Efika 5200B Project Reggae on Efika in category Multimedia proposed by Grzegorz Kraszewski on 21st February 2006 (accepted on 20th March 2006) [View Full Project]

Blog Entry

	Reggae 2007 summary and plans for 2008 posted by Grzegorz Kraszewski on 8th January 2008 The past 2007 year has been one of the best in the whole Reggae history (which has been started in 2003). In this blog entry I want to summarize 2007 achievements and try to shed some light on the project future. 3-rd party classes Moving a software project from an one person's pet to a real thing developed by at least a few people is very important and often difficult step. Reggae has made this step succesfully in the second half of 2007, when Michal Zukowski started work of Reggae decoders of many important image formats. It proves that Reggae is a mature, stable and well documented framework, which anyone can contribute to. Michal's classes are also important from another point of view. All classes written before were carefully written from scratch, handtuned and optimized pieces. While it is good for high performance and small memory footprint, it takes time. JPEG and PNG decoders by Michal base on "industry standard" off-the-shelf libraries, and as such are a proof that Reggae can easily adopt new multimedia technologies, which is very important for possible commercial applications. Of course these components can be later refined, or even replaced with some optimized code (for example using hardware components to speed processing up), but in the meantime applications can use new codecs, transition to newer, improved versions is smooth. Video metaformat The video metaformat, described briefly in my previous posts is another new thing introduced into Reggae in 2007. It is worth noting, thanks to high Reggae modularity and good framework design, introduction of the metaformat has been totally backward compatible and no single class has to be modified to accomodate the metaformat. To make a short recall, the metaformat is designed to extend Reggae capability of video handling. The metaformat exposes video structure to applications. While it may be not very interesting for typical fixed-size, fixed framerate streams, it allows for variable rate streams (AnimGIF), partial updates, partial restore (another AnimGIF feature) and more. Metaformat is designed to be very extendable in the future, as I plan to use it for processing vectorial graphics and video. While a need of exposing internal structure of raster-oriented media is debatable (but keep MPEG-4 in mind...), it is obvious for vectorial graphics, especially for any application intending to do anything more than just display. Metaformat will be also extended to support compound documents containing text with embedded images, video and sounds. Metadata stream will be then splitted by splitter Reggae class, directing chunks of data into decoders for any kind of media, and, what is important, metadata will retain object position in the document and other informations needed for document reassembly for display or processing. To sum it up, while the metaformat is by no mean rocket science, its introduction moves Reggae to another, higher level of flexibility and versatility. Media encoding It can be noticed by looking at the Reggae class list that there are no encoders. There is a reason for this. Decoding is easier - all parameters of encoded stream, like compression method, quality, bitrate etc. are just contained in the stream itself. For encoder one can expect an application (or user via application GUI) will be able to specify those parameters. To achieve this, a Reggae encoder (and maybe multiplexer) class must be able to describe itself (describe possible encoding parameters) to an application. The ideal solution will allow to handle even encoders unknown at the time of application building. An API for this must be carefully designed, as encoding parameters vary in their types. Some of them are choices, some are continuous values from a range, also a parameter can depend on another one. Describing parameters and their dependencies for example for MPEG Audio encoder is surprisingly complicated. Two solutions emerge from discussions. An encoder class can use some metalanguage to describe encoding parameters and their dependencies, or alternatively encoder can just deliver a code creating GUI component embeddable in an application (more technically it will deliver MUI Gruop object). The second soultion is easier to implement (there were some succesfull experiments) and more flexible (even weirdest parameters dependencies can be coded down). The disadvantage is making Reggae dependent on specific GUI toolkit, but as MUI is integral part of MorphOS, it does not seem to be a real problem. After programming Every programmer needs some rest after sleepless nights of bug hunting. To relax myself I build a custom case for my Efika. I've seen some Efika DIY cases, but most of them do not look good because of one fundamental mistake - when you make something at home, with simple tools, do not use industrial materials and technologies. That is why my case is made of laminated chipboard, which is quite unusual material for computer case, but has a few advantages. The first one is giving a furniture like look. I do not want my Efika to look like a computer ;-). Secondly, chipboard is good at sound attenuation. My Efika is fanless, so very quiet, but HDD emits some noise, my case will made it almost unhearable. And last but not least, chipboard is easy for tooling. On the picture you can see ready sheets of 10 mm chipboard with yet unfinished edges. I plan to finish and assemble them this week. Another unusual material is used for mounting board and backplate. You may expect a metal plate here, but again, it is not DIY-friendly material (especially steel sheets). On my pictures it looks like I've used a copper plate, but don't be fooled, it is just copper covered glass-epoxide laminate, a common material for making printed circuit boards. I will paint it in black later, as copper gets oxygenated and looks dirty. The laminate is very strong, yet making holes of any shape in it is very easy (important for the backplate, lots of holes for all these connectors and plugs...). The chassis is designed to be a single self-contained unit, which will be slided into the chipboard box with guides made of aluminium profiles, then secured in place with two screws on the back. Then I avoid another amateur projects mistake - where a device is assembled in a way making further disassembling, or parts exchanging almost impossible ;-). My design makes for example exchange of graphics card as easy as in a typical PC casing. The final thing will be a front plate made of black plexi with only two LED-s and two buttons on it. I like clean designs :-). Below my MorphOS devstation at work :-) And the last photo - teleinfo.pb.edu.pl server. Of course Efika too. Just a new meaning for a word "server" :-). Expect more photos soon. By the way, all photos here have been processed on Efika using ShowGirls, an excellent image viewer and processor for MorphOS, written by Michal Wozniak.