Leaderboard

Illegal accesses to my web site have escalated since my last message here in March, and increased 10 fold in the last 10 days. Initially, the Chinese hackers are using what I assume are VPN IPs in various countries, which were relatively easy to slow down. Then I got attempts from 20,000 IPs in Vietnam, and increasingly from other countries. My ICS web server had access attempts from 170,000 different IPs over the last 15 hours on Sunday night. I added geo-blocking last week from a list of countries in Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, and 200,000 connections were rejected and 20,000 allowed, although probably only 1,000 would have been from legitimate users on a Sunday night. Did this using the Delphi TMMDBReader component from https://github.com/optinsoft/MMDBReader that reads MaxMind database files of IP addresses, listing country, ASN, City, ISP and other information (for a price), but I'm currently using a simple country lookup database from https://db-ip.com/ . MaxMind has an anonymous IP database that is probably ideal for my purpose, but no public pricing so probably more than I want to pay. Angus

There are many components/libraries available for running processes and capturing their output. But, I got frustrated with their design and functionality, mostly for the following reasons: Fixation with and premature conversion to strings. Processes produce and consume bytes. Blocking reading of process output, resulting to inefficiencies (tight loops with Sleep, or separate threads for reading the output or providing input to the process) Incomplete features and/or over-bloated So, I have made my own pascal-process single unit library. Main features: Asynchronous reading of process output Separate stdout and stderr reading which can optionally be merged Ability to consume output as it is produced or else let it accumulate and read the final result Ability to provide input to the running process before or while the process is running. Ability to terminate the running process. Synchronous and asynchronous execution of processes. Interfaced-based facilitating memory management. MIT licence Usage: You do not need to install the library. Just download or clone the repo and add the source subdirectory to the Library path. Then add PascalProcess to your uses clause. If you just want to get the output of a process you can use the class functions of TPProcess. TPProcess = class(TInterfacedObject, IPProcess) class function Execute(const ACommandLine: string; const ACurrentDir: string = ''): TBytes; overload; class procedure Execute(const ACommandLine: string; const ACurrentDir: string; out Output, ErrOutput: TBytes) overload; end; This is an example: var Output: TBytes; begin Output := TPProcess.Execute('cmd /c echo Hi'); Writeln(TEncoding.ANSI.GetString(Output)); end; For more demanding cases you can use the IPProcess interface. Example: type TUtils = class class procedure OnRead(Sender: TObject; const Bytes: TBytes); end; class procedure TUtils.OnRead(Sender: TObject; const Bytes: TBytes); begin Writeln(TEncoding.ANSI.GetString(Bytes)); end; procedure Test2; // Processes ouput as it gets produced // The main thread terminates the process var Process: IPProcess; begin Process := TPProcess.Create('cmd /c dir c:\ /s'); Process.OnRead := TUtils.OnRead; WriteLn('Press Enter to start the process. Press Enter again to terminate'); ReadLn; Process.Execute; ReadLn; Process.Terminate; end; See here the definition of IPProcess. Limitations: Currently the library is Windows only. The intention is to support other platforms (help wanted).

There is a new version at https://github.com/rmesch/Bitmaps2Video-for-Media-Foundation. New stuff: Some rewrite of audio, making sure that gaps at the beginning of a stream are filled with silence. 2 optimized frame-rates for audio-synching, see below. Most importantly: One can now run @Kas Ob.'s frame analysis from within the demo, if one enables the hidden tab "Analysis". I just made the lines a bit shorter, as the rest was just repeating the same values for all I tested, as far as I could see. The file ffprobe.exe needs to be in the same directory as DemoWMF.exe. ffprobe is part of ffmpeg-git-essentials.7z on https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what I can and what I cannot control about audio-synching, tracing into the relevant code and running the analysis. Results of audio-rethynching follow (beware, it's long): The math is for audio-sample-rate of 48000 and the time units are all s. Audio-blockalign is always 4 Bytes for what I do. There are at least 2 different meanings of "sample": PCMSample: as in samples per second. ByteSize: Channels*BitsPerSample/8 = 2*16/8 = 4 Bytes. Time: 1/48000 s IMFSample: Chunk of audio returned by IMFSourceReader.ReadSample. It contains a buffer holding a certain amount of uncompressed PCMsamples, and info like timestamp, duration, flags ... The size of these samples varies a lot with the type of input. Some observed values: .mp3-file 1: Buffersize = 96 768 Bytes Duration = 0.504 (96768 bytes = 96768/4 PCMSamples = 96768/4/48000 s OK) .mp3-file 2: Buffersize = 35 108 Bytes Duration = 0.1828532 (35108/4/48000 = 0.182854166.. not OK) .wmv-file: Buffersize = 17 832 Bytes Duration = 0.092875 (17832/4/48000 = 0.092875 OK) Except for the first sample read, the values don't differ from sample to sample. Those are the samples I can write to the sinkwriter for encoding. Breaking them up seems like a bad idea. I have to trust MF to handle the writing correctly. The buffers seem to always be block-aligned. I've added some redundant variables in TBitmapEncoderWMF.WriteAudio so these values can be examined in the debugger. A related quantity are audio-frames. Similarly to the video-stream the audio-stream of a compressed video consists of audio-frames. 1 audio-frame contains the compressed equivalent of 1024 PCMSamples. So: AudioFrameDuration = 1024/48000 AudioFrameRate = 48000/1024 I can only control the writing of the video by feeding the IMFSamples of video and audio to the sinkwriter in good order. The samples I write to the sinkwriter are collected in a "Leaky-Bucket"-buffer. The encoder pulls out what it needs to write the next chunk of video. It hopefully waits until there are enough samples to write something meaningful. Problems arise if the bucket overflows. There need to be enough video- and audio-samples to correctly write both streams. So here is the workflow, roughly (can be checked by stepping into TBitmapEncoderWMF.WriteOneFrame): Check if the audio-time written so far is less than the timestamp of the next video-frame. Yes: Pull audio-samples out of the sourcereader and write them to the sinkwriter until audio-time >= video-timestamp. Looking at the durations above, one sample might already achieve this. Write the next video-frame Repeat In the case of mp3-file 1 the reading and writing of 1 audio-sample would be followed by the writing of several video-samples. The encoder now breaks the bucket-buffer up into frames, compresses them and writes them to file. It does that following its own rules, which I have no control over. Frame-analysis can show the result: A group of video-frames is followed by a group of audio-frames, which should cover the same time-interval as the video-frames. In the output I have seen so far, the audio-frame-period is always 15 audio-frames. For video-framerate 30, the video-frame-period is 9 or 10 frames. Why doesn't it make the audio- and video-periods smaller? No idea. Guess that's the amount of info the players can handle nowadays, and these periods are a compromise between optimal phase-locking of audio- video- periods and the buffer-size the player can handle. Theoretically, at framerate 30, 16 video-frames should phase-lock with 25 audio-frames. Here is one of those video-audio-groups. Video-framerate is 30. video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=39000 pts_time=1.300000 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=40000 pts_time=1.333333 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=41000 pts_time=1.366667 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=42000 pts_time=1.400000 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=43000 pts_time=1.433333 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=44000 pts_time=1.466667 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=45000 pts_time=1.500000 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=46000 pts_time=1.533333 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=47000 pts_time=1.566667 duration_time=0.033333 video stream_index=0 key_frame=0 pts=48000 pts_time=1.600000 duration_time=0.033333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=62992 pts_time=1.312333 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=64016 pts_time=1.333667 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=65040 pts_time=1.355000 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=66064 pts_time=1.376333 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=67088 pts_time=1.397667 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=68112 pts_time=1.419000 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=69136 pts_time=1.440333 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=70160 pts_time=1.461667 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=71184 pts_time=1.483000 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=72208 pts_time=1.504333 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=73232 pts_time=1.525667 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=74256 pts_time=1.547000 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=75280 pts_time=1.568333 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=76304 pts_time=1.589667 duration_time=0.021333 audio stream_index=1 key_frame=1 pts=77328 pts_time=1.611000 duration_time=0.021333 pts stands for "presentation time stamp" and pts_time is of interest. Video-time-intervall: from 1.300000 to 1.600000+0.033333=1.633333 Audio-time-intervall: from 1.312333 to 1.611000+0.021333=1.632333 Audio is a bit ahead at the beginning and a tiny bit behind at the end. pts should be multiples of 1024, but they aren't hmm. The difference is still 1024, but they are phase-shifted. Phase-shift is 62992 mod 1024 = 528 (or -496). The interval from a bit further ahead: Video: From 8.066667 to 8.366667+0.033333=8.400000 Audio: From 8.053667 to 8.352333+0.021333=8.373666 pts-phase-shift: still 528 (-496) Audio is lagging behind. To really see what is happening I will have to implement better statistics than just looking at things 🙂 One further test: I tried to phase-lock audio and video optimally: VideoFrameRate: f. AudioFrameRate: 48000/1024, so f = 48000/1024 = 46,875. I've added this frame-rate to the demo. Result: Perfect sync for the first audio-video group. In the middle of the second group the pts-phase-shift is again 528, and audio lags behind. For the rest of the groups the lag doesn't get bigger, it is always corrected to some degree. But the file should have identical audio and video timestamps in the first place! There is another new frame-rate, which is the result of trying to phase-lock 2 video-frames to 3 audio-frames. 2/f = 3*1024/4800 results in f = 2*48000/3/1024 = 31.25 I will try to find out what causes the phase-shift in audio by parsing the ffprobe-output a bit more (sigh). Maybe generate a log-file for the samples written, too. (Sigh). No, so far it's still fun. For those, who made it up to here: Thanks for your patience. Renate

Continuing with the "funny" compiler "errors": 1. Optional semicolon (for global and nested proc declarations only!!!) if you have any of these specifiers (platform, deprecated, assembler, register, stdcall... etc): But semicolon is required if this is a const/var/type/method 2. Crazy mixing of these specifiers (you can mix all these specifiers as you want): 3. Crazy mixing of "platform" specifier for global variable declaration: I suppose there are much more similar "bugs", I see it on 11.3 and 12.3, and believe emba will never fix it, their favorite answer - don't do like this! 😄