<li><em>[Your idea here]<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s open source, GPL v2, so patches welcome. Moreover, I would love to hear if this script works at all for anyone else. Then, I would like to hear how it works on platforms outside of the 3 that FATE now rigorously tests&#8211; I speak of Mac OS X, *BSD, Win32 with either MSVC or MinGW, Open\/Solaris on all its various platforms, even PlayStation 3 and whatever else. I actually did get <a href=\"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/sunny-fate\/\">that OpenSolaris VMware session<\/a> to boot after I waited long enough but I had no idea how to do anything useful with it. That&#8217;s when I decided to get down to it and get this script out there so that hopefully someone else will test those platforms.<\/p>\n<p><em>Extra credit:<\/em> Figure out why, when bailing out of the test sequence early with Ctrl-C, terminal character echo is off. I.e., the terminal refuses to print keystrokes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This evening, I finally got my fate-client.py script minimally ready for general consumption. fate-client.py is the unimaginatively named program I threw together some time ago to allow me to validate test specs before I activate them so that FATE will automatically test them. It works like this: download the script (http:\/\/fate.multimedia.cx\/fate-client.py) rsync the FATE suite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fate-server"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}