Saturday, June 29, 2013

Fix for Youtube error: 'This video is currently unavailable' - Ubuntu Chromium

Thankfully, this one's an easy fix and will presumably apply to other browsers and operating systems, as well.

I've been using Chromium as my browser for a while and everything has been great until recently, when some youtube videos wouldn't play reliably and instead would show the error:
This video is currently unavailable.
Learn more
This is apparently caused by being enrolled in Youtube's HTML5 video trial. You can enroll/unenroll from the program by visiting this link.

I had forgotten I was even using HTML5 video, so I never even considered this could be the problem. Once I unenrolled, everything works fine again. Of course, YMMV.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Dedithering Pixel Shaders

Dithering, as it applies to pixel art, is a pattern made up of two or more colors of pixels arranged in a pattern (usually a checkerboard or dotted line) that, when viewed on a CRT television, will blend together, resulting in an average of the adjacent colors. This allows an image to display more colors, perceptually, than may be technically possible to show otherwise, and was also frequently used to produce a transparency effect. Unfortunately, when such dithering is viewed on a modern LCD monitor or TV, the color blending never happens and we're left with ugly checkerboards all over the place. Even worse, pixel art upscaling-interpolation algorithms such as HQx and xBR tend to have a really rough time with dithering.

Recently, though, several different folks all independently developed their own solutions to the dithering problem using pixel shaders. Here are the raw images to which we'll be applying the shaders:



Three of these games are for Sega Genesis, which relied on dithering extensively, and the other is from an SNES game that uses "pseudo-hires transparency," which functioned similar to dithering insofar as the artists expected the vertical lines to be blended together by a CRT TV.

CBOD
First off, we'll look at coastkid's CBOD shader, which uses three shader passes of 4-pixel blur using various threshold values. It can be a bit blurry but does an impressive job of smoothing out the dithering, particularly with regards to vertical dithering patterns, with which the other shaders often have trouble:



GTU
Next up, we have aliaspider's GTU shader, which uses a "pixel bandwidth" variable to determine how much horizontal blurring should occur. This shader also includes light scanlines (which can be lightened or eliminated entirely by manipulating variables within the shader) and gamma correction, making it a one-stop option for people who want the benefits of CRT blending, color and scanlines without any heavy-handed phosphor emulation, etc. Its handling of pseudo-hires transparency is particularly nice:



For reference, the SNES shot used a bandwidth of 512 while the Genesis shots used a bandwidth of 320.

MDAPT
The last shader is Sp00kyFox's MDAPT, which stands for 'merge dithering and pseudo transparency.' This shader uses a modified version of Hyllian's DDT shader's detection code to identify identifies dithering patterns and then replaces them with an average of the component colors (I was mistaken; the algorithm is all Sp00kyFox's) . MDAPT is especially interesting because it is intended to run at 1x to smooth out dithering silently--so to speak--followed by another upscaling shader. On its own, here's how it handles our dithering example images:



Unfortunately, it sometimes has a few false-positives (notice the '200' in the next shot), but nothing too terrible:
When paired with some other shaders, aliaspider was able to use MDAPT to produce some pseudo-hires transparency upscaling that is nothing short of magical:

You can check out a couple more shots from aliaspider here.

Of these shaders, MDAPT and CBOD are available in Cg format, while GTU is in XML/GLSL format

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

HTC One Back Template for DIY Case Artwork

I got a super-cheap, clear hardshell case (price seems to have gone up since I bought it...) for my HTC One and was interested in making some custom art to put between the case and the phone. I wasn't able to find any templates readily available online, so I spent a little bit of time with a flatbed scanner and whipped one up myself: EDIT: turns out that Google resamples images -_- so just taking this image will not work as-is. You'll need to keep the same resolution (i.e., pixels by pixels) but set it to 200 DPI. Or, just download this one.

Note: I make no guarantees about the applicability of this template to your own case. It worked for me and I hope you find it useful, as well. The biggest potential issue would be with the cutaways for the power and volume buttons, which are pretty large on my case, but it should be easy to remove them if your case doesn't have them.

Here's how it looks when it's all finished:
Sorry about the weird picture. I didn't have another camera on hand, and there weren't any good mirrors at work, so I had to just use the reflection from an old hard drive platter...

EDIT: Here's a slightly better picture:
I made this BMO design along with a couple of other Adventure Time designs, ready to print:
Best show on television.

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