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OpenBSD has taken it upon themselves to fix (or break, depending on your perspective) incorrect random number generation. Now Ted "tedu" Unangst has provided some examples of how not to generate random numbers. You won't believe the shit some programmers do!
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 12 2014, @08:12PM
There are lots of different methods, but they all boil down to you resolve the image into a stream of numbers that you sample. You probably want to calculate a mean value for any particular element that you are are sampling and use the difference from the mean as your random value. You could handle the video as a series of stills and sample variation in any particular part of the image. Or other approaches. Exactly what technique you use would depend on what your purpose was. (Do you need a Normal distribution? A flat distribution? Etc. You probably should prefer modular values over threshold values. Etc.)
P.S.: I'm no expert in this area, and have only a very nodding acquaintance with the idea, but that's the basic approach.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14 2014, @10:15PM
Thank you. Now I'm not quite as ignorant :)