{"id":666,"date":"2008-12-05T22:59:51","date_gmt":"2008-12-06T06:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=666"},"modified":"2009-09-18T22:10:02","modified_gmt":"2009-09-19T05:10:02","slug":"i-heart-picsearch-and-python","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/i-heart-picsearch-and-python\/","title":{"rendered":"I (Heart) Picsearch And Python"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know much about Picsearch<\/a>. I don’t know what differentiates them from Google’s image search<\/a>. And I certainly don’t know what they’re doing scouring the internet for video. But I know what I like, and I like the fact that Picsearch has submitted back to the FFmpeg<\/a> development team 3 gargantuan lists of URLs:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A list of 5100+ URLs linking to videos that crash FFmpeg<\/li>\n
  2. A list of 3200 URLs linking to videos that have relatively uncommon video codecs<\/li>\n
  3. A list of 1600+ URLs linking to videos that have relatively uncommon audio codecs<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n


    \n    \"Picsearch<\/a>
    \n<\/center><\/p>\n

    That first list is a quality engineer’s dream come true. I was able to download a little more than 4400 of the crasher URLs. The list was collected sometime last year and the good news is that FFmpeg has fixed enough problems that over half of the alleged crashers do not crash. There are still a lot of problems but I think most of them will cluster around a small set of bugs, particularly concerning the RealMedia demuxer.<\/p>\n

    I am currently downloading the uncommon video and audio format files. Given my interests, if processing the crashers is akin the having to eat my vegetables, processing a few thousand files with heretofore unknown codecs is like dessert!<\/p>\n

    So far, the challenge here has been to both download and process the huge amount of samples efficiently. The usual “download and manually test” protocol usually followed when a problem sample is reported does not really scale in this situation. Invariably, I first try some half-hearted shell-based solutions. But… who really likes shell programming?<\/p>\n

    So I moved swiftly on to custom Python scripts for downloading and testing these files. Once I tighten up the scripts a little more and successfully process as many samples as I can, I will share them here, if only so I have a place where I can easily refer to the scripts again should I need them in the future (scripts are easily misplaced on my systems).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Picsearch has performed a valuable service for the FFmpeg project by submitting several giant lists of problematic samples. The challenge now is to download and process them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[68,285],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-ffmpeg","tag-python"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t