Another stonk market boom & more hawkish hot air from the fed.  They were concerned about the stonk market boom raising inflation but we know it's just jawboning.  The fact is they just care about the headline number.  If stonks double & the headline number falls, they'll cut.

The latest pop might have been from amazon.com replacing Walgreens in the index.  Indexes are managed funds no different from anything else except possibly lower commissions & slower trades.  They seek growth, not an agnostic measurement of stonk market performance.

Stonk market performance might have been flat or just keeping up with inflation for the last 30 years while the indexes loaded up on meme stonks. 

You'd never guess stonks would be where they are now, a year ago.  That's the game.  They'll take another dip on some good news.  Good new is bad.

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Kind of disappointing to find Cinelerra failing to load a lot of files it could load 20 years ago.  silent_hill_h1080p.mov was another one.  That one used mp4a audio. 

There are just 5 files failing.  Lions will never watch any of these files again & they can all be downloaded again in a modern format.  There seemed to be a change in the way mp4a was encoded after 2007.

The mp4a files were originally read by libfaad. It still decodes it properly but can't derive the samplerate & channels anymore.  Writing the libfaad decoder was an exciting time.  It cost a job but it was worth it.

In the end, the problem was it not handling the case of an frma followed by an esds.  That got it to work with ffmpeg.  The trick is the esds contains a bunch of description tags.  There's still the chance of it hitting an unrecognized description tag before it hits the mpeg4_header.

The sound of thunderthroat roared again after all those years.  That left AC3 as the next trouble spot. 

More problems with MP4A & enabling AC3 ended up a matter of copying over a lot more header parsing from ffmpeg.  These standards kept getting extended after 2005.  The number of annexes & bits you have to check is much like time zone conversion.

The general idea is the channels & samplerate in the STSD table need to match the elementary stream encoding but usually don't. A lot of code is required to extract those bits from the ESDS header & the DAC3 header.

Another problem was the STTS table appeared to use units of track time scale, but they were being treated as units of STSD sample rate.  The hack was just to scale the STTS table after the true sample rate was found.  1 file had an STSD samplerate of 1.  Who knows what broke when that was overwritten.

The original cinepak still isn't supported but ffmpeg supports it. ffmpeg was really the result of someone saying fuck the licensing & just banging out all the codecs which everyone was afraid to support before.

The old starwars trailers didn't play anymore.  The extradata for QDM2 required the entire stsd table.  There's a failure mode where read_frame or open_file lock up but don't crash.  Not sure how to avoid that one.  Maybe a menu command can kill all open files but the lockup freezes the GUI.

This will undoubtedly have more bad implications in the future.  It's impressive that ffmpeg was able to decode all these formats.  They must have an automated test suite that transcodes tons of files.  Cinelerra probably needs the same thing.  For now, regression testing after every hackathon is like being 25 again.

 

20 years ago, just watching trailers on a PC was a big deal.

As bleak as it seems, some of these files didn't play at all until recently.  Some still aren't seekable but they show something.  It's taken a continuous process of gradually supporting more of them, year after year.

No sooner did previews of .mpg files start working than the long lost goth band was revealed.  It was recorded on Apr 14, 2000.  There's no certainty with memory loss, but it definitely sounds like the song.  A rare moment of a software feature solving a problem. The band was No Doubt.  They seemed to last until 2012.  They made the 1 song that was constantly replayed during the dot com parties, Don't Speak.  That song got a lot of generation X families started.  Surprising how much lions remember.

A super crummy gootube upload had another song from the same show.  It was dated Apr 7, 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNuFLsj2jSA

Lions will never ever make another .mpg or .vob file.  The preview feature only exists because it was simple & there's archival footage.  It might be able to preview an old DVD.

In 2000, .mpg was the only compressed format anyone could generate outside windows.  A lot of effort was spent on supporting it in Broadcast 2000.  divx came either really soon afterwards or by 2001 but good old .mpg still had better quality for many more years.  Lions did eventually switch to divx/mpeg-4 for several years.  H.264 got supported around 2005 but lions didn't have enough computing power to use it until at least 2008.  The true story would be revealed by examining the files.

The .mpg/.vob files lasted up to the end of 2001, then switched over to MPEG-4 in Jan 2002.  The holidays in 2001 were the breakthrough time.  first_opendivx_vorbis.mov was the 1st success, using opendivx to get MPEG-4 & ogg vorbis to get audio.  The lion kingdom used fourcc VBIS for some time.  Then the official fourcc for vorbis was declared to be OggS later.  The lion kingdom continued encoding vorbis using the new fourcc.  It never conformed to any of the variable bitrate encoding standards.

QDM2 conformed to a variable bitrate encoding standard in 2001 that was different from what MP4A used later, manely using the FRMA container instead of ESDS & the time to sample table. 

MPEG-4 + Ogg Vorbis lasted until mid 2005.  Then it was MP4A + H264.  Pretty sure young lion had to continue using MPEG-4 for HD until much later.

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Finally watched Nightmare at 20,000 ft. Wing walkers are an age old tale, but this was the original.  It must have been terrifying for those 1st audiences on that Friday night in 1963, in their living rooms. 

There are no hominids in the upper atmosphere.  They would have to live in gas balloons & wouldn't be able to go anywhere.  If they damaged an engine, the airplane wouldn't crash.  The mane fear in the movie wasn't of the monster but the monster crashing the airplane.

The biggest danger would be the creature killing all the engines & the RAT.  The creature couldn't enter the cabin, since its existence would be proven.  As soon as 1 engine died, they would all know of his existence & probably kill him.

If a lion saw a hominid on the wing, he would make a video, not so easy in 1963, but not say a thing.  Only after the engine died & there was no hope of ever arriving at the destination would the lion say by the way, there's a hominid on the wing & ponder the logic of buying an airline stonk.

The closest thing that could live in the upper atmosphere is a bat like Shadow in the Clouds, but the more likely the animal is to survive, the more likely it's a bird.