Caveats when using ‘avidemux’ (under Linux).

One of the applications available under Linux, that can help edit video / audio streams, and that has been popular for many years – if not decades – is called ‘avidemux’. But in recent years the subject has become questionable, of whether this GUI- and command-line- based application is still useful.

One of the rather opaque questions surrounding its main use, is simply highlighted in The official usage WiKi for Avidemux. The task can befall a Linux user, that he either wants to split off the audio track from a video / audio stream, or that he wants to give the stream a new audio track. What the user is expected to do is to navigate to the Menu entries ‘Audio -> Save Audio’, or to ‘Audio -> Select Track’, respectively.

What makes the usage of the GUI not straightforward is what the manual entries next state, and what my personal experiments confirm:

• External Audio can only be added from ‘AC3′, ‘MP3′, or ‘WAV’ streams by default,
• The audio track that gets Saved cannot be played back, if In the format of an ‘OGG Vorbis’, an ‘OGG Opus’, or an ‘AAC’ track, as such exported audio tracks lack any header information, which playback apps would need, to be able to play them. In those cases specifically, only the raw bit-stream is saved.

The first problem with this sort of application is that the user needs to perform a memorization exercise, about which non-matching formats he may or may not, Export To or Import From. I don’t like to have to memorize meaningless details, about every GUI-application I have, and in this case the details can only be read through detailed research on the Web. They are not hinted at anywhere within the application.

(Updated 3/23/2019, 15h35 … )

A Clarification on Polynomial Approximations… Refining the Exercise

Some time ago, I posted an idea, on how the concept of a polynomial approximation can be simplified, in terms of the real-time Math that needs to be performed, in order to produce 4x oversampling, in which the positions of the interpolated samples with respect to time, are fixed positions.

In order for the reader to understand the present posting, which is a reiteration, he or she would need to read the posting I linked to above. Without reading that posting, the reader will not understand the Matrix, which I included below.

There was something clearly wrong with the idea, which I wrote above, but what is wrong, is not the fact that I computed, or assume the usefulness, of a product between two matrices. What is wrong with the idea as first posted above, is that the order of the approximation is only 4, thus implying a polynomial of the 3rd degree. This is a source of poor approximations close to the Nyquist Frequency.

But As I wrote before, the idea of using anything based on polynomials, can be extended to 7th-order approximations, which imply polynomials of the 6th degree. Further, there is no reason why a 7×7 matrix cannot be pre-multiplied by a 3×7 matrix. The result will only be a 3×7 matrix.

Hence, if we were to assume that such a matrix is to be used, this is the worksheet, which computed what that matrix would have to be:

Work-Sheet

The way this would be used in a practical application is, that a vector of input-samples be formed, corresponding to

t = [ -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3 ]

And that the interpolation should result corresponding to

t = [ 0, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 ]

Further, the interpolation at t = 0 does not need to be recomputed, as it was already provided by the 4th element of the input vector. So the input-vector would only need to be multiplied by the suggested matrix, to arrive at the other 3 values. After that, a new sample can be used as the new, 7th element of the vector, while the old 1st element is dropped, so that another 3 interpolated samples can be computed.

This would be an example of an idea which does not work out well according to a first approximation, but which will produce high-quality results, when the method is applied more rigorously.

Dirk

A Note on Polynomial Fitting

In This Posting, I wrote that Polynomial Smoothing / Fitting / Approximation can be used in conjunction with a Sinc Filter, to convert Sample-Rates. I should note that sometimes, Polynomial functions can be used by themselves.

This could be an explanation for how early CD Players eventually replaced the sinc filter, with “Mathematical Sound Shaping” (M.A.S.H.). The sinc filters were much maligned for their lack of immediacy. In their place, M.A.S.H. suffered from some level of distortion at frequencies near the Nyquist Frequency.

Further, experiments I have yet to carry out with ‘QTractor‘, may show, that it will convert

44.1 kHz -> 48 kHz

using the exact same method as

48 kHz -> 44.1 kHz

Assuming that is, I set the Global filtering method to a (slower) non-default setting.

Dirk