Cross-platform animation of still frames with MEncoder
Many times I’ve needed to take a series of still frames and create a video file to view them as an animation. Sometimes the images come from a simulation, and sometimes the images are from a video editing project where I had to edit individual frames. Regardless, I’ve spent a while searching for the best magic codes to provide to MEncoder to produce a universally compatible output video. I’ve tested video files created this way and they worked in QuickTime on OSX 10.6, Totem on Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (with the ubuntu-restricted-extras codec pack installed), and Windows XP with the K-Lite codec pack installed. Let me know if files produced this way don’t work for your system.
Since MEncoder’s default and preferred container format is AVI, I used that instead of MPEG. I used the default mpeg4 code, which should be a recent DivX or XviD codec, widely available on all common operating systems. I used MP3 encoding for the audio, sourced from a standalone .wav file created separately for this animation.
mencoder mf://*.png -mf fps=25:type=png -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -audiofile audio.wav -oac mp3lame -o output_video.avi
chips electrical-engineering electronics ibm link transistors video
by Layne
leave a comment
Picosecond imaging circuit analysis
Picosecond imaging circuit analysis (PICA) is a very cool method for measuring the activity of transistors in a CMOS integrated circuit. See [1] for details, but the basic idea is this: When a CMOS transistor switches state, it has a small probability of emitting an infrared (IR) photon. Since silicon is transparent to light with a wavelength longer than 1 micron, the IR photons can pass right through the silicon base of the chip. Researchers at IBM and elsewhere are setting up high-speed IR photodetectors to record these photons over many clock cycles, and produce very cool, visual records of which transistors are firing, and when in the clock cycle they are firing. As noted before, generation of an IR photon is not guaranteed, so the following movie was created from the records of a large number of clock cycles.
In this movie, the chip being tested has a distributed and hierarchical clock distribution network. This means that the initial clock buffered and amplified by a tree of buffers. As you can see in the video linked below, there is an initial pair of flashes near the top, followed by a large flash near the center, then a handful of distributed flashes, after which the chip lights up as all of the individual gates switch. Very cool stuff.
Here is a screenshot from the original source video at [2]:
Children’s Garage Band #N: 2nd Thought
So, basically, these guys rock. They played Summerfest in Millwaukee, and they have a bunch of videos on their youtube website:
Children’s Garage Band #5: Iron Man
Pint-size rock band, THE TOXIC MUFFIN, plays Black Sabbath’s Iron Man, complete with mini-solo at the end. Note the Blues Brothers shirt worn by the singer. Truly classic.
Children’s Garage Band #4: Blitzkrieg Bop
Drunk British dad gets his kids to play a Ramones classic.
Children’s Garage Band #3: Don’t Stop Believing
This kid has an amazing voice, but someone skilled is playing the piano part.
Children’s Garage Band #2: Life is a Highway
The bass player is basically as tall as his instrument. Rockin’ keyboards and guitar solo. These kids rock.
Children’s Garage Band #1: Freebird
I’m going to start posting a few awesome kids garage bands playing awesome classic rock songs. The first one is a band called 2nd Thought, playing Skynyrd’s Freebird at a middle school talent show. Yes, that’s right, they are between 11 and 13 years old. The singer is still waiting for that puberty thing to start, but the singing is strong, and the solo is pretty amazing.
advertisement cadbury-dairy-milk in-the-air-tonight video
by Wayne
leave a comment
In The Air Tonight
We open on purple recording studio wall.
A title appears: A Glass and a Half Full Production.
We start listening to the first sounds of ‘In The Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins.The camera slowly pans down as we hear the keyboard’s atmospheric intro. When we start listening to the first lyrics we spot a hairy thing in the edge of the frame. As the camera keeps panning, the mysterious figure gets revealed.
We realize that in front of us is a gorilla.It looks calmly to camera. Phil continues singing: ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight.’
The massive Gorilla stares at us – concentrated.
We are almost sure that he knows we are filming him, but his eyes look through and beyond the lens. ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for all of my life.’