QoS Player Update

I've still been working on the QoS Player and there have been some improvements:

• Tool tips on Graphical User Interface, including time code on progress/video bar.
• Large enough to be readable on HDTVs.
• Clicking on the progress bar now works correctly.
• There was an error when clicking on earlier time segments of the video.  It was basically impossible to use the progress bar.
• Rewrote code to make it easier to maintain/develop.
• Everything works better due to use of events and listeners as opposed to flags and loops.
• Controls now resize correctly/easier.  scaleX/scaleY are used to make sure the controls are correctly sized.
• YouTube quality control changed to a stepper since the combo box didn't resize correctly.
• Autoscrolling on the playlist pane now works correctly.
• The playlist pane now also shows the length of videos (in HH:MM:SS format).
• Flash quality can now by set by right-clicking on the progress bar when video is paused.
• May add its own stepper later.
• Delay publishing of videos with a PHP file.
• A watermark can be added and displayed over videos.
• Will open a URL when clicked upon.
• It's almost in a workable/releasable state.

 Check it out:  http://lostdata.comuv.com/~qosplayer2/~index2.html

QoS Player

I've been working on a custom YouTube player as an improvement over YouTube's default player.

Its purpose is mainly to make watching video (subtitled or not) easier. The left and right arrow keys rewind and fast forward by ten seconds, respectively. This differs from YouTube's default player settings of rewinding/fast forwarding by ten percent of the video's length.

This might be used in a revived Reactor, but it needs a lot of work to get it to that point. Inserting Toonami interstitials by some method shouldn't be too hard, but keeping track of everything is difficult. The solution may be to simplify it by putting the interstitial/bump code in JavaScript.

The title comes from Quality of Service. It attempts to avoid some of YouTube's more annoying problems. It tries to force YouTube to devote more bandwidth by restarting the video if it loads too slowly. It currently can't be turned off, so this might be a problem for slow connections.

Future features may include: alerting the user when a video finishes loading or allowing the video to fully load before playing (or load to some point before playing).

See keyboard controls and embedded player test @ Lost Data.

(It's surprising that Shinya Arino can beat some of the hardest games ever made, but still fails at the occasional Mario game.)

fsed.sh

After downloading the Toonami Reactor web files from the Internet Archive, I needed to strip out all the Wayback Machine code/markers.  The Wayback Machine added JavaScript code to rewrite HTML links thus maintaining "temporal integrity".  These needed to be removed for Reactor 2.5 to function properly.  Removing them manually would be too time consuming and frustrating.  The application Cygwin provided access to many tools such as sed that allow for bulk replacement of text.  However, sed (or this version on least) can only replace text on a single line.  The solution was to write a custom bash script to replace newline characters ('\n') with the bell character ('\a') and switch back after removing the offending text.  See code:

#!/bin/bash
# fsed.sh
# Name: File sed
# Replaces all newlines with the bell (\a), performs sed,
# then switches back.

regex=$1;
# Shift the argument array, to move the regex value. 
shift
for i in $*
do
  cat $i | tr "\n" "\a" | sed "$regex" | tr "\a" "\n" > $i;
done


Called like this: >fsed.sh "/regex/replace/g" ./*.html
(Of course, this is designed to work on a mass of files.  And it's incredibly dangerous, what with rewriting files and such.  Use caution.)

It's possible there are other escape characters other than the bell that could be used, but it worked well enough at the time.

Flash/Shockwave Game Download Tools

So, you may be wondering how I download Flash or Shockwave games that may contain dozens of dependent files on a server. Well, it's quite simple. I use a custom Java program based on the JPcap (packet capture) library to spit out all the requests that are being sent over a network connection. I look through the requests, find the files I want, then download them with wget.


(Tcpdump allows you to see all the crud a modern Flash game loads. And download it!)

It works something like this:

java Tcpdump 2 >> .\output.txt

(The number "2" indicates which network interface to use; generally either a WiFi connection or Ethernet port.)

And ".\output.txt" will contain text such as this:

GET>> www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/characters.xml
GET>> www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/naruto3.swf
GET>> www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/tracker.swf

I replace "GET>>" with wget instructions to make it into this:

wget -nc -x www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/characters.xml
wget -nc -x www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/naruto3.swf
wget -nc -x www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/naruto/battleforleafvillage/tracker.swf


The flag "nc" prevents overwriting of existing files and "x" forces the creation of directories. These changes are saved to a .BAT file and run in the same directory as wget.

On top of this, I have Mozilla Firefox equipped with the FlashBlock plugin. This enables me to control when a Flash or Shockwave item is loaded, thus making my "output.txt" file neat and clean. Otherwise, dozens of non-related requests would need to be discarded to obtain a game.

To make things easy, I've packaged together all of the files that I use (except for Java and FlashBlock, of course; that would just be silly). The WinPcap library must be installed before installing the Jpcap library as one is dependent on the other. The Windows version of wget is included since most people can't be bothered to search around for it. After that, the Tcpdump* application can be run from .BAT files if the command line is too esoteric.

I'm sure there are other/better tools out there, but this has worked fairly well for me. There's only one major pitfall: some games only load resources as they need them, meaning that you're required to play through the entire game to obtain all the files. Some filenames can be guessed, but others can't be.

Download:

• Credits & Resources page @ Toonami: Lost Data,
  
• or click this link directly (tcpdump_package.zip).

*This is a misnomer in that my version doesn't dump whole TCP packets, but that's just the name I've kept ever since experimenting with an example program.