There has been some buzz about HTML5 web video lately. I won’t retell the story here, because it’s almost completely political and not technical, while I’m only interested in the technical side of things. One thing that struck me, though, is that many people believe that the two contenders, H.264 and Ogg Theora, are comparative in quality and performance. As someone who implements video codecs for a living, this struck me as quite odd: How can a refined version of an old and crippled MPEG-4 derivate come anywhere close to a format that incorporates (almost) all of the the latest and greatest of video compression research? I decided to give it a try and compare H.264, Theora and a few other codecs myself.
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Over the last few weeks, I upgraded my old TV set to a shiny new LCD TV, along with a 5.1-channel AVR and a Blu-ray player. This was done for two different reasons: First, I wanted a HDTV set for quite some time already, but I waited until it was safe that I could afford it. Second, the old TV set, which was the already repaired former set from my uncle, started to behave erratically again, so it was obvious that I needed a replacement anyway.
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I love going to the cinema after work: The Tuesday afternoon showings at my local cinema are quite affordable, and for most movies except the biggest blockbusters, the auditorium is usually almost empty. This enables me to enjoy a movie without being disturbed by laughing kiddies and popcorn chewing noises :)
Here’s a list of all the movies I’ve seen this year, along with a short comment or rating: Read more …

Converting images of scanned documents into proper PDF files is quite a hard task. What I usually want is

• put the images on a page of a well-defined size (e.g. A4 or Letter)
• don’t resample the image data
• have precise control over compression – in particular, I want to use JPEG images as-is, without any recompression

This sounds simple and reasonable, but I’ve yet to find a tool that does exactly that. Adobe Acrobat handles the latter two constraints well, but I don’t know how to set the paper size when importing an image. This is no problem when using a normal vector graphics or page layout tool, but then you usually don’t have much influence on what nasty things the PDF output code does to your images. Furthermore, you mostly end up with useless cruft in the PDF files, like XML metadata or even fonts (even though there’s not a single letter of text anywhere in the document). So I decided to end this mess once and for all and write my own image-to-PDF converter. Here it is: pdfgen.
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As you may or may not have noticed, my latest intro won the PC 64k competition at Evoke 2009. Unlike my previous demos and intros, it actually featured a few effects that go beyond fixed-function rendering or per-pixel lighting. For all who are interested in how it works, I’ve written this small article that explains how each of the eight effects in the intro is done, as well as some general insight into the creation process of the intro.
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CDs or DVDs containing a full Linux system for installation, testing, repair or other special purposes are quite common these days. Chances are high that people make their first steps with the Linux, BSD or Solaris operating system using these so-called Live CDs: They are convenient (no need to install the OS), they are safe (doesn’t write anything to disk unless you really want it to) … but they are slow. Booting from a Live CD like Knoppix or the Ubuntu Desktop CD takes ages and makes you wonder if your CD/DVD drive will actually survive that whole operation, considering that it is permanently seeking. And even if you made it to the desktop, you’ll still have to be patient if you intend to open any application, because the drive has to spin up again and load libraries and data for whatever program you start. Or even worse: In the modern GUI-based environments you have to wait for icons to load even if you just click on a launcher menu. As useful as those Live CDs might be, this a major source of annoyance.

In this post, I will present a method to solve this problem. I do not claim to be the first one to invent it – in fact, I refuse to believe that no one had this idea before me.
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It’s been a while since I last wrote something here, but that’s because I was busy with Applied Mediocrity, my intro for Evoke and after that, I had some vacation. But now I’m back and have the time to work on my other projects, including this blog. So stay tuned for the next two real (technical) articles, which will be about some ideas I had about Linux Live CDs and an explanation of the effects in Applied Mediocrity.

If you followed my works, you know that I like compact, single-file implementations of decoders for various media formats, and where such a thing doesn’t exist, I tend to write or at least port one myself. Now I’d like to add the third format to that list: Baseline JPEG images.
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The is no such thing as easter. There’s only Breakpoint.
Happy Breakpoint!

This 1984-inspired text is from one of the bigscreen slides from this year’s issue of world’s largest Demoscene-only party: Breakpoint in Bingen am Rhein, Germany. As every year, the party takes place during what non-sceners call the easter weekend. And as every year, some friends and I were there, too.
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I’m a happy user of the Fujifilm S9500 bridge camera since 2005, but lately, I noticed that it would also be really nice to have a second, smaller camera that I can take with me (almost) everywhere. This isn’t a problem in itself – there are countless compact point-and-shoot cameras at around 200 € on the market. However, most (if not all) of these suffer from too high resolutions and too small (1/2.5″) sensors. The days of the legendary F30/F31 with its large 6-megapixel sensor and unrivalled low noise are also long gone, so my »new camera« project was on hold for a long time. That was until february, when Fujifilm announced the release of its new compact F-series model, the F200EXR, based on the highly anticipated SuperCCD EXR sensor. After reading the first beta reviews and seeing the first example images, I immediately ordered the camera and it arrived just in time for my Paris visit, where I had the perfect opportunity to test the camera. Here’s what I found out.
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