It's funny how often these videos are from a camera pointed at a monitor, instead of a direct digital copy. I assume extracting the actual file is logistically tricky due to both technical and bureaucratic reasons.
One famous historical version of this was the live video feed from the Apollo 11 moon landing.
There was a direct video feed, but that was being transmitted to Australia (facing the Moon at the time), and it wasn't possible to patch that directly through to US-compatible video feeds. The first images that Nasa received were upside down. The ultimate video, broadcast live internationally, was from a camera pointed at the CRT / television image at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canbera, ACT, Australia.
I'm having trouble finding a full retelling of this though here's a story of Honeysuckle Creek's role and a bit about the TV image:
I was very surprised you didn’t make some comment about it! It had to be going through every reader’s mind. Happy to provide that comedic release for those readers.
.. featuring the brilliant hack of when stumped by hand solving parametric differential orbital calculations for orientating a radio telescope to the current module position: Just aim it at the moon
( Also; Landline Australia looks at the Danish FarmDroid bot (and names Australian contacts for reviewing such tech)
I figured you might have run across FarmDroid before, they've had a "complete" demo video for the model tested here up for three years or so.
It appears to be a 'dumb' (but accurate) weeding and seeding solar powered battery backed "runs all day and much of the night" platform.
I say dumb as the major feature seems to be highly accurate (sub inch) positioning ( I'm guessing on site grounded in GPS differential base station as an error broadcast | local reference ) with a taunt bright red bit of heavy string sprung out around the four corners .. ie no vision processing and a simple "detect tree or human" stop moving trip wire.
It'll seed, remember seed positions and "weed" (disturb soil) about the remembered seed position .. but I'm guessing it'll weed out planted seeds if there's an origin or axis positioning error in re-calibration.
Still, it's being used in several countries - the 58 minute weekly Landline program devotes 10 or 12 minutes to it and the name is given of the Queensland(?) Ag. Dept. officer who's trialing it out (along with other systems).
That'd be the main point of interest for you if you ever get to wanting to officially test your rig in Australia.
Landline is free to view in Australia - it's just yt-dlp.exe that-url-I-gave-above with an AU proxy .. I can always drop it or just the relevant transcript if want either the .MKV or .SRT
Also, the TV image was "slow scan" at 10 frames per second, which meant that some conversion was inevitable and using a long-retention phosphor TV was a very effective pre-digital solution.
It’s a silly/stupid joke but I’ve been able to make it at 2 different companies courting an Australian client: I add in (and I can’t remember the exacts) a “translate 180 degrees” to the css of the body of the webpage as say “ok, I think are ready to demo”.
The police have a never-ending issue with this when trying to get video from random Temu-quality CCTV recorders at the scene of a crime. I know one defendant who almost got away[1] with a heinous robbery on a mobile phone store because the technician from HQ remoted in to try and get the video off and somehow deleted it instead.
[1] the store clerk later remembered the defendant had been drinking a pop when he entered the store and they found the bottle had been left behind, which had his DNA on it, and his DNA was on file
Those DVR/NVR (including networked cameras) should be among the first things hackers should liberate from their proprietary firmware: they all use Linux but keep it tight closed and quite often phone home somewhere in China, officially to allow users connect via the phone app (another big security concern) to their cloud service, which also means the feed goes through there.
One can buy the board alone by searching for "dvr board" on aliexpress and other shops; they're cheap and could be repurposed for other interesting uses because of their fast ADCs for example.
How could I give specs about undocumented chips running a closed system? We know they can sample 1080p video, therefore they must have several MHz bandwidth. Should anyone manage to hack into the internal OS (which is Linux, albeit with closed drivers) and reverse engineer the basic drivers functions, we'd have a cheap platform to play with. As an example, I would explore the possibility to use their ADCs for multi band SDR applications, as the 8 input channel board costs only around $30. Unfortunately there are a lot of ifs, but if I had the skills I would at least attempt a reverse engineering on the cheaper model.
I worked with some of them years ago and they had plain PAL/NTSC inputs which are low res, but more recent models should be all AHD compatible, which is hi res albeit still analog. The standard was created by Korean company NextChip.
Hmmm, thanks.
It seems AHD 1 is 720p30 and AHD 2 is 1080p30, but basically just plain yellow RCA jack (just, well, overclocked accordingly).
Usability as SDR depends on how well the genlock can be turned off, and how well the h/v blanking can be eliminated.
One of them, the NVP6114, seems to have a COLOROFF_x register and a selectable color kill mode (no Y/C separation vs. after Y/C separation). The no-separation + color kill seems to be the closest to dumb ADC, if genlock can be eliminated. AGC seems to be somewhat optional.
If you don’t need it to be perfect it is actually not too difficult. A notch filter could be enough remove most of the pattern provided that you have a good way of guesstimating its frequency
If its a DVR then one needs permission to download the video. Many DVR's have access policies that can limit certain users/groups to only view or playback disabling download. Then if they do have download access they likely need access to a USB port and have a USB drive handy as they likely have to download the file from a web UI. Then they have to get that video on to a PC or Phone/tablet and upload it.
Or just point the phone at the screen, record, click the share button and select YouTube or whatever.
When I was involved in an accident the police said they weren't allowed to give me the CCTV footage, but I was allowed to record it on my phone. Who knows.
The more upsetting part to me is that, with even a little bit of effort, recording a screen with a camera produces a perfectly acceptable image, other than some artifacts about framerate not being synced.
This was true back in the CRT and cheap Sony camcorder days, and it is even more true in the wide viewing angle, high quality phone image sensor, and image stabilization days.
But nobody cares to take five extra seconds to get good framing, or reduce glare, or hold their damn phone steady, or match the damn aspect ratio!
It's infuriating how little people seem to care in general
That is an interesting idea! It could detect the borders of the screen, straighten and auto crop, perhaps detect and match the frames per second… if the camera resolution is high enough you could maybe even detect the original source resolution.
Which is getting scarily good. I realised this a couple of days ago shooting food photos, realising the color balance and saturation were way off, but that that was because in real time the camera app had recognised the subject as food.
(I'm probably way late in becoming aware of this. It still simultaneously 1) blew my mind, 2) annoyed me, and 3) terrified me.)
Yeah, similar for interesting events caught on security cameras. I assume these videos tend to come from the operator who only has access to view but not to export. Plus, they'd need to get the export into a phone-native format for upload onto social media, so the uploader may need admin access, familiarity with formats and/or ffmpeg, and a way to transfer to a phone or personal PC.
> This is why HDCP enforcement may be the dumbest legal-technical mandate ever.
Indeed. Because of HDCP common use cases like splitting, converting or sending a video signal are unsupported or afterthoughts by most consumer devices, even when dealing with non-protected signals. Of course, the HDCP flag can be removed by some shady devices but these are not commonly available and are often poorly documented.
Heh, my wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She does live audio production for work but occasionally has to deal with video. Active HDMI splitters are one of the few cases where cheaper is often better because the cheap Chinese ones will usually do HDCP stripping and something sane with the EDID data, compared to more expensive ones that actually follow the spec.
HDCP strippers are very commonly available from the East.
Of course they aren't called "HDCP strippers", but ever since the master key was leaked/cracked, many anonymous devices with HDMI inputs will strip HDCP.
But if anything is going to push it over the edge of going off (for whatever reason it has finally decided it's time), it's going to be a plane driving over the top / near it.
The reason it detonated now is probably corrosion eating away for decades. Which also has made it incredibly dangerous to defuse WW2 bombs, because their behavior is so unpredictable.
If you look at the photo in the article, the bomb seems to be at the very edge of the taxiway, where a plane is unlikely to drive directly over it. If it would have been a little bit closer to the center, it might have happened just as you described...
I wasn't referring to the damage the explosion might have done to the plane, I was thinking about the explosion being more likely to be triggered if the landing gears of taxiing planes pass directly overhead rather than at a certain distance. Then again, since the ground under the taxiway is already compacted, any mechanical effect that reaches a buried bomb is probably vibration rather than direct pressure, and that also has an effect at some distance (but it's probably still stronger directly underneath)
Just watched a blurb from NHK's hourly news programme and they mentioned a plane carrying 96 passengers and crew had taxied down that taxiway just minutes prior to the bomb going off.
I reiterate this was sheer dumb miraculous luck that nothing and nobody was harmed or killed.
