§ ¶Things you find in the kitchen
I've been doing some work in the video capture routines in VirtualDub lately, and when I do that I tend to just grab the nearest video source as fodder. Usually it's the GameBridge hooked up to a PS2 running a random game, but today I grabbed the webcam, so it's time to take pictures of random stuff around the house.
Take, for instance, this knife sheath I found in the kitchen:
![[NVIDIA-branded knife sheath]](/blog/images/knife.jpg "[NVIDIA-branded knife sheath]")
I apologize for the poor quality image — I never said this was a good webcam — but the homemade cardboard sheath says "knife edge here" and there is an NVIDIA logo on it. "GeForce MX" is partly visible and as such I suspect this was the most useful part of the product.
(This is my revenge for the time I got made fun of for using my ATI RADEON X1800 XL, still in its original packaging, as a writing pad.)
Comments
Comments posted:
hehe.. I have a X850 XTPE holding my books in line.. Perhaps I should throw it in a machine some day? :)
Gismo - 22 01 08 - 12:08
Here, the obligatory bit of sucky hardware is the remains of a floppy disk that went "tonk... tonk... tonk... bzzzzzbzzzzbzzzz". I'm thinking of pinning it up somewhere, as a warning to all computer hardware.
Torkell (link) - 22 01 08 - 13:23
Avery, sorry about the offtopic (delete this comment when you see it) -- I just wanted to let you know that I have sent you an email with a suggestion for SSE4.1 support in VDub.
I tried to add the patch myself but I cannot compile the whole source tree because I don't have dshow.h. Any idea where to get it?
Igor (link) - 26 01 08 - 19:37
I apologize for the delay -- I do check my email frequently, but there's a bit of a delay in responding.
dshow.h is part of DirectShow and currently lives in the Platform SDK. Because DirectShow used to reside in the DirectX SDK, the PSDK that shipped VS2005 doesn't have it, and so if you try using that and one of the current DXSDKs neither will have the DirectShow headers and libs. Your best bet is to grab the Windows Server 2003 SDK. The Windows Vista SDK will work too but you'll need to hack winnt.h to avoid a conflict with VC++'s intrin.h.
Phaeron - 26 01 08 - 20:01
I was thinking about some older DXSDK and Extras but can't remember which one it was. I believe I have Windows Server 2003 SDK somewhere, will check.
The reason why I am interested is because I got myself Core 2 Duo E8200 which has SSE4.1.
I performed some tests and DPPS executes in 3 clocks (with surrounding loads and stores) while traditional solution with MULPS and 2x HADDPS takes 5 clocks.
There are some other instructions worth using for video processing too so VirtualDub should definitely add SSSE3 and SSE4.1 support.
Igor (link) - 28 01 08 - 08:18
That might be nice... if I actually had a computer that supported DPPS. The most modern CPU that I have only supports SSE2. Haven't been motivated enough to upgrade.
Phaeron - 29 01 08 - 01:14
Well, I was thinking about adding detection for the new set extensions to the VirtualDub code so that at least plugins could use them if the user choses so in the options. I didn't mean you should buy a new PC to implement DPPS. By the way, there is a software emulator for SSE4.1 downloadable from Intel site. It is actually just a DLL which you link to and it intercepts invalid instruction exception and emulates new instructions. It is not fast but you could check for correctness if you wanted to implement something without having the CPU.
Talking of CPUs, they are rather cheap, (around $170 for the 2.66GHz chip like the one I have which can run at 3.2GHz without any trouble).
Igor (link) - 11 02 08 - 22:14
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