Example of playing video on Kindle Touch

[Ehhh]

Hi, All

My demo shows, that the Kindle Touch could play black & white video with synchronized audio very well. Please, set like or dislike to get information about Demo.

Demo Application:
Now, Einkplayer application plays only avi container with mpeg4 video and mp3 audio. Example of video is included in archive too. I will extend playing h264 ASAP.

Cartoons Pluto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OE3tHEmGug

Animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERdXL...yer_detailpage

Realtime streaming video (Logitech network camera):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUVGM...yer_detailpage

Small video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr52Z...ature=youtu.be

The original version of animation is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s13dL...eature=related

Simple script which plays movie:
1. unzip gstreamer's plugins gstreamer_plugins.GZ
2. set GST_PLUGINS_PATH path to this directory (export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=./plugins ).
3. and run the script:
gst-launch filesrc location=tom.avi ! ffdemux_avi name=d ! queue ! ffdec_mpeg4 ! videorate ! video/x-raw-yuv,framerate=5/1 ! videoflip method=3 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-gray, width=600, height=800 ! eink ! fakesink d. ! queue ! ffdec_mp3 ! volume volume=1 ! audioresample ! audio/x-raw-int, rate=44100, channels=2, endianness=1234, width=16, depth=16, signed=true ! alsasink device=plughw sync=false

Waiting for comments!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[LittleLui]

Heh, nice. Seems to work really nicely for that kind of animation. I wanna have this

[hostar]

This is pretty cool. Can you describe how did make Kindle play video?

[Ehhh]

The project hasn't finished yet. It is command line application now and it needs to develop GUI application. Firstly, i would like to know , is it interesting application for people.

[thomass]

Originally Posted by Ehhh

is it interesting application for people.

of course

[wolftail]

This is really cool and the video quality is acceptable. You need to keep working on this.
Keep Up the good work and please make a GUI enabled version.

[aditya3098]

The best video to watch on a kindle is a screencast of what happens when you telnet into towel.blinkenlights.nl

[Ehhh]

Much better video is added today.

[lukeroge]

Can you release the code so far for us to look at?

[Ehhh]

) i want to add only, that this application captures videos from cameras too using rtsp protocol. I tested it, and it works very well !!!

[geekmaster]

On the streaming video shown at your link, you can get rid of those "flash updates" (gray -> black -> white -> gray) by using dithered black and white pixels to replace the "blinking" gray areas. From my testing, I much prefer the ordered (Bayer) dither over the other methods. An ordered dither is also used in the gnuboy program for the kindle (from hawhill) and as you can see when you run a gameboy ROM in it, there is no flicker (but there is some smearing on moving objects). Also, it will be MUCH faster if dithered.

The flash updates you are using take a significant fraction of a second to update (or more, depending on quantity and distribution of gray pixels). Updating gray pixels also shows an annoying flash during that very slow update. Ordered-dither updates can run at a predictable 5 udpates per second for fullscreen, or 12 updates per second for a smaller image on the screen (such as 400x300), all with no flashing during the update.

You just need to avoid drawing gray pixels, and use pure black and white, with dithered grayscale. You can see just how fast these updates can be, by running my "vidtest" program for the K3 (which uses time-variant random dithering to demonstrate update speed). You can download it here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho....php?p=2012359

You can update even faster by doing "partial screen" updates, limiting the "dirty" rectangle to only areas of the image with a significant quantity of changed pixels, such as the "walking man" in your sample video. The eink device drivers DO have a speed limit though, and if you try to update faster than that, a new update begins without completing the previous update, resulting in an unusable jumble of unfinished updates until the update requests slow down and the drivers can catch up.

[Ms.Stream]

Funny real time stream video! It's can be interesting Video Security System.

[Ehhh]

I din't know exactly how to draw gray colors without dithers. Thank you for proposal to use the ordered dithering algorithm, instead of drawing grays colors. I will try it. Thank you.

[hawhill]

You might want to look into the sources of the gameboy emulator, look into sys/fbdev/fbdev.c. It does a 5-step ordered dither via using a lookup table for 8bpp grayscale values. Should be easy to port into an mplayer fbdev output modification.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by hawhill

You might want to look into the sources of the gameboy emulator, look into sys/fbdev/fbdev.c. It does a 5-step ordered dither via using a lookup table for 8bpp grayscale values. Should be easy to port into an mplayer fbdev output modification.

I played streaming videos on the K3 using the myts terminal and optware mplayer, using the "ascii art" output driver. Even at fullscreen, the video was smooth and quite acceptable (if you view it from about two meters away).

It gets that high speed by using partial-screen updates of individual characters (myts), and using ansi escape sequences to move around the screen to do differential updates (mplayer).

I posted some details about the command-line parameters I used in the mplayer thread some time ago.

The quality should be a LOT better with dithered output instead of "ascii art" output.

And if you like ascii art video , you can take any URL for vimeo.com and replace the leading "v" with "asc", to see it rendered in ascii art.