Slashdot Mirror
More On The BBC's Codec 'Dirac'
TioHoltzman writes "El Reg is reporting about a new codec that is built on top of wavelet technology and seems to offer performance that is "roughly in line with the Video Codec 9" from Microsoft. The project has been released as open source on SourceForge. This looks like it might be really interesting." (Previously mentioned a few weeks back.)
The Sourceforge page says that Dirac uses arithmetic coding. Aren't there patents on arithmetic coding? I thought that was the problem with using JBIG for bilevel images, and why most free compressors use Huffman coding or the like.
Last time I checked, wavelet compression methods were burdened by many patents: google search. What does that mean for users of the codec?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Call me a zealot, but I think things are better off open source, doubly so in the case of codecs. I mean, it's a media encapsulation. If a codec is open, then the potential for cross-platform success is much better. Potential for profit may go down, but I'm talking innovation, not wallets.
Only the purest of souls seek enlightenment. Everyone else just wants power.
Does adding a little note saying "we covered this a few weeks ago" always get the editors off the hook for posting the same article twice? ;)
i hate to state the obvious, but this could be good for open source, that is having a big name such as the BBC behind it, it should also mean that linux (and other non MS OSs) could be able to use anything the bbc develop/publish with it, cross platform content on demand anyone?)
Excellent. We need a FOSS codec that can take the crappy WMV one down a few pegs...
This type of performance is roughly in line with the Video Codec 9 which Microsoft uses in its Windows Media Player and only slightly less than the H.264 international standard.
So what methods do these other compressions algorithms employ? I couldn't figure it out from google. It seemed as though H.264 was related to mpeg4? Also, is there a rough guess as to how effective wavelets will be when they're better developed?
Does anyone have any details on the technology behind this codec? How it compares with existing popular codecs (DivX, XviD, WMV9), which sources it is best suited for, etc.
The quote "this type of performance is roughly in line with the Video Codec 9" isn't very helpful.
The BBC said: "A lot remains to be done to convert our promising algorithm and experimental implementation into practical useable code. This includes optimization so that it can decode in real time.
:)
Cool, but let me know when it's done baking.
Am I the only one who thinks that Dirac sounds like some sort of monster from the Dr. Who series?
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
BBC to Put Entire Radio & TV Archive Online
Spam Vikings await.
I have been lucky enough to see a prototype of a wavelet video compression system recently and I can tell you no word of a lie real time video across an ethernet network at 100 to 1 compression with no loss of quality. Amazing stuff and will be on the market very shortly....
Open video codec...
carnivore...
open video codec...
carnivore...
I wonder which cost more
An obvious troll. Lots of doubletalk and no references. Wavelets have been shown to be a good way to compress video data.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yeah, well, huh, errr, umm, they are perhaps the most important newssource on the planet. I hope to heaven and hell (whch dont exist, I know, but you feel me) that what ever the Beeb does works out. The race depends on it.
as for wavelet compression being a novel codec, what about apple's pixlet technology?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is from 1998.
http://www.seyboldreports.com/SRIP/wavelet/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Regardless of patents etc. it doesn't matter that there is something as good as a Microsoft codec. Unless there is a perceived advantage, unfortunately it isn't going to become widely adopted because the huge mass marketing machine that is Microsoft is pushing its technology and making it the easy to use default.
You only have to look at Mozilla/Firebird which have finally matured into reasonably solid stable products. Netscape innovated, then lost market share and IE got a foothold. Now it doesn't matter to most companies that there is once again a good alternative in Mozilla because it only has a small marketshare. In the case of MP3, it took more of a foothold earlier on but we're already seeing movement towards proprietary formats.
The only way that the open source community is going to do well here is to provide a single coherent product without branches that is trivial to install and use for the average non-technical computer user. Unfortunately the very nature of open source and free software makes this difficult, because you have to reach a consensus amongst a diverse range of very intelligent people with very different politcal agendas. Choosing a single united front is a huge challenge.
Forget the codec for a moment. If I want to install the latest client operating system from Microsoft there is only 1. (This is the ideal - I know we've had Me/98/XP running concurrently but that's still only 3). How many Linux distributions exist - each version with its quirks and styles. It may be fantastic from the point of view of evolution of the software. Its not going to get users switching over.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think I recall correctly that the ogg is just a trnsport to carry any typoe of codec so this makes perfect sense in my humble opinion
Many many people do not understand how the government can tax a TV set, and I can admit I am somtimes in that crowd, but let us alos recognize that the Beeb is perhaps the most important source of news, regardless of how they get it to you, and more ways is better, that exists on this insane mudball today. I hope that whatever the Beeb does is a huge success. It has to be. Or the sky will fall & crush us all to death. Taht I am not kidding about......Bush just thanked Rumsfeld for torturing people. Up is down & down is up. And Amerikans are mostly OK with this.
But the BBC isn't the government - it's public service broadcasting at its best (though it's not as good as it might be, since it feels the need to justify the license fee by playing the ratings game and filling the schedule with mindless drivel). The BBC has been at the forefront of broadcast engineering development since the 1920s, and I'm happy to see them contributing to the world once more.
And the top rate of income tax over here isn't 50%, it's 40% - I wish it was 50% for high earners, then perhaps they'd have less disposable income to push house prices beyond the reach of the rest of us.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
There are lots of great or just good enough codecs out there. Having an open source codec would be great, but the biggest problem today is not getting the best/freest codec but instead is making it available from the average browser. From a practical point of view, it might be more worthwhile resigning oneself and exerting effort to make common formats (Windows, Quicktime) work well from a Linux computer (from my understanding the Mplayer plugin won't stream Windows/Quicktime).
Not that this type of research should be discontinued, of course, but from the numerous projects I've been involved in that used streaming media, common availability was the biggest problem... we often had to produce video for Windows, Quicktime and Real. There are some environments (technophobes, corporations, and government) where you can't install a new plugin.
In fact I think a Java based media streaming applet might be a great solution, since Java has pretty good saturation (although *sigh* there is no entirely free software or open source Java implementation at this moment).
(This is an excerpt from the book 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' and is for everyone here who has, or hasn't, heard of Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, the namesake of this new codec. It also conveniently fits in with the two articles about Japan that made their way onto Slashdot today.)
..."
While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden?' you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.
Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple and you want to look at the gardens
I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."
"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?'"
Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.
I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists.
At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac equation'?"
They said such-and-so.
"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac equation?' -- how do I say that?"
"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,'" they say.
"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!"
"Well, yes, but it's a different word -- it's more polite."
I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.
Nothing to do with the government. The BBC is granted a charter from Parliment, but is not government run or funded. The BBc is funded by a compulsory license fee for owning equipment capable of recieving and decoding their broadcasts such as a TV or tuner card. Basically it's a tax on virtually every household and business in the UK. There is a discount for black & white TV's, pensioners and those with vision based disabilities. In the 'old days' you used to need a 'wireless licence' as well for radios!
They are good at preventing blocking ... but not ideal in a R/D sense. H.264 would have used them if they were, simple as that ...
Only the modern wavelet schemes (which werent available at the time H.264 had to choose a reference code base) using temporal lifting can really compete with the latest gen of DCT based hybrid codecs.
Of course what he says remains nonsense, anyone who would suggest there is something better than arithmetic coding for entropy coding is full of it. There might be faster methods, but as far as compression goes the best you can hope for is to tie with it.
I make my living in UK property - it is the middle earners and the banks driving the property market in part, but most of all it's the desperate, self certifying illusionary earnings. Changing the tax rates will not help this. Changing planning laws will.
Having RTFA'd and visited the project page I haven't found enough detail to be even faintly satisfying. In particular, I couldn't find even the basic theory of operation at the project page. Anyway, here's what I'm curious about:
One of the advantages of MPEG is that it compresses not only within a frame but across frames. ie. That nasty picket fence only causes a lot of data once. After that, you only have to send changes. (This explains why when all the stations on a particular satelite link cut to a commercial at the same time there isn't enough bandwidth all of a sudden and things get ugly. phew)
Does this codec compress across frames? Or, as I suspect, have they only picked the low hanging fruit so far?
Pixlet is designed for real-time editing, so it has minimal artifacts and no interframe compression. Dirac is for broadcast, so it is much more agressive about compression and can take advantage of motion compensation and other computationally expensive compression techniques.
You are right, however, that wavelets are not at all a new compression technology. People started playing with it at least 10 years ago and JPEG-2000 uses wavelets for still photo compression. I think that the computational load has prevented their use in video until recently.
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "Would you solve the Dirac equation?"
Apologies to Richard P. Feynman.
wavelet= =waves= =quantum mechanics(sorta)= =Paul Dirac?
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
So, can anyone explain how one might use Dirac? Does it plug into transcode? Mplayer? Any other kind of Linux player, DVD ripper, or streaming server/client?
mplayer plugin plays whatever mplayer plays. and mplayer plays quicktimei have been watching apple trailers for quite some time
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Maybe I'm being a stickler, but aren't you supposed to cite material you obviously take from another website, like this one?
This sentence (and others) are taken verbatim: "Wavelets are mathematical functions that cut up data into different frequency components, and then study each component with a resolution matched to its scale."
The great thing about wavelets is how they work at arbitrary resolution without much of a performance hit. Edges look like edges. Since you can basically make a general description of an image and just keep adding more detailed wavelets until you've got the compression/quality ratio you're looking for, and you can define quality however you'd like. One of the ideas for JPEG2000 is to have a field in image tags to specify how much of the image a browser should download, so you'd only have to keep one copy on the server. (By the way, where the hell is JPEG2000?)
The above just takes advantage of spatial similarity (if a pixel is one color, it's neighbors are probably similar), but you can also take advantage of temporal similarity (if a pixel is one color in this frame, it's probably a similar color in the next one). You can also do motion compression, though when you get to that level of optimization you generally lose the symmetry between sender and receiver resource consumption. Of course, that might just be another CS dissertation away.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
There are lots of great or just good enough codecs out there. Having an open source codec would be great, but the biggest problem today is not getting the best/freest codec but instead is making it available from the average browser.
Yes, and why are so few codecs available? Two reasons: (1) most codecs out there are a software engineering mess and hence hard to integrate into anything, and (2) most of them are heavily covered by patents and copyrights so people can't just write a plug-in and distribute it.
Something like Dirac holds the promise of letting people create simple, self-contained, freely distributable players that either play stand-alone or can be easily plugged into browsers. Furthermore, the same is true for encoders, allowing people to create content more easily.
And, unlike MPEG encoders, which have lots of weird parameters and flags, Dirac looks like it is simple enough that making high-quality encodings does not require a Ph.D.
In fact I think a Java based media streaming applet might be a great solution, since Java has pretty good saturation (although *sigh* there is no entirely free software or open source Java implementation at this moment).
Well, even there, a simpler format can help: something like Dirac is probably a whole lot easier to re-implement in Java than something like MPEG4.
The USA has some agencies, like the Postal Service, that are formally private corporations in some respects, but people consider them govt agencies.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
"Surely you're joking professor feynman". One short story is called, "Would you solve the Dirac equation". It talks about his time in Japan, including trying to grok the formal/informal cases that are so common in most languages. One example: "would you like to glance at my lousy garden", vs. "may I see your beautiful garden", vs. "may I hang my eyeballs on your garden" (the example his teacher gave).
Please don't ever again say the words "wavelet technology," it sounds retarded--it might make someone want to introduce some "fist technology" to your "face technology."
You mention the UKs TV tax. When I was over there everyone talked about how the government could "tell" that you had a TV in your house, so you'd better pay the tax.
I'm a physics graduate and still can't work out (OK, so I'm not a very good one) how the feds can detect the receiver circuit in the TV (this is probably a similar problem to how radar detector detectors, that the cops claim to have, work). Or, is the whole thing (TV and radar detector detectors) an urban legend designed to trick people into paying the stupid tax??
Most Americans can't quite understand how this all works, equalivilent government funded stations like VoA probably don't set a good example with propoganda-ish broadcasting.
n/t
ogg is the container. Just like AVI and quicktime, any number of codecs for audio and video (or other) can be encapsulated in ogg.
Vorbis is the audio codec we know and love so well.
A Colorado company whose name I forget used fractal decomposition by hexagonal cells. The advantage of hex cells is that you don't have to worry about corner-adjacency, only face-adjacency => only one processing step per cell, and a simpler process to construct the fractal tree, so it was very fast even then. Each hexagon was either all black or all white, or had an edge. Edge-containing cells were broken into seven smaller hexagons (center + six around), and so forth.
This system had the advantages that it provided both image compression and the first step toward vectorizing or shape recognition, and it was very fast both decomposing and reconstructing the original image. Disadvantages were primarily the complex mapping from rectilinear to/from hexagonal representation; and vertical lines weren't quite 'straight' (a little edge wiggle at any given resolution). If displays were based on a hexagonal mapping, this system would have been great.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
For those that don't know, the Theora project is intended to provide an audio/video file format based around Ogg Vorbis and On2's VP3. But while Ogg Vorbis continues to be compettive state of the art audio codec, the VP3 video codec has gotten stale and since been ditched by it's author in favor of VP4, VP5 and now VP6 codecs. It would be interesting to see what the marriage of this new video codec with Ogg Vorbis might provide. Considering after over a year the Theora project has made it to an alpha3 release, I would guess there is definately time to rethink the direction of the project without loosing too much.
But yes, you can make your own, if it's for research.
What is "research," you might ask.
Research is simply using it with the aim of improving it.
How do you prove that you're basically doing research, you might ask.
Just write some notes on, say, what could be better about your adopted project, where it disappoints, and how well it does.
That's about it. So doggone simple to do.
Now if I can just convince all the capable, yet patent-bitter, programmer-hobbyists that they're missing countless opportunities to get all the patents they deserve. They cannot see the exponentially mind-boggling abundance of unexplored ideas about them resulting from faster and faster computers, for some odd reason.
Well since I imagine they are planning on using them to broadcast content digitally (via IP) quite a lot actually.
Even on my 'nix boxes I have IE running under WINE because it's better.
You are suicidal my friend. The first things I do with Windows boxes I have to use is to remove IE, OE and the pesky MS Messenger. They are security threats. Hell, I wouldn't even use Windows if I had the choice but they are paying me to. Best browser my arse, what do you with thousands of popups that accumulate after an hour of browsing?
Forgive the n00b rumination, but: Given the ratio of codec size (1 MB) to typical movie size (~175 MB for an XVID encoded, 30 min anime episode, for example), why hasn't anyone implemented a pluggable system that embeds the codec in the media (much like embedded fonts in PDFs)? - Fromage
So independent companies can collect taxes in the UK?
Surely it's much better to have your government spend money on an open video codec than a system to violate your rights.
I know the US government does fund cool things too, and the british government funds shit too, but it was a lighthearted point.
Income taxes might only be 40%, but you folks have an insane VAT/sales tax. Something in the neighborhood of 18% isn't it?
By comparison, the sales tax where I live is about 5%.
From reading all these comments, it seems like nobody knows that there are already a few open source codecs. Frankly, it's getting annoying that I have to repeat myself...
The VP3 codec has been BSD-licensed, and unencumbered by patents since Sept, 2001. And, every major Unix media player can playback VP3.
Despite what you may have heard from doom9, VP3 is also extremely competitive with MPEG-4 (slightly better IMHO) and I know that I can convert MPEG-2 video to MPEG-4 in nearly-perfect quality, at about half the bitrate. So, the point that the Dirac system gives a two-fold reduction in bit rate over MPEG 2 really isn't too impressive.
The sate of open source video codecs is still a mess though. VP3 encoding can't be done on Unix as far as I've seen (only Windows/Mac), so that leaves us out of luck mostly. Theora is going to offer a Unix encoder for a VP3-based codec, but development is slow, and so far behind schedule. It might not be all that impressive, next to modern codecs, once it finally becomes stable.
Maybe if the BBC would help out on Theora, it might actually be ready to use soon. Instead, we have multiple open source codecs in development, that aren't going to be usable for years.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well first of all, the chance that a house doesn't have a TV inside is really slim, so if you haven't paid you're a big target. Secondly, televisions emit a shit load of radiation which would be really easy to detect, so I think it is more that then some quantum effect of affecting the signal from merely observing it.
I remember reading some years ago about spying equipment that would allow someone using a highly directional antenna to look at what was on somebodies CRT monitor from over a mile away. I imagine that would do it, though I don't know whether it would stand up in court.
Most people in the UK are really proud of the BBC and would hate to see it go, and don't even question the fact a TV license has to be paid.
They probably can't detect the reciever, but I'm sure they can detect the CRT very easily... It's putting out such a ridiculously large ammount of energy that it can be detected from meters away, and the picture can even be reconstructed from the radiation (see "Tempest").
It would be possible to detect a TV recieving over-the-air signals, although not easy... When your turner picks-up a signal, it in-turn introduces a (fairly small) drain on that broadcast signal. If they were to go around, looking for variances in signal-strength of an O.T.A. signal, they could trace the signal-drop to your antenna. I must say, that would certainly be a lot of work.
This is second-hand information, since I don't have too much experience with the intracies of radar detectors.
Anyhow, from what I've heard, older-model radar detectors could be detected, simply because they were junk, and would spill all sorts of RF signals while they were turned on. There is nothing inherent about a radar detector that makes it detectable, and all of them made in the past few years should be made well enough that they don't give off any signals.
Radar JAMMERS on the other hand, are most definately detectable. Easily in fact, and anyone claiming otherwise is trying to rip you off. Even without any special equipment, it's pretty obvious by looking at the display of a radar gun, the difference between failing to get a reading, and having the radar jammed. Maybe the stat of the art radar jammers have gotten to the point that you can't tell with just a radar gun, but it would have to have been in the past couple years that this has changed, and it would still be very easily detected with proper equipment.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The general method of detection is that they send you a letter if you haven't bought a licence for your house, such as when the previous owner moves out and takes their licence with them.
It's at that point where you buy a licence, or tell them you don't own a TV.
Obviously, I've never tried this personally, but scuttlebutt (and TV adverts) indicate they send someone out to your house to see if you really don't have a TV. If you're muppet enough to have your TV visible from the road when you're using it, then expect a nastygram threatening (civil) court proceedings. Up to 400 quid fine, I believe.
If you refuse to let them in (which you can do of course, they won't have a warrant), and they still suspect you of having a TV (aerial or satdish on the roof, for example) then they can send a TV detector van.
Theoretically, an operating TV also acts as a low power transmitter which can be picked up with a close range directional aerial. Vans wandering through the street looking for non-payers is a myth - they have to sit right outside your house with a directional aerial looking for the signal. I've never seen one personally.
Note, you can't go to jail for not paying and getting caught. It's a civil offence, not a criminal one. It's a bit like getting caught for not paying your road tax...
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
VoA really is a government agency, and is the yankee equivalent of the BBC World Service. The World Service is funded by the Foreign Office (*not* by the licence fee) and can be reasonably considered to be a government agency.
The BBC is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation (QUANGO). IIRC they are empowered by their royal charter to collect the licence fee, which in theory is the source of all tax raising powers in the UK. The board of governors are appointed by the government and are charged with serving the interests of the viewers, and maintaining editorial independence. On of their duties as laid out in the charter is to perform R+D in line with their overall obligations.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/policies/charter/
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Unless things have changed very recently, it *is* a criminal offence and if you don't pay the fine, you can and will go to jail. (You don't go to jail for not paying the television licence, you go to jail for not paying the fine for non-payment of the licence.)
The television licence is in fact one of the leading causes of imprisonment of single parents. There have been calls to make non-payment merely a civil offence (like the penalty for non-submission of corporate accounts) so that if you don't pay, you can't go to jail (but can still be bankrupted or have the bailiff attend to sieze your goods). This has not yet happened.
Real question is; with the BBC's reputation in complete tatters, and their reputation for any fairness or objectivity gone down the toilet, who is going to download BBC digital news content?
Fox in the US and Sky News in Britain are eating the BBC's lunch every single day.
with the BBC's reputation in complete tatters, and their reputation for any fairness or objectivity gone down the toilet ... Fox in the US and Sky News in Britain are eating the BBC's lunch every single day.
Yeah, those faggot commie terrorist axis-of-evil BBC scum that don't even wear flags in their lapels. Can't trust 'em.
Nice to know we have OSS friends at the beeb
Actually not true.
You only require a TV license if you recieve and decode broadcasts, not just have the capability.
The thing that irks a lot of us here is that you still need a license (all the money from which goes to the BBC) even if you don't watch any of the BBC channels. If you watch any broadcast channel: independant TV, Sky or cable you need one.
I have a large home cinema system which I use purely for watching videos, DVDs and playing video games. This equipment could be used to watch TV broadcasts but I don't use it for that purpose.
The problem stems from their assumption that if you don't have a TV license registered at your address and you haven't told them you don't need one that you must be guilty of license evasion. So they send you letters warning you of the large fines you could face if caught watching TV unlicensed.
You have to write a letter to them sent to the same address as license applications stating that you don't watch broadcast TV and only use your set for games or watching DVDs. They'll confirm you don't need a license, and then they leave you alone...
For twelve months...
Before you need to tell them *again*
Really they can be a pain in the arse but you don't need a license if you don't watch TV.
Don't blame me - this
if you want to watch BBC archive material, you are going to need it.
Obviously the beeb are trying to drop real - bout time too, everytime I use it (only to listen to R4 over the net), i then have to hunt down and kill realevnt.exe and remove it from the startup.
and thus UK joins the axes of evil
Rumsfeld didn't torture the people. Rumsfeld didn't order the torturing. Rumsfeld should have brought it to the attention of the President earlier.
The JCS Generals are the ones, ultimately, to blame, but that won't happen. They're the penultimate military leaders, not the SecDef.
If you're going to plop the blame on Rumsfeld, then why not just up it one more level, then, and say that George Bush is responsible for it?
Yes, what has happened is crushingly embarrassing, and will feed anti-US propaganda for the next 50 years.
But, hey, the US burned Vietnamese children with Napalm (but what did the VC and NVA do to the Montignards? But that was war. To really raise a flag, look what the Khmer Rouge did).
The world is making an outrage, when far more serious issues (like the Hutu-vs-Tutsi rage in Rwanda a few years ago, or how seriously screwed up is Zamibia) go almost unnoticed.
But is the treatment that we did any worse than what a Saudi Arabian jail or trial is like (Saudi Arabia thrown in there just as an example)? They put black hoods on defendents, or have them stand trial in a cage...
From a PR standpoint, the kibosh on that activity should have been put on HARD months ago, and opened up to the world since then.
Oh well. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory we are...
Sounds good. In Germany you need a license whether you watch TV or not. If you want to avoid paying, you have to take your TV set down to the basement.
Oh, and you have to pay for radio as well.
You're correct that the general method is spam the TV-less household with threatening letters (really winds me up).
They can send someone round, but there is no requirement to let them in without a warrant. When they do come in, they can only look in "expected" areas for a TV - so look in the sitting room/kitcvhen, but no looking inside cupboards, bedrooms, etc.
I've had several letters saying "we'll be sending someone out to you, so get a license or else", but if they pop round, I'll charge 'em an entrance fee - 25 sounds about right.
The other major detection method is when you buy a TV/Tuner, the shop sends on the info to the TVLA.
The "detector van" is possible, but I don't think it is actually real - it will only detect an active TV (so daytime may not work), the accuracy needed to pin it down to *definitely* your house, not your neighbours, means they can only scan from close range (and what is the distance - could you say "yes, it's the neighbours out the back, behind the house"?
So the detector van is almost definitely pish.
Excuse me if I am wrong, I may be mistaken, but wouldn't the BBC adopting a new standard for it's entire program catalogue be a driving force to adapt in itself?!?
Just asking, because as far as I am concerned the BBC har produced a lot of quality television.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
There is more info available (including some documentation of the algorithm) on the BBC's Dirac page
It is possible to detect a TV while it's operating. This is because as the TV signal is demodulated from the signal you pick up via the aerial it goes via an intermediate stage at a lower frequency than the original signal. At this point the circuitry is broadcasting this lower frequency signal and it can be picked up. The van can triangulate this reasonably well, certainly with enough accuracy to determine if a TV is operating inside your house, rather than a neighbour for example.
-- Neil Milne
The BBC operates in a huge number of countries including the ones where
"the largest portion of the people are thinking about how they are going to get their next meal" (not like I work 8+hours a day or anything!)
So why not make things available for them, or are they too busy trying to eat to give a fuck about?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This is exactly what the more intelligent among RMS's critics will experience.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Ah but you notice how it almost worked. If that little disclaimer hadn't been there the FP would have said "another editor not paying attention..." etc. And for some reason, it seems to give slashdot users carte blanche to discuss everything - almost to the word - that they discussed last time. Hmm, what did I say in my comment to the previous post, and will it gain me more karma if I post again? :)
Never confuse volume with power.
You only require a TV license if you recieve and decode broadcasts, not just have the capability.
You have to have a TV license if you have any equipment which can recieve broadcasts. If you have a TV card sat in a box in your room you need a license. I know this because when I was at uni somebody in the halls got fined over having it and no license and the fine was a rather large one too.
Except the World Service is laudably independent compared to VoA... or whatever they're now calling parts of it... what's the Arabic for 'freedom'?
Yes, because everyone believes Lord Hutton, and Blair and his crew have been completely vindicated in this affair.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Bush just thanked Rumsfeld for torturing people. Up is down & down is up. And Amerikans are mostly OK with this.
Be logical about this. Personally, I would like to know who the ICRC informed about the abuse. All I found mentioned was of "US officials". That is very broad. That could mean Senator Kennedy was informed of this long ago and refused to tell Rumsfeld. Both could have been told at the same time. Maybe, neither of them knew of the abuse until recently.
I wish people would stop making assumptions based on what the news feeds them. It would be like listening to the "evils of Linux" by Microsoft without any facts given. Wait to point fingers until after the facts are given. Until then, please be patient with finding out those responsible. Of course, the abuse should be stopped immediately.
P.S. Calling people "Amerikans" is a little on the racist side. Please stop it.
Your naive display of faith in the interpretation of the report of the Hutton Enquiry by Murdoch owned newspapers is quite touching.
Funnily enough Fox and Sky are owned by Murdoch as well.
It's you isn't it Jimmy, how's Dad ?
No but, yeah but, no but...
What's the problem with distributing patented technology in source form? I believe this is legal. As an example VTK distributes the marching cube patented method (among others) with no problem.
1st: IANAPL
2nd: I'm not suggesting that this may be the case here, but I've heard that there may be such a thing a "incitement to infringe". Publishing source code of a patented technique might just be an example of such a thing...
I am tired of it.
with the BBC's reputation in complete tatters If that's re: Hutton, I really don't know a single soul who thinks the Hutton report an accurate report of events. The man had to be either gullible, senile, or open to bungs in a brown paper envelope in a remote lay by.
I agree.. 'ogg dirac' sounds pretty cool too.
Fiz
It's almost the same in English (and German, which is related), but nobody uses thee (2nd person singular) and ye (2nd person plural) anymore. You'll only see them in the King James Bible and Shakespeare. (I guess 'ye' was still being used in the early 19th Century.)
How does this compare to Ogg Tarkin?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The World Service is *not* independent. It depends entirely on the Foreign Office for its funding. What sets it apart from VoA is not how independent it is, but that the WS mostly tells the truth. Of course, mostly (and only mostly) telling the truth is the best form of lieing^Wpropaganda.
I have several letters from the TV licensing that say otherwise.
Also our courts put the burden of proof on TV licensing. If he got fined it was because they brought a detector around and found him recieving a signal.
Unless they catch you at it all they can do is warn you of the large fines you could be made to pay if you are caught.
From the TV Licensing web site: The key words here are use or install. For a TV to be considered installed it must be set up to receive broadcasts. So it:If neither of these are true your TV is not installed to receive or record television programme services and you don't need a license.
Do as I did the first time I tried it out. Phrase your letter as a question describing your circumstances and asking if it's true that you don't require a license - it could save you a hundred quid.
Don't blame me - this