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Gah, the Mecklenburg County Aquatic Center schedule is annoying me, lately:
*5 - TCS Swim Meet - Entire Facility Closed - 3pm - 9:30pm
*6 - 7 - TCS Swim Meet - Entire Facility Closed
It's a good thing I kept around my YMCA membership (even though their pool is closed all too frequently). It's ashame that there isn't a non-crowded pool in the south Charlotte area that is consistently open. Whatever.
I hate it.
Here's my dilemma:
A few weeks ago my parents sent me their old camcorder with a dozen tapes of ancient home videos. After playing with my video capture card (DViCO FusionHDTV5 RT Gold - using the composite input) and MEncoder, I finally got a step-by-step process down for each of the tapes. It went like this:
Press play on camcorder and then immediately execute the following command:
sudo nice -n -10 mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ffv1 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=224:mode=3 -o raw.avi -tv input=1:normid=0 tv://1
The above encodes to ffv1 (lossless codec) the video coming in from the composite input of my capture card. The nice command tells it to run at a bit higher priority than normal - mostly because I want to keep using my workstation when this is recording, but not have any user processes (yeah, Flash video) take away from the encoding process.
Next, I do the following to do a two-pass encode of the video with H.264 while keeping the audio intact (we converted to MP3 in the previous step):
mencoder -ovc x264 -vf pp=lb/ha/va/dr,hqdn3d -x264encopts pass=1:bitrate=3000 -oac copy -o /dev/null raw.avi
mencoder -ovc x264 -vf pp=lb/ha/va/dr,hqdn3d -x264encopts pass=2:bitrate=3000 -oac copy -o 1996.avi raw.avi
The pp=lb/ha/va/dr,hqdn3d does some magic by deinterlacing the video and making it look nice. The output is an AVI container with an H.264 video track and an MP3 audio track.
So far, so good, right? I did that for all twelve videos, and now am running into a roadblock.
I want to convert all of those to MP4, so QuickTime (yes, my parents have an iMac) can play it. MEncoder doesn't support MP4 directly, so I have to do an offline conversion. Normally, I'd just do the following with FFmpeg:
ffmpeg -i 1996.avi -f mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy 1996.mp4
MPlayer will play this fine (well, not fine - when seeking, MPlayer can't find keyframes, so starts with a whole bunch of crap on the screen, but this gets better once a keyframe is encountered), but.. QuickTime hates it. The video stutters horribly, for some reason.
So, I try Avidemux, a video editor I use for a number of other things and normally works very well. Unfortunately, the MP4 it created doesn't even open in QuickTime! Turns out this is a known issue. Avidemux is apparently creating a textbook MP4, but somehow QuickTime didn't read the textbook. Fail.
I search around a little bit more, and stumble across MP4Box (part of the gpac package in Debian provided by the Debian Multimedia repository). It required me to split the AVI into its tracks, and then use those to encode, while specifying the framerate (which made sense, since the FPS is in the container):
MP4Box -aviraw video 1996.avi
MP4Box -aviraw audio 1996.avi
MP4Box -fps 29.970 -add 1996_audio.mp3 -add 1996_video.h264 1996.mp4
This doesn't work right, for some reason. MP4Box doesn't listen to the FPS I'm giving it, and defaults to 25! Audio and video become desynchronized and it all goes downhill. I tried -add 1996_video.h264:fps=29.97, too, not really understanding the command-line arguments, but that didn't do anything, either. I suspect a bug, but I'm not going to bother with that.
I searched around a little more, and I found a Windows utility called MP4Creator that looked like it might be able to do the trick. I got mixed results, mostly because each time I ran it, I got a different file size! I also didn't know how to add two tracks, but apparently if you run it twice, it re-interlaves the second track into the existing MP4 (strange). Here's what I did:
mp4creator -rate=29.97 -c 1996_video.h264 1996.mp4
mp4creator -c 1996_audio.mp3 1996.mp4
Well, this plays perfectly with MPlayer (no problems with seeking!) but, now, we're back to the file not even opening with QuickTime.
What is going on, here? Is there something else I should be using? Re-encoding is not an option (and it shouldn't need to be - I have the raw H.264 and MP3 files, and I know the framerate) at this point.
Over the last couple of years I've been a resident of Charlotte, NC, I've observed that when we get winter weather, it's usually ice, not snow. Last night we got a little bit of both in what The Weather Channel called a Wintry Mix.
I took some more photos, too.
The roads aren't too great, and I saw drivers do a few stupid things (not waiting for a red light to change, and just driving right through the intersection) on my trip to the Y, around noon. In all honesty, I think walking is more dangerous than driving, at this point. I walked through some slush this morning, and when I walked over it again early this afternoon, it had turned to ice. The temperature continues to drop, making things very slippery. And, since it's all ice, none of the snowplows are even bothering to clear most of the roads.
Oh well. Staying home, for now.
Something very strange is going on with two pieces of equipment in my condo.
The clocks on both my Cisco 7965G IP phone and Logitech Squeezebox are running very slowly (somewhere between 1/5 and 1/10 normal speed), and constantly reverting back to 01:45 or so on Jan. 27th, 2010. Menus and animations on both devices run very slowly, too, like there is a hardware timer issue, or something.
I first thought this might be an NTP issue, so I did a few packet captures of the NTP traffic between the Cisco 7965G and my NTP server:
20:39:54.844785 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 38096, offset 0, flags [none], proto UDP (17), length 76)
10.3.5.104.123 > 10.3.4.2.123: [no cksum] NTPv3, length 48
Client, Leap indicator: clock unsynchronized (192), Stratum 15, poll 6s, precision -7
Root Delay: 0.000000, Root dispersion: 2.009994, Reference-ID: 0.0.0.0
Reference Timestamp: 0.000000000
Originator Timestamp: 0.000000000
Receive Timestamp: 0.000000000
Transmit Timestamp: 3473567182.860354963 (2010/01/27 02:46:22)
Originator - Receive Timestamp: 0.000000000
Originator - Transmit Timestamp: 3473567182.860354963 (2010/01/27 02:46:22)
20:39:54.881551 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 63, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto UDP (17), length 76)
10.3.4.2.123 > 10.3.5.104.123: [udp sum ok] NTPv3, length 48
Server, Leap indicator: (0), Stratum 2, poll 6s, precision -20
Root Delay: 0.043365, Root dispersion: 0.029220, Reference-ID: 209.51.161.238
Reference Timestamp: 3473803857.861653736 (2010/01/29 20:30:57)
Originator Timestamp: 3473567182.860354963 (2010/01/27 02:46:22)
Receive Timestamp: 3473804394.862448562 (2010/01/29 20:39:54)
Transmit Timestamp: 3473804394.862667697 (2010/01/29 20:39:54)
Originator - Receive Timestamp: +237212.002093598
Originator - Transmit Timestamp: +237212.002312734
It kept doing that every couple of seconds, never setting the clock. Okay, maybe being +237212 seconds off prevented synchronization due to a sanity check of some sorts, so I manually set the clock (I ended up being 90 seconds off, but whatever). A few seconds later it reverted BACK to Jan. 27th! See below:
20:54:50.889287 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 40796, offset 0, flags [none], proto UDP (17), length 76)
10.3.5.104.123 > 10.3.4.2.123: [no cksum] NTPv3, length 48
Client, Leap indicator: clock unsynchronized (192), Stratum 15, poll 6s, precision -7
Root Delay: 0.000000, Root dispersion: 2.009994, Reference-ID: 0.0.0.0
Reference Timestamp: 0.000000000
Originator Timestamp: 0.000000000
Receive Timestamp: 0.000000000
Transmit Timestamp: 3473805201.860325451 (2010/01/29 20:53:21)
Originator - Receive Timestamp: 0.000000000
Originator - Transmit Timestamp: 3473805201.860325451 (2010/01/29 20:53:21)
20:54:50.924125 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 63, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto UDP (17), length 76)
10.3.4.2.123 > 10.3.5.104.123: [udp sum ok] NTPv3, length 48
Server, Leap indicator: (0), Stratum 2, poll 6s, precision -20
Root Delay: 0.043579, Root dispersion: 0.030624, Reference-ID: 209.51.161.238
Reference Timestamp: 3473804882.860819613 (2010/01/29 20:48:02)
Originator Timestamp: 3473805201.860325451 (2010/01/29 20:53:21)
Receive Timestamp: 3473805290.909316960 (2010/01/29 20:54:50)
Transmit Timestamp: 3473805290.909515881 (2010/01/29 20:54:50)
Originator - Receive Timestamp: +89.048991509
Originator - Transmit Timestamp: +89.049190430
20:55:58.959742 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 41080, offset 0, flags [none], proto UDP (17), length 76)
10.3.5.104.123 > 10.3.4.2.123: [no cksum] NTPv3, length 48
Client, Leap indicator: clock unsynchronized (192), Stratum 15, poll 6s, precision -7
Root Delay: 0.000000, Root dispersion: 2.009994, Reference-ID: 0.0.0.0
Reference Timestamp: 0.000000000
Originator Timestamp: 0.000000000
Receive Timestamp: 0.000000000
Transmit Timestamp: 3473564203.900366698 (2010/01/27 01:56:43)
Originator - Receive Timestamp: 0.000000000
Originator - Transmit Timestamp: 3473564203.900366698 (2010/01/27 01:56:43)
20:55:58.996647 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 63, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto UDP (17), length 76)
10.3.4.2.123 > 10.3.5.104.123: [udp sum ok] NTPv3, length 48
Server, Leap indicator: (0), Stratum 2, poll 6s, precision -20
Root Delay: 0.043579, Root dispersion: 0.031646, Reference-ID: 209.51.161.238
Reference Timestamp: 3473804882.860819613 (2010/01/29 20:48:02)
Originator Timestamp: 3473564203.900366698 (2010/01/27 01:56:43)
Receive Timestamp: 3473805358.982955623 (2010/01/29 20:55:58)
Transmit Timestamp: 3473805358.983155598 (2010/01/29 20:55:58)
Originator - Receive Timestamp: +241155.082588925
Originator - Transmit Timestamp: +241155.082788900
That shows the originator timestamp going back to the 27th!
To make matters worse, the Squeezebox apparently doesn't use NTP, it grabs time from the mysqueezebox.com service over a proprietary protocol. So, forget NTP being the issue.
Here's hh.mm.ss on the Squeezebox vs a normal clock:
Yes, the last two digits are seconds.
It blows my mind that two separate devices that don't share anything in common (they are even on different subnets) are experiencing the same problem. Perhaps I should call Fox Mulder.
Any ideas?
Update:
Apparently the time and date was wrong on my server (atlantis) that runs the Squeezebox server and TFTP server. The Squeezebox was getting the time from this server, not from mysqueezebox.com, and the Cisco 7965G was, for some odd reason, getting its time via TFTP, which overrode NTP!)
Actually, it looks like something is wrong with the hardware on my server:
(destiny:1:27)% time ssh atlantis time sleep 2 sleep 2 0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 2.004 total ssh atlantis time sleep 2 0.01s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 23.412 total
Time for a reboot, I guess.
It's starting!
;; ANSWER SECTION: v5.lscache7.c.youtube.com. 86146 IN CNAME v5.lscache7.l.google.com. v5.lscache7.l.google.com. 46 IN AAAA 2001:4860:4001:402::1c
Too bad it's only for the Google over IPv6 program. Using other people's DNS servers breaks GSLB…
I'm getting sick and tired of the Appleism of everyday language. Apple likes to prefix lots of their products with a lowercase i. Things like iTunes and iPod are examples. However, it seems that many folks are applying the lowercase i to other things incorrectly. Two are really starting to bug me: types of BGP speakers and Iperf.
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a protocol used on the Internet to distribute reachability information between routers. A router can speak two types of BGP: internal BGP or external BGP (or both). RFC 4271 defines these terms in section 1.1:
EBGP
External BGP (BGP connection between external peers).
IBGP
Internal BGP (BGP connection between internal peers).
Yes, the RFC says IBGP and EBGP instead of iBGP and eBGP. If you write IBGP as iBGP you are wrong. Same goes for EBGP written as eBGP.
This really annoys me. Apple didn't invent BGP. They had nothing to do with it. You don't buy BGP in the iTunes store, or on your iPhone. You don't pay Apple a fee every month to use BGP (well, ok, in a way you do, since a minescule amount of Apple's network infrastructure costs are passed on to you if you use the App. Store or other Apple services - but who cares, that's not the point).
Please stop writing eBGP and iBGP.
The other application that is often written incorrectly is Iperf. Iperf is a Unix (and Windows) command-line network performance testing suite. It has a client & server version, and works over TCP or UDP. It even supports IPv6.
Iperf is written as Iperf, not iPerf. Apple didn't write it. It was written by some folks at NLANR/DAST. You can't buy it using iTunes, and you can't get the U2 version of it.
Please stop writing Iperf as iPerf. It's just wrong.
Thanks!
I just spent too long banging my head against this. Apparently in PF, this syntax:
table <mysubnet> const { 10.66.7.64/27 }
table <myhost> const { 10.66.7.65/32 }
rdr on $ext inet proto tcp from { <mysubnet>, ! <myhost> } to port www -> 10.66.4.36 port 80
Does NOT equal the following syntax:
table <mine> const { !10.66.7.65/32, 10.66.7.64/27 }
rdr on $ext inet proto tcp from <mine> to port www -> 10.66.4.36 port 80
The first syntax apparently doesn't allow for the exclusion of a host that lies within a subnet, if they're both separate tables (order doesn't matter, I tried both). The second creates a single table with the excluded host and the subnet, and it apparently works.
Now you know!
We all saw the JUNOS PSN (and news stories) about the TCP options vulnerability in JUNOS. Yep, now there's exploit code out there, and IT WORKS:
dax% sudo ./junos-crash.pl 10.3.4.35 179
Does this to one of my Olives:
stargazer (ttyd0)
login:
Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
fault virtual address = 0x211
fault code = supervisor read, page not present
instruction pointer = 0x8:0xc032110a
stack pointer = 0x10:0xc0836740
frame pointer = 0x10:0xc0836770
code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
= DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1
processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
current process = Idle
interrupt mask = cam
trap number = 12
panic: page fault
panic(c0879c40,c0879c40,c07eb021,c0836624,5) at
panic(c07eb021,c,c0836770,c07d2141,0) at
trap_fatal(c0836700,211,c4213000,c08366ec,c02ff95e) at
trap_pfault(c0836700,0,211,0,c0836720) at
trap(10,10,10,c0836920,c0836848) at
calltrap() at
--- trap 0xc, eip = 0xc032110a, esp = 0xc0836740, ebp = 0xc0836770 ---
syncache_add(c0836848,c08368e8,c1b5a852,c08367ec,209,22,22,ac1d) at
tcp_input(209,a,3,4030a03,17) at
syncing disks...
done
Uptime: 6d6h45m45s
Upgrade, upgrade!
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