Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 76
I've ditched the usual header for the
moment, I think it doesn't help much anyhow.
This page is copyrighted by me, and may be read and transferred by any
means only as a whole and including the references to me. I
guess that's normal, the writer can chose that of course, maybe
Ill make some creative commons stuff one day, of course I have
made Free and Open Source software and even hardware designs available!
This
page is under construction, so check back later, too.
May 24, 2009
Two quotes from The Enforcer (They´re a bit wrong):
"Ueh, Calahan,
you´re on the wrong side.
Those people
wouldn´t let you in the front door any more as they would me."
"This little Wild West
show of yours is exactly the thing this departmentis no longer prepared
to tolerate!
Don´t you remember the meeting?
What
meeting?
The meeting right here in your office, you
said priority one, run these hoods out of sanfrancisco.
But I
didn´t tell you to use violence!
Then what would you want me to do, yell
´trick or treat´ at them? "
Truth or dare?
VDPAU
That´s sort of a part of NVidia PureVideo, which I use for HD
viewing on the computer, but with more to it on Linux. A decoder and a
video renderer device with accelleration from the recent NVidia
cards´ built in powerful video processor, in this case being used
from Fedora 10/64 on a Geforce 9500GT card.
Mplayer is the guilty party in this case: since february it allows
compilation with vdpau acceleration and output device enabled from a
recent NVidia graphics card driver (180.50 or so I seem to recall),
which I upgraded first, and indeed the source repository snapshot I
downloaded on 27th of may compiled with the acceleration working, which
makes for great HD and Tv rendering, even though, contrary to
PureVideo, the CPU is still running quite a bit, but which enables
probably more optimizations on top of perfect de-interlace like
probably colour filtering, and like sharpening and de-noising, which
actually works, and can give great looking picture when set right, both
on HD film I made or on TV. Two farily random screen dumps:
Amsterdam conservatory presentation at the BIM-huis, filmed without
tripod from 10 meters away, no processing, auto-focus.
See above for the mplayer command line I used to see the TV as shown, a
random screendump with sharpening and some denoising on from a cable
station. 200 Watts for watching TV is steep, but then there is an
amount of control and pretty good picture without messy processing.
From this type of TV (coming from the pinnacle box on the server) even
the HD1000 beamer can make a good picture (on full screen with the
right program), which is pretty miraculous in general, because on the 2
meter 30 screen with the 720 (more than TV) resolution TV and the
beamers colour accurate DLP processing, most anything wrong becomes
painfully visible straight away of course.
I hacked mplayer a bit so it would also give me full screen vfpau
accelerated decoding and rendering of live tv:
The screendump program got a few frames confused, those lines
aren´t in the picture as I remember, but it´s a screen at
60Hz, so it isn´t perfect. And honestly, the frames being
broadcast are regularly not very perfect either.
Reverb experiments
A decompressed and sub-low enhanced AC-DC
"walk right over you" fragment
pushed through two impulse response reverbs in sequence, the first
mixed with a parallel reverb with feedback and zero phase filters, the
second cascaded with a plate reverb simulation :
acrev [.wav] ( 4.7
MB) acrev [.mp3]
(0.9 MB)
I use to love the sound of a gated reverb, so I tried to make on from
an existing impulse, to try out a gated impulse reverb, here being
tried with the hydrogen drumcomputer:
gatedrev [.wav] (16.2
MB) gatedrev [.mp3]
(2.9 MB)
This version had audacity to force a damped envelope on the impulse
file, beware that this program if I recall correctly changes audio
files even when no processing is done, so maybe it isn´t very
good for adapting impulses:
Gate-like characteristic from Nero Wave Editor:
I used an extra non-impulse, feedback containing reverb to make the
sound less dull, and indeed the gated reverb effect shines somewhat
like it should.
Experiments with the PC3 editor
Because I was interested in the Kurzweil PC3 algorithms, and of course
have a background in sound synthesizer software design (I had a small
company as student where I´d made a extensive DX7 sound library
program) I downloaded the PC3 editor and had a look at it.
It works, but unfortunately has no changable font size, so it always
looks small on a HD screen:
In spite of this, the many controls of the PC require more screenspace
than even a whole HD screen, so for using it good, maybe an added HD
could be nice, but then the windows cannot always be seperated. A nice
X window per control set wouldn´t be bad...
Trying FM algos, Theo? A well, I know there was a company which made FM
type sounds for the 1/2000 series, so I wondered what was possible, or
wether they would just sample. I guess not, since not all Ks can
sample, just like the PCs can´t.
Four sine waves, with lots of settings and modulation, and 32 layers
per sound, is something...
Recording devices
I saw this add from the korg website
The BB/TI PCM4202, that´s interesting: local diary 20 ,
I have samples of those too, I thought they had real good specs.
It´s a whole lot of electronics knowledge and skills later before
you get the specs for such sensitive parts from you PCB, of course.
Sounds like a nice machine for making DTS tracks on Bluray discs,
especially for high quality concert recordings.
Bristol analog synth simulation update
I saw the Bristol newpage
on sourceforge making clear a lot of improvements had been made, so I
downloaded version .4 (I had version .3, see http://www.theover.org/Diary/ldiary67.html
).
I now could try a working Moog explorer simulation, which is great. The
B3 worked, which sound humbles, but adorable nice, probably totally
preferable over the NI version, in spite of complete lack of
lickedness, apart from the good graphics.
"Direct from the phone" pictures
The pool has been aside and dirty, and now it is also treated with the
lawnmower (I did not, really not), and I guess the aliens have visited:
The pond is cool:
The following ones were shurnk an processed with Gimp (for a change, I
don´t have Cinapaint on XP):
Needless to say it´s not likely I did the flower arrangement.
This I did though: Irish coffee with great whiskey, needless the say I
take considerable distance from drinking the decaf version...
The supply from an number of years old notebook (5?) still fairly fast
though for the time is was a good sale of course had a broken low
voltage wire after having been used and transorted to various places:
I repaired it working but not fully as new, just like the fan some
years ago. It´s a bit noisy machine, but still good. The newer
notebook I´m happy to use (A Dell M90 core duo/Nvidia Quadro
graphics, full high quality HD screen) has a fanless 150W supply, with
rubber cable thus far being ok, while having been transported (though I
think not abroad like the other one) and publically used too.
An Agilent webcast about radar ?!
Well, that would sound like a secret internal communication from the
military, and possibly from quite some decades ago.
But of course currently rader is even used for counting people in a
mall (maybe I don´t agree) and of course Agilent makes top
technology of the kind that other cannot even dream to make in decades
to come, so that´s always interesting. Like when you want to make
a machine with certain specs and you know that another company makes
machines with so much bettter specs it actually measure yours
accurately..
This was IIRC a measurement where reflected pulse train was checked for
probably phase trend using an FFT
I always get slight creeps when I hear that term, especially ehrn the
interfacel looks windows-like.
Return to Forever
But then the 2008 concert in from Chick Corea and band: great
Bluray:
Other additional Blurays (Not DVDs) I tested the home cinema system
with are:
Casine Royale
Across the Universe
National Treasure 1 & 2
Chicken little
Underdog
Sky high
Eight Below
Santa Claus
Hidalgo
The hunting party
The Merchant of Venice
The Usual Suspects
Some of the later disneys are starting to get a good full surround
sound. Now lets wait for cinema loudness (no flattened sound) and two
extra sound tracks for 7.1 ! From the above Music Bluray I found that
PCM tracks with 24 bits uncompressed are also possible in the bluray
format, which is an certain improvement for movies over 16 bits, which
regularly is used.
Musically:
All this for under 10,-:
And the great thing: no additional master messing or additional master
compression and processing, it sounds like the originals.
Also ounds great with mid-range polishing by Jamin.