Yes, it's a huge difference, and the other commenter is wrong about "doing the same thing".
A single pass can only adjust the bitrate based on what it has already seen, and has to make assumptions about what will come later. In general, single pass encodes won't change the bitrate by very much from frame to frame. Some frames need the equivalent of 40-50Mbps, but if the 50 or so frames before averaged only 10Mbps, most encoders won't jump up to more than about 20Mbps for the next frame.
Imagine a movie that spends the first 90 minutes being basically talking heads..in other words, not much movement and easy to compress...and then spends the last 10 minutes with full-on action sequences with lots of motion and hard-to-compress images (smoke, fireworks/sparks, etc.). A one-pass encode at an average of 10Mbps will run those first 90 minutes at very close to 10Mbps, using up 90% of the total bits available to the encode. A two-pass encode might average only 5Mbps for the first 90 minutes, leaving 55% of the total bit budget for the remaining 10 minutes, which could be encoded at an average rate of 55Mbps (if Blu-Ray wasn't limited to about 35Mbps max average rate).
A two-pass encode really isn't about limiting filesize...it's about allocating the bits to the right frames within whatever size gets used.
I don't think much of that applies to movies scanned at 4K and resized to 1920x1080.
Even if the original scanner lost half the resolution in both directions, it would still have more resolution than the final product. You might be right about the color losses, but AVC and VC-1 on Blu-Ray seem to do a good job without losing much quality...MPEG-2 is a different beast.
My only problem with the switch to HDMI has been that the long cable to the projector is so heavy that the HDMI connectors won't physically hold the cable in place unless they're anchored in place with velcro straps around the cable. It's not a very good connector design from a physical standpoint.
You need to suspend the cable from the ceiling a few feet before it connects to the projector. Then, the only weight on the connector is that few feet of cable.
True...I'm sure that AnyDVD will disable this flag on copies.
I'm much more worried about Cinavia audio watermarking, since that will likely mark the end of playing copies on any BDA-compliant device, at least without jumping through some major hoops.
Because mine tops out at around 4 TB, that's not that many HD movies unless you compress the crap out of them and then you've basically done what the ICT flag would do, reduced the quality.
Many Blu-Ray movies are encoded at essentially constant bitrate despite the fact that this is not required to maintain the full quality.
You can re-encode a 1920x1080/24p movie at about 10Mbps average and be 99% identical to the original 30Mbps encode, as long as you use a 2-pass encode to make sure the bits end up where they are needed. Then, toss out audio and subtitles you don't use, and it's pretty easy to get a movie down to about 10GB with no real quality loss. For movies with wider aspect ratios (where there are black bars encoded into the Blu-Ray), you can get away with even lower bitrates.
That would give you room for over 400 movies on your media server, which really should be enough for most people.
The latest Intel chips use the 1155 socket, and motherboards start in about the $100 range, although they are hard to find right now, due to the SATA hardware bug. Look for them by the middle of next month and you'll see that the price is competetive with AMD. You can also get 1156 motherboards as low as $65, and the CPUs are reasonably competitive on price/peformance with AMD.
The only real advantage AMD has is that if you already have an AM3 motherboard, you can generally drop in a new chip with just a BIOS upgrade. For a completely new system, it's pretty much a wash on the price between Intel and AMD at the same performance level.
It's apparent from your rant that you aren't a good enough manager to be able to deal with people who know how to get the job done right the first time for all time.
I suspect you prefer to deal with the currently predominant types of admin:
Ones that must have hundred page change-requests to fix a typo in a string, so that anything that needs to get done takes weeks or months.
Ones that just change things until the system works, never knowing why it works, but it does get running relatively quickly and without too many errors.
I have the luck of currently dealing with admins for our datacenter who are a frightening mix of both. If they had just one "veteran Unix admin" who would spend a little more time and do the job right the first time, but not take weeks to do it, things would run a lot smoother.
And, I'm not kidding about the weeks or months to get anything done, as currently after full testing of changes to web pages (no matter how small), it takes 3 weeks before those changes roll out to the production system, as there need to be two meetings a week apart where the changes get signed off on twice. Meanwhile, these same bozos will patch production database servers without telling anyone. The problem is that their attitude is that the underlying system (OS, DB servers, web servers, etc.) is "theirs" and they make sure it is "correct" ASAP, without regard to the fact that applications need those resources to run. The sys admins don't care that the apps are what are important to the business process, but the "veteran Unix admin" understands that.
However, the fact remains that piracy is a huge deal for content creators.
Got any facts to back that up? Note that until you show a direct loss to the content owner caused by copying, you have no facts to assert that it's a "huge deal".
On the other hand, there are hundreds of companies that are making huge profits despite rampant copying of their content, including the movie and music industries. And, there's no indication they'd be making any more money if their content were locked up more securely.
Boston's Metro authority has a website that provides the exact functionality you're talking about.
Not even close to the same functionality.
You basically have to already know where you are to use the website, while the app knows where you are (maybe even including which way you are currently facing).
Also, in figuring out where to get off the train, the app can be used in reverse by just picking any spot on the map, without having to know the exact address.
True in general, but some Windows installation disks do more than just run setup.exe on startup and instead have rather involved scripts in autorun.inf. I had a driver/utility CD for an NAS device that created a menu of the manufacturer's different models via autorun and could not be invoked any other way
There is no scripting in AUTORUN.INF...it's really just a very simple INI file. The only thing that could be considered a "script" is the ability to run different programs based on the machine architecture and OS version (controlled by square-bracketed INI section heading tags).
If you trust a disc, you can just open the AUTORUN.INF file with a text editor and copy what is to the right of "open=" and paste it into the start menu run box and it will do exactly what would have happened if autorun was enabled.
Installing pirated maps requires running an executable to patch your GPS.
I guess that depends on the GPS design.
Some have no protection, so updated maps can be used by anybody. Even with maps with some sort of DRM, often it can be removed from the map and again used on any unit. Another method does require you to run a keygen, which could have malware, but a VM would solve that.
I've never seen a case where you patch the GPS code in any way, though...it's all about removing the DRM from the map, or finding a code so that the GPS unit will be able to decode the DRM.
In the US, 12K miles per year per car is the baseline for things like depreciation, etc., and many people drive 15K miles per year. This is because the country is bigger, and the required driving (like commuting for work) is generally longer distance. In the same way, optional driving like vacations (or "holiday" for you UK lot) are also longer.
So, if you only drive 5K miles a year, even at $8/gallon you'd pay less per year in gas than a US driver paying $3/gallon and driving only slightly over the norm (about 14K miles).
In other words, the smaller the country, the less transportation cost per mile matters.
And I'm sure that when gas hits $3.50 or $4 per gallon
Nothing is going to change at a mere $4/gallon, as that's only about an extra $1,000/year (from around $3/gallon right now) for a moderate gas guzzler, and less than $500/year extra for a 30mpg car.
Now, if we hee $6/gallon in the US, then we might see some real change in behavior (both of people and politicians).
Full HD streams using H264 run around 10Mbps for poorly compressed video (small publishers without a video engineer doing the work).
Actually, 1080p24 works just fine at 10Mbps average bitrate using H.264 and a two-pass encode, which can get essentially transparent re-encodes of Blu-Ray sources (at least based on PSNR and SSIM results).
If you can use the two-pass encode as a streaming source and guarantee a video buffer (like Blu-Ray), then it should work fine. For streaming of live 1080p24 (or worse, higher framerates), then you probably need 15-20Mbps average to maintain quality on the single-pass encode. Netflix should be fine for video at 3-4Mbps for 720p24, but they won't be able to afford the bits to allow the audio to be anywhere close to Blu-Ray quality.
The primary reason Blu-Ray sees average bitrates of 20-30Mbps for 1080p24 is because they can. Once the disc size (25GB or 50GB) is decided on, it doesn't cost any more to fill it with bits. Unfortunately, it actually reduces quality in the scenes that need it because of the 35Mb limit for any single second of video. With a lower average bitrate, then hard-to-compress frames could use the equivalent of 60-80Mbps and not overflow the video buffer.
5.5 torrents uploaded each day, every day for 10 years.
This part isn't all that unbelievable. For example, eztv has uploaded over 60 torrent files in the past 5 days.
Now, this is just a front account for a group of people, and uploading the torrent doesn't mean just one person is uploading the content to start with, but there are very likely 100 accounts on TPB just like this.
The researchers don't really understand how BitTorrent works.
I agree that true "fake content" is rare, but the researchers never define the term, so it could mean any of:
real content with extra malware (e.g., actual Adobe Photoshop with malware in the crack)
real content with unremovable malware (e.g., patched Adobe Photoshop that contains malware)
fake seeders (e.g., seeders == 1, leechers == 10, availability == 1.996, and no one ever finishes)
mislabeled content (e.g., torrent claims HD content when it isn't)
broken content (e.g., RAR file is corrupt)
All those are common on TBP, but none are what I would actually call "fake", as they either do what they say (i.e., it's still Photoshop), or there is some technical issue that wasn't intentional.
That's plenty of variety - far better than last year, of which half relied in part on something as pedestrian a topic as guns.
Although last year also had the expanded nominations, I'm sure we all know that the extra 5 (and maybe 6, since usually one of the 5 in the past was this way, too) are merely filler that can't possibly win, but it makes the Academy look like they actually pay attention to movies released before December.
Inception may have a shot because it was so critically acclaimed, but it's probably the only "popular" movie on the list that does have a chance.
They are looking at how many folks do not like being tracked and the popularity of programs like Adblock Plus, NoScript, etc...and are trying to add some of that functionality into the browser.
Except that avoiding tracking really isn't the primary reason people use AdBlock or NoScript...safety and speed are much higher up on the list.
What NoScript needs is a simple "Play the video" button as dealing with customers having to play "guess which blocked thing is the video"
It's not like the NoScript interface hides the "Temporarily allow all this page" menu item...it's just not a button.
Since "allow all" is the only way to "play the video" (knowing which scripts are required would mean actually loading all the scripts and executing them in a sandbox to see which ones are being called), it's fine by me.
I think the problem lays basically in that people want to make movies to become rich.
This is absolutely true, based on the fact that a $100M budget movie is a "failure" unless it brings in at least $200M.
In every other industry if you make back 10-20% more than your costs, you are successful, and if you make 50% over cost, you are wildly successful, but in the media industry you need to make 100% to not be a failure...really?
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Yes, it's a huge difference, and the other commenter is wrong about "doing the same thing".
A single pass can only adjust the bitrate based on what it has already seen, and has to make assumptions about what will come later. In general, single pass encodes won't change the bitrate by very much from frame to frame. Some frames need the equivalent of 40-50Mbps, but if the 50 or so frames before averaged only 10Mbps, most encoders won't jump up to more than about 20Mbps for the next frame.
Imagine a movie that spends the first 90 minutes being basically talking heads..in other words, not much movement and easy to compress...and then spends the last 10 minutes with full-on action sequences with lots of motion and hard-to-compress images (smoke, fireworks/sparks, etc.). A one-pass encode at an average of 10Mbps will run those first 90 minutes at very close to 10Mbps, using up 90% of the total bits available to the encode. A two-pass encode might average only 5Mbps for the first 90 minutes, leaving 55% of the total bit budget for the remaining 10 minutes, which could be encoded at an average rate of 55Mbps (if Blu-Ray wasn't limited to about 35Mbps max average rate).
A two-pass encode really isn't about limiting filesize...it's about allocating the bits to the right frames within whatever size gets used.
I don't think much of that applies to movies scanned at 4K and resized to 1920x1080.
Even if the original scanner lost half the resolution in both directions, it would still have more resolution than the final product. You might be right about the color losses, but AVC and VC-1 on Blu-Ray seem to do a good job without losing much quality...MPEG-2 is a different beast.
My only problem with the switch to HDMI has been that the long cable to the projector is so heavy that the HDMI connectors won't physically hold the cable in place unless they're anchored in place with velcro straps around the cable. It's not a very good connector design from a physical standpoint.
You need to suspend the cable from the ceiling a few feet before it connects to the projector. Then, the only weight on the connector is that few feet of cable.
True...I'm sure that AnyDVD will disable this flag on copies.
I'm much more worried about Cinavia audio watermarking, since that will likely mark the end of playing copies on any BDA-compliant device, at least without jumping through some major hoops.
Because mine tops out at around 4 TB, that's not that many HD movies unless you compress the crap out of them and then you've basically done what the ICT flag would do, reduced the quality.
Many Blu-Ray movies are encoded at essentially constant bitrate despite the fact that this is not required to maintain the full quality.
You can re-encode a 1920x1080/24p movie at about 10Mbps average and be 99% identical to the original 30Mbps encode, as long as you use a 2-pass encode to make sure the bits end up where they are needed. Then, toss out audio and subtitles you don't use, and it's pretty easy to get a movie down to about 10GB with no real quality loss. For movies with wider aspect ratios (where there are black bars encoded into the Blu-Ray), you can get away with even lower bitrates.
That would give you room for over 400 movies on your media server, which really should be enough for most people.
The latest Intel chips use the 1155 socket, and motherboards start in about the $100 range, although they are hard to find right now, due to the SATA hardware bug. Look for them by the middle of next month and you'll see that the price is competetive with AMD. You can also get 1156 motherboards as low as $65, and the CPUs are reasonably competitive on price/peformance with AMD.
The only real advantage AMD has is that if you already have an AM3 motherboard, you can generally drop in a new chip with just a BIOS upgrade. For a completely new system, it's pretty much a wash on the price between Intel and AMD at the same performance level.
I know your out there.
What do you know about my "out there"?
It's apparent from your rant that you aren't a good enough manager to be able to deal with people who know how to get the job done right the first time for all time.
I suspect you prefer to deal with the currently predominant types of admin:
I have the luck of currently dealing with admins for our datacenter who are a frightening mix of both. If they had just one "veteran Unix admin" who would spend a little more time and do the job right the first time, but not take weeks to do it, things would run a lot smoother.
And, I'm not kidding about the weeks or months to get anything done, as currently after full testing of changes to web pages (no matter how small), it takes 3 weeks before those changes roll out to the production system, as there need to be two meetings a week apart where the changes get signed off on twice. Meanwhile, these same bozos will patch production database servers without telling anyone. The problem is that their attitude is that the underlying system (OS, DB servers, web servers, etc.) is "theirs" and they make sure it is "correct" ASAP, without regard to the fact that applications need those resources to run. The sys admins don't care that the apps are what are important to the business process, but the "veteran Unix admin" understands that.
Sure, most of us use it anyway because modern Linux systems usually don't include our good friend vi (it's usually just a symlink to vim)
RedHat systems have vi as a separate executable.
However, the fact remains that piracy is a huge deal for content creators.
Got any facts to back that up? Note that until you show a direct loss to the content owner caused by copying, you have no facts to assert that it's a "huge deal".
On the other hand, there are hundreds of companies that are making huge profits despite rampant copying of their content, including the movie and music industries. And, there's no indication they'd be making any more money if their content were locked up more securely.
Bad laws should be removed, not simply scoffed at and ignored.
Until enough people scoff at the bad laws, they won't be removed.
Once you have a critical mass of people ignoring a law, then it's easier to work within the system to get the law changed (or repealed).
Boston's Metro authority has a website that provides the exact functionality you're talking about.
Not even close to the same functionality.
You basically have to already know where you are to use the website, while the app knows where you are (maybe even including which way you are currently facing).
Also, in figuring out where to get off the train, the app can be used in reverse by just picking any spot on the map, without having to know the exact address.
True in general, but some Windows installation disks do more than just run setup.exe on startup and instead have rather involved scripts in autorun.inf. I had a driver/utility CD for an NAS device that created a menu of the manufacturer's different models via autorun and could not be invoked any other way
There is no scripting in AUTORUN.INF...it's really just a very simple INI file. The only thing that could be considered a "script" is the ability to run different programs based on the machine architecture and OS version (controlled by square-bracketed INI section heading tags).
If you trust a disc, you can just open the AUTORUN.INF file with a text editor and copy what is to the right of "open=" and paste it into the start menu run box and it will do exactly what would have happened if autorun was enabled.
Installing pirated maps requires running an executable to patch your GPS.
I guess that depends on the GPS design.
Some have no protection, so updated maps can be used by anybody. Even with maps with some sort of DRM, often it can be removed from the map and again used on any unit. Another method does require you to run a keygen, which could have malware, but a VM would solve that.
I've never seen a case where you patch the GPS code in any way, though...it's all about removing the DRM from the map, or finding a code so that the GPS unit will be able to decode the DRM.
In the US, 12K miles per year per car is the baseline for things like depreciation, etc., and many people drive 15K miles per year. This is because the country is bigger, and the required driving (like commuting for work) is generally longer distance. In the same way, optional driving like vacations (or "holiday" for you UK lot) are also longer.
So, if you only drive 5K miles a year, even at $8/gallon you'd pay less per year in gas than a US driver paying $3/gallon and driving only slightly over the norm (about 14K miles).
In other words, the smaller the country, the less transportation cost per mile matters.
And I'm sure that when gas hits $3.50 or $4 per gallon
Nothing is going to change at a mere $4/gallon, as that's only about an extra $1,000/year (from around $3/gallon right now) for a moderate gas guzzler, and less than $500/year extra for a 30mpg car.
Now, if we hee $6/gallon in the US, then we might see some real change in behavior (both of people and politicians).
Full HD streams using H264 run around 10Mbps for poorly compressed video (small publishers without a video engineer doing the work).
Actually, 1080p24 works just fine at 10Mbps average bitrate using H.264 and a two-pass encode, which can get essentially transparent re-encodes of Blu-Ray sources (at least based on PSNR and SSIM results).
If you can use the two-pass encode as a streaming source and guarantee a video buffer (like Blu-Ray), then it should work fine. For streaming of live 1080p24 (or worse, higher framerates), then you probably need 15-20Mbps average to maintain quality on the single-pass encode. Netflix should be fine for video at 3-4Mbps for 720p24, but they won't be able to afford the bits to allow the audio to be anywhere close to Blu-Ray quality.
The primary reason Blu-Ray sees average bitrates of 20-30Mbps for 1080p24 is because they can. Once the disc size (25GB or 50GB) is decided on, it doesn't cost any more to fill it with bits. Unfortunately, it actually reduces quality in the scenes that need it because of the 35Mb limit for any single second of video. With a lower average bitrate, then hard-to-compress frames could use the equivalent of 60-80Mbps and not overflow the video buffer.
5.5 torrents uploaded each day, every day for 10 years.
This part isn't all that unbelievable. For example, eztv has uploaded over 60 torrent files in the past 5 days.
Now, this is just a front account for a group of people, and uploading the torrent doesn't mean just one person is uploading the content to start with, but there are very likely 100 accounts on TPB just like this.
The researchers don't really understand how BitTorrent works.
The "div.col_1" entry I gave hides the sidebar, while the "div.col_2" entry expands the comment area to fill the blank space.
You can't have the sidebar visible and expand the area that the comments use without overlap, so those entries must be done as a pair.
Or, if you don't want to waste the space for the sidebar at all, try the following:
I agree that true "fake content" is rare, but the researchers never define the term, so it could mean any of:
All those are common on TBP, but none are what I would actually call "fake", as they either do what they say (i.e., it's still Photoshop), or there is some technical issue that wasn't intentional.
That's plenty of variety - far better than last year, of which half relied in part on something as pedestrian a topic as guns.
Although last year also had the expanded nominations, I'm sure we all know that the extra 5 (and maybe 6, since usually one of the 5 in the past was this way, too) are merely filler that can't possibly win, but it makes the Academy look like they actually pay attention to movies released before December.
Inception may have a shot because it was so critically acclaimed, but it's probably the only "popular" movie on the list that does have a chance.
They are looking at how many folks do not like being tracked and the popularity of programs like Adblock Plus, NoScript, etc...and are trying to add some of that functionality into the browser.
Except that avoiding tracking really isn't the primary reason people use AdBlock or NoScript...safety and speed are much higher up on the list.
What NoScript needs is a simple "Play the video" button as dealing with customers having to play "guess which blocked thing is the video"
It's not like the NoScript interface hides the "Temporarily allow all this page" menu item...it's just not a button.
Since "allow all" is the only way to "play the video" (knowing which scripts are required would mean actually loading all the scripts and executing them in a sandbox to see which ones are being called), it's fine by me.
I think the problem lays basically in that people want to make movies to become rich.
This is absolutely true, based on the fact that a $100M budget movie is a "failure" unless it brings in at least $200M.
In every other industry if you make back 10-20% more than your costs, you are successful, and if you make 50% over cost, you are wildly successful, but in the media industry you need to make 100% to not be a failure...really?