That's beyond idiotic. It's ridiculous to suggest that ANY pulldown reversal algorithm always choses the correct field. And doing even basic analysis on HD material is very computationally intensive.
If you've got a bad source and really REALLY crappy pulldown detection in your TV, you might go 5 frames (~150ms) before the reversal algorithm resyncs to a new sequence.
It's unheard of for any source to maintain a perfect 3:2 pattern for any length of time.
You're omitting the fact that you don't know shit about what you're talking about.
Right. How many ivtc and deinterlacing algorithms have you written again?
Even for straight up interlaced 30fps content, modern motion adaptive deinterlacing algorithms are incredibly effective.
"Effective" could mean anything, so the above sentence says nothing at all. The fact is, there is no possible way to convert 60 fields into 30 frames, without losing significant information. It's mathematically impossible. And even the best motion adaptive deinterlacers make occasional mistakes. How visible their mistakes are will vary.
Toshiba has two players that put out 1080p: the HD-A20 and the HD-AX2. And, they will soon be getting firmware updates to output at 1080p/24.
Fair enough. I openly admit I haven't kept-up on recent hardware from either company. It's still by far most likely, however, for an HD-DVD owner to have a 1080i unit, and most likely for a BluRay owner to have a 1080p unit, despite a few exceptions on both sides.
The only way to avoid the 3:2 pull down is to have a 24fps device.
This is besides the point, but what you said is not entirely true. A progressive display, at any other frame-rate, can also avoid 3:2 pulldown, (which is only used for interlaced displays).
So, a 1080p/24 source (like HD DVD or Blu-ray) output to a 1080p/24 capable display device will eliminate the issue you keep posting about.
HD-DVD is not a 1080p source. The video is stored progressive on the disc, but I haven't yet heard of an HD-DVD player that will output progressive video. It will perform the 3:2 pulldown process on the video before the player outputs it (to HDMI or component) much like standard DVD players. And in the case of a 1080p display, the TV will then immediately try to reverse it.
Your 1080p display can take 1080i input from a 1080i source such as the A2 and will recombine fields to create full frame images.
3:2 pulldown reversal has never been, and never will be perfect. You will have artifacts from the unnecessary two conversion steps.
So when you're watching a 1080i source on a 1080p television you are actually effectively seeing 1080p 30frames per second instead of 1080p 60frames per second.
You're omitting the fact that deinterlacing is a difficult and inexact process that horribly mangles video.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but h.264 was pretty much an international effort.
Yes it was, and they are all motivated solely by the patent licensing fees they will get from the US.
MP3 was developed by Frauenhofer in Germany, where they could not expect to get it patented.
They developed it in Germany, and patented it in the US. The US patents are where they get their money.
Obviously patents can't be an all important condition for development.
Completely wrong. The money that motivates them ALL comes from US software patents. If the US dissolved software patents, expect development of new (open) video and audio codecs to stop entirely.
Look at the GPL... It protects the code by licensing it in a specific way, so companies can't just throw it into their products without fulfilling some specific conditions. What stops the developers of a video codec from doing the same thing?
With a program, the code itself is the invention, so to speak. Everyone knows HTML/Javascript format, and it's only the effort of writing the code that prevents everyone from doing so.
With a video codec, the coding of the video format is the invention, and the code is irrelevant. It's possible to clean-room reverse-engineer the format, write a new codec for it, and (barring patents) use that format without restrictions imposed on the original source code.
The beneficiary of any patent is always the patent holder, in the most direct way. In an indirect way, the public does benefit, because they get some better product (PAL, the typewriter, the light bulb, etc.) out of it at minimal expense.
Licensing code is far cheaper than re-writing to avoid copyright violations, so companies have an inventive to pay for those licenses.
That may work on inexpensive developments with a wide audience. As the expense to develop something gets higher, or if there is only a small group that might want the development, the cost of licensing has to go up, and so does the incentive for writing the code from scratch.
Even on copyright, of course, the US was happy to ignore such legalities when it suited them earlier in its history.
I fail to see how that has any relevance at all. Yes, that happened, very early in the US' history, but people aren't arguing that copyright should be abolished. Taking others' work without any payment is very shortsighted, whether copyright or patents.
there are software houses in Europe that will produce code for their customers, include the source in the deal, do not file for patents, and receive payment.
By all means, show me some that have spent many millions of dollars to develop the technology, that share source code to their extremely expensive developments. As I've said, such a scheme only works when the development is rather inexpensive.
Who's comment were you reading? Because it sure as hell doesn't even resemble anything I've ever written!
You are arguing based on a nationalistic view.
Not at all. The one reason nation enters into it is because the US happens to have software patents, while others do not.
"No patents = Bad for USA, Good for Europe" is an argument for the USA to abolish software patents, not for Europe to adopt them.
You are apparently unfamiliar with the "prisoner's dilemma". It's advantageous for one country to abolish patents as they get the benefit of the world's work without paying, but if ALL countries abolish patents and nobody is paying, everyone loses. If you abolish software patents in the US, I've explained exactly what will happen.
You believe that the main reason for technological evolution is patents.
No, I believe the main reason for technological progress is MONEY. Patents simply allow companies an opportunity to get money while keeping their code open to the public, rather than a trade secret.
At the beginning MPEG, JPEG were NOT patented. Why? Because everyone needed it in order to sell more hardware.
JPEG was not patented because it was simple enough that it didn't take many millions of dollars of investment to develop it in the first place. Advanced video and audio is a much more difficult problem. I'm sure the earliest drugs weren't patented either. But as technology pushes further and further along, and the cost of developing a product gets more expensive, patents are necessary.
No programmer can ever write a single line of code if they must spend time looking over their shoulder and hoping to know which methods are patented and which are not. It's simply impossible. And no PHB is going to stand behind each and every coder checking their work against a list of allowable statements and algorithms.
You could use that same argument against ALL patents, not just software patents. Engineers aren't going to do patent searches, either.
I don't beleive there's a programmer on this planet who actually supports the idea (unless they're one of the crooked ones who is already making a fortune out of patents).
I don't believe there's an engineer on the planet who supports the idea of patents (unless they're one of the crooked ones who is making a fortune out of their own patents).
So, are all patents bad? Do inventors just have to keep things quiet as possible and fend for themselves?
I guess I'm going to have to be the one person here to defend patents...
Consider the h.264 video codec. It cost millions of dollars to develop, and is protected ONLY by software patents. Europe wants to play the prisoner's dilemma to their own advantage. They want companies in the US and Japan to keep developing high tech, leaving US customers to pay for it, so that they can use it for free themselves (and they certainly do).
Everyone knows the kind of outrage there would be if US drug companies developed multi-billion dollar treatments for major diseases, then Europe decided to just use them without paying anything. The only reason the opposite happens with software patents is that the US patent system is in such a ridiculous state that everyone laughs at it. That doesn't mean patents are bad, and doesn't mean software patents are bad.
Consider the alternatives. If software patents didn't exist in the US, the only option would be to sell a closed-source codec, and keeping the format a trade secret. This would be very, very bad. Everyone would be limited to a few supported platforms, with a poor performing codec, and no opportunity to modify or improve it. Things would be like the bad old days of RealPlayer and 4DTV.
And that's only the start of it. Reverse engineering is too easy for that strategy to work for long, so instead of one big h.264 codec, you'd see each company roll out their own codecs, with only incrementally better quality than the last, and each one being regularly obsoleted... Something similar to Yamaha's attempts at TwinVQ (predecessor of AAC) or Quicktime's use of Sorensen SVQ1/3 codecs.
You'd think I'd be of the opposite opinion, since I'm quite active in a few open source multimedia projects, but I more of a realist. For technology to be developed, someone needs to pay for it. Those who think the technology will just develop itself, whether there are any incentives or not, are unbelievably naive. The US patent system needs to be fixed, without question. But it's a terrible situation we're currently in, to have the US always picking up the tab for the rest of the world... Is it any wonder brain-drain is so much of a problem?
You certainly are a pro at constructing and knocking over straw men.
I argued only with what you said. That you couldn't express what you actually meant is not my problem. Now you're the one who's ranting and creating straw men to make yourself feel better.
"The other" should be "Another" in the 2nd sentence.
I understand what you're trying to say, though I must point out, even changing that wording like so, still suggests a dichotomy between the two approaches.
You seem confrontational, yet agree with me except for my poor wording;
In general, yes, if you write something different than what you mean, you will find people (who may actually agree with you) arguing with what you wrote.
Actually, it's the CIA that is tasked with finding Osama. Well, unless Osama is somewhere in the US and commits a crime that crosses state lines or something.
The FBI isn't strictly limited to operating inside the US, and they most certainly ARE tasked with prosecuting those responsible for terrorist attacks occurring inside the borders of the US. When the WTC was bombed in '93, it wasn't NY state police or CIA arresting and prosecuting those responsible.
Though you are half right, it is (mainly) the task of the CIA to track down foreign threats to the US, and they are the ones trying to find Osama.
One reaction to abuse of governmental power is to restrict it as much as possible. The other is to have transparency in government and checks and balances.
No, that's a completely false dichotomy. No matter how many restrictions you create on the government's power, if there is no oversight, they will disregard them entirely, without any repercussions.
Transparency is just one tool, and frankly, it's ridiculous to believe that transparency accomplishes anything on it's own.
Again, the current administration's "unitary executive" theory is a dangerous precedent.
Indeed. You need only look at the existing situation, where the public overwhelmingly disagrees with the administration, yet congress continues to go along with the administration, and completely fails to hold anyone accountable for even the most blatant legal violations, to see that our system of checks and balances doesn't work.
The culture of Washington, the two party system, etc., they all conspire to allow law breaking and corruption to continue unchallenged.
I guess I just care a lot more about truth than about process.
That's likely because you don't know the reasons for the process. Look up the origins of Miranda rights. The "process" is almost always about getting as close as possible to the truth. Then read up on the lamentations of the founding fathers about the federal government becoming tyrannical (then look at what Bush has been doing, even WITH all the "processes" in-place to limit his powers).
The "process" is the kind of thing that gets loudly lambasted any time it gives the guilty even the slightest of benefits, but ignored the 99% of time when it protects the innocent.
The "process" extends to something most everyone believes in: Being "Presumed innocent". Get rid of the process, and anyone can be locked up by anyone in power for any reason, for as long as they like.
But more to the subject, the problem here isn't that the "process" is getting weakened by a change in the laws or something similar... It's that the executive branch is breaking law after law to do what it wants, claiming laws don't apply to them. The fact that Bush and Cheney haven't been impeached after 6 years of this, is more than enough to make someone lose faith in democracy.
One of the reasons I admire the ACLU is that they stick up for the privacy even of insane druggie assholes like Rush Limbaugh.
Me too... but then they started suing everyone who dare to put a crucifix or nativity scene in any spot that was visible to the public, because someone just might be offended in some abstract way. That, plus their rabid opposition to any laws that in any small way limit abortions (such as the recent late-term abortion ban) convinced me to stop donating to them entirely.
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That's beyond idiotic. It's ridiculous to suggest that ANY pulldown reversal algorithm always choses the correct field. And doing even basic analysis on HD material is very computationally intensive.
It's unheard of for any source to maintain a perfect 3:2 pattern for any length of time.
Right. How many ivtc and deinterlacing algorithms have you written again?
"Effective" could mean anything, so the above sentence says nothing at all. The fact is, there is no possible way to convert 60 fields into 30 frames, without losing significant information. It's mathematically impossible. And even the best motion adaptive deinterlacers make occasional mistakes. How visible their mistakes are will vary.
Fair enough. I openly admit I haven't kept-up on recent hardware from either company. It's still by far most likely, however, for an HD-DVD owner to have a 1080i unit, and most likely for a BluRay owner to have a 1080p unit, despite a few exceptions on both sides.
This is besides the point, but what you said is not entirely true. A progressive display, at any other frame-rate, can also avoid 3:2 pulldown, (which is only used for interlaced displays).
HD-DVD is not a 1080p source. The video is stored progressive on the disc, but I haven't yet heard of an HD-DVD player that will output progressive video. It will perform the 3:2 pulldown process on the video before the player outputs it (to HDMI or component) much like standard DVD players. And in the case of a 1080p display, the TV will then immediately try to reverse it.
50" HDTVs are under $1,000 and even that is not necessary for HDTV.
27" HDTVs are under $400 and will work perfectly.
3:2 pulldown reversal has never been, and never will be perfect. You will have artifacts from the unnecessary two conversion steps.
You're omitting the fact that deinterlacing is a difficult and inexact process that horribly mangles video.
That would be true if your TV has perfect 3:2 pulldown reversal... which doesn't exist.
Feeding hard telecined 24fps material guarantees artifacts.
Depends on how much of a sociopath you are...
The one where a self-styled economist expresses his baseless opinion, strewn with lots of weasel-words? No, I didn't get very far on that one.
I can make up numbers too.
Yes it was, and they are all motivated solely by the patent licensing fees they will get from the US.
They developed it in Germany, and patented it in the US. The US patents are where they get their money.
Completely wrong. The money that motivates them ALL comes from US software patents. If the US dissolved software patents, expect development of new (open) video and audio codecs to stop entirely.
With a program, the code itself is the invention, so to speak. Everyone knows HTML/Javascript format, and it's only the effort of writing the code that prevents everyone from doing so.
With a video codec, the coding of the video format is the invention, and the code is irrelevant. It's possible to clean-room reverse-engineer the format, write a new codec for it, and (barring patents) use that format without restrictions imposed on the original source code.
The beneficiary of any patent is always the patent holder, in the most direct way. In an indirect way, the public does benefit, because they get some better product (PAL, the typewriter, the light bulb, etc.) out of it at minimal expense.
That may work on inexpensive developments with a wide audience. As the expense to develop something gets higher, or if there is only a small group that might want the development, the cost of licensing has to go up, and so does the incentive for writing the code from scratch.
I fail to see how that has any relevance at all. Yes, that happened, very early in the US' history, but people aren't arguing that copyright should be abolished. Taking others' work without any payment is very shortsighted, whether copyright or patents.
By all means, show me some that have spent many millions of dollars to develop the technology, that share source code to their extremely expensive developments. As I've said, such a scheme only works when the development is rather inexpensive.
Not at all. The one reason nation enters into it is because the US happens to have software patents, while others do not.
You are apparently unfamiliar with the "prisoner's dilemma". It's advantageous for one country to abolish patents as they get the benefit of the world's work without paying, but if ALL countries abolish patents and nobody is paying, everyone loses. If you abolish software patents in the US, I've explained exactly what will happen.
No, I believe the main reason for technological progress is MONEY. Patents simply allow companies an opportunity to get money while keeping their code open to the public, rather than a trade secret.
JPEG was not patented because it was simple enough that it didn't take many millions of dollars of investment to develop it in the first place. Advanced video and audio is a much more difficult problem. I'm sure the earliest drugs weren't patented either. But as technology pushes further and further along, and the cost of developing a product gets more expensive, patents are necessary.
You are completely wrong. What I said is that the US is the only one paying the bills.
You could use that same argument against ALL patents, not just software patents. Engineers aren't going to do patent searches, either.
I don't believe there's an engineer on the planet who supports the idea of patents (unless they're one of the crooked ones who is making a fortune out of their own patents).
So, are all patents bad? Do inventors just have to keep things quiet as possible and fend for themselves?
I guess I'm going to have to be the one person here to defend patents...
Consider the h.264 video codec. It cost millions of dollars to develop, and is protected ONLY by software patents. Europe wants to play the prisoner's dilemma to their own advantage. They want companies in the US and Japan to keep developing high tech, leaving US customers to pay for it, so that they can use it for free themselves (and they certainly do).
Everyone knows the kind of outrage there would be if US drug companies developed multi-billion dollar treatments for major diseases, then Europe decided to just use them without paying anything. The only reason the opposite happens with software patents is that the US patent system is in such a ridiculous state that everyone laughs at it. That doesn't mean patents are bad, and doesn't mean software patents are bad.
Consider the alternatives. If software patents didn't exist in the US, the only option would be to sell a closed-source codec, and keeping the format a trade secret. This would be very, very bad. Everyone would be limited to a few supported platforms, with a poor performing codec, and no opportunity to modify or improve it. Things would be like the bad old days of RealPlayer and 4DTV.
And that's only the start of it. Reverse engineering is too easy for that strategy to work for long, so instead of one big h.264 codec, you'd see each company roll out their own codecs, with only incrementally better quality than the last, and each one being regularly obsoleted... Something similar to Yamaha's attempts at TwinVQ (predecessor of AAC) or Quicktime's use of Sorensen SVQ1/3 codecs.
You'd think I'd be of the opposite opinion, since I'm quite active in a few open source multimedia projects, but I more of a realist. For technology to be developed, someone needs to pay for it. Those who think the technology will just develop itself, whether there are any incentives or not, are unbelievably naive. The US patent system needs to be fixed, without question. But it's a terrible situation we're currently in, to have the US always picking up the tab for the rest of the world... Is it any wonder brain-drain is so much of a problem?
I argued only with what you said. That you couldn't express what you actually meant is not my problem. Now you're the one who's ranting and creating straw men to make yourself feel better.
I understand what you're trying to say, though I must point out, even changing that wording like so, still suggests a dichotomy between the two approaches.
In general, yes, if you write something different than what you mean, you will find people (who may actually agree with you) arguing with what you wrote.
The confusion is unfortunate.
Maybe because Flash has the most horrific video format known to man?
How about a Java-based video player?
Meh. That's only 10GBs of data. Her PC could potentially have more RAM than that, which certainly could store it faster than she could download it.
She could potentially write it directly from RAM to DVD-R (several minutes of course), without the data ever touching the hard drive.
The FBI isn't strictly limited to operating inside the US, and they most certainly ARE tasked with prosecuting those responsible for terrorist attacks occurring inside the borders of the US. When the WTC was bombed in '93, it wasn't NY state police or CIA arresting and prosecuting those responsible.
Though you are half right, it is (mainly) the task of the CIA to track down foreign threats to the US, and they are the ones trying to find Osama.
No, that's a completely false dichotomy. No matter how many restrictions you create on the government's power, if there is no oversight, they will disregard them entirely, without any repercussions.
Transparency is just one tool, and frankly, it's ridiculous to believe that transparency accomplishes anything on it's own.
Indeed. You need only look at the existing situation, where the public overwhelmingly disagrees with the administration, yet congress continues to go along with the administration, and completely fails to hold anyone accountable for even the most blatant legal violations, to see that our system of checks and balances doesn't work.
The culture of Washington, the two party system, etc., they all conspire to allow law breaking and corruption to continue unchallenged.
That's likely because you don't know the reasons for the process. Look up the origins of Miranda rights. The "process" is almost always about getting as close as possible to the truth. Then read up on the lamentations of the founding fathers about the federal government becoming tyrannical (then look at what Bush has been doing, even WITH all the "processes" in-place to limit his powers).
The "process" is the kind of thing that gets loudly lambasted any time it gives the guilty even the slightest of benefits, but ignored the 99% of time when it protects the innocent.
The "process" extends to something most everyone believes in: Being "Presumed innocent". Get rid of the process, and anyone can be locked up by anyone in power for any reason, for as long as they like.
But more to the subject, the problem here isn't that the "process" is getting weakened by a change in the laws or something similar... It's that the executive branch is breaking law after law to do what it wants, claiming laws don't apply to them. The fact that Bush and Cheney haven't been impeached after 6 years of this, is more than enough to make someone lose faith in democracy.
Me too... but then they started suing everyone who dare to put a crucifix or nativity scene in any spot that was visible to the public, because someone just might be offended in some abstract way. That, plus their rabid opposition to any laws that in any small way limit abortions (such as the recent late-term abortion ban) convinced me to stop donating to them entirely.