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Just before the Chinese Lunar New Year, I received the latest alpha version of AirVision 2.0. It doesn’t just inherit the strengths of the previous version; it feels significantly faster and more stable. Here is a quick preview of the installation process and some of the main UI pages. Installation Process After launching the Windows installer and following the setup steps, you’ll see a Windows Security alert. Make sure your firewall isn’t blocking the application. ...

Weeks ago, the supplier demo the Miracast function to us and my colleague told me maybe we can think if there are applications for surveillance system. At first I saw nothing special for surveillance application but I may find there is now. Here is a capture picture from the whitepaper of WiFi alliance. Basically, Miracast is a protocol and this means Miracast can be over any kind of infrastructure. However, Miracast connections are expected to be predominantly established between Wi-Fi devices connected with each other directly, without an AP acting as an intermediary. According to the topology, what we can see is a source to a sink and it is a peer-to-peer connection. ...

The pure public cloud is no doubt building web services on a public infrastructure, while hybrid combines a private component. According to Wikipedia, the public cloud (aka external cloud) refers to services provided by a third party. A picture on Wikipedia describes this clearly. Basically, there are four deployment models on Wikipedia. A private cloud can’t fully satisfy the requirements of a surveillance system. We also won’t discuss community cloud since it’s not realistic for surveillance. ...

The pure public cloud is no doubt that we build the web services on public and the hybrid combine the private part. According to the information on wiki, the public cloud aka external cloud is related to the service is provided by third party. There is a picture on wiki can describe exactly what we talk about. Basically, there are four deployment models on wiki. The private cloud can’t satisfy the requirements of the surveillance system. We do not talk about the community cloud also because it’s not real on surveillance system. ...

Today is the end of the Dragon year and we use to have a good supper on this day. It’s brand new lunar year tomorrow and we call it Snake year. Sometimes, we’d call it Small Dragon year rather than Snake year because Dragon is much more significant in traditional. Hope my family and friends have a brand new good Small Dragon Year.

My colleague did some experiments on GStreamer alsasrc and osssrc plugins and found that alsasrc consumes a lot of CPU resource (around 16% on the chip we use). He asked me why the test tool provided by the chip vendor is quite efficient (around 1~2%). It was a big gap and I started to investigate why. After hours of checking, I found that the plugin may cause a busy wait in a while loop when the parameters are set to non-blocking mode. I made a simple code modification and the CPU rate dropped to 12%. Still frustrating, but some improvement. ...

A colleague recently observed a significant discrepancy in CPU usage while testing the GStreamer alsasrc and osssrc plugins. On our hardware platforms, alsasrc was consuming about 16% of CPU resources, whereas the vendor-provided test tools achieved the same task with only 1~2% overhead. This massive gap in efficiency piqued my curiosity, and I decided to investigate the root cause. After several hours of deep diving into the code, I discovered that when the plugin is set to “non-blocking mode,” it can trigger a busy-wait condition within a while loop, needlessly spiking CPU cycles. After a quick patch to optimize this behavior, I managed to bring the CPU usage down to 12%. While an improvement, it still felt far from the vendor tool’s efficiency. ...

RabbitMQ Setup and Test Server side: My desktop PC is Windows 7. Download the RabbitMQ server from http://www.rabbitmq.com/. Installation guide: http://www.rabbitmq.com/install-windows.html I use an extra Ethernet card with IP address set to 192.168.1.19, and make sure the firewall doesn’t block port 5672. Client side: (both send and listen on the same device) I use the package from https://github.com/alanxz/rabbitmq-c. Follow the guide in the link to cross-build and install on the embedded device. ...

When I google the internet with realtime and transport stream, I could not find the information I want. The word ‘realtime’ must construct on the relative thinking. For example, there is camera and screen and the camera’s video can be showed on the screen with quite small latency. We assume the latency is under 150ms or 300ms whatever and we can call this is realtime or not when we can have comparisons. ...

Today, a supplier visited our company to introduce their solutions with DLNA and Miracast support. After some research on these protocols, it seems there are three main standards competing in the market for wireless display and media streaming. DLNA: This has been around for a long time. Apple was originally a member of the DLNA alliance. Airplay: Apple eventually left DLNA to create its own proprietary “Airplay” protocol, building a walled garden for seamless ecosystem integration. Miracast: Created by the Wi-Fi Alliance. It appears the Android camp is rallying around Miracast to challenge Apple’s dominance in this space. It will be interesting to see how these standards evolve and which one will eventually dominate the user experience. ...