It just started and now it’s already the end of September … We’ve had a beautiful spring and then a horrible summer. No chance to do some relaxing outdoor bow carving work

Anyway, the summer wasn’t boring at all! Together with Kulabyte, MontiVison has been taken over by a Canadian company called Haivision (where Hai is German and translates to Shark).

To be honest, I hadn’t heard of them before, so I was pretty amazed about the stuff I saw when visiting them in Montreal in early June! Their core product is a hardware h.264 encoder/decoder couple, which allows extremely low delay HD video transmission (down to 70ms). Not very long ago, they aquired two other companies to add digital signage and a cool multi platform software player.

By taking over Kulabyte, Haivison adds the missing piece in the puzzle, internet video distribution.

At MontiVision, we are very much looking forward to an exciting future, now being part of an extremely dynamic, creative and successful team! And by the way, the guys are pretty cool as well

I tried a lot of arrows, cheap ones from eBay, real medieval original style handcrafted Arrows from the Viking Market in Schleswig or Haithabu (Hedeby) for 25 Euros a piece and mid-priced Arrows from other markets. To make this clear first, the original style handcrafted in Germany ones totally rock. But I don’t want to use them for my everyday training, as every breaking Arrow makes you cry …

Aside of my Longbows, I built a couple of Bows for Kids. Mathis has his own collection of Arrows and most of them are relatively new. There is a single one though, which we have for a lot of years now and it just won’t die. On the Shaft, there is an Inscription saying “Szalóky Kelemen“.

Yesterday on the Medieval Festival in Hohenwestedt I found a Booth with a Guy from Hungary, selling Szalóky Arrows. I had a quick look and the quality is the same awesome quality of the old one we got. I grabbed five for me and one for Mathis. I paid 35 Euros all together!

Coming home and shooting them a couple of times, I slapped myself not to have taken two dozen of them home …

No, it’s not the 25 Euros Viking Arrow quality we are talking about, but we are talking about 80% of the quality for 6 Euros! I’ll try to collect more of the high end ones over time for the days when I dress up and go to Viking events, but for my daily training, I’ll go for Szalóky from now on.

Ok, ‘nuff said, here are some pictures (Click on them for High Res):

The Kids Arrow in the top left picture is the old one we used for quite a couple of years. The one below is one of the new Adult Arrows with self-nock.

Getting Ready to try them with the English Longbow

We created a simple C# sample application for our Video Pipe DirectShow Filters, which captures video from a DirectShow compatible video source, adds a delay and a text overlay and makes the output available for video capture or encoding application like Microsoft Expression Encoder.

This sample application utilizes the MontiVision Smart ActiveX Control to load a MontiVision Project File (DirectShow Filter Graph) created using the MontiVision Development Kit.

The DirectShow Filter Graph that is used in the above application shown in our MontiVision Workbench:

The Video Pipe Renderer sends the preprocessed video to one or more instances of our MV Video Pipe Source DirectShow Filter, which appears as Video Capture Source in Video Capture and Encoding Applications.

The following image shows the Pipe Source being accessed by the Expression Encoder:

If you’d like to try our DirectShow Pipe Filters and the Virtual Video Capture C# Sample Application, please download and install first the MontiVision Development Kit (Video Processing SDK) and then the latest version of our Audio/Video Pipe DirectShow Filters.

I just put linseed oil and beeswax on my individual version of a longbow, made from maple wood.

The wood is far from perfect, but that’s the fun when it comes to bow building

The tiller is a bit too stiff on the right side, but I had doubts to weaken the knot regions more.

A lot of knots on the right side.

And some nice color transitions.

Some knots on the left arm.

I am using a hold without leather here.

Related Articles

• Crossbow or The Longbow? Which Weapon is Better in Battle? (socyberty.com)

An updated MontiVision MPEG-4 DirectShow Filter Codec Pack is available for download from:

http://www.montivision.com/download/updates/MVMpeg4Codec.zip

The package includes:

- MV Video Encoder (DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MJPEG, h.264/AVC)
- MV Video Decoder (DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MJPEG, h.264/AVC)
- MV Audio Encoder (MPEG-4 Audio/AAC)
- MV Audio Decoder (MPEG-4 Audio/AAC)
- MV MPEG-4 Multiplexer
- MV MPEG-4 Splitter
- MV Advanced Deinterlacer
- MV Color Space Converter

Related Articles

• Microsoft Answers Your Questions About Encoding, Codecs and Silverlight (streamingmedia.com)
• H.264 to be royalty free forever (ghacks.net)
• MPEG LA Announces H.264 Codec Royalty Free For License Lifetime on Free Internet Video (reelseo.com)

The preliminary MontiVision Streaming Add-On, an add-on for the MontiVision Development Kit, contains an updated MV Stream Source DirectShow Filter for RTSP/RTP reception from e.g. surveillance cameras or network video encoders. The filter supports MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and h.264 video, as well as PCM/µLaw/aLaw and AAC audio.

We added support for Lumenera Surveillance Cameras to our MV IP Camera Source DirectShow Filter, which is part of the MontiVision Development Kit, a DirectShow SDK for Digital Video Processing in languages such as Microsoft Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Basic and Borland Delphi or C-Builder.

The MV IP Camera Source can be used to capture video from all network cameras delivering a standard MJPEG stream over HTTP. Among others, this includes cameras from AXIS, Sony, Panasonic, Bosch, Basler and Sanyo Video.

The following DirectShow Filter Graph captures a PAL live video stream from a network camera, writes the compressed Motion-JPEG data into an AVI file and shows the uncompressed stream in a video window.

You can download the latest version of the MontiVision Development Kit from http://www.MontiVision.com/download/MVDevKit31.exe

Professor Berthold K. P. Horn from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Yajun Fang and Ichiro Masaki worked out a computer vision algorithm for video analysis, which estimates the time that is left before an object in sight of a video camera will be contacted by the object (say a car) that carries the camera.

Publication: Horn, B.K.P., Y. Fang and I. Masaki, “Time to Contact Relative to a Planar Surface” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, June 2007.

The algorithm was implemented as a DirectShow filter and tested in the MontiVision Workbench, the graphical development environment that is part of the MontiVision Development Kit. The MontiVision Filter SDK was utilized for easy implementation of a video processing plug-in (DirectShow Transform Filter), as it doesn’t require DirectShow API experience.

This snapshot is showing the Time To Contact DirectShow filter in action, while the camera is moving towards a truck:

The three bars on the right of the video window show the velocity in X, Y and Z direction. In this case the camera is moving forward and left. A green Z bar would indicate a backward movement. The red circle indicates the position where the camera will probably hit the truck.

You can download an MP4 video of the whole sequence here: Time_To_Contact_Video_Analysis.mp4 (The file can viewed with players like VLC or QuickTime)

The algorithm uses an Optical Flow algorithm, that was additionally implemented as a separate DirectShow filter. Small colored vectors in the following snapshot indicate the motion recognized in the video:

The whole sequence can de downloaded as MP4 video as well: Optical_Flow_Video_Analysis.mp4

Professor Horn made the source code for these algorithms available to MontiVision in order to extend the functionality of the MontiVision Development Kit.

A few days ago a potential customer asked for reference list of Universities and Research Institutes we licensed the MontiVision Development Kit to.

This is what came out:

MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

UC San Diego – Department of Philosophy

NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology

National Aerospace Laboratory NLR

DESY – Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron

NTT Cyber Communications Laboratory Group

University of Calgary – Department of Civil Engineering

U.S. Army Aberdeen Test Center

Fraunhofer IITB, Merged with FGAN and FOM to Fraunhofer IOSB – Fraunhofer-Institut für Optronik, Systemtechnik und Bildauswertung

Fraunhofer IPT, Fraunhofer-Institut für Produktionstechnologie

Technical University of Vienna, Technische Universität Wien

Medical University of Vienna, Medizinische Universität Wien

University of Padova – Department of Construction and Transport

INIA Quilamapu

Kao Yuan University of Technology

National Formosa University – CSIE Department

Industrial Technology Research Institute Taiwan

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak – Fakulti Teknologi Maklumat

National Taiwan Normal University – Department of Graphic Arts Communication

National Chin-Yi University of Technology – Department of Computer Science

BRNO University – Department of Control and Instrumentation

The Osaka University – Immunology Frontier Center

Huafan University – Department of Mechatronics Engineering

Ochanomizu University – Faculty of Science

Okinawa National College of Technology

King Khalid University

Shieh Chien University

CSIRO Division of Minerals – Microbeam Lab

Hokuriku Research Center

Chang Gung University – Medical AR Research Center

Czech Technical University – Faculty of Biomedical Engineering

Yamaguchi University

Ibaraki University – Department of Mechanical Engineering, Masuzawa Laboratory

Chienkuo Technology University

Lausitz University of Applied Sciences, FH Lausitz

Tampere University of Technology

Yokohama National University

Niigata University – Graduate School of Science and Technology

Tokio Denki University

Kyoto Institute of Technology

National Tsing Hua University

HOUSEI University

Westcoast University of Applied Sciences, FH Westküste in Heide

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Ehime University

Singapore Sports Council

Kanagawa Institute of Technology

Allgemeines Krankenhaus Linz

National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology

KOWA Research Institute

University of Washington

Upper Austria University of Applied Science, FH Oberösterreich

Tohoku University

Institute of Information Technology Vietnam

Shih Chien University – Department of Computer Simulation and Design

National Health Research Institute – Division of Medical Engineering Research

University Technology Malaysia

Kao Yuan University of Technology – Department of Electro-Optical Science and Engineering

We’ve created a simple VB.NET Sample Application for the MontiVision Blob Finder. It simply displays the position and angle of the object recognized in the live video captured from any DirectShow compatible video source.

Download Sample Code: http://www.montivision.com/download/updates/BlobFinderSample.zip

The ZIP file includes an updated MV Blob Finder DirectShow Filter. Please make sure to register it as administrator using the register.bat batch file.

You need to have the MontiVision Development Kit installed in order to build and run the sample. You can download the trial version here.