You make this sound like a problem with multimedia,
It is. Many different programs, with different focuses, all expecting information in a completely different format, and plenty of tweaks to get everything to work right.
anybody computer literate automates tasks via scripting.
You obviously weren't paying attention. It's not the standard handful of short shell script. You need extremely large and complex scripts. Think hundreds of 20KB shell scripts, and all the associated hassle maintaining them.
3D Studio Max, XSI, Maya, Zbrush, Avid, Fusion, Nuke, Combustion and Photoshop.
I see. Therefore: Anyone else who is a pro MUST be using all the same programs you do. And because you aren't already using free programs, they must not possibly be able to do the same job.
Either you're a complete fool, or just trolling.
If you use Photoshop day in and day out you would know that Gimp isn't acceptable.
Nicely done. No reasoning. No justification. Just the word of God. No matter what, anything named "Gimp" can't do the things programs named "Photoshop" can.
You really don't need to load an entire file in order to edit it (There are some exceptions, of course)... Which is good, because I would hate to load my entire hard drive into RAM, to make any minor changes to it.
You can stick to loading reasonably small segments of it at a time, and in the case of images, only low-res previews of the entire image if/when needed.
I mean, graphic pro-men use Photoshop, that is the only graphi program that can work with really big images (and it does it well). Try opening a 56 GB image with GIMP and watch it paifully die.
Your advertisement for Photoshop belongs elsewhere.
If this is your only specific complaint, I can quite easily dismiss you by saying that a great many paid professionals don't want or need to handle "56 GB" images.
Animation guys use Maya, WheelBuck or something similar,
What theoretical "guys" use is irrelevent.
but there is NOTHING of similar quality here (or freeware or OS for that matter).
Everything is still in development, so that list will change. Besides, you aren't even constructively criticising, you're just bitching and whining that proprietary apps are (magically?) better.
Ok call me a troll if you want, but DON*T TELL ME for fuck sakes that this is for the pro.
This really is a great idea for a distro. In my own experience, I've found that keeping workstation task (web, e-mail, programming, etc) and multimedia tasks (DVR, editing, etc. as well as games...) on seperate systems works out for the best of both tasks. The two have a terrible tendancy to conflict with each other...
One may be working on a job that will take hours, while the other may need a quick reboot ASAP. One may need 99% uptime, while the other serves it's purpose just as well at 95% downtime. One needs quite high-end hardware, latest drivers, and frequent updating of software, while the other is better handled by older, lower-power, more reliable hardware and old, known-good software. One can be tucked away in a corner, while the other often needs to be nearby. etc.
Plus, it's no secret that many multimedia tools are a serious hassle to get up and working in the first place. Different toolkits and widely varying interfaces abound in this space. Good luck trying to INTEGRATE them with each other, on your own. My multimedia system is filled with shell scripts, which do the job pretty well, but aren't very elegant solutions. Doing something in a convoluted way is sometimes quicker and easier than trying to adapt the scripts that, for example, convert between formats for different editing tools.
Ahh but by the fact it does lead to the posibility of 10 possible customers makes the mark useless now.
Not at all. Anyone would love to be able to narrow the suspect list to 10. After that, you start comparing IP addresses, check the accounts for suspicious activity, etc.
And if the same account is used for more than one file, you compare the list of possible candidates, and see EXACTLY which accounts appear in both lists. Now you've narrowed it down to 1.
Grab another one and your much more likely to find the spots your looking for.
No, you aren't. They aren't going to make the data completely random. While each copy you have allows you to identify one more byte of the signature, there's still 1.99Kbytes left that you haven't indentified. That means you need a ridiculously large number of copies of each video.
In my opinion, it was never intended to be an actual useful feature. They just wanted WiFi as a bullet point on their features list,
Sounds to me EXACTLY like everything else Microsoft has ever done...
Sure, they'll advertise the millions of things Windows CE can do, but just fail to mention it's ridiculously crippled, and just BARELY fits the most basic definition... "Word Processing" means a crappy equivalent of notepad, with no options and horrible input methods that make it impossible to use even for trivial, one-word notes. "Video player" fails to mention the limited formats, the horrible performance, the awful interface, the lack of any features above bare-bones file playback, etc.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's competitors have infinitely better products, but Microsoft manages to fit more buzzwords into the product release to trick people into believing it's anything but the complete piece of crap it is.
Sorry about the rant... But I see blatantly obviously dishonest crap like this from them just about every day.
Ahhh, the mysterious world of corporate interaction.
It's really much worse than that. For all the complaints, and the long-term rivalry between Sony and Microsoft, they are STILL selling computers only with Windows, and making software for their equipment Windows-only, going out of their way to shut-out Mac and Unix systems.
And with their huge product line-up, and money to invest, they could single-handedly do more harm to Microsoft (by switching to something like Linux on their machines, and making Linux-compatible software for their devices) than the more-often touted small-game players like Dell. Plus, it would probably pay off for them, as they'd have a far better chance of capturing the pro market with Unix workstations and notebooks, preloaded with digital multimedia software, than with the clumsy joke that is Windows' multimedia capabilities.
if you have a good connection to the utility, putting together a battery system is not worth the cost.
It is if your locale buys your electricity at wholesale prices, then charges you retail price for any you use.
Not the shingles or any of the other experimental junk... they just don't have the life span or the efficiency.
Price for the wattage should be the main consideration, not effeciency. The cheap, ineffecient solar panels can completely power an entire home, if you happen to have enough roof area. If not, you'll still be saving money, and much less time to breaking even.
Many people end up with electric bills pretty close to $0 - AND without having the added complexity and danger of storing hydrogen gas.
But how many of them are also powering all their driving needs off of their solar panel? How many are doing all their cooking, heating, and cooling with solar?
It's definately a big step up from normal solar powered homes.
I'd say they went the wrong way, using hydrogen. Something like flywheels could be used for more energy-effecient electricity storage. And there are several electric cars out there with the range to meet most people's regular driving needs.
The pirated video would have ONE signature, and they would have to determine which set of signatures was used to construct it. The exact opposite of your challenge here. It's a P=NP problem.
Still, in your above example, the pirates would leave bit 7 as ".", which would at leave halve the number of candidates.
If someone else gets access to that movie and spreads it, should you be held liable?
It's the same as when someone driving your car robs a bank, or uses a gun, registered to you, to commit a crime...
You aren't directly liable. However, you can bet you'll find cops at your door, and needing to answer several tough questions.
Whether this watermark would be enough cause for them to get a warrant, search your home, and seize your computer for forensic analysis, is hard to say.
But if X is a downloaded movie and the watermarking is to be any useful you must be liable...
Not necessarily. They could just put your name on an industry-wide blacklist, which says you're either a pirate, or just can't be trusted to keep your computer safe, and therefore you should be disallowed from purchasing any movies or music in the future.
otherwise you can just say "uuuuh, somebody stole it from my computer... I didn't do nothing... you have to show I did it".
People already say that when accused of just about any crime. Proving you did something illegal is specifically the job of police detectives, and they currently can and do prove criminal activity, even without the aide of watermarks.
I see a future with millions of movie files on the P2P networks that are watermarked "Blockbuster Video".
Actually, you're not far wrong.
I foresee a future with millions of movies on P2P networks with fully in-tact watermarks to show they are registered to one "Jack Mehoff", who resides in Syria.
At least the difficulty level of such illegal copying will be a step or two higher than with current, more actively restrictive, DRM schemes.
1-Buy 2 or more files from them 2-do a bit comparison 3-modify a copy to reflect a random profile of all removed info
this would make any compairson hard.
It could, but not necessarily.
In any kind of serial number, the majority of all of the digits will be common. eg. 10011 10012 10013 etc. In that senario, you'll only see the last digit as a difference, and they can narrow it down to 10 customers. Of course, sequential numbers isn't the best method.
If they can store a few Kbytes over the course of a film (no doubt they can), and designed a good signature algorithm, they could pinpoint the exact 2 copies of the movie that the diff was performed on.
The more copies you have to compare, the harder it would become. But then, you're spending (not insignificant) ammounts of money so you can release a single anonymous illegal copy.
For high frequency components a scale with larger steps can be used as errors in these components are not easilly noticed.
Most codecs discard the majority, if not all of the high frequency components, for the bitrate savings alone.
By picking some of the entries at random and reducing the step size you are going to increase the quality of random parts of the picture.
But re-encoding to a lower bitrate will completely ruin this system, since the highest quality parts will be reduced down to the (median) quality of the rest of the file, destroying all traces.
First of all removing the signature would means you couldn't compute the step sizes, and thus you couldn't correctly decode the file.
Of course, you already explained that small changes to that information would barely be noticable to begin with, so while it couldn't be removed, it could basically be scrambled (by a custom tool), with only minor quality loss, and much more quickly than full reencoding.
Is there a guide to getting the most out of MPEG-1 video?
MPlayer's guide to encoding (with MPEG-4) will give you a good overview of libavcodec's options, and how to get the best quality. Most of which apply directly to MPEG-1 equally as well.
The one big "gotcha" is that the guide recomends *cmp=2, which will make the video extremely blocky, in expecting everyone will use deblocking on playback (which often isn't the case). *cmp=3 is very good.
They were, probably stupidly, encoded using the -qscale option alone to control file size,
Yes, that is decidely... sub-optimal. Just switching to 2-pass encoding will make a world of difference.
That's probably your problem. ffmpeg is automatically setting very frequent keyframes for MPEG-1 (for VCD-compatible hardware decoding), whereas it uses very infrequent keyframes for MPEG-4. You can override this manually (in a lavc config file) or you can use mencoder, which won't "automatically" change settings on you.
the other at 352x234.
Dimentions always need to be divisible by 16. Otherwise, you're just wasting (lots of) bits.
I was not expecting to see lower resolution win out in both MPEG-1 and mpeg4 files.
At such a low bitrate, it's not surprising. Double the bitrate for the (4X) higher resolution and you'll get much-better-looking results.
Right now, the only way to watch DVDs on Linux in most Western countries is breaking the law (i.e. the DMCA or its local equivalent), which is clearly a no-no for most users, including myself.
There's nothing illegal about libdvdcss. The DMCA specifically allows reverse engineering for compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. A hallowed economy sounds pretty good to me...
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/venerable
It is. Many different programs, with different focuses, all expecting information in a completely different format, and plenty of tweaks to get everything to work right.
You obviously weren't paying attention. It's not the standard handful of short shell script. You need extremely large and complex scripts. Think hundreds of 20KB shell scripts, and all the associated hassle maintaining them.
I see. Therefore: Anyone else who is a pro MUST be using all the same programs you do. And because you aren't already using free programs, they must not possibly be able to do the same job.
Either you're a complete fool, or just trolling.
Nicely done. No reasoning. No justification. Just the word of God. No matter what, anything named "Gimp" can't do the things programs named "Photoshop" can.
You really don't need to load an entire file in order to edit it (There are some exceptions, of course)... Which is good, because I would hate to load my entire hard drive into RAM, to make any minor changes to it.
You can stick to loading reasonably small segments of it at a time, and in the case of images, only low-res previews of the entire image if/when needed.
Your advertisement for Photoshop belongs elsewhere.
If this is your only specific complaint, I can quite easily dismiss you by saying that a great many paid professionals don't want or need to handle "56 GB" images.
What theoretical "guys" use is irrelevent.
Everything is still in development, so that list will change. Besides, you aren't even constructively criticising, you're just bitching and whining that proprietary apps are (magically?) better.
You are, and it still is.
This really is a great idea for a distro. In my own experience, I've found that keeping workstation task (web, e-mail, programming, etc) and multimedia tasks (DVR, editing, etc. as well as games...) on seperate systems works out for the best of both tasks. The two have a terrible tendancy to conflict with each other...
One may be working on a job that will take hours, while the other may need a quick reboot ASAP. One may need 99% uptime, while the other serves it's purpose just as well at 95% downtime. One needs quite high-end hardware, latest drivers, and frequent updating of software, while the other is better handled by older, lower-power, more reliable hardware and old, known-good software. One can be tucked away in a corner, while the other often needs to be nearby. etc.
Plus, it's no secret that many multimedia tools are a serious hassle to get up and working in the first place. Different toolkits and widely varying interfaces abound in this space. Good luck trying to INTEGRATE them with each other, on your own. My multimedia system is filled with shell scripts, which do the job pretty well, but aren't very elegant solutions. Doing something in a convoluted way is sometimes quicker and easier than trying to adapt the scripts that, for example, convert between formats for different editing tools.
Not at all. Anyone would love to be able to narrow the suspect list to 10. After that, you start comparing IP addresses, check the accounts for suspicious activity, etc.
And if the same account is used for more than one file, you compare the list of possible candidates, and see EXACTLY which accounts appear in both lists. Now you've narrowed it down to 1.
No, you aren't. They aren't going to make the data completely random. While each copy you have allows you to identify one more byte of the signature, there's still 1.99Kbytes left that you haven't indentified. That means you need a ridiculously large number of copies of each video.
Sounds to me EXACTLY like everything else Microsoft has ever done...
Sure, they'll advertise the millions of things Windows CE can do, but just fail to mention it's ridiculously crippled, and just BARELY fits the most basic definition... "Word Processing" means a crappy equivalent of notepad, with no options and horrible input methods that make it impossible to use even for trivial, one-word notes. "Video player" fails to mention the limited formats, the horrible performance, the awful interface, the lack of any features above bare-bones file playback, etc.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's competitors have infinitely better products, but Microsoft manages to fit more buzzwords into the product release to trick people into believing it's anything but the complete piece of crap it is.
Sorry about the rant... But I see blatantly obviously dishonest crap like this from them just about every day.
It's really much worse than that. For all the complaints, and the long-term rivalry between Sony and Microsoft, they are STILL selling computers only with Windows, and making software for their equipment Windows-only, going out of their way to shut-out Mac and Unix systems.
And with their huge product line-up, and money to invest, they could single-handedly do more harm to Microsoft (by switching to something like Linux on their machines, and making Linux-compatible software for their devices) than the more-often touted small-game players like Dell. Plus, it would probably pay off for them, as they'd have a far better chance of capturing the pro market with Unix workstations and notebooks, preloaded with digital multimedia software, than with the clumsy joke that is Windows' multimedia capabilities.
It is if your locale buys your electricity at wholesale prices, then charges you retail price for any you use.
Price for the wattage should be the main consideration, not effeciency. The cheap, ineffecient solar panels can completely power an entire home, if you happen to have enough roof area. If not, you'll still be saving money, and much less time to breaking even.
But how many of them are also powering all their driving needs off of their solar panel? How many are doing all their cooking, heating, and cooling with solar?
It's definately a big step up from normal solar powered homes.
I'd say they went the wrong way, using hydrogen. Something like flywheels could be used for more energy-effecient electricity storage. And there are several electric cars out there with the range to meet most people's regular driving needs.
100% red herring.
The pirated video would have ONE signature, and they would have to determine which set of signatures was used to construct it. The exact opposite of your challenge here. It's a P=NP problem.
Still, in your above example, the pirates would leave bit 7 as ".", which would at leave halve the number of candidates.
It's the same as when someone driving your car robs a bank, or uses a gun, registered to you, to commit a crime...
You aren't directly liable. However, you can bet you'll find cops at your door, and needing to answer several tough questions.
Whether this watermark would be enough cause for them to get a warrant, search your home, and seize your computer for forensic analysis, is hard to say.
Not necessarily. They could just put your name on an industry-wide blacklist, which says you're either a pirate, or just can't be trusted to keep your computer safe, and therefore you should be disallowed from purchasing any movies or music in the future.
People already say that when accused of just about any crime. Proving you did something illegal is specifically the job of police detectives, and they currently can and do prove criminal activity, even without the aide of watermarks.
Actually, you're not far wrong.
I foresee a future with millions of movies on P2P networks with fully in-tact watermarks to show they are registered to one "Jack Mehoff", who resides in Syria.
At least the difficulty level of such illegal copying will be a step or two higher than with current, more actively restrictive, DRM schemes.
It could, but not necessarily.
In any kind of serial number, the majority of all of the digits will be common. eg. 10011 10012 10013 etc. In that senario, you'll only see the last digit as a difference, and they can narrow it down to 10 customers. Of course, sequential numbers isn't the best method.
If they can store a few Kbytes over the course of a film (no doubt they can), and designed a good signature algorithm, they could pinpoint the exact 2 copies of the movie that the diff was performed on.
The more copies you have to compare, the harder it would become. But then, you're spending (not insignificant) ammounts of money so you can release a single anonymous illegal copy.
Most codecs discard the majority, if not all of the high frequency components, for the bitrate savings alone.
But re-encoding to a lower bitrate will completely ruin this system, since the highest quality parts will be reduced down to the (median) quality of the rest of the file, destroying all traces.
Of course, you already explained that small changes to that information would barely be noticable to begin with, so while it couldn't be removed, it could basically be scrambled (by a custom tool), with only minor quality loss, and much more quickly than full reencoding.
Really? How can a watermark possibly manage to do that?
The VIN numbers on cars hasn't exactly stopped people from re-selling them whenever they feel like it.
MPlayer's guide to encoding (with MPEG-4) will give you a good overview of libavcodec's options, and how to get the best quality. Most of which apply directly to MPEG-1 equally as well.
The one big "gotcha" is that the guide recomends *cmp=2, which will make the video extremely blocky, in expecting everyone will use deblocking on playback (which often isn't the case). *cmp=3 is very good.
Yes, that is decidely... sub-optimal. Just switching to 2-pass encoding will make a world of difference.
That's probably your problem. ffmpeg is automatically setting very frequent keyframes for MPEG-1 (for VCD-compatible hardware decoding), whereas it uses very infrequent keyframes for MPEG-4. You can override this manually (in a lavc config file) or you can use mencoder, which won't "automatically" change settings on you.
Dimentions always need to be divisible by 16. Otherwise, you're just wasting (lots of) bits.
At such a low bitrate, it's not surprising. Double the bitrate for the (4X) higher resolution and you'll get much-better-looking results.
MPEG-1 video is nearly as good as MPEG-4/Divx when encoded with a modern encoder, such as Libavcodec.
At worst, it's still better than VP3/Theora, which was crappy years ago when it was introduced.
That's positively ridiculous. Idiots can put up webpages as easily as experts.
No mention of methodology (which codecs, which coding method, what keyframe settings, etc.), basis for the conclusion (PSNR? Visual? Other?), etc.
Don't count on it. Development is continuing, but slowly.
Still, as slow as it's going, it still might beat Theora to a final/stable release.
There's nothing illegal about libdvdcss. The DMCA specifically allows reverse engineering for compatibility.
Oh yeah, and whatever you do, don't look here: http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_details.
It's ridiculously CPU-intensive, and has terrible quality as well.
Use MPEG-1! It's free, open spec, and works on nearly every video player ever made.
There's nothing illegal about libdvdcss. The DMCA specifically allows reverse engineering for compatibility.
Oh yeah, and whatever you do, don't look here: http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_details.
What socialists like yourself conveniently leave out is that companies are quite effecient at many things.
No, but smaller isn't necessarily any better, either.