Hi,
I have the same problem that you have: same TV, same PS3 and the enormous lack of information that LG (un)provides. I’ve tried many HDMI->DVI cables and none made it work. Also, the TV’s DVI input works as I have succesfully connected other DVI devices.
After some time digging in Google for answers, a common pattern began to emerge: perhaps the fuc*ing TV’s DVI input wasn’t exactly what the PS3 needs. Something to do with HDCP compatibility?
Thanks to your post everything fits in place. Some time ago, with the Xbox 360 I had to do something very similar to get to know the limitations and possibilities of the composite input. In the end some user in a forum stated that the limit was something like 576i and not the 720p which I was trying to use. Also the original brochure didn’t helped me at all!
By the way, I do remember removing an HD Ready sticker from the TV prior to its first use. But that was close to 2 years ago. It’d be difficult to reclaim anybody anything based on that…
Thanks for the info. Now I know that the PS3 to LG 32LZ50 won’t work at all in Hi-def through the DVI input. One reason more to get a new Tv some time in the future…
Amazon blows CS3 unveiling
Huh, don’t know where the count goes, but Amazon has once again released product details a little too early, thanks a bunch;)
Their CS3 product page contains pricing, screenshots and most important features. One thing which caught my eye was the inclusion of Acrobat Connect (a.k.a. Breeze) in every package. Surely this can’t be the real deal, but some sort of launcher application where you still need to purchase a separate account?
Update
Didn’t notice it earlier, but the site also says that CS3 will ship April 20th, far earlier than has been speculated.
2 Comments
HDTV madness
So I bought a PS3 two days ago. I was looking forward to finally use my somewhat old HDTV to enjoy 720p action. Ok, I have had some decent action with my XBox360, but you know, that’s still analog VGA.
The first thing that I thought was weird is that Sony does not ship the PS3 with any hires cables. No problem, i thought, just pay a few bucks more… As it turns out, Sony also does not sell any DVI-cables (my TV is about two years old and thus does not come with HDMI. Also the component input only allows for 576i). Luckily HDMI is just DVI+sound with a different plug, so I buy a HDMI->DVI cable. Now how do I get decent sound of my shiny PS3? With optical audio, of course. Unfortunately my amplifier does not support optical audio, so I head to a Hi-fi store and buy a new amplifier and optical wires. At last I have everything I need to enjoy superior picture quality.
I connect everything, select HDMI mode and…. nothing.
F*ck. I mess around a bit but the screen remains blank.
Googling around a bit I notice a lot of problems users are having with some HDTV’s. A term that I’ve not heard before is in most posts: HDCP – High Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection. I’ve always thought of a TV being just a bloody stupid enhancement of the oscillator. A signal comes in and images are displayed. Boy have I been wrong. HDCP is a copy protection for the “last feet”. The signal that comes out of your Blue-Ray or HD-DVD is still encrypted, so that swappers have no easy way of recording that data-stream, and HDCP encrypts it just before it hits the screen. Ok, this surely is something that a mere mortal does not need to know, does he?
Well, he does, if he has bought his LCD HDTV a few years ago.
As it turns out my f*cking LG RZ-32LZ50 does not support HDCP.
Err, I’m quite certain that the store that sold me the LG said that the TV is HD-Ready. HD-Ready is a strandard which basically says that the TV has at least 768p resolution and supports HDCP (since most HDTV services, be it satellite or blue ray require HDCP).
So what happened? Well, the store actually did not use the term that described HD-Ready standard, but they had a sticker on the TV which said “HD-Valmis”. “Valmis” is a finnish word which translated into “Ready”. So they did not user the standard HD-Ready, which would have given me something to complain about (they promised me something that was incorrect, which by Finnish consumer law would have given my complaint quite a bit of leverage). But because they just said “You know, this TV is ready for some of the future services because it has good resolution”, I doubt I’ll ever be able to have them refund anything.
The point of this story? If you’re an early adapter of any technology, be sure that you know all the pitfalls involved, even if it’s a simple consumer electronics product such as a TV, Microwave-oven or toaster.
1 Comment
HTML in Flash
Now that I’ve had a little time to play with Apollo (mostly lovin’ it) I can’t shake the idea of how great it would be to have proper (x)HTML support within the Flash Player.
You know, Flash is really, really bad at laying things out (as in layout 
). Basically you have to define and code a heck of a lot to create something really simple. Flex does this a lot better, of course, but having spend the last 2 months with it I must say that I really do miss the elegance and simplicity of xHTML & CSS.
Flex does a good job at laying out and controlling UI controls, but a really lousy job at making it easy to display structural information. And that’s the beauty of Apollo. It’s inbuilt browser. Whenever you need to display a ton (or even less) of information, there’s no better option than HTML. So in effect you get the best of both world, a very powerful application framework and a great way to display structured information.
So I wonder, what would be the size of a stripped down version of the Web-Kit be? Small enough for FP10? Forget JavaScript, XML support, AJAX. Just implement a decent subset (or all of the specification) of XHTML and CSS2 (ahh, if not 3) into the Flash Player and I will be your friend for life.
You’ve already done it for Apollo, all you now need to do is remove two thirds of the code you have in there
5 Comments
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Proper HTML and CSS support in Flash is certainly very high on my wish list for any future release of the Player. As it stands, it’s very difficult to create a proper CMS with a Flash frontend without jumping through a multitude of hoops.
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FlashTextEditor allows CSS text editing and outputs clean CSS formatted HTML.
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You may be interested to read this blog entry:
“How Has HTML in Flex Worked For You?”
http://www.deitte.com/archives/2007/03/how_has_html_in.htm -
etqjsn yomdbte lchwv lpeuigw axysoeftu taurjbd quoypshz
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Que buen aporte
There goes all of my freetime
So it’s out. I’m sure it will keep me really busy until CS3 is released.
Searching for images by color
I’m trying to search for images based on color. In theory this is somewhat simple: When images are uploaded to the service, I create a histogram of rgb values from the image. When the user then commences a search with a certain colour I go though all histograms, look up the value for r, g and b and look to see if it is greater than the threshold.
Now, how the heck do I translate this into a MySQL structure? I certainly don’t want to have an own column for all values of r,g, and b (768 columns, huh), but a BLOB is not (quickly) searchable. Has anyone tried anything like this (storing somewhat large amounts of data, that is still searchable in MySQL) before? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
6 Comments
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If you’re using MyISAM engine, you could use something like a comma-delimited text fields (in MyISAM the text fields are indexable) and use FULLTEXT search for them. Maintaining them could be a pain though.
If you’re using InnoDB, you probably have to use several varchar-columns to do the same thing.
I’m not sure how fast these solutions really are, since you will end up with pretty large amounts of data. Especially with if you have several hundred images. But maybe worth trying. -
Thanks, using fulltext came to my mind, but that solution would really blow up the amount of data in the Table. An since the application relies on really quick data searches I’m keeping the table in memory instead of the filesystem. But I think I’ll have to give it a try anyhow and see how it performs.
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One way to reduce the amount of data to store is to calculate average colours of, say 10×10 px blocks, and then store only the averages.
I’m not sure how accurate values the user needs but the general colour scheme could be evaluated using larger pixel blocks instead of individual pixels. -
Had to do something similar in a project recently and did exactly what Unkulunkulu mentioned – broke the images into smaller blocks and calculated average colors for them. Dunno if that is accurate enough for your needs but worked for me.
Back in the days when I was working for MediaTeam I was lightly involved in CBIR (content based information retrieval) projects. There are lots of good papers on CBIR technologies online, the downside is that they get very technical and theoretical very quickly. The guys at MediaTeam and my old boss Timo might be able to give you some good pointers…
http://www.mediateam.oulu.fi/research/ivp/?lang=en -
Thanks for the input.
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How about if you simply discard most of the data? You would simply pick out the most significant peak(s), store it’s (their) hue & saturation value(s) into the database table.
Later on it should be reasonable easy to match images with colors. Instead of calculating the correlation between the full color spectrum requested by the user with that of each image, you calculate the (weighed sum of) difference(s) in hue peak(s) and the color user asked for. In the most simple case with a single peak hue, you can probably do the matching with a single query.
I believe something along those lines would provide good enough results with insignificant amount of maths & storage.
Flex resizing revisited
I earlier had the problem of slow responses to resizing the browser window and having the Flex Framework layout stuff with constraints. I revisited the problem, since our app is making it’s way to beta and I wanted to fix this bummer. As it turns out, it was really easy (there’s a lot of documentation in Flex, so it sometimes can take a while before you find what you’re looking for).
Anyhow, Flex2 does indeed throttle measure and layout passes (components get layout for every tenth or so resize event in my case), but using validateNow – method of the UIComponent class you can force measurement and layout of a component and all it’s children. Placing this:
stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, resize);
}
private function resize(e:Event):void{
this.validateNow();
}
into the application class wil make things resize aaahso smoothly.
7 Comments
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I believe, by doing so, you are calling very expensive operation in CPU terms (this.validateNow() whenever Stage changes its size by 1px.
Resize animation can be stalled on slow machines… -
Damn right it’s CPU intensive, and it has to be! Nothing good has ever come out of a CPU running at 15%
Anyways, luckily resize events are dispatched only after each render cycle (and only one at a time), so running it on a slow computer will not put 100 events in the que and bog down the application. So basically this is exactly what I want: Whenever the user is resizing the window, the application will take up all processing power to render the resizing as quickly as possible. I’ll add this code to _every_ single Flex app I write. I just can’t think of a reason to _not_ to render as quickly as possible when the user resizes the browser window. -
validateNow = haaaaaaaaaaaaandy.
taa -
Thanks… I was just about to embark on trying to solve this problem. Luckily your blog came up on the first page of Google search results
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I have a VBox & . And using the same methods as in your example. Instead of this I use the reference to Vbox . But it does not resize all its children immediately. I have a chart & a legend inside the Vbox. The legend resizes but the chart does not. Immediately after using validateNow(), I add it to the printjob. But the chart which is printed is not resized. But on the screen I can see the chart has resized. So, it seems there is a delay in which the chart is resized and it happens after it is added to printjob? Any options to this?
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Thanks for the post. I was looking for some solution as to how to detect when the browser resizing has finished. My question is :-
Cant we use updateComplete event to see when the browser has finished resizing? Calling validatenow will also result in updateComplete being called finally. -
Fantastic. Thanks so much!!
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I had a really good read on this, very detail, and very useful information.
Thanks.
http://www.ipod-converter.org
ball established, notional.