LWN: Comments on "Poker and FOSS"

Poker and FOSS

FilippWillson — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 20:59:44 +0000

I have been living in Japan for many years. Although he is an American himself. I can say that online gambling has significantly changed the casino industry in Japan. Today the majority of users play poker online, including myself. If you're interested in learning more about this, read ithis article http://www.igeekphone.com/how-online-gambling-is-changing.... I will be glad if the information seems interesting

Poker and FOSS

ewen — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 23:26:57 +0000

The input to the venue (Gold Coast Convention Centre) *projectors* was, I believe, HD-SDI (ie, the HD version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface), at 1080p. The interface facing the presenter was 1080p over HDMI (as a consumer standard), then there was a Decimator HDMI to HD-SDI convertor (one of these https://www.decimator.com/Products/MiniConverters/MiniCon...; not sure the exact model) to convert HDMI to HD-SDI. That HD-SDI output then fed both the LCA2020 slide capture *and* the projectors (via a video switcher in the main room, semi-directly in the other smaller rooms).

No VGA involved, except in a few cases on the presenters laptop. For which there was a canned solution sitting in the LCA2020 AV room, a VGA to HDMI scaler, which Bradley did use later in the week.

Most modern venues, including more recently fitted out universities, have either HDMI or HD-SDI input to their projectors. Some of the older projectors will have VGA and HDMI options (like, eg, older televisions), but VGA is increasingly uncommon as an input on venue projectors. And even where VGA exists as an input into the projection equipment, it's increasingly not brought out to the front of the room, as VGA is also not great with long cable runs. Higher end projectors are typically fed via HD-SDI though, because HDMI is a short (cable) run consumer standard, and doesn't deal well with the tens of metres of cable to a large venue projector; HD-SDI is a "broadcast" standard *designed* to keep video quality over longer cable runs. So HDMI to HD-SDI convertor boxes are increasingly common in higher end venues, as close to the input (ie, presenter) as possible.

The days of analogue fed projectors (eg, VGA) in venues are basically over. And realistically were nearly over 5+ years ago when the Linux.Conf.Au capture system switched from VGA input to HDMI input; this isn't a new change. (VGA might still be reasonably common as an option on lower end home/desktop projectors. But even then it wouldn't surprise me to learn a bunch of them are HDMI only now, and I'd be surprised to find even a consumer one now, new, that was VGA input only.)

Ewen

Poker and FOSS

lamby — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 15:50:12 +0000

FYI this is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyKqmzQPYjc

Poker and FOSS

imMute — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 15:21:42 +0000

> having two VGA-to-HDMI adapters in the path

I'm betting there weren't actually two VGA-to-HDMI adapters used; instead it would be a VGA-to-HDMI adapter and an HDMI-to-VGA adapter. The distinction *matters*. DVI-to-HDMI and HDMI-to-DVI is the only conversion that is truly passive (ie, a physical adapter would work with the data passing in either direction). Any other conversion (between VGA, DVI/HDMI, and DP) is an active conversion and I've personally only ever seen adapters that are uni-directional. I'm being pedantic here because I work at company that does video processing and we've been bitten by this so many times. Here's what we've found:
- DP-to-VGA, DP-to-HDMI/DVI: these are very reliable; they're typically very high volume and based on ASICs.
- HDMI-to-VGA: pretty reliable as well; high volume
- VGA-to-HDMI, VGA-to-DP: never actually seen one of these (didn't need it)
- HDMI-to-DP: this is the one that frustrated us the most. There is not nearly the selection as the inverse (DP-to-HDMI) and the reliability is a crapshoot -- often depending on the lot number or firmware version of the device.

And don't even get me started about DP++ output ports.

Poker and FOSS

sml — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 12:02:57 +0000

Thanks for the interesting talk!

Rather than Github, you might want to look at https://sourcehut.org/ which is licensed under the AGPL.

Poker and FOSS

fwiesweg — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 07:28:02 +0000

Thank you, too! I'm quite curious and eager to have a look at it!

Poker and FOSS

bkuhn — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 23:06:35 +0000

Thanks so much to Jake for writing an article about my talk! It was really fun to talk about something very far afield from my "usual". I didn't clearly explain during the talk that all of pokersource was developed 100% in public in the usual Free Software way; it's just that it was on a code hosting site that is now completely defunct, so the public repositories online that you'll find are either old or incomplete forks of the codebase as it stood in the late 2000s.

As mentioned, I do have a git-svn repository of the last SVN checkout that I was working on, so for lack of a better place to upload it quickly, I'll try to put that up on GitHub (sigh) in the next few days and will post here when I do.