Thursday 14 June 2018

The horrors, magic and ZMBV


Sometimes I fall into the horrors, where is the new thing? What shall I make next? What if I can't find anything to make? Why do I keep switching the computer on and off ?

And then I notice something I haven't spotted in ffmpegs list of codecs  as I've been experimenting with swapping to Devuan 2 and then from there to Linuxmint19 beta in a desperate attempt to keep my old machines working after the debacle of the meltdown patch stealing my cpu cycles and overheating my processor ( Devuan gives me a decrease of 10% in cpu heat and an increase in compiling speed on my old penryn 2.3ghz dual core) , these are things which make a difference if you're penniless. But back to linuxmint19 beta on the newest Toshiba (c850d-19z) given to me by a friend and since rebuilt, because there are things I need which come with the newer kernel . So where are we going with this ramble - ah yes.

One of the things of being a part of an online community like Glitch artists collective is the sharing of ideas and discoveries, in the pit of despair at ever making anything new again I stumbled across a conversation between a friend Dawnia Darkstone and a few others ( look for Dawnias' work on line - you wont regret it; here https://www.facebook.com/Letsglitchit )   about a codec called zmbv , and lo and behold a way out of my dilemma , not only does it hexedit beautifully it also datamoshs ( more info here https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=DosBox_Capture_Codec )
leading to this - my favourite thing so far this year : 





There is something very beautiful in the way the pixels slide and break ( the source video is again from the internet archive - an old copy of Pandoras' box starring Louise Brooks - my continuing obsession with old silent films - I like the contradiction of using modern technology with an old tech source  plus black and white breaks in a very pure way conjuring colour from other places).  The only disadvantage I've found with Zmbv is speed of transcoding - a whole day on my gear to transcode a 45 minute movie, ah well the results are worth it.

And this time I also made stills :





And then of course there is magicyuv , an experimental codec in ffmpeg which is unlike any other I have used so far , all the advantages of raw video but will transcode back to mpeg4 without loss of brokenness . I've yet to try it properly in audacity but I have high hopes for it , and the sound artifacts are an extra bonus 




ikillerpulse ( requires tomato.py in working directory)

I've been working on this script for the last week or so. What does it do? It takes an input video/s,  converts to a format we can use f...