Sonification of Traveling Landscapes

I just heard a talk called “Real-Time Synaesthetic Sonification of Traveling Landscapes” (PDF) by Tim Pohle and Peter Knees from the Department of Computational Perception (great name!) in Linz. They have made an application creating music from a moving video camera. The implementation is based on grabbing a one pixel wide column from the video, [...]

GeoVision MPEG4 Codec

I recently received a video file with some material I am supposed to analyse. The problem was that I couldn’t figure out what type of codec was used. VLC told me that it uses a codec called GMP4. After some research I have found that this means an MPEG-4 codec developed by GeoVision. I have [...]

Flash Movie Conversion on OS X

Looking for a solution to make flash movies on OS X, I came across this nice tutorial based on FFMPEGX. In terms of video quality I prefer to create videos with H.264 compression using MPEG Streamclip, but since flash seems to be the de facto standard on the web these days I will try to [...]

Video broadcasting

Vegard mentioned QuickTime Broadcaster in a blog entry yesterday. While QT broadcaster is certainly easy to set up and use, I have found it even easier to use some of the video broadcasting solutions in Max/MSP/Jitter. The jit.qt.broadcast object allows for QT streaming, but I have found the jit.broadcast object using RTSP to be somewhat [...]

Choosing the Right Video Format

The discussion about video standards for live processing has been summarised as: Codec: Motion JPEG (for interlaced footage) or Photo JPEG. Compression ratio/quality: Quality 80 is a decent baseline for JPEG, though you can crank as high as 97 to improve quality. Keyframes: Encode a keyframe on every frame so it’s ‘scratch-ready’. Alpha channels: For [...]