Here’s another tale that I’ve been meaning to tell for a while. I think it’s the last one for now. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Way back in Workstation 5, we introduced the ability to record movies of activity in a virtual machine, and to this end we devised our own codec. Now, that’s probably enough to generate a hail of bread-rolls from the cheap seats, but bear with me.<\/p>\n
We have a remoting protocol allow for interaction with a virtual machine at a distance and it is largely VNC with some small extensions, so it seemed very natural for us to use this as a basis for our recordings – we could just dump the VNC stream into a file and write a codec to play it back. And this is in indeed what we did – except that we only ever wrote a windows codec and never provided a linux equivalent or useful documentation. It was a source of much frustration for me – how could we stick this feature in our Linux product and offer no credible way to play back the resulting recordings??<\/p>\n
Naturally, the MPlayer<\/a> and ffmpeg<\/a> crowd didn’t take long to work out how to use the windows codec with their win32 loader but that’s horribly suboptimal and last year, some people managed<\/a> to reverse engineer<\/a> the format (it’s pretty easy once you realise that it’s just VNC) and added native support to ffmpeg. The latest release of MPlayer features this support.<\/p>\n Not being a regular MPlayer user, I didn’t realise this until the beginning of the year – and once I did, I saw that there was a page in the multimedia wiki<\/a> describing the format. Now that we had a ready made forum to document the format, I suggested to one of the guys who did a lot of the original work (Hi Tony!) that he should update the wiki and fill in the gaps and correct the mistakes – which he then proceeded to do. It’s a small gesture, but the ffmpeg folks appreciated<\/a> it and I hope we can look forward to complete support in a future release.<\/p>\n A lot of the time, the failure to publish this kind of information is more a function of logistics than proprietary paranoia – it’s a lot easier to directly update a wiki page than to try and get a page added to the official company website!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s another tale that I’ve been meaning to tell for a while. I think it’s the last one for now. \ud83d\ude42 Way back in Workstation 5, we introduced the ability to record movies of activity in a virtual machine, and to this end we devised our own codec. Now, that’s probably enough to generate a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-joy-of-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}