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FraKtus

177 karma · joined March 25, 2012

Software architect, fascinated by music visualization. http://blog.fraktus.com
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FraKtus··on Ask HN: Do you create music? let's hear it
Tetrik is a great track and the visualisations are great.

For me having visuals nicely synchronised to the music is adding a lot.

Now that you have a nice custom tools to produce video you should build on it and produce more of them. You have a fan here!

FraKtus··on New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support
From very far.

Quartz Composer is a graph of filers that you can interconnect in a graphical interface. You use it to create visual filters or generators. iTunes was using Quartz composer files .qtz for some of his music visualizers.

Quartz Composer is GPU accelerated thanks to its use of the Quartz API.

It was very popular with artists because of the creative freedom it gave when composing the filters. You did not need to be a developer to create a filter, thanks to the editing application.

Quartz Composer is now deprecated and dying in slow and anonymous death.

XQuartz is a windowing system accelerated with Quartz. The X system was not invented by Apple but very popular on top of Unix.

FraKtus··on Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program
I tried several things but what got the interest of my daughter(10) is code.org

She also uses it at school, and she regularly enjoys working with it on her own.

Because she seems to go more toward the graphical creative side, I made her work on the logo of a personal project I work on at the moment, and she did enjoy it a lot.

Sometimes I ask her to edit some c++ code I work on and see how the result is when running the code from Xcode; we have a lot of fun doing that!

FraKtus··on Show HN: Make comic book layouts in the browser
Does not seems to work with Safari 13, had no problems with Chrome on macOS.

Really great, did show this to my daughter that is into comics!

FraKtus··on Show HN: I Built a Synthesizer with WASM
It does not work for me with Safari 13, no sound. Works fine with Chrome.

This is nice!

Can you explain how you implemented the interface?

FraKtus··on Show HN: BeautifulCode, generate beautiful images of your source code
Editing the code is weird with Safari 13, the pointer was a few char off. Exporting PNG does not work.
FraKtus··on Run x86 Apps (including homebrew) in the Terminal on Apple Silicon
There is no need of homebrew to install ffmpeg on Apple Silicon. I could just ./configure and make on the DTK.

ffmpeg has so many configure options, I always avoid building it with brew.

FraKtus··on Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++
Maybe it is still VBL related, in the DX11 sample you will see this when presenting the final frame:

g_pSwapChain->Present(1, 0); // Present with vsync

//g_pSwapChain->Present(0, 0); // Present without vsync

So you can control this by setting the first argument to 1 or 0.

FraKtus··on Graphics in Qt 6.0: QRhi, Qt Quick, Qt Quick 3D
Do you have an idea why they are doing that?

Why would you maintain 2 targets doing the same thing for an OS?

FraKtus··on FFmpeg Drawtext Filter for Overlays, Scrolling Text, Timestamps on Videos
It's difficult because it depends on the player you will use and the destination codec.

I keep a document with arguments I use for each of my use case.

FraKtus··on Vdx – An intuitive CLI for processing video, powered by FFmpeg
I use FFmpeg for many years, and I did wonder many times why isn't there a CLI that would be simpler to use but still useful for most tasks.

To my knowledge, no project succeeded in doing that. It's not difficult to code a simple reader and a basic encoder, but then you have many cases not supported correctly, as you wrote.

FraKtus··on Show HN: WZRD – Visualize your music with StyleGAN
Congratulations!

As a developer of VJ applications for more than 25 years, it deeply resonates with me.

I will wait to be able to create an account with my email rather than using google to play with it.

| I watched the 4 example videos. While impressive, the first one has so much flickering that I had to stop watching it. The second example is perfect, and you feel very well the connection to music. The third one got me lost; I am a big fan of ambient and cosmic music, but the result did not seem connected. The fourth one is much better, and you perceive the waves of the musical input very nicely. |

While using a very different technological approach, the three videos from the right side have a lot in common with the results of Shadertoy.

Many music videos on YouTube are just a static picture; there is an excellent market for your idea. Maybe try to have more examples based on what you see prevalent on YouTube.

FraKtus··on FFmpeg Drawtext Filter for Overlays, Scrolling Text, Timestamps on Videos
It's true that if you simply use it on it's simple form such as "ffmpeg -i in.mp4 out.mov" the default bitrate will favour creating small files that will have artefacts, as soon as you set the right option you get very nice results.
FraKtus··on Why Apple II Is the World's Best Selling Personal Computer (1978)
Not sure, because the Apple II was easy to copy and it was very popular to buy a Pear computer without roms and just insert the copy of the EPROMs to have a full functional Apple II at a bargain price.
FraKtus··on Monospace: A JavaScript demo in 1021 bytes, winner of the demo competition
It did stutter a little bit but I could enjoy it with Chrome on my MacBook Pro 2012.
FraKtus··on How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
I wonder how would Gould react after listening to the Goldberg recording made by Lang Lang...
FraKtus··on Show HN: Fun with cell phone webcam and WebGL shaders
There are many more examples on the shader toy web site.

https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=webcam

It's running fine on my MacBook Pro with Chrome.

FraKtus··on Show HN: Video Transcoder on the browser using WASM
I am not knowledgeable with WASM, can it enable threading in FFmpeg? That’s where FFmpeg shine...
FraKtus··on Why Johnny Won't Upgrade
One example is Parallels Desktop, they constantly mail me to upgrade but there is no information what system version they run on. So I downloaded the installer and just launched it. The installer did delete my previous version without asking any question and I was just left with the option to buy the upgrade...

I had to restore a backup to find back my working version. Not sure sure if there are as many extreme examples: an installer that deletes the previous version, remove a valid perpetual license, without asking!

FraKtus··on Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot
Why?
FraKtus··on Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot
Godot has only OpenGL renderers. Do they plan to add DirectX and Metal?
FraKtus··on Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
Thanks!

penetrum has this nice white paper:

Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysis_whitepaper.pdf

This is their conclusion:

"After extensive research, we have found that not only is TikTok a massive security flaw waiting to happen, but the ties that they have to Chinese parties and Chinese ISP’s make it a very vulnerable source of data that still has more to be investigated. Data harvesting, tracking, fingerprinting, and user information occurs throughout the entire application. As a US company, we feel that it is our responsibility to raise awareness of this extensive data harvesting to TikTok’s 1 billion users."

There is bad coding in the app but is that enough for the ban?

They also seems to get telemetry data, who does not :-)

FraKtus··on Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
We are on HN here, right? Does anybody was able to do a man in the middle inspection to prove that the app is spying on Users?

Does anybody did inspect the binary and found a back door in the app?

In am working in video and I find that the tool they did develop allowing kids to remix video succeeded were previous startup failed...

FraKtus··on For those at northerly latitudes, Comet NEOWISE up in the evening now, too
In Belgium, because of the light pollution, it's impossible to see it with the naked eye.

I could, however, catch a short time-lapse of it with my camera:

https://youtu.be/tq_CEIFzh70

Something I don't get is that the comet will come closer to earth in the next days; however, the astronomy sites say it will lose intensity. How can that be possible?

FraKtus··on Elements C++ GUI Library
While I am a big fan of Dear Imgui it's very difficult to skin it and for a VST plugin you expect this feature.
FraKtus··on The Open Goldberg Variations
There is nothing like the clarity of the harpsichord sound. Especially for music that can have that many details to listen.

I am a big fan of Scott Ross. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDGQSRpLIJk

Spent countless hours to listen to his Scarlatti recordings :-)

FraKtus··on The Open Goldberg Variations
What is your opinion on Brad Mehldau - After Bach? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MZw6XI-b6Q
FraKtus··on Fast 2D Rendering on GPU
Thank you for sharing your experience I will investigate.
FraKtus··on Fast 2D Rendering on GPU
You say free software and of course, it's nice to have source code and flexibility.

I have nothing against licensing and it looks like things are moving there. Do you have a recommendation for Metal / DirectX support for that kind of rendering facilities? What matters more for me is performance.

FraKtus··on Fast 2D Rendering on GPU
Another need for that kind of effect is for real-time events.

I work on software that is used to create visual effects in real-time. It's used in live events such as concerts, clubs, corporate presentations. There you want to be able to render high-quality text in high resolution, even higher than 4K, and still allow a performer to add effects on text such as zooming, scrolling, doing 3D transition effects...

Today the best way to do this is via a font atlas but it does not look nice when zooming. Also if you need non-European characters it may heavy preparing the font atlas.

So I am looking for a library that would allow this kind of rendering manipulation for text rendering. Do you have any suggestions?

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