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Website

PokeTalk – Call your friends for free

I recently came across this website www.poketalk.com.
poketalk
This website allows you to place international phone calls for free!
What’s the catch? Well… a single phonecall is limited to 10 minutes, and you have 50 phonecalls per month (Tip- you can re-register with a different e-mail address to get extra 50 calls).
Once you place a call, the phone will ring at your house, and when you pick up, the phone will ring at the destination. That way both of you are having incoming calls and won’t be charged.
The main difference between this service and www.Jajah.com (another phone-to-phone service), is that you don’t have to register a specific number on either side to get the call for free.
So, this is definitely a website I recommend adding to your favorites.

Categories
programming

OpenGL for AviSynth [Update: now w/code]

Hi
I had a little project at work recently, that involved creating movie clips using AviSynth.
And I was appalled by the shabbiness of existing transition plugins available freely for AviSynth, they always reminded me of 80s-like video editing…
So I set out to integrate AviSynth with OpenGL to create a nice 3D transition effect for our movie clips.
I had 2 major bases to cover:

  • AviSynth plugin API
  • OpenGL rendering

AviSynth API is not so well documented, but they have very good ground-up examples on how to DIY plugin. Here is the one I used, that basically does nothing but copy the input frame to the output frame.
Open GL on the other hand is very well documented and “tutorialed”. I based my code on this example from NeHe.
So basically what I wanted to achive is:

  1. Read input frame (AviSynth)
  2. Paint frame as texture over 3D model (OpenGL)
  3. Draw rendered 3D image to output frame (OpenGL+AviSynth)

Reading the frame is pretty straightforward. Frames come encoded as RGB 24bit, with a little twist: rows size in bytes is not width*3 as you’d expect it be, but AviSynth use a parameter called “Pitch” to determine row size in bytes.
Update (14/9/09): source is now available in the repo: browse download

Continue reading “OpenGL for AviSynth [Update: now w/code]”
Categories
comics

Lay-off badges


The Israeli hi-tech market inspired me…

Categories
ffmpeg graphics gui linux programming qt video

Showing video with Qt toolbox and ffmpeg libraries

I recently had to build a demo client that shows short video messages for Ubuntu environment.
After checking out GTK+ I decided to go with the more natively OOP Qt toolbox (GTKmm didn’t look right to me), and I think i made the right choice.
So anyway, I have my video files encoded in some unknown format and I need my program to show them in a some widget. I went around looking for an exiting example, but i couldn’t find anything concrete, except for a good tip here that led me here for an example of using ffmpeg’s libavformat and libavcodec, but no end-to-end example including the Qt code.
The ffmpeg example was simple enough to just copy-paste into my project, but the whole painting over the widget’s canvas was not covered. Turns out painting video is not as simple as overriding paintEvent()…
Firstly, you need a separate thread for grabbing frames from the video file, because you won’t let the GUI event thread do that.
That makes sense, but when the frame-grabbing thread (I called VideoThread) actually grabbed a frame and inserted it somewhere in the memory, I needed to tell the GUI thread to take that buffered pixels and paint them over the widget’s canvas.
This is the moment where I praise Qt’s excellent Signals/Slots mechanism. So I’ll have my VideoThread emit a signal notifying some external entity that a new frame is in the buffer.
Here’s a little code:

Continue reading “Showing video with Qt toolbox and ffmpeg libraries”
Categories
comics

Thinking of new services…

Categories
comics

Take that – Toyota Prius!

Inspired by this article in the Telegraph.

Categories
programming

The strange case of the BackgroundWorker and the disappearing exception

I was recently building a simple GUI in .NET to operate an algorithm as part of a school project, and I encountered a weird problem using BackgroundWorkers. I spent a lot of time debugging it, mainly because the code seemed to be perfect (which was true) but the run-time behavior was so strange…
Anyway, to make my algorithm as weakly-coupled as possible decided not to use ‘BackgroundWorker.ReportProgress‘, because then my algorithm will have to know what a BackgroundWorker is…
I decided to actually fire my own event whenever I wanted to report on the algorithm progress (which is rather lenghty). So I defined my delegate and event inside my one-function class that runs the algorithm:

Continue reading “The strange case of the BackgroundWorker and the disappearing exception”
Categories
graphics

DIY: Cow skin pattern for your GIMPed cows

I wanted to share with you a (very simple and short) method for creating cow-skin patterns, totally random each time, for your GIMPin needs.
This can actually work the exact same way in GIMP, PS or Paint.NET.
I will demonstrate with GIMP, but it is so simple you can do it in any of the aforementioned programs.
So here goes:

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Categories
comics

Honest typo

Categories
comics

Where all the babes hang

* Made with Paint.NET