Bilinear Resampling, ShaderJob, Pixel Bender And Flash Player

*Update*

Sometimes you’re an idiot and you spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel because you misread one little line of documentation. This is one of those times where I get to be that idiot. I invented a solution for bilinear resampling in Flash Player when I didn’t need to. You can actually get the same results pretty simply using just BitmapData.draw() method with smoothing on (I had read this didn’t work when down sizing), but it requires creating a temp BitmapData object if the source you’re feeding the BitmapData.draw() method is not another BitmapData object (i.e. a DisplayObject). Here’s what that scenario would look like.

            // source in this example is a DisplayObject
            var temp:BitmapData = new BitmapData( sourceWidth, sourceHeight );
            temp.draw( source );
 
            var output:BitmapData = new BitmapData( outputWidth, outputHeight );
 
            var matrix:Matrix = new Matrix();
            matrix.scale( outputWidth / sourceWidth, outputHeight / sourceHeight );
 
            output.draw( temp, matrix, null, null, null, true );
            temp.dispose();

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ThumbGenie 1.2 Now Supports Bilinear Image Resampling (improved scaling in non-geek speak)

One of the things that’s sort of sucked about ThumbGenie has been the quality of scaled thumbnails. The 640×360 image below was generated from a 960×540 video frame. Notice the edge degradation (jaggies) and poorly rendered text that results from the nearest neighbor scaling. (more…)

ThumbGenie 1.1.0 Now Generates Embed Code

I updated ThumbGenie over the weekend to support generation of embed code. Now, every time you create a thumbnail from an MPEG4-AVC file or SWF embed code will be generated. ThumbGenie ships with a default “object / embed” code template, but you can easily modify or replace the template with your own code. (more…)

ThumbGenie: An AIR Thumbnail Generator for MPEG4-AVC / SWF Files

One of the not so nice aspects of hosting your own Jing / Jing Pro videos is generating thumbnails that can be used for the “click-to-play” screen that viewers initiate video playback with. My current thumbnail workflow works something like this:

1. Capture video.
2. Save video to local disk (desktop).
3. Open video with QuickTime Pro ($30).
4. Select a video frame and Choose QuickTime’s “Export Movie as Bitmap” option.
5. Open .bmp file generated by QuickTime Pro in Fireworks (beaucoup $$$).
6. Resize image in Fireworks to fit my embed dimensions (embed dimensions are different than video dimensions).
7. Export out JPEG file (.jpg) with some compression applied (trade quality for size).

Jing’s supposed to be all about the easy, but the workflow above is decidedly not. It shouldn’t be that hard to generate thumbnail images from your JIng videos and it shouldn’t be ultra expensive. Enter ThumbGenie, an AIR application, written by moi, that allows you to load MPEG4-AVC or SWF files, select a video frame and generate a thumbnail image as either a JPEG or PNG file. Wait, it gets better. You can apply JPEG compression and scale the exported image down. Best of all its completely free, as in beer. So what are you waiting for, download ThumbGenie and start generating thumbnails pronto!

If you head over to ThumbGenie central you’ll find some helpful “getting started” videos as well as the installer badge.