Monday, August 10, 2020

JPEG XR (JPEG extended range)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR

JPEG XR[4] (JPEG extended range[5]) is a still-image compression standard and file format for continuous tone photographic images, based on technology originally developed and patented by Microsoft under the name HD Photo (formerly Windows Media Photo).[6] It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.
Support for the format is available in Adobe Flash Player 11.0, Adobe AIR 3.0, Sumatra PDF 2.1, Windows Imaging Component, .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 10, Internet Explorer 11, Pale Moon 27.2.[7][8][9] As of August 2014, there were still no cameras that shoot photos in the JPEG XR (.JXR) format.

Facebook’s new 3D photos





https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/07/how-facebooks-new-3d-photos-work/

Johannes Kopf, a research scientist at Facebook’s Seattle office, where its Camera and computational photography departments are based. Kopf is co-author (with University College London’s Peter Hedman) of the paper describing the methods by which the depth-enhanced imagery is created; they will present it at SIGGRAPH in August.
http://visual.cs.ucl.ac.uk/pubs/instant3d/





http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/makedm/

How to make Facebook 3D Photo from Stereo pair

Download the latest StereoPhoto Maker(ver5.29b or later)

I use DMAG(Depth Map Automatic Generator)64bit software to create the Depth map from stereo pair.
Grate thanks to Ugo Capeto 3D who made DMAG software!
Attention : DMAG works on 64bit Windows only!

3D Stereoscopic Photography

http://3dstereophoto.blogspot.com/


the3dconverter2

Download Here:
http://3dstereophoto.blogspot.com/2019/11/2d-to-3d-image-conversion-software-3d.html




wigglemaker.

DMAG5


I have tried it yet, if you do, let me know.


Extracting Depth Map Photos for the Looking Glass

https://blog.lookingglassfactory.com/process/extracting-depth-map-photos-for-the-looking-glass/

If your unaware of what Looking Glass is, it's truly amazing.
a life like 3D volumetric display.  Done using some sort of holographic or lenticular layers in front of a 2D display. It has a solid 2 inch thick Acrylic Brick that hold the optics together in a super solid fashion. Anyhow the end result is amazing.






RGB and depth map images


Article goes in to how to extract and manipulate a depth map using exiftool. 

https://exiftool.org/

ExifTool by Phil Harvey

Read, Write and Edit Meta Information!


Seems there is a magic undocumented command that might only run on MacOS?
-MPImage2




StereoPhoto Maker’s Looking Glass Web Tools site.


http://stereo.jpn.org/lkg/depth/depthe.html  
This is cool, seems the web page can detect and render directly to the Looking Glass.




Very high-speed Digital Subscriber Line 2 (VDSL2)


In 1994 I went and drew a chart of every possible way and strategy of getting internet in to a home.
Cable TV and Phone Lines being the most obvious, and using the water pipes or sewer also being options, and radio in various bands and arrangements from Micro Satellite dish, building neighborhood wifi mesh networks, various radio network topologies and immediately started working on all of these.

The idea that data could be pushed over a phone line and still leave the only analog phone line working unaffected is amazing.   My first T1 1.544 Mbit/s lines in 1995/7 used PairGain transceivers (it seemed like cheating because they were using ADSL to provide it) , that connected to the CSU/DSU and then a Cisco 2500 router to finally get an ethernet.   I say cheated because T1's use to be

Now they can push 300Mbit/s over these old phone lines. 

 line-modulation techniques for VDSL  are:

  • quadrature amplitude modulation (4-QAM) 
  • discrete multitone (DMT). a form of OFDM



The following list is a summary of existing OFDM-based standards and products. For further details, see the Usage section at the end of the article.

Wired version mostly known as Discrete Multi-tone Transmission (DMT)[edit]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL

Very high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL)[1] and Very high-speed Digital Subscriber Line 2 (VDSL2)[2] are digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies providing data transmission faster than Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL).
VDSL offers speeds of up to 52 Mbit/s downstream and 16 Mbit/s upstream,[3] over a single flat untwisted or twisted pair of copper wires using the frequency band from 25 kHz to 12 MHz.[4] These rates mean that VDSL is capable of supporting applications such as high-definition television, as well as telephone services (voice over IP) and general Internet access, over a single connection. VDSL is deployed over existing wiring used for analog telephone service and lower-speed DSL connections. This standard was approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in November 2001.
Second-generation systems (VDSL2; ITU-T G.993.2 approved in February 2006)[5] use frequencies of up to 30 MHz to provide data rates exceeding 100 Mbit/s simultaneously in both the upstream and downstream directions. The maximum available bit rate is achieved at a range of about 300 metres (980 ft); performance degrades as the local loop attenuation increases.




VersionStandard nameCommon nameDownstream rateUpstream rateApproved on
VDSLITU G.993.1VDSL55 Mbit/s3 Mbit/s2001-11-29
VDSL2ITU G.993.2VDSL2200 Mbit/s100 Mbit/s2006-02-17
VDSL2-VplusITU G.993.2
Amendment 1 (11/15)
VDSL2 Annex Q
VPlus/35b
300 Mbit/s100 Mbit/s2015-11-06
VDSL2 frequencies.png

VDSL2


The protocol is standardized in the International Telecommunication Union telecommunications sector (ITU-T) as Recommendation G.993.2. It was announced as finalized on 27 May 2005,[5] and first published on 17 February 2006. Several corrections and amendments were published from 2007 to 2011.[2]VDSL2 is an enhancement to VDSL designed to support the wide deployment of triple play services such as voice, video, data and high-definition television (HDTV) VDSL2 is intended to enable operators and carriers to gradually, flexibly, and cost-efficiently upgrade existing xDSL infrastructure.
VDSL2 permits the transmission of asymmetric and symmetric aggregate data rates up to 300+ Mbit/s downstream and upstream on twisted pairs using a bandwidth up to 35 MHz. It deteriorates quickly from a theoretical maximum of 350 Mbit/s at source to 100 Mbit/s at 500m (1640.42ft) and 50 Mbit/s at 1000m (3280.84ft), but degrades at a much slower rate from there, and outperforms VDSL. Starting from 1,600 m (1 mi) its performance is equal to ADSL2+.[
Bonding (ITU-T G.998.x) may be used to combine multiple wire pairs to increase available capacity, or extend the copper network's reach. Hybrid Access Networks  can be used to combine xDSL with wireless networks. This enables network operators to provide faster Internet access services over long lines.

Vplus/35b

Vplus is a technology to achieve higher speeds over existing VDSL2 networks. It was developed by Alcatel-Lucent and standardised in November 2015 in ITU G.993.2 Amendment 1 as VDSL2 profile 35b.[2] It promises to deliver speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s downstream and 100 Mbit/s upstream on loops shorter than 250 m. On longer loops, Vplus falls back to VDSL2 17a vectoring performance.[8] Vplus uses the same tone spacing as VDSL2 17a to allow vectoring across Vplus (35b) and 17a lines, and thus mixed deployments and a smooth introduction of Vplus.

Saturday, August 08, 2020

lightform - Video Projection Mapping.

https://lightform.com/


Lightform is a San Francisco, California. company developing AR hardware and software founded by Brett Jones, Raj Sodhi and Kevin Karsch in 2014


Lightform has two main products: the hardware, LF1, and the software, Lightform Creator. LF1 is a 3D scanner and media player that provides AR effects when it is paired with an image projector. LF1 performs this function by capturing the object that would be enhanced through AR application with its camera. After calibrating the image data according to the projector lens, the images are sent to the user’s laptop. Using the Lightform Creator, users can then apply AR effects based on their needs.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_mapping

Projection mapping, similar to video mapping and spatial augmented reality, is a projection technique[1][2] used to turn objects, often irregularly shaped, into a display surface for video projection. These objects may be complex industrial landscapes, such as buildings, small indoor objects or theatrical stages. By using specialized software, a two- or three-dimensional object is spatially mapped on the virtual program which mimics the real environment it is to be projected on. The software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto the surface of that object.[3] This technique is used by artists and advertisers alike who can add extra dimensions, optical illusions, and notions of movement onto previously static objects. The video is commonly combined with, or triggered by, audio to create an audio-visual narrative. In recent years this technique has also been widely used in the context of cultural heritage as it has proved to be an excellent edutainment[4] tool thanks to the combined use of a digital dramaturgy.



My old 3D stereo camera rig


Around year 2003.

2 NTSC bullet cameras commonly used in cctv, approx 60 fov.

It would go in to two of the CCTV dvr boards for experimentation.



Friday, August 07, 2020

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a container format for individual images and image sequences. It was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and is defined as Part 12 within the MPEG-H media suite (ISO/IEC 23008-12). MPEG claims that a HEIF image using HEVC requires about half the storage space as the equivalent quality JPEG. HEIF also supports animation, and is capable of storing more information[citation needed] than an animated GIF or APNG at a small fraction of the size.
Introduced in 2015, HEIF was adopted by Apple in 2017 with the introduction of iOS 11, and support on other platforms is growing.
HEIF files are a special case of the ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF, ISO/IEC 14496-12), first defined in 2001 as a shared part of MP4 and JPEG 2000. This file format standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video.

High Efficiency Image Container (HEIC) in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra in 2017.


HEIC And HEIF

HEIC is the container or file extension that holds HEIF images or sequences of images. HEIF borrows technology from the High Efficiency Video Compression (HEVC) codec, also known as h.265. Both HEVC and HEIF are proprietary technologies developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).




HEIF came into the mainstream when Apple made it the default format for its pictures on iOS11 devices and macOS High Sierra. However, other operating systems or websites don’t yet support HEIF and its HEIC file extension, so Apple’s operating systems will automatically convert the images to JPEG when users want to share them with friends who don’t use Apple products.
HEIC files can store not just multiple individual images, but also their image properties, HDR data, alpha and depth maps, and even their thumbnails.

Federal Judge Gives Greenlight To Termination Of Paramount Consent Decrees


A federal judge has given the green light to Justice Department to terminate the 71-year-old consent decrees that have restricted major studio control over the exhibition process.


https://deadline.com/2020/08/paramount-consent-decrees-justice-department-2-1203007221/ 

--

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.

United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948) (also known as the Hollywood Antitrust Case of 1948, the Paramount Case, the Paramount Decision or the Paramount Decree),[1] was a landmark United States Supreme Court antitrust case that decided the fate of film studios owning their own theatres and holding exclusivity rights on which theatres would show their movies. It would also change the way Hollywood movies were produced, distributed, and exhibited. The Supreme Court affirmed (a District Court's ruling) in this case that the existing distribution scheme was in violation of the United States antitrust law, which prohibit certain exclusive dealing arrangements.[2]
The case is important both in U.S. antitrust law and film history. In the former, it remains a landmark decision in vertical integration cases; in the latter, it is responsible for putting an end to the old Hollywood studio system.

Thursday, August 06, 2020

Qualcomm drops a BOMB on the VR Industry









Qualcomm had a press announcement this morning and the embargos have finally dropped. We are in for an entirely new wave of VR like we have ever seen. This.. is very well what we could have called VR 2.0 way back, but it's nothing like what I had expected. Over 15 companies have decided to work together for VR to go mainstream along with 5g adaptations. Lets see where this goes! new headsets, 5g, wireless, cheap.. exciting.

Here what i covered today:

Qualcomm press anounement regarding AR and VR ( XR ):
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/release...

HTC Former CEO forms a new VR company (XRSpace; Mova):
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21...

XRSpace Ready Player One like VR world:
https://www.techradar.com/news/xrspac...

Ford VR designed car:
https://fordauthority.com/2020/05/new...

HP reverb G2 leaks:
https://www.roadtovr.com/rumor-leaked...

Blastworld SteamVR page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/11...

Outtro music artist:
Protostar- Overdrive
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Qifig...

HoloLens 2 AR Headset: On Stage Live Demonstration

Just in case your not keeping up, here is where we are at now.










Wednesday, August 05, 2020

New Live Streaming TV site.

http://pervasys.com/


Just a test site for now, but you can do channel changing. 

If anyone has any live streaming video or audio URL's for youtube, twitch or else where please comment here and I will  add them. 

I just need an plain webpage or an URL I can drop in an iframe html tag.


Netflix Research


Just stumbled on this cool website where Netflix openly posts about some of the research they are doing. 


Video Encoding and Quality
https://research.netflix.com/research-area/video-encoding-and-quality

AI and Machine Learning

Streaming

Tuesday, August 04, 2020

Netflix, Youtube and the CDN.




It's amazing how I managed to completely lose out on video streaming and the CDN.

I started the first PC sound recording / playing device company in 1987 Zebra Research , Audio Byte (should have been Sound Byte, but customer went and trademarked our brand) .

From having started streaming video from a microscope in in 1989 across the Stanford campus and being able to teleoperate it, as project MUTLAS Multiple Location Time Lapse System.

I worked on the TCP/IP drivers for DOS and in 1989 I was able to stream audio across a TCP/IP socket and play it in real time on the PC, as well as from a Floppy Disk.

I creating the first real time streaming video codec Cell-B, using vector quantization in 1992 on a short term contract for Sun Microsystems CEO directly. We streamed to 13,000 viewers from 384 Sun Servers, globally .

Earlier that same year I had posted the source code for the BSD Unix Operating system (386/BSD) to the internet having had helped in a small way to port it to the PC.  My primary interest was in being able to do Video more effectively.   I have since had a lot of influence over the FreeBSD video system and had written V4L2 Linux Kernel Drivers.  My contract employee we hired to fix the FreeBSD audio system later went on to head the FreeBSD project, Luigi Rizzo.

In 1993 Sun shares this codec with Xero Park and it make it in to the NV first video conferencing software

By 1994 I had my product Livecam working somewhat, I also partnered with Xing to create Streamworks Mpeg 2 streamer based on their windows MPEG player.

 I recieved $100,000 for my Startup Netsys in 1994 to build the first CDN, Netsys Inc.  I called it the SDSN Symmetrically Distributed Server network.

By 1996 Netsys failed, and a new company had formed DVT (Digital Video Technology) and IBS (Internet Broadcast Systems) we have 1M simultaneous streaming viewers watching live content. By 1997 we went broke because we could collect credit card payments and the cost of Bandwidth.

In 1997 in Korea we built the first Digital CCTV systems with Internet video stream from rehashing the livecam technology. I developed the first multichannel Video capture board, initially 16x multiplexer in to one video capture card.  connected to a printer port, but this was quickly integrated in to a single board, and immediately copied across Seoul by everyone we showed it too.

In 1998 we reformed again in to DVBS, Digital Video Broadcast System, which went public on the Vancouver Stock Exchange in 1999 only to crash and burn taking down a profitable company with it.

I put the last of my savings in to Enumera 2000/1, a Cell Processor company with an architecture similar to CUDA as well as the first Blade Servers. The cooling solutions later became Nisvara 2002 - 2006. 

The next 6 years were lean times.

In 2003 VCT Vision CCTV dvr company was formed, and fell about around 2006. 

In 2006 I worked with Citrix Online to help scaling and capacity planning, on the roll out of 1080p HD video conferencing in to GotoMeeting and a stream of GotoX products.

Their CDN was built out original from the head Sysadmin from one of the ISP's we partnered with in 1996 and had built out a very similar system to what I had at that time.


Youtube started in 2005. There largest provider of Bandwidth is Peer one, and ISP we worked with in 1999 with DVBS to build out our CDN again. They successfully implement by idea of reaching so much bandwidth that you can force Peering agreements and get the Bandwidth for free because it starts costing more ISP's to not offer you a caching server.


Netflix started streaming services in 2007, and by 2009 had built an internal control center called Netflix Content Control Plane (NCCP). NCCP's job was to steer the end user to the right edge (CDN location), whereas the actual content delivery was done by third party providers like Akamai, Level 3 Communications, and Limelight Networks. The team moved to an internal CDN in 2011, calling it Open Connect, and with it came the entire job of managing the infrastructure.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/09/global-cdn-netflix/

Netflix Content Control Plane (NCCP)

https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-around-the-globe-to-deliver-a-great-viewing-experience

Netflix's move to their in-house CDN -- Open Connect

They run on a custom fork of FreeBSD with NGINX.


Even the OS I had a hand in and NGINX is similar to the (now long abandon)  Afterburner web server developed by Aryeh Friedman and myself. 

Because of this whole cycle of boom and bust, with inconsistent investment and revenues we would lose all the patents before any of them get completely finished being filed. 




Monday, August 03, 2020

Basis Universal : Supercompressed GPU Video Texture Codec


I was poking about inside Mozilla's big WebXR demo to see how it was made.
 https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/hello-webxr/

Most of the assets are xxx.basis files.  ".basis"  I had never heard of a dot basis file and not much came up on the internet. 

Digging deeper I found a compiled Web Assembly Library and a javascript library wrapper for it.

  60935   basis_transcoder.js
 367268   basis_transcoder.wasm



They also used Draco which is also interesting for 3D object compression. 

In further searching it's starting to look like this basis codec is going to be a standard part of three.js and therefore aframe.io for web based VR development. 

Basis Universal GPU Texture Compression

texture video compression system that outputs a highly compressed intermediate file format (.basis) that can be quickly transcoded to a wide variety of GPU texture compression formats.


basis_universal

Basis Universal Supercompressed GPU Texture Codec
Basis Universal is a "supercompressed" GPU texture compression system that outputs a highly compressed intermediate file format (.basis) that can be quickly transcoded to a very wide variety of GPU compressed and uncompressed pixel formats: ASTC 4x4 L/LA/RGB/RGBA, PVRTC1 4bpp RGB/RGBA, PVRTC2 RGB/RGBA, BC7 mode 6 RGB, BC7 mode 5 RGB/RGBA, BC1-5 RGB/RGBA/X/XY, ETC1 RGB, ETC2 RGBA, ATC RGB/RGBA, ETC2 EAC R11 and RG11, FXT1 RGB, and uncompressed raster image formats 8888/565/4444.
The system now supports two modes: a high quality mode which is internally based off the UASTC compressed texture format, and the original lower quality mode which is based off a subset of ETC1 called "ETC1S". UASTC is for extremely high quality (similar to BC7 quality) textures, and ETC1S is for very small files. The ETC1S system includes built-in data compression, while the UASTC system includes an optional Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) post-process stage that conditions the encoded UASTC texture data in the .basis file so it can be more effectively LZ compressed by the end user. More technical details about UASTC integration are here.
Basis files support non-uniform texture arrays, so cubemaps, volume textures, texture arrays, mipmap levels, video sequences, or arbitrary texture "tiles" can be stored in a single file. The compressor is able to exploit color and pattern correlations across the entire file, so multiple images with mipmaps can be stored very efficiently in a single file.
The system's bitrate depends on the quality setting and image content, but common usable ETC1S bitrates are .3-1.25 bits/texel. ETC1S .basis files are typically 10-25% smaller than using RDO texture compression of the internal texture data stored in the .basis file followed by LZMA. For UASTC files, the bitrate is fixed at 8bpp, but with RDO post-processing and user-provided LZ compression on the .basis file the effective bitrate can be as low as 2bpp for video or for individual textures approximately 4-6bpp.
The transcoder has been fuzz tested using zzuf.
So far, we've compiled the code using MSVS 2019, under Ubuntu x64 using cmake with either clang 3.8 or gcc 5.4, and emscripten 1.35 to asm.js. (Be sure to use this version or later of emcc, as earlier versions fail with internal errors/exceptions during compilation.) The compressor is multithreaded by default, but this can be disabled using the -no_multithreading command line option. The transcoder is currently single threaded.
Basis Universal supports "skip blocks" in ETC1S compressed texture arrays, which makes it useful for basic compressed texture video applications. Note that Basis Universal is still at heart a GPU texture compression system, not a video codec, so bitrates will be larger than even MPEG1.

Important Usage Notes

Probably the most important concept to understand about Basis Universal before using it: The system supports two very different universal texture modes: The original "ETC1S" mode is low/medium quality, but the resulting file sizes are very small because the system has built-in compression for ETC1S texture format files. This is the command line encoding tool's default mode. ETC1S textures work best on images, photos, map data, or albedo/specular/etc. textures, but don't work as well on normal maps. There's the second "UASTC" mode, which is significantly higher quality (near-BC7 grade), and is usable on all texture types including complex normal maps. UASTC mode purposely does not have built-in file compression like ETC1S mode does, so the resulting files are quite large (8-bits/texel - same as BC7) compared to ETC1S mode. The UASTC encoder has an optional Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) encoding mode (implemented as a post-process over the encoded UASTC texture data), which lowers the output data's entropy in a way that results in better compression when UASTC .basis files are compressed with Deflate/Zstd, etc. In UASTC mode, you must losslessly compress the file yourself.
Basis Universal is not an image compression codec. It's a texture compression codec. It can be used just like an image compression codec, but that's not the only use case. Here's a good intro to GPU texture compression. If you're looking to primarily use the system as an image compression codec on sRGB photographic content, use the default ETC1S mode, because it has built-in compression.
The "-q X" option controls the output quality in ETC1S mode. The default is quality level 128. "-q 255" will increase quality quite a bit. If you want even higher quality, try "-max_selectors 16128 -max_endpoints 16128" instead of -q. -q internally tries to set the codebook sizes (or the # of quantization intervals for endpoints/selectors) for you. You need to experiment with the quality level on your content.
For tangent space normal maps, you should separate X into RGB and Y into Alpha, and provide the compressor with 32-bit/pixel input images. Or use the "-separate_rg_to_color_alpha" command line option which does this for you. The internal texture format that Basis Universal uses (ETC1S) doesn't handle tangent space normal maps encoded into RGB well. You need to separate the channels and recover Z in the pixel shader using z=sqrt(1-x^2-y^2).

3rd party code dependencies

The stand-alone transcoder (in the "transcoder" directory) is a single .cpp source file library which has no 3rd party code dependencies.
The encoder uses lodepng for loading and saving PNG images, which is Copyright (c) 2005-2019 Lode Vandevenne. It uses the zlib license. It also uses apg_bmp for loading BMP images, which is Copyright 2019 Anton Gerdelan. It uses the Apache 2.0 license.
The encoder uses tcuAstcUtil.cpp, from the Android drawElements Quality Program (deqp) Testing Suite, for unpacking the transcoder's ASTC output for testing/validation purposes. This code is Copyright 2016 The Android Open Source Project, and uses the Apache 2.0 license. We have modified the code so it has no external dependencies, and disabled HDR support.



This package uses BASIS and discusses is a little. 

Digital humans that look just like us | Doug Roble

Sunday, August 02, 2020

One negative review of xsplit.

Frustrated doesn't even come close to what I'm feeling. I'm using OBS and X-split to make my videos and X-Split is giving me fits. I'm pretty done with it! The audio and video continue to be out of sync even though I've micro adjusted the settings, gotten a new hard drive, high speed internet and now use an ethernet cord. WHO KNOWS WHAT OTHER SOFTWARE I CAN USE BESIDES XSPLIT??? I have my debit card ready, lol.
*Note unless you know what I'm talking about, it's ok, please  don't worry about it. 
**And NO, I'm not messing with Xsplit anymore right now. 
😬😖😩