by Dark Shikari, an active x264 dev, 2-pass encoding is no more efficient than crf.
Just because one x264 developer over-simplified once, doesn't change facts. The link I posted ALSO happens to be from an x264 developer, and he details exactly which options suffer from CRF vs 2-pass.
As for the sliceless multi-threading used by x264 there should be no significant quality loss
Fission bombs and fission reactor both started with something cold fusion notably lacks - physics and a sound theoretical basis.
To be fair, just because, for once in human history, useful technology was theoretically conceived of before it was discovered, doesn't at all mean all future discoveries will follow the same path. Einstein could well have been an exception humanity will never see again.
There certainly isn't a long history of every useful effect/material/etc. being theorized of, before it was discovered. There are far too many instances which run contrary to that model.
If I disable passwords I'm always afraid that the one time I really need to get into my LAN will be the one time I don't have my private keys with me.
Disable root login in the sshd_config, and use a sufficiently unguessable username, as well as very strong password.
If you have other user accounts on the system, you can use the "Match" keyword in the sshd_config to only allow one specific user account to perform keyboard-interactive (password) login.
wouldn't it be possible to encode a 16 minute video file on 4 processors by breaking it into 4 minute sections and encoding these separately?
You have no way of knowing how complex one segment is, versus another, before you've encoded the entire thing, so the allocation of bits wont be optimal. If that didn't matter, nobody would spend the time on 2-pass encoding.
Plus, other things, like I-frame placement, can have a cascading effect throughout the video... Not knowing what happened in the 600 frames before the start of "segment 2" is a real drawback in efficient placement.
and it definitely does not result in significant quality loss.
Not true. I just don't have the time to argue the point in detail right now... Go do some encodings with/without a large numbers of threads, with PNSR or other objective metric measurement, and try again.
And besides that, x264 is really only multithreaded on the SECOND pass. The first pass will barely use more than a single CPU.
there's hardly any reason to use 2-pass encoding over crf encoding unless you are still burning your videos to optical media.
Not true. x264 improves on 1-pass encoding, but there are plenty of ways to improve quality that require 2 passes (or a much larger buffer) to work properly.
With 4 30 minute pieces there will only be 3 problematic areas where the pieces are supposed to fit together, This shouldn't cause any major issues.
An assertion on high from someone who probably hasn't actually even encoded more than a handful of videos... Never mind understanding the technical details of video encoding, let alone WRITING a video codec.
The answer is still NO. Encoding a video in segments SHOULD and DOES cause major issues. Unless you're doing fixed-bitrate encoding, you have no way of knowing what percentage of the overall file-size each "piece" should use. Credits? Action sequence? Slow pan? Do you really think they all require the same bitrate?
Video encoding is one of them, but that one is embarrassingly parallel
This is most certainly not true. While many video codecs have been multi-threading enabled, they always do so at a significant quality reduction.
because the encoder could just split the video into quadrants and have each of four cores work on one quadrant.
Many features of H.264 (like GMC) require a a whole frame, not a quadrant. In practically all lossy video codecs, motion vectors have to be computed as the differential from the previous. And there are endless other examples. Of course there's little point in going into it, because the next time video encoding comes up on/., dozens of other people will make the exact same uninformed statements...
Just go visit the x264 mailing list and ask the developers why they stopped using slice-based encoding for multithreaded encoding...
I used to recommend splitting a 2-hour video into four 30-minute parts and feeding each to a single-threaded encoder.
That would only make ANY sense with fixed bitrate encoding. It can possibly be used in the second-pass of multipass encoding, but that's not trivial to do by any stretch.
The conclusion is inevitable. Everybody dies. There's no escaping it.
This leads us to the question... If it's all for nothing, why put up with the trials and tribulations of living, if it's all a waste in the end. Should those having a bad day commit suicide, because it's the easiest way out, and just shaving a few years of the infinite inevitable conclusion?
And why would I enjoy myself more by doing unlimited harm to others? I don't see it.
There are ALWAYS ways to "enjoy yourself" more, if you ignore the suffering of others. More money, more pollution, more mess, more of whatever. Working hard, now that's no fun at all.
That potentially could be the lifespan of the universe.
We've undergone dark ages before, repeatedly. There's NO REASON to believe that NOW, we're finished with that... In fact, we keep finding better ways to do it, and additional ways it may be done to us...
It takes VERY, VERY LITTLE to wipe out millennia of accumulated human knowledge.
The threat of "quantum computers" seems to be the way to justify any crazy thing you want to do, these days. Even though, in reality, it's no threat at all.
There are plenty of theoretically secure encryption algorithms out there, even now, which aren't threatened by quantum, or any other kind of theoretical computer. Let's just all switch to using Lamport signatures, so that we can ignore the next 100 million stories posted on/. that offer status updates on the most elementary of quantum computers, and what it means for the nude pictures you're e-mailing to someone you've never met in person...
If those alternative energy sources were even remotely feasible you can be sure they would be all over them.
That's a bit like saying bottled drinking-water companies would be all-over home water delivery and filtration, if it were remotely feasible...
Even if there are signs that the oil industry is slowly dying, an entrenched field, where you've got no competition is MUCH more profitable than jumping into new markets which ANYONE can compete in on an equal footing.
It's fusion or bust... but we haven't got much time left
That's just plain idiotic nonsense.
Solar power can EASILY... TRIVIALLY, provide all the power we could ever want, very inexpensively, covering a tiny amount of land area, and could be in-place very soon. There just hasn't been nearly ANY investment in it, because coal and natural gas continues to provide a quicker return on the investment.
In fact, I suggest everyone look to west. In California, electric utilities are required to produce a large minority of their power from renewable energy, without loopholes. The ramping up to this rule has been over a decade in coming, and all attempts to overturn it have failed. Neither the people nor the politicians are blinking, this time around, unlike CARB with the electric vehicle mandate in the '90s.
California is either going to be getting ~ 10% of their electricity from solar in the next ten years, at grid prices, or the lights across the state will go out, and stay out. The grand experiment is in place, and the stage is set. It's simply time to sink or swim. This will either prove that power companies can make solar power increasingly profitable, at grid rates (once they have no way to get out of it) or else the 7th largest economy in the world is going to stop, for lack of energy.
This could be a fear of death thing or it could just be a hope for a miracle.... I suppose you can't expect religious people to act rationally about these things though.
Utterly WRONG. In fact what they found was that: "religion had been widely associated with an improved ability to cope with the stress of illness."
"religion" has always struck me as a haven for the fearful, those who lack self-esteem, or narcissistic personalities looking for external justification for their insane behaviour.
Yeah! Mother Theresa was a prick!
Probably get modded down for this
Not a chance. Slashdot has long since become an echo chamber for gay, libertarian, atheists. We've got everything else, how about an anti-astroturfing filter, before the next useless feature and site redesign that makes/. even harder to actually READ?
Atheists think that the pleasure of typing into a textbox on Slashdot while nibbling black licorice is plenty reason to keep processing oxygen and sugars for as long as they can.
Okay. So, you've enjoyed yourself. In a very short time, it's over. You don't go to an old folks home where you can reflect back on how much you enjoyed your life. You are oblivion. Now what? Everything you've done, alone, is gone. It might well have never happened. So what is the point?
It really sounds like you haven't thought it through, yourself.
If life is about enjoying yourself, then extreme hedonism, while doing unlimited harm to those around you to get it, is the only way to go.
On the other end of the spectrum, if we exist in what we leave behind, you should start making endless donations at the nearest sperm bank, to propagate the genes as far and wide as possible. With that part taken care of, start building an army, death ray, whatever, to REALLY make your mark on those who survive you.
After all, your genetic material and your societal impact are the only thing which will last. And in both cases, no matter how much of a mark you make, it's likely to be completely erased within a couple centuries anyhow.
Religious people's peace and happiness are conditional, and when the conditions change, they often don't know how to cope. Atheists are unconditional, and therefore don't kick up such a fuss when it's over.
Sounds like atheists are actually the ones whose happiness is conditional on their good health, and just give up. Meanwhile the more religious find a way to be happy, even after intensive medical treatment. In fact, this WAS the conclusion of the study, not the trolling anti-religion spin put on the/. submission.
Of course, the REAL answer is pretty obvious. The most popular forms of religion command their followers to maintain their own life as much as possible. There was a minor controversy when baseless rumors began spreading that Pope John Paul II refused life-extending treatment near the end of his life...
Now, with the Catholic church having spread the doctrine that the faithful are obligated to extend their lives as much and by any means possible, some morons just feel obligated to spin that simple fact around, to try and promote their own agenda.
Yes. Relieving the middle class of their cash through inflation and interest, and placing that cash in the pockets of rich bankers does have benefits. For the bankers.
No, actually cutting taxes is what makes the rich, richer, while the middle-class and poor (who pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes) get poorer.
Meanwhile, spending money on shared public projects (roads, schools, etc.) benefits us all equally, and the rich pay a higher proportion of the costs.
All the problems we're facing, which you've listed, were NOT caused by Keynesian economics. They were caused by neocon pseduo-economics (you'll note that Republicans never have actual, accredited economists in their staff). They were caused in no small part by Clinton and Bush's tax cuts on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and dumping money into the stock market, rather than actual public projects.
I wonder what I could buy if I had 80% of my money. Oh, wait, sales tax would also be 20%? Guvmint's gotta get its fix somehow.
I wonder how much money you'd be making in the first place without your reaping of the benefits all those government programs your taxes are paying for...
Public schools? Public roads? Police force? Hospitals? Cheap electricity? Clean water? Advanced technology (NASA, DARPA, the internet, etc.)?
The idea that the money we pay in taxes is purely a detriment to us is ridiculous, as is the belief that we can endlessly cut the amount of taxes we pay, with the government still having enough money to pay for all the services we all expect of them.
Yes, I cringe when I look at the taxes withheld from my pay-check, but I can quite easily live well despite the cash difference.
Of course, you're welcome to point out where taxes are being spent that is legitimately WASTEFUL, but I bet all the questionable projects you can come up with won't result in a 0.1% reduction in taxes.
Keynesian economics are only a failure if you care about actual prosperity instead of duping people into letting you run the country.
No. Keynesian economics have been proven to be quite sucessful. It's only a moronic right-wing talking point that keeps trying to refute it, with NO evidence to support the claim.
Mutually-assured destruction worked exactly as intended, in preventing nuclear war for over 50 years.
Not really.
After WWII, the US had several years as the only nuclear-armed nation, and yet didn't attack the Soviet Union.
The US developed the fusion bomb before the USSR, making it the first with the "assured-destruction" scale weapons, where little if any retaliation would have been possible, and yet didn't use that opportunity.
From the 50s through the 60s, the US was pretty well assured that, with a full nuclear first strike, it could almost entirely eliminate the retaliatory threat from the USSR. Again, it didn't happen.
The USSR had to adapt it's nuclear submarine fleet for extended operation under the Arctic polar ice cap just to establish a guaranteed retaliatory capability.
Problem with the x86 architecture is that they try to do anything brute force and that sucks a lot of power.
I suggest you go read the decades of papers that explain why adding special-purpose hardware to accelerate specific tasks is a stop-gap solution, and a guaranteed dead-end.
x86 is in fact the WORST POSSIBLE example of a CPU that tries to "brute force" "anything". In fact x86 chips are about the ONLY architecture still being developed that uses an advanced instruction set, and has numerous special-purpose features, like multimedia instructions (MMX, 3DNow, etc.), SIMD instructions (SSE), and arbitrary precision math.
ARM, happens to be a great example of the overly simplistic architecture you describe, and sadly mis-attribute to x86.
You may be happier for a few years, but if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family, are you really happier overall?
You're assuming you'll be wishing for a family if you don't have one. You're REALLY going to need to cite that!
How many people are on bad terms with their families? How many people raise children, only to have them turn out as selfish, sociopaths, criminals, etc.?
Raising children also happens to be an unimaginable amount of endless, thankless, work.
Truth is, despite all the complaining about diapers and sleepless nights and moody teenagers, its overall on average fun,
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier. People all remember their fond memories of their children, and forget the endless behavioral problems, financial strain, sleepless nights, etc., etc.
Most adults are really just big kids inside and find the kids are an excellent excuse for their own goals of running around in the park and building legos and building tree houses and digging in sandboxes and riding bikes and playing aports and computer and video games.
Most adults need no particular excuse to do most of those things. Biking, video games, amusement parks, etc. Plenty of adults happily enjoy all of those by themselve, while making no excuses. Of course, YMMV.
And if you do need an excuse, most people have nieces, nephews, etc. who are only too happy to go fun places with their uncle. Mommy certainly enjoys getting a break for a while, as well.
And most people who've had a normal childhood really do grow out of their desire to do many of those activities. I certainly can't say I enjoy running around Chuck-E-Cheese, with the hordes of children screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs.
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Just because one x264 developer over-simplified once, doesn't change facts. The link I posted ALSO happens to be from an x264 developer, and he details exactly which options suffer from CRF vs 2-pass.
Ah, good, more assertions...
To be fair, just because, for once in human history, useful technology was theoretically conceived of before it was discovered, doesn't at all mean all future discoveries will follow the same path. Einstein could well have been an exception humanity will never see again.
There certainly isn't a long history of every useful effect/material/etc. being theorized of, before it was discovered. There are far too many instances which run contrary to that model.
Try that with the pseudo-scientific nutjobs, and you'll get about the same results.
There are enough nutjobs to cover every field known to man.
Disable root login in the sshd_config, and use a sufficiently unguessable username, as well as very strong password.
If you have other user accounts on the system, you can use the "Match" keyword in the sshd_config to only allow one specific user account to perform keyboard-interactive (password) login.
You have no way of knowing how complex one segment is, versus another, before you've encoded the entire thing, so the allocation of bits wont be optimal. If that didn't matter, nobody would spend the time on 2-pass encoding.
Plus, other things, like I-frame placement, can have a cascading effect throughout the video... Not knowing what happened in the 600 frames before the start of "segment 2" is a real drawback in efficient placement.
Not true. I just don't have the time to argue the point in detail right now... Go do some encodings with/without a large numbers of threads, with PNSR or other objective metric measurement, and try again.
And besides that, x264 is really only multithreaded on the SECOND pass. The first pass will barely use more than a single CPU.
Not true. x264 improves on 1-pass encoding, but there are plenty of ways to improve quality that require 2 passes (or a much larger buffer) to work properly.
http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=996114&postcount=2
An assertion on high from someone who probably hasn't actually even encoded more than a handful of videos... Never mind understanding the technical details of video encoding, let alone WRITING a video codec.
The answer is still NO. Encoding a video in segments SHOULD and DOES cause major issues. Unless you're doing fixed-bitrate encoding, you have no way of knowing what percentage of the overall file-size each "piece" should use. Credits? Action sequence? Slow pan? Do you really think they all require the same bitrate?
This is most certainly not true. While many video codecs have been multi-threading enabled, they always do so at a significant quality reduction.
Many features of H.264 (like GMC) require a a whole frame, not a quadrant. In practically all lossy video codecs, motion vectors have to be computed as the differential from the previous. And there are endless other examples. Of course there's little point in going into it, because the next time video encoding comes up on /., dozens of other people will make the exact same uninformed statements...
Just go visit the x264 mailing list and ask the developers why they stopped using slice-based encoding for multithreaded encoding...
That would only make ANY sense with fixed bitrate encoding. It can possibly be used in the second-pass of multipass encoding, but that's not trivial to do by any stretch.
This leads us to the question... If it's all for nothing, why put up with the trials and tribulations of living, if it's all a waste in the end. Should those having a bad day commit suicide, because it's the easiest way out, and just shaving a few years of the infinite inevitable conclusion?
If your theology contains no explanation for why you shouldn't act like a sociopath, it is massively incomplete.
You've clearly pulled that number out of your ass, because it's orders of magnitude off the mark.
There are ALWAYS ways to "enjoy yourself" more, if you ignore the suffering of others. More money, more pollution, more mess, more of whatever. Working hard, now that's no fun at all.
We've undergone dark ages before, repeatedly. There's NO REASON to believe that NOW, we're finished with that... In fact, we keep finding better ways to do it, and additional ways it may be done to us...
It takes VERY, VERY LITTLE to wipe out millennia of accumulated human knowledge.
The threat of "quantum computers" seems to be the way to justify any crazy thing you want to do, these days. Even though, in reality, it's no threat at all.
There are plenty of theoretically secure encryption algorithms out there, even now, which aren't threatened by quantum, or any other kind of theoretical computer. Let's just all switch to using Lamport signatures, so that we can ignore the next 100 million stories posted on /. that offer status updates on the most elementary of quantum computers, and what it means for the nude pictures you're e-mailing to someone you've never met in person...
That's a bit like saying bottled drinking-water companies would be all-over home water delivery and filtration, if it were remotely feasible...
Even if there are signs that the oil industry is slowly dying, an entrenched field, where you've got no competition is MUCH more profitable than jumping into new markets which ANYONE can compete in on an equal footing.
That's just plain idiotic nonsense.
Solar power can EASILY... TRIVIALLY, provide all the power we could ever want, very inexpensively, covering a tiny amount of land area, and could be in-place very soon. There just hasn't been nearly ANY investment in it, because coal and natural gas continues to provide a quicker return on the investment.
In fact, I suggest everyone look to west. In California, electric utilities are required to produce a large minority of their power from renewable energy, without loopholes. The ramping up to this rule has been over a decade in coming, and all attempts to overturn it have failed. Neither the people nor the politicians are blinking, this time around, unlike CARB with the electric vehicle mandate in the '90s.
California is either going to be getting ~ 10% of their electricity from solar in the next ten years, at grid prices, or the lights across the state will go out, and stay out. The grand experiment is in place, and the stage is set. It's simply time to sink or swim. This will either prove that power companies can make solar power increasingly profitable, at grid rates (once they have no way to get out of it) or else the 7th largest economy in the world is going to stop, for lack of energy.
Utterly WRONG. In fact what they found was that: "religion had been widely associated with an improved ability to cope with the stress of illness."
Yeah! Mother Theresa was a prick!
Not a chance. Slashdot has long since become an echo chamber for gay, libertarian, atheists. We've got everything else, how about an anti-astroturfing filter, before the next useless feature and site redesign that makes /. even harder to actually READ?
Okay. So, you've enjoyed yourself. In a very short time, it's over. You don't go to an old folks home where you can reflect back on how much you enjoyed your life. You are oblivion. Now what? Everything you've done, alone, is gone. It might well have never happened. So what is the point?
It really sounds like you haven't thought it through, yourself.
If life is about enjoying yourself, then extreme hedonism, while doing unlimited harm to those around you to get it, is the only way to go.
On the other end of the spectrum, if we exist in what we leave behind, you should start making endless donations at the nearest sperm bank, to propagate the genes as far and wide as possible. With that part taken care of, start building an army, death ray, whatever, to REALLY make your mark on those who survive you.
After all, your genetic material and your societal impact are the only thing which will last. And in both cases, no matter how much of a mark you make, it's likely to be completely erased within a couple centuries anyhow.
Sounds like atheists are actually the ones whose happiness is conditional on their good health, and just give up. Meanwhile the more religious find a way to be happy, even after intensive medical treatment. In fact, this WAS the conclusion of the study, not the trolling anti-religion spin put on the /. submission.
Of course, the REAL answer is pretty obvious. The most popular forms of religion command their followers to maintain their own life as much as possible. There was a minor controversy when baseless rumors began spreading that Pope John Paul II refused life-extending treatment near the end of his life...
Now, with the Catholic church having spread the doctrine that the faithful are obligated to extend their lives as much and by any means possible, some morons just feel obligated to spin that simple fact around, to try and promote their own agenda.
No, actually cutting taxes is what makes the rich, richer, while the middle-class and poor (who pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes) get poorer.
Meanwhile, spending money on shared public projects (roads, schools, etc.) benefits us all equally, and the rich pay a higher proportion of the costs.
All the problems we're facing, which you've listed, were NOT caused by Keynesian economics. They were caused by neocon pseduo-economics (you'll note that Republicans never have actual, accredited economists in their staff). They were caused in no small part by Clinton and Bush's tax cuts on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and dumping money into the stock market, rather than actual public projects.
I wonder how much money you'd be making in the first place without your reaping of the benefits all those government programs your taxes are paying for...
Public schools? Public roads? Police force? Hospitals? Cheap electricity? Clean water? Advanced technology (NASA, DARPA, the internet, etc.)?
The idea that the money we pay in taxes is purely a detriment to us is ridiculous, as is the belief that we can endlessly cut the amount of taxes we pay, with the government still having enough money to pay for all the services we all expect of them.
Yes, I cringe when I look at the taxes withheld from my pay-check, but I can quite easily live well despite the cash difference.
Of course, you're welcome to point out where taxes are being spent that is legitimately WASTEFUL, but I bet all the questionable projects you can come up with won't result in a 0.1% reduction in taxes.
No. Keynesian economics have been proven to be quite sucessful. It's only a moronic right-wing talking point that keeps trying to refute it, with NO evidence to support the claim.
Study after study has proven the benefits.
Not really.
After WWII, the US had several years as the only nuclear-armed nation, and yet didn't attack the Soviet Union.
The US developed the fusion bomb before the USSR, making it the first with the "assured-destruction" scale weapons, where little if any retaliation would have been possible, and yet didn't use that opportunity.
From the 50s through the 60s, the US was pretty well assured that, with a full nuclear first strike, it could almost entirely eliminate the retaliatory threat from the USSR. Again, it didn't happen.
The USSR had to adapt it's nuclear submarine fleet for extended operation under the Arctic polar ice cap just to establish a guaranteed retaliatory capability.
At best, there was about 20 years of MAD.
I suggest you go read the decades of papers that explain why adding special-purpose hardware to accelerate specific tasks is a stop-gap solution, and a guaranteed dead-end.
x86 is in fact the WORST POSSIBLE example of a CPU that tries to "brute force" "anything". In fact x86 chips are about the ONLY architecture still being developed that uses an advanced instruction set, and has numerous special-purpose features, like multimedia instructions (MMX, 3DNow, etc.), SIMD instructions (SSE), and arbitrary precision math.
ARM, happens to be a great example of the overly simplistic architecture you describe, and sadly mis-attribute to x86.
Are you REALLY that lazy, or do you just feel the need to feign ignorance?
I heard about it on TV, months ago, so I don't have a URL handy, but you know, the first handful of search results are perfectly good:
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art43105.asp
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2003/05/06/breeding/index.html
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/parenting/children-do-not-make-couples-any-happier-1245184.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1941195/Marriage-without-children-the-key-to-bliss.html
http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792
You're assuming you'll be wishing for a family if you don't have one. You're REALLY going to need to cite that!
How many people are on bad terms with their families? How many people raise children, only to have them turn out as selfish, sociopaths, criminals, etc.?
Raising children also happens to be an unimaginable amount of endless, thankless, work.
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier. People all remember their fond memories of their children, and forget the endless behavioral problems, financial strain, sleepless nights, etc., etc.
Most adults need no particular excuse to do most of those things. Biking, video games, amusement parks, etc. Plenty of adults happily enjoy all of those by themselve, while making no excuses. Of course, YMMV.
And if you do need an excuse, most people have nieces, nephews, etc. who are only too happy to go fun places with their uncle. Mommy certainly enjoys getting a break for a while, as well.
And most people who've had a normal childhood really do grow out of their desire to do many of those activities. I certainly can't say I enjoy running around Chuck-E-Cheese, with the hordes of children screaming and yelling at the top of their lungs.