cgarry

Sounds like you are charging ahead with your project James, good stuff.

Chris

Ah, well, there's always just one more gotcha  The Ut Video codec appears not to want to play if I tell it the file format is BGR24 rather than RGB24.

Fortunately I believe the ffmpeg swscale library can convert from the former to the latter.  I just have to work out how to use it.

James

No it does not accept BGR24.  I just used a for loop to swap the pixels around, I found that easier than figuring out the swscale library!

Chris

Nice work sir!

I have to agree with you James, early optimisation is a bad idea.  I say get your design working first and then only optimise areas when the profiling tools say that it is worth doing.

Cheers,

Chris

I'm finding a huge number of out-of-date examples myself  Even the example code that is shipped with the source code for the version I have installed doesn't actually build without lots of warnings

I'd probably opt for static-linking the ffmpeg libraries into the executable on Linux if I have to go down that route.  It's far easier to keep things under control that way and the cost in terms of size is hardly huge.

It will definitely be open source.  I've earned my living from working with open source software for fifteen years or more and been a user of it in one guise or another for not far off twice that.  It would feel disrespectful not to give a little back.

James

I am planning to open source PIPP once I have reworked it to be a C++ QT application (rather than a C# GUI round a C++ application), plus tidied up some of my scruffy code!  Though finding the time to do this is the hard part.

I have sent you a PM that you may or may not find useful!

Cheers,

Chris

I had shied away from ffmpeg because the interface seems to change on such a regular basis.  I've downloaded  the demo code from the ffmpeg website and none of the different version actually compile against the libraries I have installed.  If I get it to work I might have to static link it.

James

It took me ages to get ffmpeg working on Windows, there are so many out of date examples out there on the internet.  Once I got it building all was fine as I distribute the DLLs with PIPP.  Ironically I build the Windows' ffmpeg DLLs on my Linux box because it is much easier.

How would this would this work with Linux?  Would you build and distribute the ffmpeg libraries with your application or does it not work that way?

Also, are you planning to make your program open source?

Cheers,

Chris

With standard AVI libraries I could not figure out how to generate mono (DIB) AVI files that were not 3x the size the needed to be.  That is why I wrote my own class.  For the Ut Video codec (and MPEG-4) I just wrote a wrapper for ffmpeg and I am very pleased with how that worked.

Chris

Oh, irritatingly I've not managed to find an implementation of the Ut codec for Linux yet.  I've not looked that hard, but it would be handy if someone had already done it.

James

Ut codec support should easy enough with FFmpeg, that is what I used.  I can give you the AVI/SER file generation code from PIPP if you like, save you reinventing the wheel completely.

Chris

Good work sir!

I have been planning to move PIPP over to using the QT toolkit instead of C# for some time now.  I like the idea of being able to produce native versions for Linux, Windows and OS X.  Now I just need to find the time to actually do it...

Cheers,

Chris

They also have the advantage that they do not get warm like a real battery which is an advantage if you use you camera for DSO imaging.

Great write up James, covering the process from beginning to end.

I have noticed recently that enabling this option in PIPP (as you did) was more important than I realised for both lunar and solar imaging:

* Processing Options->Enable Histogram Stretch

Without this enabled I found that Reg6 would very often produce badly aligned images with multiple edges.

I also find that for lunar images where the moon is not full, it is worth using this option to set which edge is in shadow:

* Processing Options->Edge In Shadow (Lunar Images Only)

This just helps PIPP to do a more consistent alignment between frames which seems to make life easier for Reg6.

Cheers,

Chris

This is the case that my woman made me from scratch. We got a regular brief case from the local store, and went out to a fabric store and got some foam and some cloth to cover the foam. She then cut out a shadow board for all my filters, EPs, and what not and then sewed the cloth on.

I also love that i have room for the manuals, journal, pens, and even hot-hands on the upper piece.

and a lot of room for future growth!

Its pretty great!

Nice! What is the foam like? One of the problems I have is when I want to reorganise a case it is often cheaper to buy a new case rather than replace the foam.

Cheers,

Chris

(I know DEC PE doesn’t exist but it almost look like one).

DEC PE does exist in exactly the same way that RA PE exists. With a good polar alignment the DEC axis does very little and so DEC PE will not show. However, with a bad polar alignment the DEC axis will need to keep moving in one direction, albeit much slower than the RA axis, and PE will show up.

Cheers,

Chris

One good idea is not to post your exact long and lat on this forum along with a list of all your expensive kit.

Cheers,

Chris

Since I seem to be in a photo taking mood today:

* 8mm, 10mm and 14mm Radian EPs

* 20mm Plossl EP

* 24mm, 27mm and 35mm Panoptics EPs

* 12.5mm Illuminated reticle EP

* x2.5 Powermate

* 6.3 Focal Reducer

* SPC900NC Webcam

* Some filters

And just to join the camera case club:

Cheers,

Chris

Great review. My C9.25 is in desperate need of collimation, possibly not unrelated to me fitting it with Bobs Knobs. I shall get that done as soon as I get the chance.

My one complaint about this scope is it does seem to be a bit of a cloud magnet...

Cheers,

Chris