Add an introduction sequence to a Theora video

FilmTo produce new HD videos from the Embedded Linux Conference, we needed a new script to add an introduction sequence to the videos we processed.

To make all this automatic, and to suppress the need to go through interactive tools (such as kdenlive) to produce a title with a fade-in / fade-out effect, I created a new theora-intro script. The process got much more complex than I expected, but fortunately, I got a lot of valuable advise and help from the Theora mailing list, and could hide all this complexity inside the script. That’s what scripts are for!

A nice feature. compared to the interactive video editors, is that no extra video processing pass is needed. Thanks to this, even a big video file can be processed within a few minutes. Another useful feature is that the script preserves the Ogg metadata (artist, title, location, copyright…).

So, if you wish to add an introduction sequence to your own videos, whatever their initial format, first convert them to Theora using ffmpeg2theora. Then, create a title image for your video, and then run theora-intro on it.

You can find all useful details on our theora-intro page.

ELC 2009 videos

My Colleague Thomas and I had the privilege to participate to the 2009 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference, which took place in San Francisco, on April 6-8. In spite of the weak economy, this event was once again a success. It attracted major developers from the embedded Linux community, as well as participants from all over the word.

Following the tradition, we are proud to release new videos about this event. These videos were shot by Satoru Ueda and Tim Bird (Sony), and by Thomas Petazzoni and Michael Opdenacker (Bootlin). For the first time, we used an HD camcorder to shoot some of the videos. A higher resolution allows to read the slides projected on the screen. As usual, the videos are released with a Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Thomas and I found the following talks particularly interesting:

  • Ubiquitous Linux, by Dirk Hohndel
  • Embedded Linux and Mainline Kernel, by David Woodhouse
  • What are Interrupt Threads and How Do They Work?, by Reece Pollack
  • Visualizing Process Memory, by Matt Mackall
  • KProbes and Systemtap Status, by Tim Bird
  • Deploying LTTng on Exotic Embedded Architectures, by Mathieu Desnoyers
  • Embedded Linux on FPGAs for fun and profit, by Dr John Williams (Petalogix)
  • Linux on Embedded PowerPC porting guide, by Grant Likely
  • Understanding and writing an LLVM Compiler Backend, by Bruno Cardoso Lopes

You may be interested in watching the presentations we made and the BOFs we led:

  • Building Embedded Linux Systems with Buildroot, by Thomas Petazzoni. In these last months, Thomas has made big contributions to this build system.
  • Build tools BOF, by Thomas Petazzoni
  • Update on filesystems for flash storage, by Michael Opdenacker
  • System Size BOF, by Michael Opdenacker

Of course, lots of other talks were very interesting. See the whole list by yourself:

FOSDEM 2009 videos

As previously announced, I had the chance to attend the FOSDEM conference again this year. And once again, the famous Bootlin video camera was with me, and I could record a few talks. I’m pleased to make them available today.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Here are the available videos, with my personal comments. Of course, except the talk about CMake, all of them come from the embedded devroom. Thanks to the speakers for sharing their knowledge and presenting their projects !

  • video captureWt, a C++ web toolkit, for rich web interfaces to embedded systems, by Pieter Libin (Noesis Solutions)
    Video (44 minutes, 124M)
    Presentation of a Web application generator, which generates a Web application including a web server from a C++ description. The C++ design is based on many ideas coming from Qt, which eases the creation of the graphical application. Certainly a very interesting tool for embedded systems.
  • Hacking with modular hardware: the BUG, by Ken Gilmer (Bug Labs)
    Video (43 minutes, 129M)
    The BUG is a set of hardware modules that can be combined together. A base module contains the CPU, memory and other basic components, while additional modules can provide GPS, Wifi, webcam, I/O lines and many others. Of course, it comes with a completely free software SDK. Can be an interesting starting point for prototyping or hobbyist embedded hacking, even though the hardware is quite expensive.
  • Building Embedded Linux Systems with PTXdist, by Robert Schwebel (Pengutronix)
    Video (68 minutes, 151M)
    A very good presentation on why system building tools are needed for Embedded Linux systems (cross-compiling issues, etc.), and how PTXdist fits this need. Even though I’m personally quite fan of Buildroot, PTXdist’s competitor, the presentation was very interesting.
  • video captureDevelopment on the OpenMoko with hackable:1, by Pierre Pronchery (Bearstech)
    Video (55 minutes, 189M)
    A hands-on lab on the OpenMoko, which unfortunately was too short to be really interesting, and restricted to only the 10-12 people at the front of the room. Interesting for the people who did it, probably not so interesting to watch afterwards.
  • Development and Certification of Linux-Based Fire Safety & Security Systems, by Baurzhan Ismagulov (Siemens)
    Video (47 minutes, 124M)
    The topic of the talk was really appealing, because the use of free software in environments where human life is in danger has always caused many debates and discussions. Unfortunately, the talk completely misses the point : the speaker spent the whole talk discussing Germany-specific rules and laws for the certification of fire safety and security systems, almost without saying a word on how Linux can match these rules.
  • Maemo on BeagleBoard, by Juha Kallionen (Nokia)
    Video (20 minutes, 51M)
    Good talk, but not a lot of content, outside of « Hey, we run Maemo on BeagleBoard, try it !». A kind of announcement talk, I would say.
  • video captureAdvanced power management for OMAP3, by Peter De Schrijver (Nokia)
    Video (49 minutes, 169M)
    A very interesting, in-depth, technical talk about the power management features of the OMAP3 CPU and how these features can be used by the Linux kernel.
  • Emdebian 1.0 release – small and super small Debian, by Neil Williams (Debian)
    Video (86 minutes, 257M)
    video captureAgain, another interesting talk about the status of Emdebian, which has just reached 1.0. Neil described both Emdebian Crush and Emdebian Grip, that are two different approaches for making Debian more suitable for embedded systems. Very good progress has been made, and Emdebian is certainly something that should now be considered as a distribution for embedded systems.
  • CMake – what can it do for your project, by Alexander Neundorf
    Video (45 minutes, 167M)
    A general introduction to CMake, with lots of examples and demonstrations. Very nice for those who never had the opportunity to look at CMake.

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2008 videos

Together with the announcement of our free mainlining offer in our Linux kernel and bsp development services, we are pleased to announce the availability of new conference videos.

The CELF Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) and the NLUUG Autumn Conference on Mobile Computing took place last November in Ede, in the Netherlands.

For those who don’t know them yet, the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) and ELCE are in our opinion the most interesting conferences for embedded Linux system developers. They cover only interesting topics, such as power management, boot time, flash storage, security, graphics, mobile applications and many more.

This time, four people shot videos: Ruud Derwig (NXP), Tim Bird (Sony), Thomas Petazzoni and Michael Opdenacker (both from Bootlin). Then, Thomas took care of reading the tapes and DVDs, and encoding them to Ogg/Theora, all this in just a few minutes of manual intervention, thanks to his super automated scripts.

Here are all the videos:

Speakers were supposed to post their slides on the CELF Wiki, but some of them haven’t done it yet.

If you don’t know which video to start with, here are the talks that Thomas Petazzoni and I preferred:

Of course, these are just our personal recommendations, from the talks we managed to attend. We are sure that many other ones are worth recommending.

OLS 2008 videos

30 videos from the Linux Symposium in Ottawa

We are pleased to release 29 videos that we took at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa, Canada, in July 2008:

  • Keynote: The Kernel: 10 Years in Review, by Matthew Wilcox (Intel)
    video (57 minutes, 175M)
  • Talk: Tux on the Air: State of Linux Wireless Networking, by John W. Linville (Red Hat)
    paper, video (52 minutes, 168M)
  • Talk: Suspend to RAM in Linux: State of the Union, by Len Brown and Rafael Wysocki (Intel)
    paper, video (52 minutes, 163M)
  • Talk: Real Time vs Real Fast: How To Choose?, by Paul E. McKenney (IBM)
    paper, video (45 minutes, 166M)
  • Tutorial: ftrace: latency tracer, by Steven Rostedt (Red Hat) video (98 minutes, 772M)
  • BOF: Embedded Linux, by Tim R. Bird (Sony)
    video (42 minutes, 200M)
  • BOF: Embedded Microcontroller Linux, by Michael Durrant (Arcturus Networks)
    video (42 minutes, 243M)
  • Talk: Energy-aware task and interrupt management, by Vaidyanathan Srinivasan (IBM)
    paper, video (52 minutes, 182M)
  • Talk: Application Testing Under Realtime Linux, by Luis Claudio R. Gonçalves (Red Hat)
    paper, slides, video (54 minutes, 297M)
  • Talk: Application Framework for Your Mobile Device, by Shreyas Srinivasan (Geodesic Information Systems)
    paper, video (25 minutes, 146M)
  • Keynote: The Making of OpenMoko Neo, by Werner Almesberger (OpenMoko)
    video (94 minutes, 463M)
  • BOF: U-Boot by Wolfgang Denk (Denx)
    video (54 minutes, 362M)
  • BOF: Linux Compiler, by Rob Landley (Impact Linux)
    video (100 minutes, 765M)
  • Tutorial: Practical Guide to Using Git, by James Bottomley (Hansen Partnership)
    video (61 minutes, 357M)
  • Talk: Advanced XIP File System, by Jared Hulbert (Numonyx)
    paper, video (49 minutes, 160M)
  • Talk: SELinux for Consumer Electronic Devices, by Yuichi Nakamura (Hitachi)
    paper, video (31 minutes, 113M)
  • Talk: Around the Linux File System World in 45 Minutes, by Steve French (IBM)
    paper, slides, video (49 minutes, 298M)
  • BOF: Linux The Easy Way with LTIB, by Stuart Hughes (Freescale)
    slides, video (25 minutes, 144M)
  • Keynote: The Joy of Synchronicity: Coordinating the Releases of Upstream and Distributions, by Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical)
    slides, video (76 minutes, 458M)
  • Talk: Smack in Embedded Computing, by Casey Schauffer
    paper, video (59 minutes, 211M)
  • Talk: Bazillions of Pages: The Future of Memory Management, by Christoph H. Lameter (SGI)
    paper, video (49 minutes, 258M)
  • Tutorial: Writing application fault handlers, by Gilad Ben-Yossef (Codefidence)
    video (49 minutes, 275M)
  • Talk: Linux, Open Source and System Bringup Tools, by Tim Hockin (Google)
    paper, video (51 minutes, 229M)
  • Talk: DCCP Reached Mobiles, by Leandro Melo Sales (Federal University of Campina Grande)
    paper, video (42 minutes, 193M)
  • Talk: Building a robust Linux kernel, by Subrata Modak (IBM)
    paper, slides, video (51 minutes, 249M)
  • CELF BOF presentation: Best of recent CELF Conferences, by Tim Bird (Sony)
    slides, video (10 minutes, 88M)
  • CELF BOF presentation: Developing Embedded Linux with Target Control, by Tim Bird (Sony)
    slides, video (17 minutes, 145M)
  • CELF BOF presentation: Embedded Building Tools – An Audience Survey, by Michael Opdenacker (Bootlin)
    slides, video (17 minutes, 127M)
  • CELF BOF presentation: GCC Tips and Tricks Highlights, by Gene Sally
    video (14 minutes, 62M)

See also all the papers, and a report from the CELF BOF.

We could only shoot the presentations we attended. You can see that our main interests are embedded systems and the Linux kernel wink smiley.

Conference videos and report

27 free videos from the ELC and FOSDEM 2008 conferences. Extensive technical report from ELC 2008.

After participating to the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) in Mountain View, and to FOSDEM in Brussels, we are pleased to release the videos that we managed to shoot.

These videos should be useful to anyone interested in the multiple topics covered by these very interesting conferences, either to people who couldn’t join these conferences, or to single core participants who couldn’t attend more than one presentation at once. These videos are also interesting opportunities to see and hear key community members like Andrew Morton, Keith Packard, Henry Kingman, Tim Bird and many others!

While we’ve been releasing free technical videos for a few years now, ELC is the first conference for which we are also offering an extensive report, written by Thomas Petazzoni, one of our kernel and embedded system developers. This report is trying to sum up the most interesting things learned at this conference, at least from the presentations Thomas could attend. This way, you shouldn’t have to view all the videos to identify the most interesting talks.

Creative commons In agreement with the speakers, these videos and the report are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

We hope that sharing this knowledge will attract new contributors and users, and will bring our community one step closer to world domination…

Embedded Linux Conference, Mountain View, Apr. 2008

Don’t miss our detailed report on the below presentations!

  • Keynote: The Relationship Between kernel.org Development and the Use of Linux for Embedded Applications, by Andrew Morton (Google):
    video, slides (55 minutes, 240 MB)
  • UME – Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, by David Mandala (Canonical):
    video, slides (30 minutes, 145 MB)
  • Appropriate Community Practices: Social and Technical Advice, by Deepak Saxena (MontaVista):
    video (thanks to Kevin Hilman, MontaVista)(44 minutes, 139 MB)
  • Adventures In Real-Time Performance Tuning, by Frank Rowand:
    video,slides (50 minutes, 251 MB)
  • Shifting Sands: Lessons Learned from Linux on an FPGA, by Grant Likely:
    video, slides (44 minutes, 262 MB)
  • Disko – An Application Framework for Digital Media Devices, by Guido Madaus:
    video (27 minutes, 190 MB)
  • Keynote: Tux in Lights, by Henry Kingman (LinuxDevices.com):
    video, slides (44 minutes, 139 MB)
  • Back-tracing in MIPS-based Linux Systems, by Jong-Sung Kim (LG Electronics):
    video, slides
    (54 minutes, 160 MB)
  • Making a Phone Call With Phase Change Memory, by Justin Treon (Numonyx):
    video, slides (28 minutes, 159 MB)
  • Building Blocks for Embedded Power Management, by Kevin Hilman (MontaVista):
    We couldn’t film his presentation, but we already shot a similar presentation he gave at Fosdem 2008: video ((56 minutes, 183 MB)
  • Using Real-Time Linux, by Klaas van Gend (MontaVista):
    video, slides (53 minutes, 263 MB)
  • Every Microamp is Sacred – A Dynamic Voltage and Current Control Interface for the Linux Kernel, by Liam Girdwood (Wolfson Microelectronics):
    video, slides (35 minutes, 71 MB)
  • Power Management Quality of Service and How You Could Use it in Your Embedded Application, by Mark Gross (Intel):
    video, slides (57 minutes, 401 MB)
  • OpenEmbedded for product development, by Matt Locke (Embedded Alley):
    video, slides (49 minutes, 141 MB)
  • Kernel Size Report, and Bloatwatch Update, by Matt Mackall (Selenic Consulting):
    video (49 minutes, 146 MB)
  • Leveraging Free and Open Source Software in a Product Development Environment, by Matt Porter (Embedded Alley):
    video, slides (45 minutes, 220 MB)
  • Using a JTAG for Linux Driver Debugging, by Mike Anderson (PTR Group):
    video, slides (113 minutes, 694 MB)
  • DirectFB Internals – Things You Need to Know to Write Your DirectFB gfxdriver, by Takanari Hayama ():
    video (43 minutes, 200 MB)
  • Linux Tiny – Penguin Weight Watchers, by Thomas Petazzoni (Bootlin):
    video (thanks to Jean Pihet, MontaVista), slides (32 minutes, 140 MB)
  • Keynote: Status of Embedded Linux and CELF Plenary Meeting, by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video, slides (49 minutes, 112 MB)

Slides are collected on http://www.celinux.org/elc08_presentations/.

Fosdem, Brussels, Feb. 2008

  • Modest, email client for embedded systems, by Dirk-Jan Binnema (Nokia):
    video (34 minutes, 121 MB)
  • Design a Linux robot companion with 8 bits microcontrollers, by David Bourgeois:
    video (54 minutes, 211 MB)
  • Linux on the PS3, by Olivier Grisel:
    video (47 minutes, 272 MB)
  • Xen for Secure Isolation on ARM11, by Jean-Pihet (MontaVista):
    video (41 minutes, 207 MB)
  • Building blocks for Embedded Power Management, by Kevin Hilman (MontaVista):
    video (56 minutes, 183 MB)
  • Emdebian Update: Rootfs, GPE and tdebs, by Neil Williams:
    video (47 minutes, 226 MB)
  • pjsip: lightweight portable SIP stack, by Perry Ismangil:
    video (55 minutes, 194 MB)

Additional video

  • Roadmap to recovery – pain and redemption in X driver development, by Keith Packard:
    video (44 minutes, 168 MB)

ELCE 2007 videos

Free videos of CELF’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe / 9th Real-Time Linux Workshop in Linz, Austria, November 2007.

We are happy to release the videos that we took at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2007 / 9th Real-Time Linux Workshop which happened in Linz, Austria in November, 2007.

  • Detection & Resolution of Real Time Issues Using TimeDoctor, by François Audeon (NXP):
    video (32 minutes, 359 MB)
  • Fancy and Fast GUIs on Embedded Devices, by Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri (INDT):
    video, slides (46 minutes, 146 MB)
  • arch/ppc, arch/powerpc and Device Trees – A Walk Through a Port, by Hugh Blemings (IBM):
    video (30 minutes, 534 MB)
  • Free Software, Licensing and Business Processes, by Shane Martin Coughlan (FSF Europe):
    video, slides (40 minutes, 138 MB)
  • Introduction to LogFS, by Jörn Engel:
    video, slides (46 minutes, 260 MB)
  • WebKit on Linux and How It Compares to Other Open Source Engines, by Holger Freyther (Trolltech):
    video, slides (49 minutes, 205 MB)
  • Status Overview of Real-Time, by Thomas Gleixner (Linutronix.de):
    video (47 minutes, 236 MB)
  • Kernel Summit Report, by Thomas Gleixner (Linutronix.de):
    video (34 minutes, 520 MB)
  • Writing DirectFB gfxdriver For Your Embedded System, by Takanari Hayama (igel):
    video, slides (31 minutes, 223 MB)
  • Improving JFFS2 RAM Usage and Performance, by Alexey Korolev (Intel):
    video, slides (20 minutes, 141 MB)
  • YAFFS, by Wookey:
    video, slides (45 minutes, 194 MB)
  • Parallelizing Linux boot on CE Devices, by Vitaly Wool (Embedded Alley Solutions):
    video, slides (40 minutes, 185 MB)
  • Linux Suspend-to-Disk Objectives for Consumer Electronic Devices, by Vitaly Wool (Embedded Alley Solutions):
    video, slides (35 minutes, 652 MB)
  • Evaluation of Linux rt-preempt for embedded industrial devices for Automation and Power technologies – A case study, by Morten Mossige, Pradyumna Sampath, Rachana Rao (ABB):
    video, paper (22 minutes, 224 MB)
  • Assessment of the Realtime Preemption Patches (RT-Preempt) and their impact on the general purpose performance of the system, by Arthur Siro (DSLab / OSADL):
    video, paper (31 minutes, 224 MB)
  • Panel: the ideal embedded Linux distribution, by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video (65 minutes, 465 MB)

To speed up the processing of these videos, we contracted Jan Gerber, the developer of ffmpeg2theora, to add denoising support to this tool. Thanks to this contribution, it is now possible for anyone in the community to directly denoise DV camcorder input and generate Ogg/Theora video in just 1 step. Before it was necessary to use mencoder‘s denoising filter, and because mencoder couldn’t process DV input properly, a preprocessing stage with ffmpeg was also required. This new functionality can also improve the quality and compression rate of live Ogg/Theora video broadcasts.

CELF conference videos

Videos from the 2006 CE Linux Forum conference in Santa Clara, California

For people who couldn’t make it to the 2006 edition of the CE Linux Forum conference, Bootlin is happy to share the following videos, shot by Michael Opdenacker:

  • Keynote, by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video, slides (46 minutes, 139 MB)
  • Usability of User-Space device drivers, by a speaker from Renesas:
    video, slides (50 minutes, 256 MB)
  • What’s New with Busybox, by Rob Landley (TimeSys):
    video (55 minutes, 322 MB)
  • Topics in Embedded Power Management, by Todd Poynor (MontaVista):
    video, slides (44 minutes, 253 MB)
  • CE Linux Forum Open Test Lab, by Matt Locke (Nomad Global Solutions):
    video (35 minutes, 213 MB)
  • Power Management Panel, by Mark Gross (Intel):
    video (55 minutes, 360 MB)
  • Panel: Tips for Mainlining, From the Experts (starring Greg K.H., Greg Ungerer, Matt Mackall), by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video (34 minutes, 230 MB)
  • MIPS BOF, by Arvind Kumar (MIPS):
    video (53 minutes, 268 MB)
  • uClinux, by Greg Ungerer (SnapGear):
    video, slides (44 minutes, 235 MB)
  • Examining Linux Kernel Size, by Munehiro Ikeda (NEC):
    video, slides (42 minutes, 247 MB)
  • Integrating DirectFB into a UHAPI Platform, by Denis Kropp (directfb.org):
    video, slides (31 minutes, 93 MB)
  • Linux Trace Toolkit Next Generation, by Mathieu Desnoyers (École Polytechnique de Montréal):
    video, slides (34 minutes, 211 MB)
  • MythTV on Philips Nexperia PNX8550, by Klaas de Waal (Philips):
    video, slides (50 minutes, 293 MB)
  • Visualizing Resource Usage During Initialization of Embedded Systems (embootchart), by Matthew Klahn (Motorola):
    video, slides (51 minutes, 236 MB)
  • State of Linux Real-time BOF, by Manas Saksena (TimeSys):
    video (42 minutes, 297 MB)
  • Closing Activity: Embedded Linux Quiz, by Tim Bird (Sony):
    video (22 minutes, 235 MB)

Slides are being collected on http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/ELC2006Presentations.

You may also be interested in our report, published by LWN.net.

Fosdem 2006 videos

Videos from the Fosdem conference in Brussels

For people who couldn’t go to the 2006 edition of Fosdem, one of the 2 most popular worldwide meetings for Free Software developers, or who couldn’t attend all the presentations they were interested in, Bootlin is happy to share the below 12 videos from this event:

  • Software patents, by Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation):
    video (83 minutes, 345 MB)
  • SETR LiveCD, live tool for embedded development, by Hector Oron:
    video (30 minutes – lacks the first 5 minutes, 93 MB)
  • Optimizing the Linux kernel and applications, by
    Michael Opdenacker (Bootlin): video (49 minutes, 129 MB)
  • Lock-Free Data Exchange for Real-time applications, by Peter Soetens (Flander’s Mechatronics Technology Center, Leuven):
    video (49 minutes, 170 MB)
  • Alsa SoC layer, by Liam Girdwood (Wolfson Microelectronics):
    video (37 minutes, 95 MB)
  • The Maemo development platform, by Tommi Komulainen (Nokia):
    video (45 minutes, 151 MB)
  • Building and supporting distributions with OpenEmbedded,
    by Koen Kooi (Familiar release manager):
    video (48 minutes, 179 MB)
  • Towards a common embedded power management solution, by
    David Weinehall and Sampsa Fabritius (Nokia): video (81 minutes, 292 MB)
  • Real-time patches for Linux, by Klaas van Gend (MontaVista):
    video (55 minutes, 126 MB)
  • SLIND, a small Debian for embedded systems, by Benjamin Collar (Siemens):
    video (55 minutes, 161 MB)
  • Openocd, the Open On-Chip Debugger, by Dominic Rath (University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg):
    video (40 minutes, 128 MB)
  • The challenge of the GNU/Linux desktop, by Jeff Waugh (Ubuntu / Gnome):
    video (53 minutes, 176 MB)

See the abstracts of the presentations in the embedded track. Many other Fosdem videos can be found here.

Though most videos are related to the embedded topic, anyone could be be interested in Richard Stallman’s arguments on Software Patents as well as in Jeff Vaugh’s very entertaining keynote.

These videos are available under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 2.5 license.

Many other videos from Fosdem can be found here.