There's some background in there on the development of the original ARM designs, as well as the StrongARM and the current SpiNNaker project, an attempt to come up with a more biologically based style of computation.
All fascinating stuff, and especially so at the moment with the explosion of ARM-based computers out there.
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There are more pics and description here on the ROOL forums. The nutBOX comes hot on the heels of Dave Thomas's lego housing for his IGEPv2 here, first reported on riscos.info.
There's still some way to go before the RISC OS OMAP port is stable enough to drive a general purpose computer suitable for everyday use, but in the meantime, plenty of people are having fun with what already exists...
]]>The new IYONIX pc ROM can be downloaded free of charge from the ROOL site, in either flash programmer or softload form. ROOL advise that the ROM image is believed to work in softload form on all IYONIX versions of RISC OS from 5.10 or later. In flash programmer form, it should work from version 5.07 or later.
To avoid any unforseen compatibility issues with third-party software, it's advised to at try out the softload at least once before running the flash programmer tool. Just remember that the using the softload won't fix the year 2012 bug (and can even result in a jump to 2110) - the only way to fix the year 2012 bug is to use the flash programmer.
Update: ROOL have now added to the release announcement a human-readable list of the changes that have been made since the last official release (5.14).
Links
RISC OS advocate Paul Vigay, whose body was found off the coast of Portsmouth last year, left behind a list of his passwords and a note to his girlfriend saying "I love you", an inquest has heard.ISP owner and crop circle researcher Paul, 44, had split with his girlfriend Andrea Louie Smith on the night of his death and was £10,000 in debt. His body was discovered in the sea in February 2009; reports showed there was no suspicious circumstances, no suicide note and no sign of struggle on Paul's body, and that he had only consumed a small quantity of alcohol. There was no CCTV footage or witnesses to the death, leading a coroner to admit that his death will remain a mystery.
The hearing, held in Portsmouth, heard that Louie and Paul had fallen out over his decision to let one of his friends stay at their house, and that she had wanted to wed and bring up a family.
Louie, who published the magazine RISC OS Now with Paul, told the inquest that she had discussed ending their three-year relationship during a meal a week before Paul's death. She said: "It was not arguing. It was not aggressive. It was just emotional. He was crying, I was crying. I said 'this is it. I think it's come to the end of the line now'."
On the night of his death, as Louie packed her bags to leave, Paul said he was going outside. Louie told the inquest: "I said, 'You promise me you come home.' He said: 'It's not important now'."
The passwords Paul left in a note did not work when the police and Paul's family attempted to use them.
Paul's father, John, told the inquest: "He had very firm beliefs and he would stick to them. He did not believe in suicide."
Coroner David Horsley, who recorded an open verdict, said: "I cannot say beyond reasonable doubt that yes Paul has taken his own life.
"The only person who could tell us what was going on in his mind and what happened that night is sadly not here to tell us."
Paul, of Manners Road, Southsea, was a keen RISC OS advocate and, as well as developing numerous pieces of software for the platform, he also ran the riscos.org website and was well known for helping users solve computing problems on mailing lists and other online forums. Stunned by news of his death, RISC OS users, crop circle investigators and his personal friends joined together in paying moving tributes to Paul in mailing list and newsgroup messages and in posts on an online book of condolence.
Thanks to Mike Reed for first spotting this.
Links:
The Telegraph article
Portsmouth News article
Previous Drobe coverage
Paul Vigay book of condolence
Starting this article with the most prolific first, we have NVIDIA and their Tegra platform. Although the Tegra 1 platform was announced less than a year ago, there was only one device on display using the chipset. Why's that? Because NVIDIA have just announced the Tegra 2! Utilising a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU running at "up to" 1GHz, the new Tegra is able to decode 1080p HD video, and has powerful enough graphics hardware to be able to display said video at its native resolution. And although the Tegra 1 was initially a Windows CE-only affair, this new generation of the chip has been seen running Google's Android, so there's hope that the hardware documentation will be open enough to allow a suitably crazy set of individuals to begin a RISC OS port, should they feel so inclined.
 Mobinnova Beam smartbook with 1GHz Tegra 2 Via Engadget, Liliputing, and Liliputing. |  MSI 10" Tegra 2 tablet running Android Via Engadget, Liliputing. |
 Compal Tegra 2 tablet running Android Via Engadget, jkkmobile. |  ICD's lonely Tegra 1 tablet, "Vega" Via Engadget. |
 Tegra 2-powered Boxee Box media player Via Engadget. |  Verizon Tegra 2 tablet Via Engadget. |
 Pegatron's Tegra-2 powered Neo smartbook Via Engadget. |  Quanta's lopsided Tegra 2 tablet prototype Via Engadget. |
 Notion Ink Adam tablet with Pixel Qi screen Via Engadget. |  And finally, news of a Tegra 2 devboard Via Alan Robertson. |
Coming in second place this year was Marvell, with the highlight being the announcement of their new ARMADA range of SoC's. Like the Tegra 2, Marvell's ARMADA is a powerful beast, utilising up to four ARMv7 cores running at GHz speeds and capable of decoding and displaying full HD video. Slightly more detailed specs are available on Marvell's website.
 Stylish ARMADA smartbook Via Engadget. |  2GHz ARMADA-powered Plug Computer 3.0 Via Engadget. |
 ARMADA-powered EBOX nettop Via Engadget. |  Non-ARMADA Paradigm Shift tablet Via Engadget. |
Although they didn't have much exciting new stuff to show at CES, there is news that Qualcomm are following the trend and working on a dual-core, 1.5GHz, 1080p-able version of their Snapdragon chipset.
 Lenovo's Snapdragon-powered Skylight smartbook Via Liliputing, Engadget, and Liliputing. |  Lenovo's IdeaPad x86 netbook/ARM tablet hybrid Via Engadget, Engadget. |
 HP's Snapdragon-powered, Android-running smartbook Via Liliputing, Engadget, and Liliputing. |  Qualcomm's own Snaptop tablet-with-keyboard prototype Via Liliputing. |
Freescale appears to have had a rather poor showing at CES, with the only notable item on display being a 7" tablet with keyboard-dock, powered by a 1GHz i.MX515 processor.
 Dockable tablet thing Via Liliputing, Engadget, Liliputing, and Engadget. |
 Some random Cortex-A8 tablet Via Liliputing. |  800MHz ARM11 tablet with TV tuner Via Engadget. |
 800MHz ARM11 netbook Via Liliputing. |  Shuttle launches push for standardised notebook motherboards Via Liliputing, Engadget. |
 Big-and-bendy, ARMADA-powered Skiff e-reader Via Engadget, Engadget, and, erm, Engadget. |
Yes, it looks like TI's OMAP platform was notably absent from this year's CES. However, all is not lost - the Pandora is (still) inching closer to release (Just a few case tweaks left, hopefully), the Touch Book has been on sale for a few months now (to mixed reviews), and TI's next-gen, multi-core, 1080p-capable OMAP4 was actually announced way back in February last year - they just don't have any prototypes to show off yet. Hopefully this year's Computex Taipei will be TI's time to shine.
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Version 2.5 of web browser NetSurf is set to be unveiled at this year's Wakefield show - but its developers warn this could be the last release for the platform. The new version has a rewritten CSS engine to improve its ability to display web pages correctly, should be faster at processing web pages, and boasts big improvements to the way the freely available software caches pages and uses the computer's memory.But as the developers of the open source browser no longer have the time to maintain the RISC OS port of NetSurf, it's likely that future improvements to the program will not make it into the RISC OS port - and automatically generated builds of the software are expected to stop if these new enhancements break the RISC OS-specific source enough to stop it compiling.
Team spokesman Michael Drake said earlier today: "NetSurf 2.5 is likely to be the last release for RISC OS. It is unlikely that RISC OS development builds will function for much longer after this, either. Once NetSurf 2.5 has been released we will be incorporating new developments, which are currently being held back, into NetSurf's core web browser engine. These will not be compatible with the existing stagnant RISC OS front end code.
"The source code for the RISC OS front end will continue to be available in the normal place, however it won't compile without the necessary attention to bring it into line with NetSurf's core."
The genesis of NetSurf was sparked following a discussion about browser development on the Iconbar.com forums, and, after years of development, has since won several awards for its contribution to the RISC OS platform. It has now been ported to various other operating systems, including Linux and AmigaOS, where development will continue.
Repeated appeals were made by leading NetSurf developers for a RISC OS maintainer to volunteer their time, but as yet no one has been able to lend any support to the project. Speaking after revealing that the RISC OS frontend had not been touched for over two years, lead programmer John-Mark Bell said: "Dropping support for any platform is not a decision we take lightly. However, when it gets to the point where progress is being hindered, difficult decisions have to be made."
He added today: "Realistically, the people qualified to maintain the RISC OS port are up to their necks in other stuff."
]]>A few attempts have been made to remedy this situation, but, until recently, they have come to nothing.
In the mid-1990s, Innovative Media Solutions produced a range of Acorn readers for PC-format, educational CDs, such as Microsoft Dinosaurs and Dorling Kindersley's The Way Things Work. These readers included dedicated versions of ARMovie, which could convert the CD’s AVI files to Replay format on the fly.
Unfortunately, the work that IMS had done, did not result in the release of a souped-up version of Replay, which could play all Quicktime and AVI movies, despite the fact that RISC OS Ltd seem to have done some work in this area about five years ago.
But now, with the release of the open-source applications, Murnong and FFMpeg, by Chris Martin, things have started to take a turn for the better.
Although RISC OS still does not have a proper media player, which can play all the common video formats, we do now have the next best thing - an application that can capture a YouTube video stream as it arrives, and convert it to an MPEG file, which can be played using KinoAmp.
The first thing to do is to install the latest versions of Murnong, FFMpeg and Mpgtx, if you don't have them already.
Now load the !Murnong application, so that its icon appears on the icon bar.
Load your favourite web browser up, and navigate to an interesting YouTube video.
This short film about an invasion of giant robots, allegedly made for 0, has won its Uruguyan director a million contract from Sam Raimi, to make a Hollywood sci fi film!
Select Save Web Page from the browser’s menu, but instead of dragging its file icon onto your hard drive, drag it onto the Murnong icon on the icon bar.
Murnong will respond by opening a Fetch Video dialogue box, so name the output file, and drag its icon to the disc or directory you wish to save it on.
Murnong will now calculate the path to the actual YouTube FLV video, contained in the page, and launch another application called Wget to actually retrieve it. (Incidentally, YouTube keep changing the way their system retrieves these videos, so Chris has already had to update Murnong a couple of times to keep pace with these changes.)
Once you have the FLV video saved as a Data file, you can drag it back onto the Murnong icon on the icon bar. This will open a simple conversion window, allowing you to convert just the audio or video content, or both, to an MPEG file and convert from 12 frames a second to 24, if required, to make the video playable in KinoAmp.
Although it is fairly easy to make playable versions of YouTube videos this way, there are two common problems with many of them.
One is that the videos have rarely been cut out neatly, so there is often distracting material before and after the bit you really want. This not only reduces its impact, it also wastes valuable hard drive space.
The other problem, is that material that has been transmitted on television, usually has ugly, black bars around the edges of every frame, and often has a ‘tear’ running along the bottom. This would not have been visible on your television set, but nearly always seems to be present on stuff that was originally recorded on a VHS tape recorder.
As long as you are quite happy with what YouTube gives you, there is no need to delve any deeper.
But if you wish to extract clean, high-impact clips from whatever you have downloaded, at some point you will need to get your hands dirty, and start to experiment with FFMpeg, the versatile, video-processing program that lies at the heart of Murnong.
This time, I am going to use the FFMpeg application to convert the downloaded FLV Data file, rather than just dragging it back onto the Murnong icon to do it.
There are two ways of using FFMpeg:
This opens a task window, which reports on the audio and video contents of the file, and also opens a dialogue box, which allows you to select the conversion options that you require.
Make sure that Quality is set to Same as Input, and Audio to Copy, then drag the output file icon onto your RAM disk, and click on Convert.
Also note the Cutting section at the bottom, and the Cropping section on the right - we will be looking at these again later.
Once the conversion has completed, select the data file on your RAM disc and set its file type to BF8, before playing it in KinoAmp.
Although just dragging the FLV file onto the program icon, and filling in the dialogue box, is the easiest way to use FFMpeg, there are two big problems with it:
If, however, you intend to convert a lot of video files, it would be better to learn how to do it using Obey files.
From now on, I will be explaining how to do this, but also showing which options need to be chosen on the front end, in case you are still allergic to using Obey files.
The YouTube movie I am going to use, is a collection of vintage adverts dating back to 1969, which can be downloaded from here.
To use an Obey file to do a straigtforward conversion to MPEG, as we have just done using the front end, load a text editor such as Zap.
The basic forms of the files that you will need, are provided as a zip file, and it is easier to amend these, than it is to create them from scratch.
But it IS worth knowing the quick way of entering file names, without having to worry about making mistakes in the file path.
We want to create an Obey file that looks roughly like this:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -i 1969/flv -f mpeg -sameq -acodec copy RAM::RamDisc0.$.1969,BF8Now, the easiest way to enter the path name for 1969/flv, is to find it on your hard drive, hold down the Shift key, then drag its file icon into the Zap window, with the cursor positioned just after the -i (the input file).
If the edit window fills up with rubbish, you know you have done something wrong !!!
Also, if the path name pushes the rest of the instruction onto a new line, delete the line break, otherwise the Obey file will not run properly.
Now drag a small file into the RAM disc, shift-drag its file icon into the Zap window at the end of the line, to put in the path, and change the file name to 1969.
Add ,BF8 (without leaving a space on either side of the comma) to the end of the line, to get FFMpeg to set the output file type to MPEG, rather than Data.
By now, your Obey file should look like this:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -i ADFS::HardDisc4.$.1969/flv -f mpeg -sameq -acodec copy RAM::RamDisc0.$.1969,BF8Once we have the basic form of this Obey file, it is fairly easy to modify it to achieve other effects, such as extracting clips from longer sequences, changing the audio or video format within the MPEG container, or cleaning up the edges of the frames, if needs be.
The next job is to extract a short clip from the sequence, using the Findus Fish Fingers advert as an example, so make a copy of ConvToMpeg and name it ExtractClip (or use the one provided in the download).
Now play the file 1969 in KinoAmp.
As soon as you have reached the beginning of the section you want to extract, left-click in the player window to pause it, then middle click and select Film->Info from the menu.
Look up the time code value of the beginning of the clip, next to Playing Time.
Make a note of it, then close the dialogue box, and left-click in the player window again to resume play.
Left-click once more at the end of the required clip, and look up the Playing Time again, to find the time code value for the end of the clip.
Subtract the previous time code value, to calculate its duration.
Having obtained the rough -ss and -t values (start time and duration) for the clip, in this case 120.80 and 43.80, load ExtractClip into Zap, then edit it so that it looks something like this:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -ss 120.80 -t 43.80 -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.1969 -f mpeg -sameq -acodec copy RAM::RamDisc0.$.FishFingers,BF8In fact, probably because of the poor quality of the original recording, simply running ExtractClip like this, results in a movie in which the sound plays about a second behind the picture. Running ExtractAlf, from the download, will correct this problem, by extracting the audio and video content seperately, a second apart, to bring the two back into sync again.
Also, with other files, you will probably have to run the Obey file several times, with slightly different values of -ss and -t, to ‘walk in’ the beginning and end points of the clip, if you really want to get a neat result (or enter the Start Offset and Duration on the Convert screen, if you are using the application’s front end).
By this time, you should have an MPEG clip, which starts and stops in the right place, but still has thick black bars around the sides, and often also has a kind of ‘tear’ running along the bottom.
If you want to remove these borders and the ‘tear,’ there is a cropping facility within FFMpeg, which allows you to do just that.
Allow the movie to play in KinoAmp, until you reach a light-coloured frame, then middle click and select Film->Save Frame.
Now examine the resulting sprite file, bump up the Zoom to about 6 to 1, then select white as the painting colour, and draw a single pixel line across the four borders.
Count the pixels to measure the width of the borders, then copy ConvToMpeg again as CropBorders, and change it to look something like this:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.FishFingers -f mpeg -sameq -acodec copy -cropleft 8 -croptop 0 -cropbottom 2 -cropright 8 RAM::RamDisc0.$.FishFingers2,BF8Et voila! Once you have run this, you will have a much neater clip with nice, neat edges, whose picture and sound quality is as good as the YouTube original.
Alf Garnett - head of one of Britain’s most famous dysfunctional families!
And once you have ConvToMpeg, ExtractClip and CropBorders, it is a simple enough job to use them again with different input files.
To make things easier, download the zip file, which contains a basic form of the three obey files, so you don't spend ages trying to get the syntax right.
Just remember to be careful when editing them!
Homework: Now use ExtractClip and CropBorders to extract the Cadbury’s Flake or Sunsilk Shampoo adverts from the same sequence.
If you wish to play some of the music that you have downloaded in a CD player, you can extract just the sound component of it, and save it as a WAV file.
You can do this from the Convert screen, by selecting Wave as the output format, or with an Obey file like this:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.1969/flv -f wav RAM::RamDisc0.$.SoundOnly,FB1First drag the FLV file onto the FFMpeg icon on the iconbar, to get the program to check that the audio is encoded in MP3 format, then run an obey file like this:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.1969/flv -f wav -acodec copy RAM::RamDisc0.$.MusicOnly,1ADffmpeg:ffmpeg -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.1969/flv -f mpeg -sameq -an RAM::RamDisc0.$.NoSound,BF8Another thing that you often have to do, especially with footage that comes from a digital camera, is to increase the frame rate so KinoAmp can play it.
Many of these videos end up being encoded on YouTube, as 15 frames-per-second FLV files, and FFMpeg will not allow a simple conversion on these, because such a slow speed is not permitted under the MPEG file specification.
To get around this, you have to encode the file at 24 frames per second, using the -r 24 argument, in front of the output file name:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.Slower/flv -f mpeg -sameq -r 24 RAM::RamDisc0.$.Faster,BF8If you look in the VIDEO_TS directory of a home-recorded DVD, you will see a collection of files named something like VTS_01_1/VOB, etc.
These VOB files are the recorded MPEG data created by your DVD recorder.
On a full disc, there would typically be five of these, each one over a gigabyte in size, representing about 25 minutes of recording time each, at Standard Quality. So a clip that occurs 40 minutes into the recording, is likely to be in the second VOB file.
The first thing to do, assuming you have enough hard drive space available, is to copy the VOB file, containing the clip you want to extract, onto your hard drive.
Once you have this, set the file type to BF8 for MPEG, and play it using KinoAmp.
As before, once you have reached the beginning of the section you want to extract, left-click in the player window, then middle-click and select Film->Info from the menu.
Look up the time code value of the beginning of the clip, next to Playing Time.
Make a note of it, then close the dialogue box, and left-click in the player window again to resume play.
Left-click once more at the end of the required clip, and look up the Playing Time, to find the time code value for the end of the clip.
Subtract the previous time code value, to calculate its duration.
Having obtained the rough -ss and -t values (start time and duration) for the clip, create and run an Obey file that looks something like this, but subtract a couple of seconds from the value of -ss and add four to -t, so that the resulting file will have a bit of space on either side of the reqired clip.
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -ss 11.92 -t 130 -i ADFS::HardDisc4.$.VTS_01_1/VOB -f mpeg -sameq -s 'cif' ADFS::HardDisc4.$.MyClip,BF8As an alternative, you can use -s '4cif' which produces a clip of the same dimensions as the original, but on a StrongARM RiscPC this would only play at about one frame a second.
Warning: Down-sizing from DVD quality to a quarter size is very processor intensive, and converting one minute of DVD video, on a StrongARM RiscPC, takes about 25 minutes. Do not convert any more than you have to, and if you are planning to extract a long sequence, it might be best to leave it running overnight.
We can now treat MyClip as if we have just downloaded it from YouTube.
Play it in KinoAmp, to establish the required values of -ss and -t more accurately, and then edit ExtractClip, to ‘walk in’ its beginning and end points, if you really want to get a neat result.
By now, you will probably have realised that you can use the time settings of ExtractClip, and the remove border settings of CropBorders in one Obey file, ProcessClip, which will look something like:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -ss 1.24 -t 124.60 -i ADFS::HardDisc4.$.MyClip -f mpeg -sameq -acodec copy -cropleft 6 -croptop 22 -cropbottom 26 -cropright 6 ADFS::HardDisc4.$.MyClip2,BF8Please note: DVD+Rs have to be finalised in your DVD recorder, before CDFS will read them properly and allow you to get at the individual VOB files.
Another useful utility Chris Martin has ported to RISC OS, is the film splicer Mpgtx, which allows you to join segments of film together into one video.
The process of splicing is actually very simple, as long as the segments you want to join have been encoded with identical audio and video settings, and there is no unwanted padding before, or after, any of the required segments.
If that is the case, you can simply convert each of the segments seperately, then join them together using an Obey file something like this:
ADFS::HardDisc4.mpgtx -j ADFS::HardDisc4.Seg1 ADFS::HardDisc4.Seg2 ADFS::HardDisc4.Seg3 -o ADFS::HardDisc4.JoinedTo explain how we might process different segments to get around these problems, we can take a missing episode of Doctor Who as an example (and make a detour into the history of British television along the way).
Over the years, the BBC has ‘lost’ more than a hundred early, black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who!
After transmission, the original recordings were transferred from (then very expensive) videotape onto cheaper, celluloid film. The film copies were then gradually thrown out, because the BBC didn’t think anybody would ever want to see them again.
They only stopped this practice of ‘junking’ old, black-and-white episodes of classic series around 1978, when the emergence of the home video recorder created a whole new market for vintage British television.
The first of these missing episodes, is the first installment of the Marco Polo story, The Roof of the World, broadcast only once in 1964.
The first Doctor, William Hartnell, at his cantankerous best!
Without John Cura, we would have almost no visual record of many early TV programmes, for not only were many ‘junked’ to save space, but many others, like the early episodes of The Avengers, were broadcast live from a studio, and were never actually recorded in the first place.
Now, forty years later, a small band of enterprising fans are slowly marrying up the sound recordings of these early, missing Doctor Who episodes with the ‘Cura telesnaps,’ to produce the best representation of these programmes we are ever likely to have . . . at least until somebody takes a DVD recorder back to the 1960s in a home-made TARDIS!
These reconstructions are slowly turning up on YouTube, but because of the maximum time limits that they impose on videos, they will usually have been chopped into segments less than ten minutes long. Consequently, a 25-minute programme will have had to have been split into three parts, to get it onto YouTube in the first place.
It is, therefore, a good test of Mpgtx and FFMpeg, to see if we can use them to stitch some of these segments back together, and restore The Roof of the World to its former glory!
The first thing to do is to download the three sections of the episode, one, two and three, and save them as Marco1, Marco2 and Marco3/flv.
Although we could simply join the three segments together, we won’t get a very good result like that.
Some of the sections have an advert for BBC Audio at the end, and even once that has been removed, the start of the next segment does not line up precisely with the end of the previous one. So some ‘trimming’ is required to get the three segments to fit together neatly.
But there is a more serious problem, which soon becomes apparent if you drag the three FLV files onto the FFMpeg icon, and see what the program makes of them.
The audio settings on the first file are 56 Kb/s, mono, on the second, 64 Kb/s, mono and on the third 48 Kb/s, stereo. Also the first two files are 320 by 240 pixels in size, while the third is 352 by 264!
The audio paremeters are different in each file, and the last one has a larger frame size than the first two.
If we want to produce a joined MPEG file that is actually playable, we will first have to use FFMpeg to process the three files, so that the audio and video parameters are identical.
The first thing to do is copy Marco1/flv into your RAM disc and run an Obey file something like this:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -t 425.44 -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.marco1/flv -f mpeg -sameq -ab 64k -cropleft 2 -cropright 2 -cropbottom 2 RAM::RamDisc0.$.Marco1,BF8Now shift-drag Marco1/mpg onto your hard drive, copy Marco2/flv on to RAM disc, and run this Obey file:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -ss 6.4 -t 559.00 -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.marco2/flv -f mpeg -sameq -cropleft 2 -cropright 2 -cropbottom 2 RAM::RamDisc0.$.Marco2,BF8We need to cut about 3 seconds from the beginning of this segment, but if we try to do this while converting straight to MPEG, we get a ‘buffer underflow’ error, so we have to shuffle sideways and process this FLV in two stages.
To do this, we have to run the scariest Obey file of them all:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -ss 3.12 -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.marco3/flv -f avi -sameq -ac 1 -ab 64k -cropleft 18 -cropright 18 -cropbottom 14 -croptop 12 -vcodec mpeg1video RAM::RamDisc0.$.Marco3/AVI,FB2(Incidentally, it is a little known feature of KinoAmp that it will also play some AVIs, if the video format within the AVI ‘wrapper’ is CinePak or MPEG. You can actually double-click on this temporary file and play it!)
Now we just have to convert from AVI to MPEG:
ffmpeg:ffmpeg -i RAM::RamDisc0.$.Marco3/AVI -f mpeg -sameq -acodec copy RAM::RamDisc0.$.Marco3,BF8Not only is there some corruption to the downloaded video, which leads to pixellation and picture breakup, as well as glitches on the sound, but YouTube has also encoded it at a slightly larger frame size, forcing us to crop the edges more severely, in order to get the three segments to join together properly.
The corruption may be due to the panning effect, that the video’s creator has applied to the map, at the beginning of the segment, and it suggests that not all of the effects that can be created with video-editing software, will encode properly into YouTube’s FLV format.
Having experimented with this, I have found that it is possible to join the first and second segments together successfully, using this obey file:
ADFS::HardDisc4.mpgtx -j ADFS::HardDisc4.Marco1 ADFS::HardDisc4.Marco2 -o ADFS::HardDisc4.Marco12,BF8Shift-drag Marco12 and Marco3 into a directory called MarcoPolo.
Middle-click on the KinoAmp icon, on the iconbar, select Playlist, then drag the MarcoPolo directory to its input area and save the play list as PlayMarco.
You can now drag PlayMarco onto the KinoAmp icon, to play the whole episode.
Because of the bad coding of the third segment, this reconstructed episode is not perfect, but it is still pretty impressive.
Luckily, most splicing operations are not nearly as complicated as this, but it should have given you a pretty good idea of what to do, if you encounter problems.
And now, several hours after you started, sit back and enjoy The Roof of the World!
Doctor Who’s first companions, Ian and Barbara, enjoying the view!
Happy new year! The votes have been counted and we're pleased to announce the winners of The Icon Bar Awards for 2009. Thanks to everyone who took part and congratulations to all the nominees on the shortlist.And here are the results:
Congratulations to John Tytgat and Martin Wuerthner who worked on the new PostScript 3 printer driver. The new driver offers many improvements leading to higher quality both when printing to PostScript 3 printers and when creating PDF files. Martin also receives recognition for the latest version of the popular ArtWorks vector graphics package. New features included support for alpha masks and improvements to multi-page editing, text areas and PDF export.
NetSurf has won this category many times in the Drobe awards, and the trend continues here at TIB. Well done everyone involved. In the autumn the team pleaded for RISC OS developers to step forward and maintain the WIMP front end - so a tip of the hat to Steve Fryatt who has bravely offered to help out. Congratulations also to the GCC/SDK team for their crucial work on the platform's development tools. We give them the special tortoise award, since the 4.1.1 r2 release was made just a few days past the nomination cutoff date.
The Beagleboard port won the lion's share of the votes in this category, and deservedly so. As many of our commenters have pointed out this is where the future of RISC OS lies. Many hugs and kisses to Jeffrey Lee and the ROOL team.
Digital culture festival Alt Party won the Best Show award thanks to star guest Sophie Wilson. You can watch her talk on YouTube. Meanwhile ROUGOL celebrated its 10th birthday in style by organising its first show.
We have two awards for significant and lasting contributions to the RISC OS community.
In 2009, the RISC OS community lost one of its greatest advocates. Paul Vigay had been a fan of Acorn and RISC OS since the very early days and right up to his untimely death in February he continued to support and take an active part in the RISC OS community through Argonet and Orpheus, magazines, his websites, software and the masses of help and advice he provided on forums and newsgroups. He was a friendly figure at work and at shows and a great sport in our podcasts; Paul will be sorely missed.
Our second special award goes to Chris Williams. Drobe has been one of the top sources for RISC OS news since 1999 when it was started by Peter Price and Chris Williams. Over ten years Drobe provided nearly two and a half thousand items and consistently produced well written and timely news and articles. We'd like to think we gave Drobe a run for its money on occasions, but probably didn't most of the time. Overall, it's obvious that Chris has a passion and dedication for journalism and a professionalism which made Drobe the first choice for RISC OS news. Although the updates stopped in October 2009, Chris has left the entire backlog of articles available on the Drobe website.
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Well it's that time of year again. It hardly seems like a full year since we last wished all our readers a very Merry Christmas. Once again, most of you are probably too busy downing the bottle of something-that-you-found-in-the-back-of-the-cupboard, and stuffing yourself with mince pies to notice this post, but we're still going to say it anyway, just like we always do.Merry Christmas to all our readers, and we hope you have a wonderful new year - whatever you're doing and however you're celebrating.
And don't forget to vote for The Icon Bar Awards 2009 before the voting closes on New Year's Eve!
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Best New Development
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