YJL

I believe its some time in this year, the HD quality options, thats 720p and 1080p, were missing, and not only those, actually I only got 360p of all options.

Currently, as of 2015-12-05, I am using Firefox ESR 38.4.0. In fact, I have found the solution much earlier even though this official YouTube Help gives absolutely zero help at all but never bothered writing it, but now I have decided to write a post.

From what I can check with about:config.

If I turn on:

• media.fragmented-mp4.exposed
• media.fragmented-mp4.ffmpeg.enabled

I will get 720p HD with video/mp4; codecs="avc1.64001F, mp4a.40.2". Thats just 360p and 720p for now.

If I also turn on:

• media.mediasource.enabled

I will also get 1080p HD, 144p, 240p, and 480p. The 720p is video/mp4; codecs="avc1.4d401f". Now its the full set as before.

No, this is not about the inhumanly, awful Cinnamon Challenge.

Aside: I had no idea someone actually made a Wikipedia page for it. But you really have to watch it to understand how many nuts are out there.

I was watching a cooking video (just click the link and watch first), then totally unexpected ingredient was added:

salt, and cumin, chili powder, and like literally just a little tiny smidgen of cocaine

Its different than Chef Johns humor or double entendre, this is a blooper, a super hilarious slip-up. I have heard of some marijuana cake, but cocaine as spice, thats the first. It takes her literally one second to realize what she have just said, cinnamon and cocaine hardly sound alike, I wonder

Anyway, kids, dont do cinnamon or accept cocaine challenge, they are bad for you! But moms, add some cocaine to spice up your dishes!

Saw this video on recommendations and it is named: Helicopter Fishing. While I was waiting for the helicopter to hover above a river or big water body, but it never came and I wasnt really paying much attention to watch.

Before the landing, I thought what the heck!? Where did that guy got that model airplane and where is the fishing rod? Is he going to fish with that plane? I really thought they were going to fish, literally. Never saw anyone did that and thats why I clicked to watch this video.

I then realized he was returning the plane to owner and understood why another guy said he saw everything and moved around treetop. I was so focusing on seeing a rod and a pond, I couldnt hear any conversations they had.

It is written in description:

Fishing out a P-51 Mustang model airplane with a Robinson R-22.

LOL! Shouldve read the description. Its a cool video anyway and great experience from either party. That is a nice place to live in if you are rich enough, big house, small lake, green land, big trees, by the way.

A couple of days ago, I started to see few threads about bluish issue on Arch Linux forums with Adobe Flash 11.2. I was still using 11.1 at the time. Earlier, 11.2 was marked as stable because of security vulnerability. So I deiced to upgrade and ignored potential the bluish issue. (I didn't read any threads on Arch Linux)

After upgraded and I had watched few videos, I have forgot those bluish issues, it didn't happen to me. Now, there is a first thread on Gentoo Fourms, now I know my computer isn't affected due to my ATI card, it seems about nVidia card and its vdpau. (By the way, I don't feel any H/W accelerated, my card is probably too old.)

If you google, you will see this bluish issue is happening over all distros, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, etc. I read a few threads and I am not sure whose bug is, and I don't really care. Who would I?

Anyway, if you are nVidia user, then wait for update for driver or Xorg or Adobe, one of them should deliver the fix or already done.

Don't downgrade to 11.1 since this 11.2 contains security patch.

Meanwhile enjoy your free Blue Map Group performance. Wait, it's not even April 1st. Adobe you released it too quick. It's not an Intel ads, the Blue Map Group, you dumb xxx! xD

Sorry for you guys use nVidia card, I just can't help myself. Please don't hit me! ;p

I found myself of real case scenario when I saw Shit Girls Say in YouTube Recommendations.

I saw there were a lot of parody of that video, they reminded me of this * operator. You can search "shit say" on YouTube or Google and get good matching results, but Shit * Say should be more precise.

The trend of Shit * Say seem to go back months ago, no idea why I missed it. Though not everyone is fun but some do make you laugh especially you fit into the profile or have encounter with same type of person as the video tries to make fun of them.

I believe no developers have fully used their own creations. I do mean using not testing.

I recently wanted to watch Mass Effect 1/2 walkthrough, because I wanted to understand the storyline. So, I searched for playlists for those two series, but soon that reminded me of an annoying situation I had already seen and forgot.

The default quality is either 360p or 480p (if you enlarge the player and have set auto option in account playback settings). If you watch without fullscreen, then there is not problem at all, but if you switch to fullscreen, two annoyances are waiting for you.

First, the auto option will switch to 720p for you (if you have checked the checkbox for HD quality), which is great and that's what I want to have. But after this point, you need to try not to exit fullscreen mode. Once you do, exiting fullscreen mode, two things come along:

1. Page will be reloaded (only happens after player plays other videos from playlist, which definitely will happen, that's the reason why you watch videos from playlist). Which actually make sense, the page has not yet updated even player has played other videos. Although this can be annoying, but I can let this one go.
2. The side effect from #1, the video's buffer is cleaned and rebuffered since page reloaded, because the default quality is 360p or 480p, which is different than 720p, therefore rebuffering is required and wasted. I was watching 720p and I want to continue watching in 720p.

There are some related questions on help forums, I didn't look into those. Because there is no need, or this kind of annoyance had already been resolved.

If you have used playlist for real, I mean watching a playlist with 50+ videos, then you can understand. But the chance to watch such playlist is not very often.

The introduction of auto switching of video quality is meant to save bandwidth, I believe, only loading higher quality stream when is requested. But think about this case, the video is fully buffered, then player exits fullscreen. The 720p buffer is wasted, because it gets cleaned, if page reload also occurs.

There are some Firefox Addons about HD, I don't know if that will help or not, or if that is possible for me to append a parameter in the URL to force HD quality. Like I said, it's not often and I have survived watching those videos without exiting fullscreen too many times before I wrote this post.

I would call it stupid, just I don't think the dev has thought about it. If they did, then it's the worst, they don't care.

For a long time, I can't figure out why 480p or 640x480 videos are stretched by YouTube. The output resolution is still the same but they seems to be rescaled in Y-axis. This should be much problem for your daily life video, but it is for screencasting. They looks like 90s homemade video in analogy, just terrible.

You can see an example in my previous video like this one. I used the following command to record:

~/p/x11grabr/x11grabr -b -s 640x480 | ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pix_fmt bgra -s 640x480 -r 25 -i - -vcodec libx264 -vpre lossless_ultrafast -strict experimental -threads 0 test.mkv

 ~ $ mediainfo test.mkv 
General
Unique ID                                : 107803120395874480459111442715539922352 (0x511A2032421B3E79424266CB5EDBDDB0)
Complete name                            : test.mkv
Format                                   : Matroska
Format version                           : Version 2
File size                                : 584 KiB
Duration                                 : 2s 480ms
Overall bit rate                         : 1 929 Kbps
Writing application                      : Lavf52.111.0
Writing library                          : Lavf52.111.0

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High 4:4:4 [email protected]
Format settings, CABAC                   : No
Format settings, ReFrames                : 1 frame
Codec ID                                 : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration                                 : 2s 480ms
Bit rate                                 : 1 891 Kbps
Width                                    : 640 pixels
Height                                   : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 4:3
Frame rate mode                          : Variable
Frame rate                               : 25.000 fps
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.246
Stream size                              : 572 KiB (98%)
Writing library                          : x264 core 115
Encoding settings                        : cabac=0 / ref=1 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x1:0 / me=dia / subme=0 / psy=0 / mixed_ref=0 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=0 / 8x8dct=0 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=0 / chroma_qp_offset=0 / threads=3 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=250 / keyint_min=25 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc=cqp / mbtree=0 / qp=0
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No

Today I finally found a way to get around the problem by using WebM:

~/p/x11grabr/x11grabr -b -s 640x480 | ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pix_fmt bgra -s 640x480 -r 25 -i - test.webm

 ~ $ mediainfo test.webm 
General
Unique ID                                : 162746949293301742131061222707439175632 (0x7A6FEC1BDD11DE98A5F24CEB620587D0)
Complete name                            : test.webm
Format                                   : WebM
Format version                           : Version 2
File size                                : 203 KiB
Duration                                 : 2s 40ms
Overall bit rate                         : 815 Kbps
Writing application                      : Lavf52.111.0
Writing library                          : Lavf52.111.0

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : VP8
Codec ID                                 : V_VP8
Duration                                 : 2s 40ms
Bit rate                                 : 776 Kbps
Width                                    : 640 pixels
Height                                   : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 4:3
Frame rate                               : 25.000 fps
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.101
Stream size                              : 193 KiB (95%)
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No

The quality is poorer because it needs to tune a bit, but at least YouTube won't mess it up, here is an example output.

The strange thing is 720p is fine, I don't understand what's going on and I won't bother to post in help forums because I doubt their engineer will read my question. YouTube Guru in forums? (Not sure about what YouTube staff name those volunteers) No offense, nah, but thanks anyway.
YouTube never mentioned problem with the video codec, no issue was reported except the file didn't have audio codec it recognizes. To YouTube: some videos are meant to have no audio tracks.

Anyway, if you know anything about the issue which I can still use AVC, please let me know. I am guessing it could be those encoding setting, but it's a long list and 99.999% of them I have no idea what they are for.

I havent post any cooking video on this blog, but this will be first one, made by smithbitevids, called Chocolate Soufflés with Nougat Whip via Chef John:

Anthony Bourdain has few episodes named Food Porn from No Reservations, but they are totally nothing comparing to this. Just hear the luscious stirring, whipping, pouring, oh man. Even chopping chocolate sounds sexy like hell.

And the visual impact is like there is no tomorrow. Splashing, sprinkling, dipping, dripping, tipping, hooray molee smokie!

Their videos are art.

I want to play Minecraft after I watched this video:

I have known this game Minecraft for some time, but never wanted to play it. I thought it might use too much of my brain.

But now, I want to shoot some arrows in the air and to make tons of TNT and to blow stuff up with those TNT. Not sure how this game plays, but I am sure I can do some damage. :)

(Hmm I dont like this Also, please make sure youre running the Sun JVM)

I just watched this dangerous video: (Be warned: Brace yourself!)

I have no idea what this story is about. All I heard was fox, fox, and fox.

Anyway, I couldnt stop to wonder what words are said most, so I googled for a text version to do a simple check:

I don't have a brilliant brain like Einstein's, but I think this idea is great, an intro clip.

Like TV shows, many YouTube publishers put an intro clip in every video they make. I just watched an intro clip of 30+ seconds of a ~6 minutes video. That video was a recommendation and I had watched same intro before, didn't subscribe to that channel.

That's about 8% of the video size and it's a significant waste in current development of Internet. It's significant because they can reduce it easily.

Such thing has already existed, but in reverse direction, the video ads is an example. Some video streaming websites show you an ad before the video you request, you have to watch it.

If YouTube adds a new field, which allows publisher to choose one as intro clip. The player will play intro clip first, then the main video. Viewer can decide if they want to skip intro.

Of course, there are some new settings. You can always skip intros, or always show intros, etc. Even you decide to show intros every time, as long as the intro clip in cache, you don't need to waste more bandwidth to transfer same content again and again.

It's not all about bandwidth, I just simply want to get into the point, mostly.

But, as usual, wgasa to my idea?

A few hours ago, Gmail announced a new video and chat plugin for Linux users. I am a 64-bit user, pure one, there is no 32-bit library on my system. I wasnt going to try because 1) I am not into online IM chatting not to mention this voice and video chatting and 2) I dont believe that Google would release a 64-bit stuff.

But you know curiosity killed the cat, so I went to download, just to file to find out if they are 64-bit build or just 32-bit as my expectation. I ran

ar -x google-talkplugin_current_amd64.deb
tar xf data.tar.gz
cd opt/google/talkplugin

Now, its about to see the truth:

% file * */*
GoogleTalkPlugin:         ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, stripped
cron:                     directory
lib:                      directory
libnpgoogletalk64.so:     ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped
libnpgtpo3dautoplugin.so: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped
cron/google-talkplugin:   POSIX shell script text executable
lib/libCg.so:             ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped
lib/libCgGL.so:           ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped</pre>

(Side note: you can see there is a cron, Google installs a cron job to update .deb package, so this plugin would never get outdated. I really can not agree with this automatic method. (I assume that its automatic, I didnt read that script))

I was shocked, twice! First shock was there did have 64-bit shared library and the second shock was why the hell this GoogleTalkPlugin is a 32-bit build? I couldnt understand. As far as I know, the browser plugin uses shared library, so that 32-bit stuff shouldnt be a problem, it must be some kind of desktop manager for the plugin, its worth trying. (I was wrong. :()

So, I tried to install it:

chmod +x *.so lib/*.so
cp *.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/
sudo cp lib/* /usr/lib64/

I installed them in Mozillas (Firefoxs) plugin directory, so Chromium can also use it. After restarted browser, I got a good sign from Chromium and Firefox.

So, I recompiled my kernel with required modules. Rebooted, got into Gmail in Chromium, went to setting. Nothing!? Switched to Firefox, still nothing.

Then, I ran Chromium from command-line, I got this log:

[000:017] Warning(clientchannel.cc:583): Unreadable or no port file.  Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
[000:022] Warning(clientchannel.cc:439): Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
[000:022] Warning(optionsfile.cc:22): Load: Could not open file
[000:022] Warning(clientchannel.cc:553): Failed to get GoogleTalkPlugin path. Trying default.
[000:025] Started GoogleTalkPlugin, path=/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin
[000:025] Waiting for GoogleTalkPlugin to start...
[001:098] Warning(clientchannel.cc:583): Unreadable or no port file.  Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
[001:099] Warning(clientchannel.cc:439): Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
[001:099] Waiting for GoogleTalkPlugin to start...
[002:190] Warning(clientchannel.cc:583): Unreadable or no port file.  Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
[002:191] Warning(clientchannel.cc:439): Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
[002:191] Waiting for GoogleTalkPlugin to start...

I could only say !#$%^, Google!

If your system is multilib, I think you have good chance to get it running, just move that 32-bit stuff to /opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin.

Google, please re-build GoogleTalkPlugin for 64-bit! Pretty please?

I am using Ubuntu 9.10 right now, next to my laptop. The installation was easy, it only took up to 20 minutes to do first boot. But after that, I hit two problem.

First one, once again, NetworkManager, a bug. So I used pppoeconf to do the job. Commandline tool is more reliable. Second, my video driver, nVIdia 96 series. I guess this video card is really too old, GeForce4 MX. I had to manually setup a modeline, or my X would be stuck in 640480 (Correct one is 16801050), even worse than open source driver. These two are the problem I had had so far.

I actually had tried to resolve this resolution problem, but last time with 9.10 RC release. I enabled the restricted driver and ran nvidia-xconfig. I got Out-of-range message from my LCD monitor, I stuck. I think I was even trying to switch vc1, though I had no idea if there are virtual consoles available. I just quited. This time, I tried to get into runlevel 3. Well, I ended up with uninstalling gdm, no kidding! I tried to disable gdm from bringing up at booting with update-rc. However, it just didn't want to leave me, how sweet? (If you know how to correctly temporarily disable gdm or how to boot into so-called runlevel 3, please enlighten me!)

Anyway, un-installation did the trick. I fixed the resolution problem in console, then got into X and re-installed the gdm. The Visual Effect also works after I fixed the resolution.

I think I am going to use this new install for some of my daily routine until I get sick of it. I would be using it in a different way, I won't touch Terminal as much as I can, unfortunately, I already did. Work-out-of-box with GUI? In your dream only if you are lucky.

I have to give Ubuntu's graphical design a thumb up, the icons in notification area are simply elegant, same color scheme. And the notifying popup is already a well-known feature (I think it's been out for a least a year).


Its indicator-applet (the one with mail envelope icon) and indicator-session-applet (the one with your username on it) are quite interest, it can merge with some other program, e.g. Empathy. When I close Empathy, I tried to search for a new icon in notification area, but I couldn't find one. I thought I might accidentally end it because I wasn't familiar with it. But it actually is in the two applets. You can bring it back from indicator-applet and change your status to away from indicator-session-applet. That makes perfect sense, just need to get used to this new way.


The login screen of gdm is definitely beautiful. But the entire Ubuntu scheme seems to be slightly dark. Wine rosy color. I wish it could be more cheerful. The sound effects are great, too. The logging sound and the popup/warning sounds are cute in my opinion.

Currently, it runs well. The memory usage is quite low, less than 200MB when I just boot it up and the boot time is about 45 seconds to the desktop without counting password typing time. I am satisfied with the performance and the result of install. You would be more happier with Ubuntu 9.10 if you have the better hardwares than I have.

YouTube provides few predefined sizes of embedded code, but usually that won't fit perfectly for your blogs. I wrote a simple script to calculator based on the width that you want, it will give you what proportion you should set.

As of writing, the control panel, at bottom of video, is 25 pixels high. If you have set border on, that will increase 20 pixels on both width and height.

---

---

A sample embedded code looks like:

<object width="width" height="height">
 <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/video_id&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param>
 <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
 <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
 <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/video_id;hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"
  type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always"
  allowfullscreen="true" width="width" height="height"></embed>
</object>

You need to replace proportion in two places, which are marked in red.

My webcam gives me very dark image, so I tried to find out how to adjust.

v4l2ucp - Video4Linux Universal Control Panel

A GUI control panel. It's very easy to adjust.


v4lctl of Xawtv

This program is part of Xawtv, a command-line tool. You can do with it like:

$ v4lctl -c /dev/video0 list
attribute  | type   | current | default | comment
-----------+--------+---------+---------+-------------------------------------
norm       | choice | (null)  | (null)  |
input      | choice | tv8532  | tv8532  | tv8532
bright     | int    |     399 |     399 | range is 1 => 767
contrast   | int    |   32767 |   32767 | range is 0 => 65535
$ v4lctl -c /dev/video0 bright 80%
$ v4lctl -c /dev/video0 contrast 75%
$ v4lctl -c /dev/video0 list
attribute  | type   | current | default | comment
-----------+--------+---------+---------+-------------------------------------
norm       | choice | (null)  | (null)  |
input      | choice | tv8532  | tv8532  | tv8532
bright     | int    |     613 |     399 | range is 1 => 767
contrast   | int    |   49151 |   32767 | range is 0 => 65535

You can man v4lctl.

Unfortunately, my webcam has only small change on brightness and totally no difference on contrast.

I watched this music video "Change" by Taylor Swift on YouTube, which was released on Aug. 8, the opening day of this Olympics Game.

Video (bad quality)


Audio


It's interesting to connect this song Change to Obama's Change. Although we all know this song was written for American Olympians. Try to read the lyrics and think about the elections, you may feel something.

THE US MILITARY has ordered YouTube off of its networks and has launched its own video-sharing Web site for troops, their families and supporters.

Since May 2007, the Defense Department banned employees and soldiers from accessing social not-fighting sites including Youtube and Myspace, citing security and bandwidth issues.

—US builds Trooptube

I wonder if U.S. DoD employees watch videos on YouTube all day long? Or how would this involve bandwidth issue? If you already know American Army, then this TroopTube is really not a big thing to you.

I first visited it to see if I can find a secret LOLcat solider, but for a visitor, you can only see few videos. So I signed up as civilian friend, however, I still see no lolcat.

This sign up form is quite interesting. We all are familiar the Captcha, but when its about the Military, you have change your jargon.

So, am I having the Level 1 Security Clearance? :)

Currently the video is limited to up to 5 minutes or 20 MB, you can also mark videos as private, but how would other people watch that? I see no option to add friends or foes :). You can also comment on videos.

I think normal Internet users will not use this website, but I am really bored, just want to check out.

Recently I kept playing a MV on my screen, so I decided to turn on Desktop Effects, then I will have alpha channel. I can make video window a little transparent and I can read stuff beneath that window. I have tried to keep system as simple as possible, therefore I didn't install other players besides the default, totem. Funny thing is after turned the Desktop Effects on, I also installed Xine (front-end), MPlayer, and VLC. Why I installed them? because I can't stand with the quality of gstreamer, Xine, or VLC, only MPlayer can satisify my eyes.



I will start to note about how to let each player play with Desktop Effects first:




Make sure you switch to gstreamer (as root)

totem-backend -b gstreamer

Choose video driver

gstreamer-properties

Switch to Video tab, choose X Window System (No XV), Test, then Close.




Go to Setup, Choose Master of the known universe from Configuration experience level in gui tab, Switch to video tab, Choose driver xshm.




Tools/Preferences, Video, Display/Output X11 video output.




In Preferences/Video. x11 may work, but the fullscreen doesn't work for me. gl2 is sort of working, but have other issues.



The quality of them, I rank them in this order: MPlayer > VLC >>> Xine = gstreamer. Although VLC seems to be better than Xine or gstreamer, but it gives me few glitches on audio, that is not acceptable to me.



MPlayer is not really fully working with Desktop Effects, I wonder if this is also about open source video driver. I can't recall the status when I still use ATI driver.



Since I only have a small window playing, I will stay with Desktop Effects using Totem + gstreamer, I can accept the quality when window is small. When I need the fullscreen playing, I will turn off Desktop Effects and use MPlayer.