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Choosing a CRT-Shader for Youtube

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This is part two of the capture of  Stars for Youtube. Video Generation The process is rather simple: Run demo on Dosbox, capture the video. You get a 70fps 320x200 video using the lossless zmbv codec for images, and lossless PCM audio. As the demo is a plain VGA program, this is a perfect copy of what is displayed/played by the demo. Play the 320x200 video with Retroarch, with CRT-shader and video capture. In Retroarch settings, I choose the target resolution, activate video lossless record + GPU shader record. As Retroarch won't play zmbv video, I first transcode to "lossless" h264, also setting the aspect ratio for the next pass. After Retroarch, I transcode the video to h264 Q1 to reduce the video size from 30GB to 10 GB, with no visible quality loss. Here is the makefile I used for the conversion: https://gist.github.com/kassoulet/485ce8bb3c29461ae67a5aeb5a683fbe (remember, the audio is taken from a video I generated using the remastering done in part one)...
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Stars Audio Remastering

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I present to you an experiment I did to create the best possible video for an 1995 MSDOS demo. Note the choices I made: Use Dosbox Process the audio from the original modules. Apply CRT emulation to the video. This post will detail the audio processing. Audio Source Choice The original demo uses two Amiga modules (MOD) for the sound, so there is no real panning. Some channels go to the left output, the others to the right. The demo is played in stereo on GUS soundcards, and in mono on SoundBlaster soundcards. For me the panning is questionnable, and after a few tests in mono, I go for a reduced stereo field + mono low-end. For the source I will use a high-quality replayer  with 8-tap fir interpolation to re-generate from the source modules. I also go for a full remastering of the track, as we are taking about one of the finest  masterpiece of French heritage here. (yeah I know the musician is not french :) ) Audio Edit The first step is to merge the two tracks into one, and ch...
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Python bdist_rpm & changing the package name

When you create a RPM package with python's distutils, there is something rater annoying: you can't change the package name. or at least not easily. After a moment of bad/hard solutions, I've found a easy and clean way to do it: Let's say you have a customized nose. When you create the RPM with "python setup.py bdist_rpm", the resulting package is nose-$version.rpm, but you want it to be python-nose-$version.rpm, so it can be recognized by redhat packages. But a src.rpm is also created! You just have to install (rpm -i) the src.rpm, this will create a .spec file in ~/rpmbuild/SPECS and a tar.gz in ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES. Now, edit the package name in the spec file, decompress/rename the folder/recompress the tar.gz. Run rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/yourspecfile.spec and the new/renamed RPM is in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS.
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Activate webp in local google app engine

On Ubuntu Linux, the python-imaging package doesn't have webp support compiled. Fortunately, it's easy to fix: Remove the official python-imaging package. Install libwebp-dev. Run "sudo pip install pillow" in a terminal. Webp support is now available from your local app engine.
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Tired of rpmbuild failing due to unpackaged pyc/pyo files? You have two solutions: add %define _unpackaged_files_terminate_build 0 in top of spec file, or disable /usr/lib/rpm/brp-python-bytecompile by adding an exit 0 at the beginning.
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Kawaii Live Wallpaper

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I'm so weak... Yes, I stopped resisting, and did some OpenGL ES code on Android. Also my first try with live wallpapers, not so bad :) The effect itself is very simple, but I like it a lot. I did a similar effect on a title screen a loooong time ago. The frame rate is capped at 30fps not to drain the battery.
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gzfuse - simple, transparent gz decompression for fuse

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This is my new pet project. Allowing you to mount folders full of gzipped files, and read them transparently. This is the gain in place using gzip files: And this is the speed penalty using gzfuse: Please note that the implementation is very young and experimental. It uses fusepy and Python for now, so it's rather slow (but fast enough). And more worryingly single-threaded. If there is a demand, I may rewrite in C, and maybe add a way to write files. Get it here:  https://github.com/kassoulet/gzfuse
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