RE: Electric Sheep - beautiful distributed screen saver

Hmm - your idea of running the screen saver on a seperate PC, then sharing
the MPEG files sounds like a plan.  As you say, it's just a case of finding
an automated way to convert the files format across, then do a bit of custom
code to play through a directory of files, repeating each one for a number
of cycles.


....now what would be _really_ cool would be to have the HD1K analize
whatever music is playing, calculate the beat, and cycle the MPEG playback
in time to the music. :)

I'll certainly have a play with this when I get my hands on a unit.

Cheers!
-h

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Dave Dodge
> Sent: Monday, 31 May 2004 10:16 a.m.
> To: Roku Tech Mail List and Discussion Group
> Subject: Re: [Roku-tech] Electric Sheep - beautiful distributed screen
> saver
>
>
> On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 09:19:43AM +1200, Hamish Guthrey wrote:
> > Has anyone had a go at porting Electric Sheep to the HD1000 platform?
>
> This was one of the first things I thought about when I got the HD1000
> months ago.
>
> > I'd love to see this on the HD1000. :)
>
> Consider: the HD1K has no floating point unit, and I believe the
> fractal generator is extremely floating-point intensive.  Also, we
> know from other tests that there are issues (such as the sqrt function
> not working) with floating point emulation, depending on the exact
> compiler flags used.
>
> I took a first shot at it in March. I managed to compile expat, curl,
> libjpeg, and electricsheep on the HD1K, to the point that it could at
> least run its "hqi-flame" test.  The test took 68 minutes to produce
> two 640x480 images, and both images were flat black (i.e. no flame was
> drawn).  So there's a serious problem in there somewhere.
>
> Probably the easiest solution to that is to run the flame generation
> and collection stuff on a desktop system instead, and just share out
> the MPEG files to the HD1K for playback.
>
> But there's another problem: MPEG2 data comes in at least three
> fundamental forms: ES (elementary stream), PS (program stream), and TS
> (transport stream).  Electricsheep generates a pure MPEG2 video ES.
> The HD1K's playback engine only accepts TS.  A few months ago I tried
> various free command line conversion tools, but never managed to get
> the electricsheep ES into a TS that the HD1K would accept.
>
> Since then, CinemaSix has come out and can convert VOB (DVD-style PS)
> to TS for the HD1K.  If you can get an ES to VOB converter to work
> that might be enough to get the files to play.  Be warned though that
> most ES to VOB converters are going to expect you to provide an _audio_
> ES to go along with the electricsheep video.
>
> > Bomb is another piece of open source interactive art by the same author
> > (www.draves.org/bomb/) - another one that would be great on the HD1000.
>
> This is somewhat in line with another project I've got on the
> back-burner.  It looks like it does some intense manual pixel
> manipulation.  The HD1K can do this, but probably not smoothly at high
> resolutions.  Here's a test program that does some simple blending,
> blurring, and animation on a 160x120 pixel grid:
>
>   http://www.dododge.net/roku/holding/tryvidscale.roku
>
> That uses some really stupid algorithms, and I expect to be able to
> work on higher resolutions (maybe 320x240) once I get around to reworking
> the code.
>
>                                                   -Dave Dodge
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