I’ve been making some rock & roll with the Sunrunners the past few months. You can check out:

http://soundcloud.com/sunrunners anything we’ve recorded (1 song so far)

ustream.tv/sunrunners our shows streaming live when possible (and the archives)

facebook.com/sunrunnersband to stay up to date on when you can see us in person around the SF bay, LA, and SD this fall.

sunrunnersband.com which I think just redirects to facebook at this point

twitter.com/sunrunnersband which is probably just the same as facebook, but less.

I had the chance to test and evaluate a Digital Rapids Touchstream encoder a few weeks ago. The first thing I learned is that Digital Rapids has their own?* AVC(H.264) codec on the Touchstream called DRAVC for Web. There was something noticeably different about the video, compared to the FMLE and Ustream Producer streams at which I spend so many hours staring. I can’t necessarily say it was better or worse or describe what exactly was different, but there was a tangible difference in the look of the video. It had a similar UI to the Kulabyte software, where all of your encoding configuration is done within a separate preset-maker application. I guess I understand it, but I’m not a big fan of that setup.

After having success streaming with a low-res test preset, I decided to push the frame size and bit rate a bit. To my dismay, the video would not load on my macbook, but played fine on my windows machine. I send out a call on Yammer for people to check out the stream and report back with their OS and browser and whether or not the video loaded. The results came trickling in and it seemed most people on macs just had a player constantly trying to load and never saw the video. All but 1 person on a windows computer could see the video without issue or incident. Having dealt with the mysterious mac jittery issue, I tried disabling the hardware acceleration and the video immediately played upon refresh. So when the decoding was left up to the Flash Player software, the video played perfectly, but with acceleration enabled, the graphics card in my macbook(NVIDIA GeForce 320M) was unable to decode the video that had been encoded using the DRAVC codec.

I spoke with my contacts at Digital Rapids and they said they were aware of the issue and that it had only recently started happening on Macbook laptops. I went back to my coworker who had been unable to see the video on his windows laptop and it turned out his PC had an NVIDIA graphics card, and disabling FP hardware acceleration solved his issue as well.

All of this made me reevaluate my previous conclusion that the jittery video was an issue between apple and flash. It seemed to be more of an issue with H.264 decoding and NVIDIA, considering we had now observed 2 distinct decoding failures from different encoding implementations. Coincidentally, in the 2 weeks I had the Touchstream and figured all of this out, Apple released the newest generation of Macbook Pro laptops and NVIDIA was nowhere to be found, having been replaced by AMD. It’s good to know there aren’t more of them being made, but from a streaming perspective, it is a bit troubling how many of those Macbooks with the NVIDIA cards are out in the wild. From the broadcaster end, the only way I know to ensure your H.264 stream will not be jittery on those macs is to use Baseline Profile, or to limit your frame size to 512 x 288 or smaller when using Main Profile. Certainly not ideal, but it is something to consider and if you are getting complaints from a client or viewers about the stream being jittery, it’s good to know that a quick switch to Baseline Profile H.264 can fix the problem.

*I think I read somewhere that Digital Rapids used the Nero H.264 codec, but can’t find it now and it may have been outdated anyhow. I don’t see anywhere in Digital Rapids’ current documentation that gives Nero(or anyone else) any credit for the H.264 encoding.

working hard

Around August, I started noticing jittery playback on some streams, and adding to the troubleshooting complexity was the fact that they weren’t jittering for everyone. In fact, I could have two instances of the same feed open on my computer with one jittering and the other playing back smoothly. The first trend we noticed was that it was only happening on Macs. Next was that it seemed to happen most often in the Chrome browser. Ultimately we determined that the “trigger” for this jittering was GPU acceleration kicking in to assist with the H.264 decoding. For instance, on my MacBook Pro with 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU, the jittering starts when the video is H.264, Main Profile, Level 4.0 with a resolution of 640 x 360 or greater. From the delivery side, we see the issue most often on streams coming from a Tricaster encoding Main Profile, Level 4.0 H.264 video. Adobe has several open bugs regarding Flash player hardware acceleration issues and we are anxiously awaiting a fix.

In the meantime there are a couple things you can do to get around the problem. If you’re doing the encoding, dropping the H.264 Profile from Main down to Baseline will eliminate the problem. I know many experts who are horrified by the idea of using Baseline profile H.264, but to be perfectly honest, unless you’re doing larger frame sizes and huge bit rates, I don’t think Main profile offers a drastic improvement in perceived quality. On the viewing end, if you’re seeing the jitter, you can CTRL+click on the player to bring up your Flash Player settings and disable the hardware acceleration. That process and the jitter itself are illustrated in the video I made below.

Insanity Prevention Tip #1
The MIDI pins are not numbered in order.

I didn’t have internet access when I was first working on this, so I spent a few fruitless, frustrating hours trying different combinations of the wrong wires and pins. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that I was using a 220 ohm potentiometer in lieu of a resistor(because I happened to have one). Eventually, I got it straightened out and had the tutorial note loop playing, so it was time to try writing some musical code.

Insanity Prevention Tip #2
There are 2 different conventions for numbering MIDI notes, depending on the manufacturer’s definition of “Middle C”. If the chart you are referencing is showing different note numbers than what is being played, try transposing your code up or down by an octave(or use a different chart). This anomaly is fairly obvious if you are playing musical tones, but can be somewhat mysterious and frustrating if you’re playing percussion or sound effects.

I’m not a very good drummer, but I have about 3 songs I can bust out if I ever happen upon a drum kit. One of them is the opening to “Sifting” by Nirvana. I hardcoded the arduino to play this beat on a loop on my Boss DR-660. Here’s my code.

For a slightly more complicated task, I programmed the arduino to play the synth opening to “Girl” by Beck on my microkorg. My code.

Not exactly right, but I was starting to hate the song so I quit before it got to that point. I just found this note duration tool, which would have been invaluable if I really cared about the timing. Next up is programming some continuous control…

1. caterpillar fattens up on milkweed leaves
2. caterpillar hangs for a day or two
3. bright green chrysalis forms, stays that way a couple days
4. chrysalis turns black for a day
5. butterfly comes out

One memorable time, the chrysalis stayed black especially long and instead of a monarch butterfly, we were greeted by a steady stream of baby spiders I can only assume hatched from eggs that were laid in the caterpillar’s back. Shudder.

Anyhow, the point is none of us had ever witnessed the transition from 2 to 3, including my parents and grandma who had done this same gathering and observing in their childhoods. I assumed the chrysalis was somehow spun, but for all I knew it was magic. I brought two of them to my apartment and had been watching them turn milkweed leaves into dry poop pellets for about a week before one began his upside down hang. I had the video camera set up and got home from work just in time to see the dangling body undulating like an alien was trying to escape. I rolled tape just before the magical moment began.

While the caterpillar’s body is hanging, it is attached to the silk button by its 2 hind legs. As the pupa works the caterpillar skin up towards the top, just before the shedding is complete, it grabs on to the bunched up skin. For a moment, this is the only thing keeping it from falling. Around the 2:50 mark, the pupa pulls out a hooked stem called the cremaster and works it into the silk button, dropping the caterpillar skin to the ground.

I’m going to alternate shoes each run and see if any trends emerge over time. I’ve been “off” since mid-October, but ran a 5K yesterday and today, one in each pair. Both days I ran an 8:40 min/mile pace, so things are even so far.

It’s not perfect, but nike+ is a pretty useful run tracking system and a great motivator. Even though I’m probably the only one looking at it, I feel bad whenever I haven’t run in a while and my profile is broadcasting my laziness. I’ll post an update once I have significantly more data, but if you want to follow the progress closely or you think you have what it takes to LunarChallenge me(you probably do), my nike+ id is andyfrancis.

To commemorate this historic proclamation, I rasterbated Mike Mitchell‘s sweet “I’m with COCO” graphic, and hung it on my roof.

Rasterbator is pretty gd awesome if you have a printer, scissors, scotch tape, and time. It takes any image, scales it up to the size of your choosing, and spits out a pdf file for you to print and assemble. I’ve always done full color and trimmed the printer margins, but you can leave them on, creating a different look, that looks especially cool in black and white.