Serviio DLNA media server

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Last update : May 8, 2013

Serviio is a free media server allowing you to stream media files (music, video or images) to DLNA renderer devices on your connected home network. Serviio is based on Java technology and therefore runs on most platforms. A pro version was launched in July 2012 when the 1.0 version was released.

The relevant features of Serviio are :

  • streams audio, video (SD & HD) and image files in their native format or transcoded in real-time
  • streams content from online sources (RSS feeds, live audio/video streams, web page content, …)
  • streams your PC desktop
  • includes a plugin system, based on the Groovy language, to support streaming from non-trivial online sources or to create playlists
  • supports different editable renderer profiles
  • supports external subtitles

Serviio uses a priority-based metadata extraction to describe your media files :

  • embedded metadata into the media files
  • locally stored metadata files (.nfo sidecar files)
  • scraped online metadata

The performance and high quality of the Serviio DLNA server has been documented by the fact that Sony UK first recommended Serviio for Sony devices and recently licensed Serviio to create their own customized Homestream server. Sony started the DLNA initiative in 2003.

Serviio is developed by the freelance Java consultant Petr Nejedly (alias ZIP). The current version 1.2.1 was released on March 22, 2013. Serviio is supported by a strong on-line community, active on the main forum and on the numerous sub-forums. There are also various third party tools available, for example a web user interface in php or AJAX, consoles (ServiiDroid, …), a database for storing information about online sources (ServiiDB).

Patters created a DSM package to install Serviio on a Synology NAS.

Here is a small list of some other DLNA servers to allow you to compare the Serviio features with other projects.

ID3 in MP3 metadata container

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Last update : August 25,2013
ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.

There are two unrelated versions of ID3: ID3v1 and ID3v2. They are de facto standards, because no standardization body was involved in its creation nor has given it a formal approval status.

A tag editor is used to read or write ID3 metadata. Many media players, including the standard players iTunes and Windows Media Player, provide tagging features.

The most common fields displayed in a DLNA renderer are the following :

  • Artist Name
  • Album Name
  • Title
  • Genre
  • Year
  • Comments
  • Length
  • Picture of the artist or album (high resolution panoramic pictures, for example 640×480 pixels, are best suited)

Sometimes the track number is also shown. Less usual are the Album Artist, the Composer or the Disc Number.

Widely used tag editors are Mp3tag (current version 2.57 released on July 6, 2013, created by Florian Heidenreich) and Easytag (current version 2.1.8 released on February 10, 2013, created by Jerôme Couderc).

The ID3 standard is very flexible with regards to the type and number of images that can be embedded in a MP3 single file (21 types are specified : icons, leaflets, cover art, artist, composer, conductor, location, …). In practice only one picture is used and displayed by the player. More informations about embedding album art in MP3 files are available at the weblog of Richard Farrar.

Informations about metadata editors for image files are available in the following post.

 

Groovy : a dynamic language for the Java platform

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Groovy is an agile and dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine. It builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. Groovy seamlessly integrates with all existing Java classes and libraries and compiles straight to Java bytecode so you can use it anywhere you can use Java. A set of Eclipse plugins that provide Eclipse support for Groovy projects is available (Groovy-Eclipse).

The current stable version is 1.8. Groovy is used among others for the development of plugins for the DLNA media server Serviio.

3D character rigging and inverse kinematics

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Pinocchio 2007, by Ilya Baran and Jovan Popovic

Rigging (skeletal animation) is a process used in computer animation, particularly in the animation of characters, to efficiently mimic real world skeletal systems for animation purposes. Characters are represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh.

This rigging technique is used by creating a series of bones to form skeletons. Each bone in the skeleton is responsible for deforming and animating a part of the character mesh and has a three dimensional transformation (position, scale and orientation) The bones  form a hierarchy, the skeleton.

Usually the animator is assisted through inverse kinematics and other goal-oriented techniques. The benefit of rigging is that an animation can be defined by simple movements of the bones, instead of vertex by vertex changes. The drawback of rigging is that it does not provide realistic muscle movement and skin motion.

Manual rigging to specify its internal skeletal structure and to define how the input motion deforms its surface is a tedious process. Most 3D modeling & animation packages used by professionals provide inbuilt automatic rigging and skinning algorithms. An example is the BlenRig System for Blender.

An experimental auto rigging and animation tool called Pinocchio was presented in 2007 at SIGGRAPH by Ilya Baran and Jovan Popovic from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The corresponding paper “Automatic Rigging and Animation of 3D Characters” was published in the ACM proceedings of SIGGRAPH. The source files, binaries for Windows and test meshes are available from the Pinocchio project page at MIT.

A commercial standalone automatic rigging tool, called Jimmy|RIG, was created by Origami Digital LLC, to allow people to quickly apply motion capture data to their characters without the tedious process of painting weights and setting up a skeleton. Different software versions are available, a Lite version starts at 150 $US.

A web-based automatic rigging solution is offered by Mixamo which provides the first premium quality 3D character animation experience entirely online.

The following list shows some links to videos related to automatic rigging :

 

GPU Caps Viewer

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Last update : September 16, 2014

GPU Caps Viewer is a video card information utility that gives details about hardware (GPU) and software (OpenGL, OpenCL and CUDA API level support).

The current version of the program is 1.21.1.2 released on September 5, 2014. The following pictures show the informations displayed  for my desktop PC used for some tests with the outstanding ReconstructMe Project.

GPU Caps Viewer 1.16.0 : General View

GPU Caps Viewer 1.16.0 : CUDA View

GPU Caps Viewer 1.16.0 : OpenCL View

GPU Caps Viewer has been developed by Jérôme [JeGX] Guinot from Switzerland. He considers himself as OpenGL developer and GPU torturer. He is the owner of the blog Geeks3D providing informations about 3D tech news each and every day. He is also the founder of the website oZone3D.Net (“Heat up your graphics card”) and maintains the personal log JeGX’s Infamous Lab (former JeGX’s DevBlog). Some other creations of JeGX are GeeXLab, FurMark, TessMark, FluidMark, ShaderToyMark, GPU Shark, GLinspector, EVGA OC Scanner and MSI Kombustor.

The program  contains 11 OpenGL and 8 OpenCL demos.

Biovision Hierarchy (BVH) Format and MoCap data for Character Animation

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bvhacker version 1.8.0.6, by D. Wooldridge

The Biovision Hierarchy (BVH) character animation file format was developed by Biovision, a defunct motion capture services company. BVH provides skeleton hierarchy information as well as motion data. The BVH format is an ASCII file that is used to import rotational joint data. It is currently one of the most popular motion data formats, and has been widely adopted by the animation community, probably because of its simple specifications.

Most 3D modeling & animation packages used by professionals provide an inbuilt BVH editor. This contribution mainly focus on tools and motion data accessible to animation hobbyists.

A list of some commercial and free BVH tools is shown below :

  • bvhacker : free bvh file editing tool ideally suited for final preparation of bvh files for upload to Second Life
  • BVH Helper : a suite of Python tools to aid the import of BVH files into Poser
  • BVHplay : a free, open-source BVH animation player
  • Life Forms Studio 5 : the most powerful character-animation package in its price-range
  • SimFonIA : innovative plugin for 3D animation for  SketchUp
  • iClone 5 : real-time 3D animation
  • bvh player for iPad : bvh files can be imported by email or iTunes

Next comes a list of commercial and free BVH animation data :

Additional informations about character animation are available at the following links :

Polygon Cruncher and other 3D mesh optimizing tools

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Among 3D mesh optimizing tools, Polygon Cruncher, developed by Manuel Jouglet, owner of the french company Mootools, is the most renowned program. Polygon Cruncher reduces the number of polygons of  3D objects without changing their appearance. You keep all details, materials, textures, vertex colors and normals, even at high optimization ratio. Polygon Cruncher uses an exceptional algorithm developed since more than 10 years and gives incomparable results. It is really simple to use and has been chosen by major 3D companies.

The latest version of Polygon Cruncher is 10.02 released on May 25, 2012. Polygon Cruncher exists in different version: StandAlone which includes Maya files support, plugin for 3D Photo Browser, plugin for 3DS Max / 3ds Max Design and plugin for Lightwave Modeler. A free SDK for developers, offering Polygon Cruncher optimization features through a C++ library is also available. The price for a full single licence is 129$.

Another famous mesh optimizing tool (open source) is Meshlab.

Andy Davies, a Hampshire-based (UK) 3D Artist, administrator/instructor of www.eat3d.com, created a video in 2009 showing a comparison between Polygon Cruncher and Meshlab.

Other mesh optimizing tools are listed hereafter :

Frozen iPod Touch

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Today my iPod Touch became frozen with a white blank screen. It was unresponsive to buttons and all other inputs and not recognized by iTunes. The reset procedure indicated by Apple to push the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time, for at least ten seconds, didn’t help.
After waiting until the iPod ran out of battery completely and recharging, the iPod Touch recovered and is now fully operational again.

PCL : Point Cloud Library

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documentation segmentation on the pointclouds.org website

A point cloud is a data structure used to represent a collection of multi-dimensional points and is commonly used to represent three-dimensional data. In a 3D point cloud, the points usually represent the X, Y, and Z geometric coordinates of an underlying sampled surface. When color information is present, the point cloud becomes 4D.

Point clouds are most often created by 3D scanners. Point clouds can be directly rendered and inspected, but generally they are not directly usable in most 3D applications, and therefore are usually converted to polygon or triangle mesh models, NURBS surface models, or CAD models through a process commonly referred to as surface reconstruction.

Here comes in the Point Cloud Library (PCL), a standalone, large scale, open project for 3D point cloud processing. The PCL framework contains numerous state-of-the art algorithms including filtering, feature estimation, surface reconstruction, registration, model fitting and segmentation, as well as higher level tools for performing mapping and object recognition. PCL is released under the terms of the BSD license and it’s free for commercial and research use.

The PCL website provides a blog, a news, media and download section and a great documentation with tutorials, descriptions, API’s and advanced topics about 3D point clouds.

One example of a PCL project is the open source version of KinectFusion.

 

MeshMixer, Sculptris, zBrush and 3D-Coat

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meshmixer version 07 update 4

Meshmixer is an experimental easy-to-use mesh cleanup/composition/sculpting 3D modeling tool developed by Ryan Schmidt, who is a Research Scientist at Autodesk Research in Toronto, Canada. Ryan is also the author of the sketch-based implicit surface modeler ShapeShop. Meshmixer is now part of Autodesk. The current version of Meshmixer is 07, update 4, released on May 18, 2012. An up-to-date documentation is not yet available.

Meshmixer is often compared to Sculptris, a sculpting tool that Tomas Pettersson has been developing since early December 2009. Sculptris was picked up by Pixologic when Tomas Petterson joined this company in 2010. Sculptris is still available for free at the Pixologic website and the skills you learn with Sculptris can be directly translated to ZBrush, the award winning and most widely-used digital sculpting application in today’s market. The models that you create with Sculptris can even be sent to ZBrush with the click of a button using the GoZ™ functionality.

Another commercial digital sculpting program is 3D-Coat from Pilgway. It was designed to create free-form organic and hard surfaced 3D models from scratch.