Balint's Blog

TVisionarium (AKA T_Visionarium Mk II, affectionately TVis) was officially launched yesterday in The Scientia at the University of New South Wales. Bruce Beresford was invited to open it. Jill Bennett published a book about it: “T_Visionarium: A User’s Guide” (albeit not the technical one you might expect). I received a nice credit at the back of the publication (as well as in this academic one on AVIE). The project itself also has its own Wikipedia page. It will be open for public viewing as part of the 2008 Sydney Festival for three weeks. If you want to have your brains blown out by an extraordinary sensory experience, then definitely come along.

The TVisionarium Sydney Festival banner:

One experiment I’ve started working on recently is getting behind the hood of motion-compensation based video codecs, specifically the decoder, and trying to distort the motion vectors before the macro-block is recontructed. The purpose is to see whether interesting/beautiful/ugly video sequences will result. I’ve often seen such if there’s an error in an existing video stream and the decoder leaves behind artifacts. I’d like to make this an interactive process.

In order to do so, I needed to get the source code. Easy: libavcodec (part of ffmpeg). Next (since I do most of my development on Windows) I needed to compile and debug it using Visual Studio (MSVC). Hard: since the authors wrote it conforming to C99, it won’t compile under MSVC since it doesn’t support the spec. It does however compile using MSys+MinGW – this is still no good as I need to interactive debug the damn thing under MSVC. Furthermore, I’d like to quote the guide: “FFMPEG DOES NOT BUILD UNDER MSVC++, AND WILL NOT, EVER, BUILD UNDER MSVC++.”

So what do I do? I spent a day porting libavcodec to Windows (albeit not in its entirety: no networking code, and all encoders that rely on external source are disabled). I compiled a fresh version of ffdshow, plugged in my compiled version of libavcodec, and voila! It actually works!