The Full Enchilada

It’s been quite some time since I played around with Adobe After Effects, perhaps several years. And yet even with version 4 and on and on….it was quite “complete” in its features. It had and still has the widest range of plugins available. The latest incarnations, the CS series, currently the Adobe After Effects CS5 mainly adds native 64-bit OS support over CS4 along with Roto Brush tool and the mocha plugin.

Now I was always curious why so many raved about Eyeon (eyeonline website) FUSION years ago when it had no sound/audio support, and apparently years later it still doesn’t. The same thing can be said for D2/thefoundry’s NUKE or NukeX, again absolutely no support for audio, not even playback, forget about keeping it in the final render. Some would have you think that’s not a big deal….which is ludicrous.

Sure it isn’t ‘bad’ to own Nuke, NukeX or Fusion but my recommendation is if $10k is a lot of money to you, stick to Adobe After Effects. Its an unbelievable bargain for the power within it, and you won’t have to go through headaches of manually synchronizing audio clips. (frame numbering never agrees between applications with certain encoders like Divx etc and when you base it on time its not as accurate and forget about effects that change the timeline since then resyncing your audio will have you pulling your hair out and then jumping off a cliff.)

So why don’t these so called “high-end” FILM video compositing systems support audio? Adobe After Effects does, and does it well, which allows for easy usage of such great fx such as Trapcode Sound Keys and others. The music, audio/sound effects in a movie or a commercial are just as important as the video and there is no doubt being able modify one without having to redo the other is a very huge time saver.

So no, not having audio support doesn’t make those programs “cool” and “high-end” and not “bloated”, it makes them incomplete, a work in progress, beta software, at least not something that can be used without crutches.

I say this out of disappointment, because I really do prefer the NODE based workflow. I really enjoyed Silicon Grail, Rayz and also NothingReal Shake (then bought by apple to be cannabilized).

I’m now very curious about Autodesk TOXIK (it seems to borrow a lot from the ultimate Autodesk/Discreet FFI, Flame, Fire, Inferno along with their great keyers which used to be SGI only back in the days), which has been renamed Autodesk Maya Compositor and is included with Maya 2010. It also has a nice nodal based workflow reminiscent of SHAKE and I bet it probably can handle AUDIO, because Autodesk is a ‘real’ company

It has been discovered that the ever growing in popularity video compositing piece of software called Nuke or NukeX seems to have some spyware of sorts. Apparently, during installation, the PluginInstaller.exe which is automatically invoked tries to send information to the company’s servers, to the IP of The Foundry. Apparently the snippet of data sent may even be the user’s email address if they happened to be logged in to their account at that time, even if they did not provide any of that info during the installation. (Supposedly the firewall software caught the attempt to transmit snippets of data to their servers…)

Perhaps this should be double checked since it seems a bit unbelievable that legit companies would be doing this much. I would think likely maybe the PluginInstaller.exe was just trying to announce to their servers that someone had installed their software…and not to harvest any specific personal identification information. Also, apparently if the PluginInstaller.exe can not reach the network/internet, it stops/crashes and will not install.

Should windows’ built-in firewall warn users of programs attempting to send data out to the internet? It might get annoying seeing that each time you initiate a computer ’search’ there’s some packets sent to microsoft servers. Not to mention all the software ‘update’ programs you might have running.

Are there any really good firewalls out there that let you specify which programs can access what range of the network or internet? Let’s say you want to allow the program to access local network only, or perhaps to block it from communicating with a range of IPs or domain names but allow it access to the rest of the internet.

Well, as I promised I just did some Live Video streaming tests with Theora video format (using libtheora on linux). What I can report is a video delay of about 22 seconds. It was about 45 (stream was around 27kbps I think)seconds when I had ffmpeg take the 192 x 144 screencapture area and resize it to stream it at 320 by 240, of course at the new 320×240 it was a bit zoomed in but seems like also the transcoding to resize added about 20 seconds delay (stream was around 58k-65kbps from what I recall). The stream was the linux desktop screencaptured since I didn’t have a webcam on the remote linux box, I served the live screencam stream off of icecast server running on the same box and served it up to view back on my local windows xp desktop through an html5 simple page served by apache on that same box, using the video embed tag to serve the icecast theora live video stream. (there was no audio in the stream, no audio was captured and no audio channel streamed..)

(see my previous post for the audio streaming tests details http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/comparison-firefox-html5-realtime-audio-streaming-of-ogg-vorbis-versus-standalone-player-zinf-theora-libtheora-video-also.htm )

Perhaps I should also mention that I was doing the screencapture of the remote linux box while being logged in to it remotely with NX (using freenx nxserver), but it was just a physical box, not a VMware virtual machine, VPS etc…so I think delay due to graphics driver issues can be overlooked, it was quite responsive and robust while using it through NX (by nomachine) remote desktop.

It’s quite unfortunate that currently video streaming is in a huge disarray, there’s nothing that works on everything, you have to recode/transcode for different platforms and serve with different servers. Apple may claim they’re the good guys pushing for HTML5 standards versus Adobe Flash proprietary plugins but some would say they are dishonest if they would try to play the pro-standards good guy when they do not wish to support OGG and Theora instead of their own AAC format etc…so sure html5 currently supports theora on the desktop but far as I know nothing supports theora on mobile platforms, they support only mpeg4/flac/aac/h264 etc..hopefully this will change soon but with everyone trying to push their own proprietary technology it may take a while if the consumers don’t force them to by demanding open protocols. (just don’t watch streams encoded in PATENT encumbered formats, if everyone did that you’d be amazed at how quickly open patent-free formats would become the most widely used…

Has the serpent given us the ‘forbidden Apple’?

Well, I was bored I guess so I wanted to check out FireFox’s new html5 audio and video tag support. I was able to play a Theora encoded ogg file just fine using Firefox video tag, this was a file I had created using linux screen capture. Anyway, I was more interested in serving a live shoutcast/icecast stream to firefox html5 for a quick easy way to embed live stream without any plugins. I found that it did indeed work, I was broadcasting live through my microphone on my windows desktop computer (Windows XP) to my linux shout server and was listing to the feed back on my windows desktop but at a whopping FULL minute delay! Yes, no kidding everything I said was delayed by a full 60 seconds.

So while it certainly did work just fine, the audio wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t choppy, it didn’t break up, worked fine other than being a full minute behind. I decided to not change anything except the player, I started up Zinf application/player and loaded up my streaming URL into it. I then did the delay test and it was about half of the delay with FireFox, about 30 (closer to 25) seconds or so delay only. It also took considerably longer to do the initial connection with firefox which took around ten or more seconds while with Zinf it only took a second or two for the buffering to complete and the audio to start coming in..and I should mention that streaming live mp3 at 128kbps took only a split second to connect to live stream with Zinf and flash player on website and the delay was just 4 seconds long.

Bear in mind that I was streaming at about 16-20Kbps only! With a Vorbis quality setting of -1 and without stereo, just a Mono stream sampled at 11025 rate. Cranked up to the highest Vorbis quality settings and streaming at around 450Kbps or more, with Zinf I was able to get the delay down to just two seconds! Still can’t jam live over the internet at near zero latency ASIO levels but its good enough for a live broadcast internet radio station.

Next, I’m planning to do some tests with live streaming video in ogg container, theora format and see what kind of video delay I’ll get.

I had not used Bind9 for quite some time and recently I was setting up some domains which I really was not authoritative for, ie Godaddy was actually acting as the real SOA DNS server for it but I wanted to TEST and check if my local configuration was working ok. In the past I would just run nslookup, then tell it to use local server with “SERVER IP” or “SERVER localhost” and then when I did my lookups it would return ONLY what my locally running named domain nameserver replied. Everything I tried this time spewed out only records from the real authoritative name servers at Godaddy, ignoring what my local dns named configuration said. I tried with dig mydomain.com @localhost and others. I even tried dig +trace and dig +recurse=no and I also tried in nslookup doing set recurse=no to disable recursion but nothing I did gave me a non recursive lookup!

What finally worked!? I went to a WINDOWS machine and used NSLOOKUP from the Windows XP machine and again with SERVER command set active (dns) domain name server to the IP of my linux box running named. Hurray, looking up the domains this way now showed me what I had configured my linux servers dns with. It confirmed for me everything on my local linux server was working as planned.
I then realized that this had worked from Windows Desktop because it being an external system, BIND had been configured in named.conf to NOT allow RECURSION to external networks so as to not create an open recursive DNS for the world.

So how can I successfully run a non recursive domain lookup from the linux server running bind 9 named? Do I need to edit /etc/named.conf and disable recursion globally for internal network also and do a quick /etc/init.d/named restart ? (yea, it’s rhel-ish ..)

Or what is the correct OPTION flag/argument for dig or nslookup so I can do no recurse, non recursive domain lookups? How about for reverse dns lookups such as dig -x IP.-in-addr.arpa @localhost ?

Gonna crash for the night so maybe it’ll come to me in a twisted morning dream

At CES 2010 Intel unveiled the x86 Moorestown Smartphone running Linux based Moblin OS and sporting two cameras, one in front for video conferencing and one in the back.

DELL is aso introducing their own pda/smartphone with a 5-inch WVGA 800 x 480 touchscreen, 3G, Bluetooth, a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, a microSD slot and a 1,300mAh battery, powered by Android 2.0.

Some of the new features in Firefox 3.6:

Improved browser startup time, overall more robust, JavaScript performance increase.
Can run scripts asynchronously speeding up page loads.
Support for new DOM, CSS, and HTML5 ,File API support etc.
Quick one click browser skin/style changes.
Native video supporting full screen and poster frames.
WOOF font format support.

These days the web is all abuzz with the new “Cloud Computing” jargon. Seems everyone’s got their head stuck up in the Clouds! And me thinks a Reality Check is in order…

Cloud Computing I claim is pretty useless unless your Cloud technology provider is offering you some kind of heavy-duty worthy CDN close to Limelight and Akamai standards. Otherwise, for the majority of people, resisting the marketing hype may provide more ‘bang’ for the buck.

In a sense, Cloud Computing is quite similar to the lowly Shared Hosting. You might experience a very cheap price entry point if your website does not use a lot of CPU, memory, or bandwidth. But as soon as your site actually has some traffic you will likely find that you’re spending considerably more to stay up in the clouds than you would have if you had purchased basically the same thing but under the “Xen VPS” label. Sure there are other VPS solutions that don’t isolate the virtual machines as much as Xen and VMware virtualzation and the like do (such as Parallels VPS and some others…), but if you purchase a real Virtual machine, either Xen or VMware or Hypre-V you would be getting a good part of what a Cloud usually offers and likely at a better bang for the buck!

In fact, I propose that unless you get some sweet CDN as part of the Cloud package, that you stay away and just get your own Dedicated Server that you can install and run your own little clouds on! You can run your own VMware or Xen setup.

I am an experienced consultant who has dealt with various hosting companies so here’s a secret for you that will save you much money. Whenever you look at a hosting provider, look at their prices for Dedicated Servers and bandwidth. This is the golden key to understand if their other offerings are overpriced or not. If they can not afford to give you a well priced Dedicated Server, you can be SURE you are not getting the most for your buck on any of their other deals, its as simple as that!

Now don’t get me wrong, the packaging of all the available Virtualization technologies into these Cloud or Grid networks is a beneficial thing in many ways if done right. Unfortunately, it’s really only done right at the highest levels, ie its not cheap to have an Akamai quality CDN and several virtual servers on separate dedicated boxes with redundant fiber optic connections etc…so why pay “Cloud Computing” prices for in effect what might be a simple Xen, VMware, or worse (traditional more shared resource VPS), when you can get fully dedicated hardware and build your own little cloud for less.

So if you’re a big company with LOTS of traffic and much $$$, then “Cloud Computing” might be the best for you, just check to see exactly what you’re getting for the money, its sometimes a little harder to predict overall cost.

If you’d like more details, drop me a note/comment.

Yea, ok, seriously, I didn’t think I’d ever be (continue reading…)

Well I didn’t have a good time getting the NXSERVER from NoMachine to work right after downloading the .deb debian package files from their website, the client, the node, and the server module.

(Windows NX client dies/exits with this error:)
NX> 200 Connected to address: xx.xx.xx.xx on port: 22
NX> 202 Authenticating user: nx
NX> 208 Using auth method: publickey
NX> 204 Authentication failed.

Apparently NX server installs the ssh keys in the wrong place, when you try to login with the NX client it looks in some /usr/NX/share/ instead of /usr/NX/etc/keys and the easy fix is to simply run /usr/NX/bin/nxserver –keygen and it will recreate keys in the right place, then just go and recopy the key from inside the client .key file in the shared keys directory and paste it in your NX CLIENT and the connection will then complete successfully. If you don’t know where nxserver is just try to do a whereis nxserver or which nxserver or use locate or do a find / -name nxserver

Well, I hope this helps someone get their FreeNX remote control software working because I sure don’t want anyone suffering through the pitiful performance of VNC!

Might I add that I find Mint to be a wonderful Ubuntu/Debian based distribution, highly recommended especially for those who don’t just need it as a server but also as their primary DESKTOP operating system. This Mint OS has it all, plays all your music, movies, DVDs out of the box. You can still install Automatix or any other Debian .deb packages or use the built-in excellent Synaptic package manager or the unique MintInstall to install popular software with one click of a button off an ever-growing list on the website.

I run Mint 4.0 as a VM (VMWARE Virtual Machine) under 64-bit CentOS x86_64 4.2 and its nice to know FreeNX supports file/printer sharing and multimedia for rerouting AUDIO from the server to the client.

Software Developers will LOVE the one click install of the ECLIPSE IDE and Mono .Net platform. If you thought Ubuntu was great, think of this as a special MINT version!