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Comment Re:Compressing video from the camera was bad (Score 1) 118

In practice, no one used the H.264 stream from the camera. Everyone uses the JPEG output. The H.264 stream was embedded in a weird format inside the JPEG comments... This was a spec created by Logitech+Microsoft+Skype, and as far as I know, only the old version of Skype and GStreamer could ever use it. And since the old Skype has been replaced, no one is actually using those! So they only used the JPEG content, which is more than good enough. The H.264 was never about the USB bandwidth, it was always about PCs of the era not being able to do H.264 encoding in real time.

Comment Re:Global Shutter 720p (Score 1) 118

So why isn't there compression invoked?

But there is compression. Almost all webcams on the market actually output JPEG images for anything but the lowest resolution/framerate.. That said, JPEG, even though it's an antique codec isn't the problem. The problem is the sensor & ISP that they have that is very very cheap..

Comment The economy? (Score 4, Insightful) 595

I've yet to find a comparable serious study of the effects of the lock down on the welfare and the health of everyone who survives. The current course set by China and European countries is driving us towards freezing all economic activity. We risk not a recession, but an economic depression. That Imperial College report suggest keeping the lockdown for 18 months, we've never done anything so drastic. We know that unemployment and poverty have serious health consequences. We know that this kind of stress is terrible for everyone's health. I'd like to find if there is anything out there from experts trying to quantify it?

The most interesting statistic I saw is that the average dead patient in Italy is 79.5, wherehas the normal life expectancy is 82.5, so we're talking shortening the lifespan by 3 years on average for those who die. If 1% die, that's an effect of 0.3 years on the life expectancy. What is the effect of economic depression on life expectancy?

Submission + - A dream come true: Android is finally using DRM/KMS (collabora.com)

mfilion writes: Released a few months ago, the Google Pixel 3 is the first Android phone running with the mainline graphics stack. A feat that was deemed impossible 10 years ago is now a reality thanks to a lot of hard work from the entire community.

Submission + - Why Linux HDCP isn't the end of the world (collabora.com)

mfilion writes: Recently, Sean Paul from Google's ChromeOS team, submitted a patch series to enable HDCP support for the Intel display driver. HDCP is used to encrypt content over HDMI and DisplayPort links, which can only be decoded by trusted devices. However, if you already run your own code on a free device, HDCP is an irrelevance and does not reduce freedom in any way.

Submission + - Android: NXP i.MX6 buffer modifier support added to gbm_gralloc & Mesa (collabora.com)

mfilion writes: GPUs like those of Intel and Vivante support storing the contents of graphical buffers in different formats. Support for describing these formats using modifiers has now been added to Android and Mesa, enabling tiling artifact free running of Android on the iMX6 platform. With modifier support added to Mesa and gbm_gralloc, it is now possible to boot Android on iMX6 platforms using no proprietary blobs at all. This makes iMX6 one of the very few embedded SOCs that needs no blobs at all to run. Not only is that a great win for Open Source in general, but it also makes the iMX6 more attractive as a platform. A further positive point is that this lays the groundwork for the iMX8 platform, and supporting it will come much easier.

Submission + - Tracing the user space and Operating System interactions (collabora.com)

mfilion writes: Like the bug that no one can solve, many issues occur on the interface between the user application and the operating system. But even in the good Open Source world, understanding what is happening at these interfaces is not always easy. This article reviews some of the tools to trace the calls being made among the kernel, libraries and the user applications.

Submission + - Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold: A look at the ramifications of this decision (collabora.com)

mfilion writes: Collabora's Daniel Stone considers the future of the Linux desktop in the light of Ubuntu's return to GNOME. "The world in 2017, however, is a very different place. KMS provides us truly device-independent display control, Vulkan and EGL provide us GPU acceleration independent of window system, xkbcommon provides shared keyboard mechanics, and logind lets us do all these things without ever being root. GBM allocates our buffers, and the universal allocator, borne out of discussions with the whole community including NVIDIA, will soon join the family. Mir leans heavily on all these technologies, so the change is a bit less seismic than you might think."

Comment Hello! (Score 1) 351

There is a precedent with the "Hello" webrtc calling functionality, which also relies on a proprietary service. I wish Mozilla had invested in writing a decent WebRTC server, it's really something that is missing from the WebRTC ecosystem. Currently we only have MCUs (where all the media goes throught the server) and hosted services, but no good P2P WebRTC service.

Comment Re:Funny how this works ... (Score 1) 184

Very different, Netflix licenses the content from the copyright owners. So this case is about regulatory oversight, not about copyrights. In particular, it's about knowing if Netflix has to pay to produce "canadian content", it's about knowing if there will be any Canadian TV in the future or not. And the big problem is that English Canadians like the idea of Canadian TV, but they don't watch it and aren't ready to pay for it, they'd rather watch Americans shows, etc.

French Canada (Quebec) is a whole different matter because there is a cultural and language barrier that keeps foreign content as 2nd tier.

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 533

systemd's big feature of the alternatives is that is also supervises running deamons after they've been started. OpenRC (and baselayout 1.x, it's predecessor), tried to do it, but in a half-hearted way that never really worked. That why we have the "zap" command to tell the init system "you think this daemon is running, but it's actually not". With systemd, this kind of thing can no happen because it actually uses modern kernel features to keep track.

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