Notices

after seeing the magnificent 7th apple tentpole that is iAd, i applaud open source developers even more!! a little bit of craziness, alot of work and the grace to share it for free.

Thanks for 3 years of tender loving code!

I don't get it, Ukki, you were loaned the N900? Why don't they just sell you the unit you've been using, then? Please pardon me for asking, but are you in such financial straits that you can't get one through typical channels? I realize not everyone has that much cash lying around all the time, but I'd think $500 or so is within reason of the typical working adult (unless you are a student or such, on a more limited budget?)

Anyway, please forgive me if I have intruded into personal matters. I still brag about Knots as a highpoint of functionality on the N900 to just about anyone who will listen when I am talking about how great the N900 is. And I am still so very impressed with an apps ability to reencode and then stream that data live and on the fly - it seems to transcend even the internet's most ambitious efforts at making entertainment widespread and accessible.

So BRAVO, Ukki, whatever your path may lead you to! When the day arrives (not so far off, I guess!) when I can stream my own personal collection of archived DVD's - through my phone! - onto friends' TV's - movies that "Netflix online" service simply does not, nor will never, carry - we will have entered another realm of freedom of information. You are a true pioneer, Ukki, please remember that! I see no one else doing what you are doing.

It's not that I couldn't afford one, but the idea of having to pay 500 euros for a device so I can write software for others (Knots was pretty much fine for me the day I released it ) doesn't quite feel right. I've never been a "phone person" before N900. I love it as a phone, but I don't really need the "watch from the internet" feature since I have such a bad upload bandwidth and Knots running on a device that can't transcode. Since all these features were written for others, I can get along with lesser phone because I still have my N810.

But like I said, my loan time was extended so we are back to normal.

And I really appreciate the support I got from the Knots users. I didn't want to keep the phone for entirely selfish reasons and since many of you stepped up and wanted Knots to continue, I must be doing something right Thank you.

Well I think you can do that already and quality really depends on your bandwidth. And my path will probably lead me to some rewriting. Not sure I'll be adding more features, just making it easier to use and expand.

So here's your chance to make a difference. What bugs you them most? What else do you need? What doesn't work? Let it all out, bug tracker will listen.

Wow it's working perfectly.. Great app

Just installed Knots for the first time om my computer(s), and it's a great idea/app, BUT I'm having some problems.

I'm using the standard N900 transcoding profile, and I'm getting dropped frames on high bitrate files - anything above 480p xvid would choke the single core on my 1.6 ghz atom.

I then tried my 3.7ghz quadcore, and now most 720p x264 encoded files played with no skipping. But once again - going into even higher bitrate x264 files, I got dropped frames again.

Having the taskmanager open I noticed only 1 of the cores suffered heavy load, so I figured the encoding process didn't utilize multithreading. I turned to my friend google, who linked to a page describing this setting:

threads=

This options allows to set the amount of threads that should be used to encode the streams. Increasing this number to the amount of processors on the computer, (or twice this number on Intel P4 HT processors) should improve transcoding performance.

How can I enter this value in the Knots server?

EDIT: Threads parameter is now available in git, but it doesn't seem to work with most codecs on OS X at least. So don't use it unless you know what you are doing.

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=41318

Hello!

Very very strange. Everything was working perfectly, then just suddenly every browser (chrome, firefox) gives me:
"FLASH VERSION 9,0 OR GREATER IS REQUIRED
You have no flash plugin installed

Click here to download latest version"

EDIT: Well, strange as it is I managed to get the flash player upgraded (or reinstalled whatever) and now it works. Strange though that this thing happened as I had played one song successfully and suddenly the next one I played didn't work. And of course I hadn't done anything to my browser in between.

I have restarted the server several times without no change. N900 streaming still works though! (even if it sometimes seems to end up in a state where progress bar moves but no music sounds, I have to restart the knots server app. when that happens).
I have now observed a list of different strange things, its important though to understand I'm NOT complaining here, knots2 is a very nice app anyway. I'm just informing the developer about these issues:
1. Sometimes VLC refuse to start when starting knots2 (knots informs about this in the terminal). What I do then is to stop knots2 and retry, and then usually it starts again.
2. Sometimes knots2 cannot be stopped with CTRL+C, it just refuse to die. I have to kill the process using kill <pid>.
3. Not too seldomly it appears to end up in a state where the song appears to be playing but no sound actually comes out. Solution is to restart knots2 a couple of times.
4. The is no log out option in knots2, therefore it's difficult to switch user. Sometimes it also accumulates users at the status tab, even if I'm at the very same browser session.
5. Fetching covers may fail without obvious reason. I overcame this by increasing some hard loop limit in the code where the covers are fetched (don't remember where I did that, but it helped when having lot of music).
6. I'm used to a normal 'pause' button...there is none.
7. Regardless if the current tune has completed or is currently playing (and after having used the 'hide' button), I have to go back to the tune I played and press the blue 'stop' button, otherwise I won't be able to start another song.
8. The player plugin doesn't seem to work in IE at all (it's not fully sized and no song plays even if bar is moving). Doesn't matter to me though since I'm not using IE.

Please let me know if I'm fuzzy, or if I can help with logs or something.
I'm using knots2 under ubuntu karmic. I have not compiled ffmpeg myself, just used the repos. I use authentication externally from my network, but without SSL (I know, maybe not the best). My router forwards the 1978 port (only).

Regards
Lars

Thanks Lars, there are some issues I have no control over, and some would need more info, but I'll check what I can fix.

Thanks for the reply Ukki, I know you didn't owe an explanation to the board. I understand now, that you primarily use the N8 series and not the N9 series.

That might explain, then, why the encoder labeled N800 is so much more powerful and robust than the one labeled N900? %^) Really, if I had a question or problem, it would be to ask, why does the N900 encoder leave big black bars on the side of the video (i.e. not use all the screen's available space) and make such an inferior encode as compared to the N800 encoder?

Other than that, I will say that the quality of the encode has gotten much better. It's been a while since I used Knots for actual extended viewing, and I do believe that there is a lot less macroblocking going on. That might be because I've been watching relatively static films, though. I'l have to check out an action movie to see how it handles lots of movement, too.

Well not really, but Knots was written for n8x0 and I can get by with it.

Well there's no cropping etc. by default and Knots tries to keep aspect ratio (I just tell VLC to use a certain sized canvas, it fits the video inside that canvas with correct ratio) so there will be black bars for some videos. I guess when the canvas is bigger than the actual video this happens, because VLC doesn't stretch it? Doesn't this happen with the default media player too?

You can try using the disable_aspect setting with value 1 to disable aspect correction and use a profile that has a smaller resolution than your source material.

You can try different video codecs with different video sources to prevent artifacts. Sometimes artifacts happen at the start of transcoding or right after seeking and will correct itself after a while. And with sd material you should use passthrough if mplayer can handle the video.

I'm really no expert in video encoding so if anyone any suggestions, I will gladly change things.