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August 20, 2007

HOWTO - iPod and PSP movies on Windows Mobile

Last week I mentioned that you can use TCPMP on Windows Mobile Smartphones and Pocket PCs to view H.264 encoded MP4s. I glossed over a few details, so here's a quick guide for getting everything running.

What You Need:

TCPMP: download the latest version for Pocket PC or Smartphone (currently 0.72RC1)- Link
H.264 ffmpeg plugin: under "additional plugins" - Link
AAC plugin: grab the Windows Mobile download under the "BetaPlayer AAC plugin" heading - Link

You'll also need your Smartphone or Pocket PC, a PC with ActiveSync, and enough space on the device (or SDCard) for storing the video you want to watch.

Install the Files:
The TCPMP download is a CAB file. You can either drop this on an SDCard in the device or copy it to the device with ActiveSync. Once it's there, use the file explorer on the device to find the CAB and execute it to begin the install.

After you've installed TCPMP, you'll need to also install the H.264 and AAC codecs so that you can view and hear videos encoded for the iPod. Both of these plugins are downloaded as a ZIP file. Inside you'll find EXE and CAB installers for the Smartphone and Pocket PC Windows Mobile platforms. You can install the CAB files just like you did with TCPMP, or you can execute the EXE installer on your synced PC and ActiveSync will take care of moving it to the device for you.

Transfer and Play Videos on the Device
The fastest way to get large video files to your device is just to drop them on a large SD or MiniSD card and insert it into your device. I did this with a few MP4s I had lying around from MAKE podcasts and Google Video downloads.

You'll find the TCPMP/Core icon in your Start Menu. After executing, you can choose "File->Open" to browse and select an MP4 file to play. There are some settings under options to adjust the video buffer and playback settings. You'll have to experiment to see what works best for your device.

On my test Smartphone, the MP4 video playback is pretty poor, but it does work. The audio doesn't skip, but there are a bunch of dropped video frames during playback. From what I can tell, the device just doesn't have the CPU muscle to decode the video fast enough without hardware acceleration. I have a feeling the Pocket PC hardware might be more up to the task. Please leave a comment if you can confirm this.

August 17, 2007

YouTube and iPod video content on Windows Mobile

Out of the box, Windows Mobile devices can only play WMV files. Formats like Flash video or Quicktime are not supported. Using the open source media player TCPMP and some Pocket IE tweaks, however, you can view the FLV video content available on several popular video sites like YouTube and Google Video, right on your WM5 or WM6 Pocket PC or Smartphone.

For all you Tube-aholics, this is it! You now have direct, unfettered access to Youtube, Google Video & Veoh, in all their glory. Install the CABs listed below, go directly to these websites, and click on a video to play. That's it :)

Even better, you can also use TCPMP to watch H.264 MP4 / iPod encoded videos. With a large enough SD card, you should be able to use the same MP4 encoded videos on your Treo that you play from iTunes or on your iPod or iPhone.

Correction:
dankirkpatrick comments that the device referenced in the MP4-to-Treo article at jaydryden.net is actually a PalmOS device, and not the lookalike Windows Mobile Treo 700w. TCPMP is available for Windows Mobile, though, so I'll try and put together some instructions for this and verify that it works (it should). The encoding info on the Palm article should still apply, you just need to install TCPMP for WM, not for PalmOS.

Full Youtube and Google Video access - Link
Watching MP4 video on ~~Windows Mobile~~ PalmOS using TCPMP - Link
Wikipedia entry on TCPMP - Link

July 11, 2007

Play ripped DVDs with VLC

Steve Anderson wrote in about an underused feature of our favorite open source video player, VLC.

I discovered yesterday that the wonderful VLC media player has the ability not only to mount a DVD directory that's been ripped to the hard drive, but also to play a .iso image of a DVD. Seeing as I've been using it for ages without knowing this was possible, I figured a lot of other people would be ignorant to this feature!

Maybe you want to test an ISO that you've created before burning it to a disk. Perhaps you'd like to store your DVDs to your harddisk without transcoding them, retaining all the menus and special features. Using VLC, you should be able to do either by entering a "dvd:" url in the Open dialog box.

Example URLs to Open and play a DVD ISO:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/dvdimage.iso

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdimages/dvdimage.iso

Example URLs to Open and play a ripped DVD folder:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/DVDFOLDER

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdcopies/DVDFOLDER

Resources:
VLC DVD Trick - Link
Get VLC - Link

July 5, 2007

Text-mode YouTube

You'll probably never have the desire or need to download and watch a YouTube video on a text-only console, but doesn't it make you feel better knowing that it can be done?

The trick is to use the AAlib ascii image library as an output device for mplayer, using the -vo parameter:

mplayer -vo aa video.flv

Mplayer will decode the flv frames, process them with AAlib and print luscious video to your console window. At 80x25, it's almost 2 whole kilopixels of resolution! [via]

Watch Videos in ASCII Art - Link
Linux Multimedia Hacks - Link
AAlib ASCII Graphics Library- Link

June 10, 2007

HOWTO mount a camera to your bike

I've seen a couple gorgeous films lately of couriers flying through traffic, narrowly avoiding cars and pedestrians, all filmed from a bicyclist's perspective (example).

Most of these are shot from helmet cam, but there's something cool about the perspective from a fixed bike mount as well. The latter is really easy to do on the cheap, and there are a couple Instructables that'll show you how to build a secure mount for your video camera with just a buck or two or hardware.

Video Camera Mount for Bicycle - Link
Bicycle Camera Mount for under $1 - Link

May 22, 2007

Watch YouTube videos on AppleTV (very soon)

A Series of Tubes is an AppleTV plugin that allows you to browse and view YouTube videos on your AppleTV. It's currently in private beta and supposed to be released any day now. With a recent Digg mention, the dev team will hopefully be psyched enough to wrap up the beta stage and get rev 1 out the door.

A Series of Tubes wiki - Link.

April 5, 2007

Cbreak: Open Source Commercial Remover for AVI Files

benjiwenjifoofoo sent a link to Cbreak, a cool tool that automatically removes commercials from AVI files. It works by scanning the AVI for black screens, which typically come before and after a commercial, and divides the AVI into black-seperated segments. Segments that are shorter than some specified length are discarded and the rest of the frames are stitched back together, losslessly. There's also a manual mode for the chance video where this algorithm doesn't work perfectly.

If you want to do the same for MPEG files, you can still use this tool by converting the MPEGs to AVIs losslessly using ffmpeg. After using Cbreak, just convert them back to MPEG.

It's Windows only, but the source is included (GPL) so maybe this could be ported to Mac/Linux as well. Personally, I'd also like to see this modified to automatically remove the sporting event from the super bowl commercials.

Cbreak: Free commercial remover for AVI files -Link.

March 6, 2007

Teach via IM with One-Way Video Chat

Click To Play

Over at O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter, Erica Sadun points out a little-known (at least to me) feature in the current version of iChat:

By control-clicking (right-clicking) a buddy's name, a contextual menu pops up offering the option to invite that person to a one-way video chat. This means that they can watch your video but will not send video back to you in return.

How have I missed this option for so long? Though Erica wants to use this feature to iPodcast (stream via IM) movies and TV shows to her friends, I see this as a great opportunity for "hands-on" instruction you normally don't have access to when you're not physically in the same room with someone.

For example, crafts like knitting are notoriously hard to teach without visual cues, and even the most detailed books often suffer from their lack of moving pictures. When I learned to knit, I used books as a crutch, but actually learning required sitting next to my mother-in-law to see how it was done. Even now, when I hit a roadblock with a new technique, I need to wait till the next time we're together. But if we had a feature like this, we likely wouldn't have to wait. I could just "look over her shoulder" as she described what she was doing.

The most obvious benefit of one-way video is that it doesn't require the recipient to have a video camera on their end, but as Erica notes, for instructional content as with streaming movies, one-way video has another notable advantage over two-way video conferencing:

you don't have to watch the other person watching your video. You don't have to see them adjusting their hair, performing nasal maintenance, or any of the other unconscious things people do when they get involved in watching TV as opposed to engaging actively in a social situation.

The pedagogical opportunities for this feature are virtually limitless, and it will add a whole new dimension to tech support with the release of Mac OS X Leopard, when we finally get iChat Screen Sharing. - Link to video download.

February 23, 2007

Choose Your Own Product Placement

Product Placement Experiment

Josh Paul, author of Digital Video Hacks, has created a pretty amazing product placement experiment:

While viewing, pay attention to the table; there will be a box of cereal on it (or not). The box of cereal can be changed by using the links below. After changing a placement, simply restart the video from the beginning.

The video is also clickable, so when a product is on screen, clicking on it leads to an appropriate web site.

Related:

Digital Video Hacks

February 15, 2007

Vixy.net: Online FLV-to-MP4 Converter

Here's an online service that will transcode FLVs for you into several common formats, such as AVI/DivX, MOV/MPEG4, 3GP, etc. I've only had a chance to try it on a couple videos, but it seems to work well. You can submit a YouTube URL or a direct link to an FLV and it will kick out a recompressed version that you can easily play on your desktop, iPod or PSP. -Link.

They've also released the trasncoder source under the LGPL, which you can grab over at sourceforge and use in your own transcoding project. Nice! -Link.

Related:

Howto: Download Youtube and Google Videos

February 13, 2007

Hear with Your Eyes: The McGurk Effect

In Hack #59 of their book Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb use a classic illusion known as the McGurk Effect to show how our senses combine to completely change our ultimate experience of perception. Knowing what's going to happen doesn't even keep you from experiencing the illusion. It just weakens the effect a bit.

Let's try it out. Watch my lips as I make a few sounds:

[[McGurk Effect clip]]

Now, listen to just the audio portion from that clip:

[[audio clip]]

Besides perhaps being a little bit creepy, when you watched the video, I should have appeared to be saying "da da," but when you listen to the audio without the video, it's clear I'm saying "ba ba."

This illusion can't happen in real life. Like McGurk, I made it by splicing the audio of me saying "ba ba" over a video of me making a different sound: "ga ga." When you're not watching the video, you hear what I'm actually saying. But when you see my lips moving, the two bits of information clash. The position of a person's mouth is key in telling what sound someone is making, especially for distinguishing between speech sounds, called phonemes, like "ba," "ga," "pa," and "da," which are all made by popping air out.

Beyond a neat mind trick, the McGurk Effect has some practical uses as well. In Hack #57 of his book Digital Video Hacks, Josh Paul shows how to create the effect yourself, as I've done in this video, and use it in your own movies to fool your audience.

Here's an example of an applying the effect. Watch my lips as I mouth a couple words, while dubbing over a completely different phrase:

[[olive juice effect]]

What did I say? Could you tell that I was saying "olive juice" in the video, before editing it with a different audio track? Does it even matter?

This type of editing occurs frequently when feature films are shown shown on TV. Some words obviously are frowned upon by the FCC, and when movie houses edit them out, they generally try to fool you into believing the audio is original to the movie, or at least keep you from noticing the difference too much.

A common example is when someone shouts "Forget you!" onscreen. Though you know a different phrase was used in the original, the illusion is convincing enough to keep you from being distracted by the dubbing. But when the illusion is used with words that don't quite fit the context of the movie, the effect tends to break down. For example, when I hear John Goodman shout, "This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps," I know the attempt has failed miserably. - Link to video download.

Resources:
Mind Hacks, by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb

Digital Video Hacks, by Josh Paul

Arnt Masso's McGurk Effect Video

Hearing with Your Eyes collection of McGurk Effect movies

HD DVD processing key found

30Gbhddvd
Arnezami from the Doom9 forums slurped out the processing key that can unlock every HD DVD and Blu-Ray disc, regardless of how any of us feel about these wonky multiple formats and DRM, reading the forum messages on how this was accomplished is a lot of fun...

...then I realized why I first didn't find the Media Key: it was removed from memory after the Volume ID was retrieved and the VUK calculated. I also saw that in my "corrupt" memdump the VUK, Vol ID, Media Key and the Title Key MAC were all closely clustered in memory: in the first 50kb (of the entire multi megabyte file!) but there were large empty parts around it. Almost as if it was cleaned up.
This gave me an idea: what I wanted to do is "record" all changes in this part of memory during startup of the movie. Hopefully I would catch something insteresting. In the end I did something a little more effiecient: I used the hd dvd vuk extractor (thanks ape!) and adapted it to slow down the software player (while scanning its memory continously) and at the very moment the Media Key (which I now knew: my bottom-up approach really paid off here) was detected it halted the player. I then made a memdump with WinHex. I now had the feeling I had something.

And I did.

Processing Key, Media Key and Volume ID found!!! - Page 6 - Doom9's Forum - [via] Link.

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