Video Hacks

616 Articles

Art Project Analyzes Every Public Recording Of Facebook’s CEO Since 2004

June 11, 2019 by 15 Comments

[Benjamin Grosser] had a simple question: “What does Mark Zuckerberg think about?” The resulting art project is named ORDER OF MAGNITUDE and to create it he researched archives of every public utterance the founder and CEO of the world’s largest social media network has made, going as far back as 2004.

The end product is a nearly fifty-minute film consisting entirely of cuts centered around what [Benjamin] says are three of the Facebook CEO’s most favored and often-used terms:

  • The word “more”
  • The word “grow”
  • Metrics such as “ninety-nine percent”, “two million”, and terms of that nature.

The idea is that the resulting video provides insight into what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about, has focused on, and how that has (or has not) changed between 2004 and now.  How well does ORDER OF MAGNITUDE do that? Watch the video below, and judge for yourself.

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DIY Vactrols Give MIDI-Controlled Video Distortion

May 26, 2019 by 2 Comments

It’s one thing to assemble your own circuits from scratch using off the shelf components. It’s quite another to build the components first, and then build the circuit.

That’s the path [Joris Wegner] took with this video distortion effects box, dubbed PHOSPHOR. One might wonder why you’d want a box that makes a video stream look like playback from a 1980s VHS player with tracking problems, but then again, audio distortion for artistic effect is a thing, so why not video? PHOSPHOR is a USB MIDI device, and therein lies the need for custom components. [Joris] had a tough time finding resistive optoisolators, commonly known as Vactrols and which are used to control the distortion effects. He needed something with a wide dynamic range, so he paired up a bright white LED and a cadmium sulfide photoresistor inside a piece of heat shrink tubing. A total of 20 Vactrols were fabricated and installed on a PCB with one of the coolest silkscreens we’ve ever seen, along with the Sparkfun Pro Micro that takes care of MIDI chores. Now, distortions of the video can be saved as presets and played back in sync with music for artistic effects.

This isn’t the first time Vactrols have made an appearance here, of course. We saw them a while back with this Arduinofied electric guitar, and more recently with a triple-555 timer synth.

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A Laser Aiming Module For First Person Hacking

May 25, 2019 by 16 Comments

You’ve perhaps noticed that [Jeremy Cook] is rather prolific on YouTube, regularly putting out videos on his latest and greatest creations. He wanted to add a head-mounted GoPro to his video production bag of tricks, but found it was a little trickier than expected to get the camera to point where he was actually looking. The solution? A 3D printed laser “sight” for the GoPro that let’s him zero it in while creating videos.

The idea here is very simple: put a small laser module on the same mount as the GoPro itself so you’ll have a handy red dot showing more or less where the camera is looking. The position of the red dot relative to the center-point of the camera’s field of view is going to vary slightly with range, but with something like a GoPro that’s shooting a very wide area to begin with, it’s not really a problem in practice.

Sounds like a good idea, but won’t that leave a weird red dot in all the videos? [Jeremy] is already ahead of you there, and added a small push button switch to the front of the module so he can quickly and easily turn the laser on and off. The idea is that he turns the laser on, gets the dot roughly where he wants the camera pointed, and then turns it back off.

[Jeremy] has put the STL files for the single-piece 3D printed module up on his GitHub for anyone who might find them useful. Besides the printed part, you just need to provide a suitably sized 3.7 V LiPo battery and the laser diode itself. If you need to find a good supply of cheap lasers, you might want to check the clearance rack at the big box store.

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A Very Modern Flying Spot Scanner

May 22, 2019 by 16 Comments

Analogue TV signals are a beautiful exercise in order and synchronisation, in that as the white dot on your old CRT TV back in the day traced its way across the glass it would have been doing so in faithful obedience to the corresponding electron beam in the camera at the studio. But a camera with a lens and light-sensitive scanning camera tube wouldn’t have been the only way of generating a picture. The flying-spot scanner drew a raster over its subject — usually celluloid film — with a white dot of light and recorded the result with a single photocell to produce a video signal. The ever resourceful [Niklas Roy] has built one using a video projector.

In this scanner the “dot” is a square of white pixels that is moved around the scene, while the sensor is a photoresistor that is read by an Arduino which passes the data to a PC. The whole is mounted in a booth that the subject positions themselves in front of, and covers their head with a cloth. It’s a slow process because the photoresistor is hardly the best sensor, in fact a portrait takes 83 seconds.

The result is hardly superlative quality, but of course this is an artwork in itself rather than a particularly good camera. It is however an impressive piece of work, and we know we’d give it a go if we had the chance.

[Niklas] is a frequent feature on these pages, having produces some pretty impressive work over the years. Some of our favourites are his container-sized music construction machine, and his tiny cardboard plotter.

A PIC And A Few Passives Support Breakout In Glorious NTSC Color

March 29, 2019 by 27 Comments

“Never Twice the Same Color” may be an apt pejorative, but supporting analog color TV in the 1950s without abandoning a huge installed base of black-and-white receivers was not an option, and at the end of the day the National Television Standards System Committee did an admirable job working within the constraints they were given.

As a result of the compromises needed, NTSC analog signals are not the easiest to work with, especially when you’re trying to generate them with a microcontroller. This PIC-based breakout-style game manages to accomplish it handily, though, and with a minimal complement of external components. [Jacques] undertook this build as an homage to both the classic Breakout arcade game and the color standard that would drive the home version of the game. In addition to the PIC12F1572 and a crystal oscillator, there are only a few components needed to generate the chroma and luminance signals as well as horizontal and vertical sync. The game itself is fairly true to the original, although a bit twitchy and unforgiving judging by the gameplay video below. [Jacques] has put all the code and schematics up on GitHub for those who wish to revive the analog glory days.

Think NTSC is weird compared to PAL? You’re right, and it’s even weirder than you might know. [Matt] at Stand Up Maths talked about it a while back, and it turns out that a framerate of 29.97 fps actually makes sense when you think it through.

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An HDMI Input For A Laptop Screen, Minus Laptop

March 14, 2019 by 11 Comments

The lack of HDMI inputs on almost all laptops is a huge drawback for anyone who wants to easily play a video game on the road, for example. As to why no manufacturers offer this piece of convenience when we all have easy access to a working screen of this size, perhaps no one can say. On the other hand, if you want to ditch the rest of the computer, you can make use of the laptop screen for whatever you want.

This project from [Avner] comes to us in a few parts. In the first section, the teardown of the laptop begins and a datasheet for the screen is discovered, which allows [Avner] to prepare an FPGA to drive the screen. The second part involves building an HDMI sink, which is a device which decodes the signal from an HDMI source into its constituent parts so it can be sent to the FPGA. The final section of the project involves actually sending a video to this impressive collection of hardware in order to get a video to appear on the old laptop screen.

This build is worth checking out if you’ve ever dealt with anything involving digital video. It goes into great depth on a lot of the technical details involving HDMI, video devices, and hardware timing issues. This is a great build and, even though we’ve seen similar projects, definitely worth diving into if you have some time on your hands and a spare laptop screen.

DAT, The HD Video Tape Format We Never Knew We Had

February 24, 2019 by 48 Comments

When we consume our music online via streaming services it is easy to forget the days of recordings being contained on physical media, and to overlook the plethora of competing formats that vied for space in our hi-fi systems to play them. [Andrew Rossignol] has an eye for dated recording media formats as a chiptune enthusiast though, because not only has he found a DAT machine from the 1990s, he’s hacked it to record HD video rather than hi-fi audio.

If you’ve not encountered DAT before, it’s best to consider the format as the equivalent of a CD player but on a tape cassette. It had its roots in the 1980s, and stored an uncompressed 16-bit CD-quality stereo audio data stream on the tape using a helical-scan mechanism similar to that found in a video cassette recorder. It was extremely expensive due to the complexity of the equipment, the music industry hated it because they thought it would be used to make pirate copies of CDs. But despite those hurdles it established a niche for itself among well-heeled musicians and audiophiles. If any Hackaday readers have encountered a DAT cassette it is most likely to have not contained audio at all but computer data, it was common in the 1990s for servers to use DAT tapes for backup purposes.

[Andrew]’s hack involves using the SPDIF digital interface on his Sony DAT player to carry compressed video data. SPDIF is a mature and well-understood standard that he calculated has a bandwidth of 187.5 kB/s, plenty to carry HD video using the H.265 compression scheme. The SPDIF data is brought into the computer via a USB sound card, and from there his software could either stream or retrieve the video. The stream is encoded into frames following the RFC1662 format to ensure synchronization, and he demonstrates it in the video below with a full explanation.

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