geekmaster kindle video player

[geekmaster]

@ixtab: s/fluent/fluid/

[ixtab]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

@ixtab: s/fluent/fluid/

Fixed, thanks. Damn foreign languages! And I thought my english was quite fluid

[geekmaster]

(duplicate post removed)

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by ixtab

Yep, I think I can reproduce it. Try this in main:

1. Open any book, switch to landscape mode.
2.

[root@kindle us]# zcat harvey.gmv.gz  |./gmplay 
Segmentation fault

3. Switch back to portrait mode.
4. gmplay works again.

So the rotation setting seems to "physically" rotate the underlying device (if you know what I mean). You can even verify this by setting the device to portrait inverted -- gmplay will also play "upside down".

I only treat the DX and DXG as special and add both letterbox and pillarbox to center the 800x600 video. I could detect widescreen mode and force it back to portrait mode with another ioctl() call, but I went to so much effort to shrink my code that I detest adding special "corner cases" back into it. But I suppose I must do that when I add GUI/keyboard/touchscreen to it. We want this solid when it gets slash-dotted to keep from being buried in support requests... (Yes, my past projects got LITERALLY thousands of hits per minute from around the world for many months, taking down webservers, with significant traffic for many years) ... Under a different name, of course...

[geekmaster]

I added some references to this post (in the P.S. section):
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho....php?p=2075591

Please read them. Study what you need to understand them. It will help your brain. I promise.

[geekmaster]

The "snow" demo:

./gmplay</dev/urandom



EDIT: It seems that the K3 cannot generate random numbers fast enough, so it falls into "frame drop" mode designed for the DX and DXG. I have a modified (unpublished) gmplay that works at lower framerates, needed on the K3 when watching HD video that ffmpeg running on the K3 cannot decode fast enough, and that plays /dev/urandom as fast as it can generate the random numbers, with no dropped frames (instead of almost all frames dropped as you can see in the published gmplay program). But on the K4 it is fun to watch /dev/urandom.

UPDATE: Here is a MUCH faster source of video to watch (much faster, and has "patterns" showing the contents of your usb drive. If you have raw uncompressed gmv videos on the USB drive, you might even see them somewhere in this video "program":

./gmplay</dev/mmcblk0p4

[ixtab]

Well then, mmcblk0p4 is a bit like the TV program these days: Lots of bullshit, and if you're lucky, sometimes, something useful in between

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by ixtab

Well then, mmcblk0p4 is a bit like the TV program these days: Lots of bullshit, and if you're lucky, sometimes, something useful in between

Yeah, our $1600 TV only gets turned on for American Idol, and I have my back to the screen (looking here) during most of that time. Watching TV is a consumer activity, but I feel much more satisfied while I am being a producer instead of a consumer...

Luckily, it is a "smart" TV, so when the spouse is not around to be annoyed by it, I can flip over to TED Talks and Revision 3 internet TV.

[twobob]

I'm Digging around getting the audio working. (That's my background) any tips? I got the video streaming working and I know GM is close on this one already.

I would PM but I'm sure everyone want's to know. I got my tools working now. Happy to help.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by twobob

I'm Digging around getting the audio working. (That's my background) any tips? I got the video streaming working and I know GM is close on this one already.

I would PM but I'm sure everyone want's to know. I got my tools working now. Happy to help.

WHAT tools did you get working?

I compiled ffmpeg to run on the kindle (with all options, but no alsa sound). I can play a video, and output RAW 800x600 monochrome video to my "gmvid transcoder" (piped through stdout/stdin). The pipe that to gzip and to a file (which is how I transcoded the *.gmvid.gz files in the first post). I can ALSO start another instance of ffmpeg playing the audio piped to stdout, then to the kindles built-in audio player (using stdin).

On the K4 and K5, it can play realtime video and audio that way (even from x.264 1080p source material). But on a K3, it works better playing 640x480 DivX video). The K3 cannot do x.264 decoding in realtime (using the compiler options I used to build ffmpeg).

My ffmpeg can also record the kindle framebuffer direct to video.

What I really want is a program that can output video and audio without audio glitches (like the other kindle video player does).

If we want to continue supporting piping like I use now, I need to interleave the audio into my gmv files (which are now just raw dithered 600x800 video packed 8 binary pixels per byte, no file header). I was thinking of adding a file header OVERLAYING the first video frame (for compatibility with old players). A new player could detect a magic number in the header and not display that first frame. The header could say what kind of audio it contains, and other video stuff)...

Just ideas. I do not remember -- did I even publish my gmvid transcoder anywhere (stdin 8-bit pixels, stdout dithered packed binary pixels)? If not, I can do it in a couple of weeks.

P.S. What did you think of the "Harvey" video?

[twobob]

Harvey. moody and cloying. with 70's angles and lots of crazy 1st person.

The split in half man is bonkers. disturbing metaphor, great visuals though.

My favourite is Harold Lloyd, one of my all time fave movies as a kid that one.

The actual movie aside I can report it plays beautifully on the K3 in normal mode.

I get about 6 - 7 1/2 Fps which is surprisingly effective on the Eink screens.

Pretty certain I've exhausted every movie and file available now so I'm working on getting the ffmpeg going now I have scrathbox up and running.

Walk then run I thought. possibly with a little crawling thrown in for good measure.

I'm playing with a few ideas now to get some audio linked with the other interfaces on the device.

undecided if procedural, or wave table is the way to go. Need to get spitting out some data to have a see how the device s performs. In a way writing for embedded reminds me of writing back in the day.

It occurs to me that the last chip specification manual I read was for the 86000 series.
Better get with the times.

Excited about streaming some raw date thru the transcoder. Aif is more visually exciting than Wav without any adjustment at all. Ive been considering the data rates and what slices would work best for some audio to video trickery.

Anyway. : ) Would seriously love to get my hands on that. When you have time.
Many thanks

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by twobob

I get about 6 - 7 1/2 Fps which is surprisingly effective on the Eink screens.

undecided if procedural (audio), or wave table is the way to go. Need to get spitting out some data to have a see how the device s performs. In a way writing for embedded reminds me of writing back in the day.

Anyway. : ) Would seriously love to get my hands on that. When you have time.
Many thanks

The K4 (in diags mode) and the K5 can easily do 50 FPS because the drivers do not wait until the eink display "catches up", but at faster speed it becomes MUCH more content-dependent before it gets too many artifacts to be useful. The K3 was limited to 7FPS by the eink drivers, so I used 7FPS (fullscreen, or 12FPS partial screen) to encode the dithered video (to save space). A lot of testing showed that 7FPS works well on the eink because it is a rather long-persistence medium AND mostly because it is NOT a light-emitting display (which would cause you to see flicker or other artifacts much more easily).

Regarding sound, I am a huge fan of procedural encoding. Using procedures to generate video (such as procedural textures) is about as dense a form of compression as you can get, and the same for audio (such as MOD files). In fact, I used procedural video to generate the first video that I posted. I ran the program on a linux host PC, and sent the output through my raw2gmv program, then into gzip, to create that video file. That program can also run on a kindle, and that "procedural video" program is MUCH smaller than any video compression that you can apply to the output video. Creating content in real time is definately the way to go (unless you want to preserve natural content). Of course, modern codecs are BECOMING more procedural, where the do feature extraction and object recognition, saving the instructions (i.e. display list) to recreate a close model of the original content on playback (much like how the human brain operates). This requires a lot of processing power, but we are getting there. For sound, you know that some very simple algorithms can simulate some rather natural sounds (as used in simple non-wavetable music synths like in greeting cards).

Regarding the raw2gmv transcoder, I will publish that when I get back (a week or so). I have not finished implementing my parallel (4-pixels per operation) dither algorithms, but I have proven it "on paper". I try to avoid conditional branching on modern multilevel cache processors, by using complex logic expressions (how I do my recent "NOT formula 42) dithering without a dither table. Essentially, I figured out how to generate a dither table in realtime in a cache-friendly way and logically interleaved that with the pixel dithering code. You can see the non-parallel version in the gmplay source code. For a hint of how I procedurally created my first video, see the "goodbye()" function in the newtrix demo.

TTYL

[twobob]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

...
Here is how I proxy a video stream to my kindle with 16:9 aspect ratio:

PHP Code:

ffmpeg -i http://mirrorblender.top-ix.org/movies/sintel-2048-surround.mp4 \
 -pix_fmt gray -f rawvideo -vf pad=800:600:0:75 -s 800x450 -|./raw2gmv|nc -l 5555 


And here is a command to play a file from the host pc at full 800x600 resolution:

PHP Code:

ffmpeg -i SundayPicnic.mp4 -pix_fmt gray -f rawvideo -s 800x600 -|./raw2gmv|nc -l 5555 


Here is how I play those video streams on my kindle, after starting them on the PC:

PHP Code:

nc 192.168.15.201 5555|./gmplay 


I think those link's for NetCats nc command need a -p to specify the port Geekmaster on my Slackware installation ON THE HOST SIDE

like: ffmpeg -i SundayPicnic.mp4 -pix_fmt gray -f rawvideo -s 800x600 -|./raw2gmv|nc -l -p 5555

HTH someone else get this going

[NiLuJe]

@twobob: I concur, the original netcat tool needs the -p switch, while gnu netcat or busybox netcat probably don't (haven't checked, 'cause there's a whole bunch of netcats around [netcat, gnu netcat, busybox, netcat6, ...]).

[geekmaster]

I almost always test commands like that before posting. On my computer, it should have worked, or I would have corrected it... I am not sure which netcat I was using though. I often compile from source, sometimes with custom changes. I had on ongoing email conversation with the author back in the day (hobbit@avian.org from "the l0pht"). I hear that those guys "went straight"...