Photos

images (possibly containing dirs not yet linked here)

• current galleries (some original material, some linked from the scan/dcim dirs)
• recent digital camera images
• older (mostly slide) scans

Computer Aided Digital Video
(mostly linux oriented) (not entirely up to date with respect to playback and conversion of asf/divx material under linux)

NOTE: I really oughta clean up sometime soon <g>

• svcd picture size adaption table
• mpeg 2 description (only titles are in chinese)(local copy)

• [borken,outdated]ASF Standards Description - it's up somewhere, but I currently don't remember the URL. Search Altavista - it is there, because M$ wanted it to be adopted by ISO, who appear to have given Quicktime the preference though
• ASF to mpg/divx to mpg/nuv to mpg: our Exportvideo/avi2mpegpatch enables you to do just that (see below). Previously, to convert ASF to MPEG, you had to use window$ and perform point and drool operations: news postings (referring to 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Some of them involved graphedt.exe from the M$ DirectX SDK.
• The MPEG Consortium with overpriced standards
• ASF Patent
• VirtualDub 1.3c GPL'd source code still includes asf reader! (local backup copy); later versions had to remove the format when M$ threatened to sue
• The Experts:
  • LiVid - Linux Video
  • Open DVD
  • DeCSS and local copy
• The Linux Way: As advertised on Freshmeat - mpeg_movie from heroine includes customized versions of mpeg_encode, an mpeg audio encoder, the MPEG system multiplexer and demux and little to no additional documentation - besides it doesn't compile at all on my glibc-2.1 system (rhl 6.0 borg with roots going down to slackware 3.x and redhat 4.2) (but runs fine when compiled on an approporiate glibc-2.0 system)
• The above mentioned mpeg_encode component - It's primary site is supposed to be mm-ftp.CS.Berkeley.EDU, but then it is also supposed to run on &quot; DECstation 5000 and Alpha, HP PA-RISC (HP/UX 9.X) (i.e., HP 9000/7XX and 9000/3XX), SGI Indigo running IRIX 5.0.1, Sun Sparc (SunOS 4.X)&quot;, still there exist Linux and various BSD ports.
• SAMPEG-2/SAMPEG-4 by Dirk Farin - scene adaptive MPEG-2 encoder now gpled freeware! help dirk to write the best encoder available under linux yet!
• [borken]mp1e home, old patches and current download site (metalab/ibiblio) - fast mplexing grabbing mpeg encoder, only produces i-frames though.
• Fame - Fast Assembly MPEG Encoder: only I-frames
• FFmpeg is a real time video and audio encoder for Linux
  the number of usable output formats is amazing: mpeg, realvideo (rv/rm/ram), divx, flash (any more?)
• original RTJpeg - great video codec that ingeniously only saves picture blocks that have significantly changed
• romans nuppelvideo builds on RTJpeg but incorporates sophisticated forking, audio capturing and other measures to guarantee synchronisation on slow processors (for 384x288 a ~ 300 - 400 MHz K6 is needed depending on the system configuration, including parameters such as sound card (pci awe/terratec is better, isa is worse), cache, main memory and so on. Videos in this fromat can be converted to mpg using
• our Exportvideo/avi2mpegpatch
• [german]Linux als Videoschnittsystem? (~ Linux for Video Cutting, german only, but with fine link collection)
• mpeg systems stream multiplexer: Boston University/MCL system encoder, mplex (was at tu muenchen from moar, however both links are currently broken. ask ftpsearch or get it with the mpeg_movie package (see above)). bttvgrab has one too - and it doesn't work any better. Is it me, the streams I am trying to join or the programs?
• MainActor from MainConcept is commercial software (so much so they put black lines into videos encoded with the demo version), but it seems to be good solid software. Available for linux x86/alpha and M$ Windows - buy one license key, use it on any platform. I didn't get the viewer to work yet, but it would perform well if I could (libSDL DGA support, optimizations?). As an aside, it doesn't handle the weird M$ formats (MP43 avi and any ASF) under Linux any more than other products.
• MPEG Audio Encoders
  • TooLame - lightning fast, Lame-derived MPEG Audio Layer 1/2 encoder
• TV shows
  • South Park: Most Eps, rotating episodes on the news
  • Babylon 5: rotating eps on usenet
  • Sopranos: check altoid's irc server for location and access tokens
  • Sopranos, Quantum Leap and others can also be found in the newsgroup alt.binaries.multimedia
  • Star Trek
    • alt.binaries.startrek
    • Insurrection VCD in rar format
    • Alt.Binaries.Startrek Episode Posting Log by Alister Fiend
    • Futurama Chronicles
• NNTP News Sources
  • List of Premium Usenet Service Providers with provider traceroute pages by Jeremy Nixon from supernews
  • group list for all groups
  • search for open news servers carrying your groups
  • deja, of course
  • http://news.cis.dfn.de
  • news:alt.free.newsservers
  • giniss - what's the catch? all binaries groups are there
  • Usenet Report - comparison of premium news providers (currently offline?)
  • Freenewsgroups
  • serverseekers
  • News Server resource center
  • long list of publically accessible newsservers, few if any of them are likely to carry binary groups, though
• Playback of Multimedia content
  • XMPS 0.1.1beta supports DIVX AVI playback using a bag of tricks and the windows dll. get it from there or download the binaries here (i386, patch to support (non-esd-)sound with mpegs; you might or might not have to install additional libraries, the tgz was tarred from what I needed on a debian 2.2 system (not the compile system!). note the weird stow format with lotsa symlinks)
  • dvdview by Dirk Farin, the author of SAMPEG-2, the scene adaptive MPEG-2 encoder (unluckily only available in binary form (yet?), ask him about GPL-compatible releases)
  • aviplay/avilib - library for playing DivX ;-). This is also the base for xmps above, and kwintv (the kde v4l player application) has been reported to record in avi using the appropriate dll, this library and a patch.
  • Xtheater doesn't play anything but mpegs yet, but is supposed to be able to read vcds.
  • mtvp is still the best mpeg player out there: superb synchronisation, playing from stdin, http streams, vcds and files etc.
    However, it is a commercial product (non-commercial, non-governmental unlimited trial use of the non-gui player is permitted and development licenses are available, though); audio support for the generic oss driver is bad (in our experiments with cheap sb clones but also with the sb128/pci card of a cow-orker only setting MTVP_AUDIO_OSS_DELAY_METHOD to 4 lead to acceptable playback with some streams); it doesn't (yet afaik) support OpenGL or Xvideo scaling
  • Realaudio/Realmedia: Real Networks usually provide halfways recent players for content authored in their proprietary format. Since this is a way of no return, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the format, but sometimes you might just be stuck with it.
    Security concerns over information leaks/gathering have been voiced on the bugtraq list ...
    Occasionally alpha versions have been available from this url
  • netshow_linux from m$. only plays mpeg 4 version 1 asf streams, but it is still noteworthy for this capability. find it on ftpsearch - in fact, non-linux versions seem to be available from some locations, too
  • Mainactor is supposed to include a fast video player for the supported formats; I wouldn't know, it always crashed on me.
  • the smpeg library from lokigames includes a command line application, a gtk version and an opengl mpeg player. Synchronisation is still inferior to mtvp, but it is the best hope the free software community has: xmps is also based on a recent version of this library.
• Audio Redirection/Recording (afaik (Linux) OSS/Free only)
  • libaudiooss - a transparent OSS emulation on top of the Network Audio System
  • dspd
  • vsound, patch for realplayer g2
  • EsounD/esd, the Enlightened Sound Daemon, might also be abused to this end
• mjpeg library - hopes to embrace as many different formats as possible, care is taken to ensure smooth playback. what about recording?????
• [german] Siemens/Hauppauge DVB Report from Linux Magazin Deutschland
• dvgrab - reads dv data from a dv camcorder over ieee1394 into an avi file. mental note: try to borrow that camcorder rsn
• FIASCO! - Fractal Image And Sequence COdec. The methods seem to be there, Ullrich Hafners PhD Thesis is available in deadtree format :-/
  This is certainly the future, but will only be practical when VR3-shaped boxes can stream fractal video and algorithmically coded audio over umts ...
• [german] Fraktale Videokompression - a paper on fractal video compression by Thomas Harrer
• Grabbing/Capping
  • bttvgrab - Grabbing Application with multiple output formats and an integrated mpeg1/2 encoder for v4l (particularly bt8[47]8* cards). Problems: development since 04/2000 seems to have stopped; the tcl/tk interface doesn't optimally interface with the backend; some intermediate foormats crash the encoder
  • xawtv - v4l/bttv TV application with AW GUI, lirc interface, grabber, radio and fb-tv applications ...

Standards, Theses, Abstracts ...

• [german]Diplomarbeit: Eine Videokomponente für das Videokonferenzsystem Multimedia Collaboration von Nicolai Leymann 1996
• Sampeg - Scene Adaptive MPEG 2 Encoder Thesis by Dirk Farin

Sound Clips

• Absolutely Fabulous Sounds Archive

I/O Peripherals and Drivers

• Mass Storage (currently only CD-R)
  • cdrecord by Jörg Schilling (mkisofs 1.12 included, cdda2wav on site, ftp, blank media capacity list)
    update 2/2006: after using cdrecord-prodvd for three years and experiencing repeated timeouts due to license glitches there now seems to be a new cdrecord-prodvd binary for linux; honestly I couldn't care less anymore, I'm fed up with the closed source and binary expiration policy and currently use
  • DVD+RW/+R/-R[W] for Linux (in particular growisofs for dvd burning - the syntax is different, but it gets the job done)
  • cdrdao Writes Disc-at-Once Images (including bin/cue support), however it seems my TEAC/JVC-OEM Pinnacle RCD-1000 refuses to write a lead-out in this mode (documented problem?), so I'll just have to stick with cdrecord above
  • List of CD-R vendor Codes (on the Sony web site, link from the cdrdao page)
  • vcdtools including mkvcdfs, vcdmplex. note: none of the available multiplexers seem to work well for me, see above
  • VCDpad expands MPEG Systems streams to 2324 bytes sectors

Glue Links to the Other Media

• etext - read it
• music - old
• kaestner - my first webpage (a verse from a poem by Erich Kästner)
• news - nntp, newsservers etc.