I don't know about the rest, but a flash.flv video file will play just fine in mplayer.
No, it won't. Only a tiny subset of FLV features are supported. So, you may get lucky with older FLV files, and others encoded with just the right options, but the vast majority don't work for a damn.
And besides that, you need the SWF plugin to parse the embedded SWF file just to get the URL to the actual FLV file it's embedding. No such nonsense with "real" multimedia formats.
PDF is pretty obviously an open standard, as numerous programs imlement display and conversion to/from PDF. I haven't seen any programs that handle any more than the tiniest subset of SWF yet, and FLV support in libavcodec is currently quite primitive.
It seems on my computer that it's a DRMed WMV file which doesn't work on Linux at all.
No, it's certainly not a DRMed file.
Is it the case that you've tested this file and it worked on 32 bit linux rather than just assuming that it's an unprotected wmv?
32-bit FreeBSD to be exact, but yes. MPlayer handles it just fine. I suggest looking through the output log to find out why your system is having problems with it.
No, I have indeed tried other drivers, and it definately doesn't work at all with any others.
It "works" with older versions of X.org, until you start anything that use the GL or SDL capabilities, at which point the server crashes. With newer versions though, restarting X11, or trying to switch from X to a VT will cause the system to lock-up hard. It's really a mess.
Besides, the Savage chip's performance is so bad that none of this matters. It not only wastes CPU time, but also completely kills the system's responsiveness. Even launching some dumb little program like GAIM freezes everything up for a half second. You don't even want to know how horrid it is when Firefox is trying to scroll a large/complex web page. It's ridiculous that onboard video today should be so utterly lowsy. Even my decade-old ATI Rage 128 card makes the system fly (by comparison).
I actually wonder why that is the case. In other areas (say, Java) you don't see anybody selling something claiming it's Java, when it's not (MS tried and didn't succeed).
The main reason is that ACPI bugs can be worked-around in software (if you know everything there is to know about the hardware and BIOS implementation) and the manufacturer has to write a driver anyhow. So they do a quick, one-off driver that just barely works, and don't care about all the problems that will result from that mindset in the near future.
Maybe the lesson here is to choose your hardware more carefully?
Oh? And where is the list of hardware fully ACPI supported under FreeBSD? If it exists now (which I happen to doubt) it certainly didn't back when I bought all my equipment.
None of this happens to be cheap junk. My systems are all Asus/MSI motherboards, with ATI/NVidia cards, SBLive for sound, etc.
As a side note, it looks like you haven't looked at/etc/rc.suspend and/etc/rc.resume.
No, I know. It looks like you didn't read where I explained that the videocard was the show-stopper.
And before you accuse me of anything else, I've tried with every possible combination of video-related settings in the BIOS, in combination with all video-related sysctl variables. That was necessary to get it to work even with onboard video, and there's just no way any combination works with any AGP card.
S3 (Suspend) doesn't exactly work wonderfully under other operating systems either. It's highly dependant on the motherboard chipset being used, and all attached hardware.
I would be quicker to condem Microsoft if Linux (or FreeBSD preferably) could properly suspend and resume ANY of my systems properly. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
FreeBSD-6.2 was the closest I got... If I pull out my videocard and use the onboard, it actually resumes successfully.
Though the onboard video (Savag) really blows, and I haven't yet found any version of X.org that doesn't regularly crash when using that particular driver.
And both the onboard nic, and my SBlive card stop working, and I have to manually reload the kernel module every time I resume...
And with all of those addeniums, that's the closest I've ever gotten to getting Suspend to work (and being forced to use the onboard video is a complete show-stopper). In fact, the latest snapshot of 7.0 was actually a downgrade, and wouldn't resume from S3 at all.
So the problem can't lie entirely with Microsoft (though they are partly to blame for the extremely lax and often Windows-centric ACPI practices). Hardware manufacturers bare a great deal of the responsibility for making their ACPI implimentations buggy as all hell to begin with... So much so that even Microsoft apparently can't even work-around it.
They are reporting many of the same stories, just not doing it like they're having a root canal done at the same time.
IMHO, the quantitative difference is much more than them "having fun."
They focus attention on more important stories, as opposed to CNN watching babies falling down wells, celebrity interviews, and all the rest of that crapfest.
They actually do a good job of countering arguments, rather than just letting some guy say the world is flat, and moving on... This includes reading quotes or showing clips that directly contradict what the person is claiming. It's absolutely insane that it's considered "news" to just feed the public press releases, and not do ANY research (or even critical thinking) at all about the stories of the day.
It's funny that the truth gets modded "-1 troll", while an idiot that is completely off-topic and doesn't even read what he's quoted gets modded up to +4.
Would you expect Dell to give the source to every program installed on it's computers to any customer on demand?
If the hardware and software are inseperable, and I'm BILLIONS of dollars for the equipment, you can be damn sure I expect the source code to all related software.
Re:If you've ever seen how fast a fire moves...
on
Arson Science Rewritten
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· Score: 0, Troll
I know there was a case a few years ago where an "arsonist" in TX was executed for having killed his family, and within less than a year it was established that he was innocent.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in the US, there hasn't been a single case where an executed man has later been proven innocent. Even the most fervent anti-death penalty advocates don't dispute that simple fact. All claims that suggest so, are based on pure speculation.
Can you even remember the world before Google? (It was only five years ago, after all.)
Vividly... Searches for Hippopotamuses turned up porn. Searches for C++ turned up porn. Searches for Slashdot turned up porn...
Other than the porn, there were dozens upon dozens of pointless hits for sites that only in-passing included the search term you wanted, and perhaps not even that, as search engine databases were often years old, and sites completely changed in that time. What's more, there was never any spell-checker, so with a trivial mistake, you could be wasting all that time with the wrong term, and never find what you want.
Finding anything was laborious and extremely time consuming. Now with Google, almost ALL search engines have raised their standards near the Google level (alltheweb seems to be somewhat of an exception) and now only a tiny fraction of searches turn up page after page of pointless crap.
However, Google doesn't seem to be improving much these days, while there are obviously other ideas to be explored. On vague or expansive subjects (or just if you aren't particularly good at searching) Clusty tends to be a better bet, as it automatically categorizes your results for you, allowing you to trivially easily narrow them down... much moreso than if you just included additional categorizing terms in the search.
Can you imagine the world without the Web? (It was only about 10 years ago.)
Yes... fondly. Links neatly grouped together in the same spot on every page, not in colors that blend in with the background, in tiny font sizes, or hidden in buggy, inconsistent javascript sub-sub-sub menus.
No god awful color schemes, or Flash-only sites. No sites that have huge columns on the left and right sides (with almost nothing useful in them) that squish the center column (content) down to one-word-per-line (I'm looking at you, Slashdot).
Never a single site that depended on your screen resolution (now all but 0.01% of websites are utterly unusable in 640x480 or below).
No cookies, no javascript, no background images, no BLINK element, no pop-up windows, etc. To make a site, you actually needed CONTENT, not overindulgent designers.
DVDs promised to be just like CDs - just avoid scratching them and they'll be good forever, [...] There's no such difference between DVD and HD/BR.
Actually, you just mentioned the difference... Blu-ray discs have a scratch-proof coating, so you no longer have to worry about damaging them.
No difference I can see on my existing (480p) TV, no difference in format. No reason at all to change.
No kidding. Nobody would be stupid enough to suggest people without HDTVs upgrade to an HD format. I can't even guess where you got the idea that you were a potential customer.
so I can get hiqh quality video and DTS audio and multiple commentaries and all the bonus features without swapping discs then there will be a difference in kind.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD do exactly that. The include support for DTS, as well as higher quality lossless codecs, and they are fully intended to include significantly more extras.
You definately don't need to increase storage by a factor of 10 to do that. Video resolution has an inverse relationship with bitrate, so you can have 6X the resolution, at around 2X the bitrate, and leave more than a full DVD worth of space for whatever extras you might want.
The percentage of people who benefit from blu-ray or HD-DVD (users of HD TVs with decent home cinema setups and expendable money to buy everything they already bought on DVD) is considerably less than the percentage of people who benefitted from the upgrade to DVD from VHS
Many people have HDTVs, 99% of those that don't, will in the next couple years. Nobody expects anyone to buy an HDTV just so they can watch highdef discs.
So, with that, the barrier to entry is exactly the cost of the player... About $300 to $500 RIGHT NOW, and no doubt much lower in a couple years.
It's also ironic that with VHS to DVD, it was somewhat necessary to re-buy your movies on the new format, but it absolutely IS NOT with HD-DVD/Blu-ray, which can play standard DVDs perfectly well.
Let's not forget that when DVD players came out, most people didn't have the S-Video inputs on their TVs (remember RF converters everywhere?), or surround-sound systems. So requiring "decent home cinema setups" is just as much nonsense now, as it was when DVDs came out.
I can barely tell the difference between a DVD and a good rip which is encoded to half that resolution.
Well:
Well the key point is that you CAN tell the difference between the two to begin with. Highdef is not 2X the resolution, but 6X, so you're SURE to be able to tell the difference.
You really need a higher resolution display to judge this, NOT better eyes... On my 26" HDTV, I can see all the MPEG-2 compression artifacts which I would swear couldn't possibly be there, when watched with a standard def TV. Low-res TVs filter/blur/smooth the picture so much that it masks detail. Not so on HDTVs, or computer monitors.
It tried to push out its proprietary format with the MiniDisc, and it failed miserably. It tried to push out its proprietary format with UMD, and it failed miserably.
...it tried to push out its proprietary format with the Memory Stick, and it... Whoops! That one is doing quite well.
Now, it is trying to push out its proprietary format with Blu-ray.
Blu-ray is really no more proprietary than HD-DVD (or Memory Stick for that matter).
Isn't the decreasing cost of increased broadband bandwidth and increased hard disk space will eventually make HD disc formats obsolete?
"Eventually" being the key word. You've got an absolute minimum of 10 years+ before that could potentially happen, and it's more likely to take even longer.
In the mean time, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray will be adding more layers, pushing that date even further off into the future.
I'd be perfectly happy to have a Chinese EVD player/recorder for my HD material,
No, you wouldn't.
EVD is a glorified revision of DVDs (IMHO) 8 years too late.
The AVS video codec used is very computationally intensive, while still being (at best) somewhat lower quality than MPEG-2. It is used in lieu of other better codecs for Chinese propoganda purposes, and is completely impractical otherwise.
EVD (AT BEST) will be lucky to become the equivalent of the VCD format, in the next generation of cheap Chinese DVD player.
Re:What about the rest of the world?
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
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· Score: 1
As a Brit with only a limited understanding of how the interweb works, how does net neutrality affect me? If this bill had happened, how would it affect my internet experience?
Well, it would make internet access more expensive in the US, so you would indirectly be affected by that in any number of ways. No doubt US-based websites would do more aggressive advertising on their sites, and you'd see fewer and fewer personal or non-profit websites, as the costs become prohibitive.
If you make calls to VoIP customers in the US, you may have more drop-outs. If you play online games, you'll find the US users have higher delays, etc.
Though it's possible, I really doubt they'll extend it to the backbone, so traffic from and to someone outside the US, that just happens to go through the US, shouldn't be affected.
Slashdot Mirror
Videos have been embedded in browsers for more than a decade before FLV even existed.
On Linux/BSD: mplayerplug-in, plugger, and numerous others work perfectly well.
No, it won't. Only a tiny subset of FLV features are supported. So, you may get lucky with older FLV files, and others encoded with just the right options, but the vast majority don't work for a damn.
And besides that, you need the SWF plugin to parse the embedded SWF file just to get the URL to the actual FLV file it's embedding. No such nonsense with "real" multimedia formats.
FLV, not SWF.
PDF is pretty obviously an open standard, as numerous programs imlement display and conversion to/from PDF. I haven't seen any programs that handle any more than the tiniest subset of SWF yet, and FLV support in libavcodec is currently quite primitive.
No, it's certainly not a DRMed file.
32-bit FreeBSD to be exact, but yes. MPlayer handles it just fine. I suggest looking through the output log to find out why your system is having problems with it.
No, I have indeed tried other drivers, and it definately doesn't work at all with any others.
It "works" with older versions of X.org, until you start anything that use the GL or SDL capabilities, at which point the server crashes. With newer versions though, restarting X11, or trying to switch from X to a VT will cause the system to lock-up hard. It's really a mess.
Besides, the Savage chip's performance is so bad that none of this matters. It not only wastes CPU time, but also completely kills the system's responsiveness. Even launching some dumb little program like GAIM freezes everything up for a half second. You don't even want to know how horrid it is when Firefox is trying to scroll a large/complex web page. It's ridiculous that onboard video today should be so utterly lowsy. Even my decade-old ATI Rage 128 card makes the system fly (by comparison).
The main reason is that ACPI bugs can be worked-around in software (if you know everything there is to know about the hardware and BIOS implementation) and the manufacturer has to write a driver anyhow. So they do a quick, one-off driver that just barely works, and don't care about all the problems that will result from that mindset in the near future.
Oh? And where is the list of hardware fully ACPI supported under FreeBSD? If it exists now (which I happen to doubt) it certainly didn't back when I bought all my equipment.
None of this happens to be cheap junk. My systems are all Asus/MSI motherboards, with ATI/NVidia cards, SBLive for sound, etc.
No, I know. It looks like you didn't read where I explained that the videocard was the show-stopper.
And before you accuse me of anything else, I've tried with every possible combination of video-related settings in the BIOS, in combination with all video-related sysctl variables. That was necessary to get it to work even with onboard video, and there's just no way any combination works with any AGP card.
S3 (Suspend) doesn't exactly work wonderfully under other operating systems either. It's highly dependant on the motherboard chipset being used, and all attached hardware.
I would be quicker to condem Microsoft if Linux (or FreeBSD preferably) could properly suspend and resume ANY of my systems properly. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
FreeBSD-6.2 was the closest I got... If I pull out my videocard and use the onboard, it actually resumes successfully.
Though the onboard video (Savag) really blows, and I haven't yet found any version of X.org that doesn't regularly crash when using that particular driver.
And both the onboard nic, and my SBlive card stop working, and I have to manually reload the kernel module every time I resume...
And with all of those addeniums, that's the closest I've ever gotten to getting Suspend to work (and being forced to use the onboard video is a complete show-stopper). In fact, the latest snapshot of 7.0 was actually a downgrade, and wouldn't resume from S3 at all.
So the problem can't lie entirely with Microsoft (though they are partly to blame for the extremely lax and often Windows-centric ACPI practices). Hardware manufacturers bare a great deal of the responsibility for making their ACPI implimentations buggy as all hell to begin with... So much so that even Microsoft apparently can't even work-around it.
No, actually it works perfectly.
And on what evidence are you basing this conclusion?
All the non-RIAA music I've come across has been significantly worse, at best.
How could NOT getting paid to make music, possibly make the music any better?
IMHO, the quantitative difference is much more than them "having fun."
They focus attention on more important stories, as opposed to CNN watching babies falling down wells, celebrity interviews, and all the rest of that crapfest.
They actually do a good job of countering arguments, rather than just letting some guy say the world is flat, and moving on... This includes reading quotes or showing clips that directly contradict what the person is claiming. It's absolutely insane that it's considered "news" to just feed the public press releases, and not do ANY research (or even critical thinking) at all about the stories of the day.
Why? Because Flash is now considered less proprietary than Windows Media?
Guess which one works in MPlayer, Xine, VLC, ffplay, GStreamer, etc., and which doesn't?
It's funny that the truth gets modded "-1 troll", while an idiot that is completely off-topic and doesn't even read what he's quoted gets modded up to +4.
If the hardware and software are inseperable, and I'm BILLIONS of dollars for the equipment, you can be damn sure I expect the source code to all related software.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in the US, there hasn't been a single case where an executed man has later been proven innocent. Even the most fervent anti-death penalty advocates don't dispute that simple fact. All claims that suggest so, are based on pure speculation.
Vividly... Searches for Hippopotamuses turned up porn. Searches for C++ turned up porn. Searches for Slashdot turned up porn...
Other than the porn, there were dozens upon dozens of pointless hits for sites that only in-passing included the search term you wanted, and perhaps not even that, as search engine databases were often years old, and sites completely changed in that time. What's more, there was never any spell-checker, so with a trivial mistake, you could be wasting all that time with the wrong term, and never find what you want.
Finding anything was laborious and extremely time consuming. Now with Google, almost ALL search engines have raised their standards near the Google level (alltheweb seems to be somewhat of an exception) and now only a tiny fraction of searches turn up page after page of pointless crap.
However, Google doesn't seem to be improving much these days, while there are obviously other ideas to be explored. On vague or expansive subjects (or just if you aren't particularly good at searching) Clusty tends to be a better bet, as it automatically categorizes your results for you, allowing you to trivially easily narrow them down... much moreso than if you just included additional categorizing terms in the search.
Yes... fondly. Links neatly grouped together in the same spot on every page, not in colors that blend in with the background, in tiny font sizes, or hidden in buggy, inconsistent javascript sub-sub-sub menus.
No god awful color schemes, or Flash-only sites. No sites that have huge columns on the left and right sides (with almost nothing useful in them) that squish the center column (content) down to one-word-per-line (I'm looking at you, Slashdot).
Never a single site that depended on your screen resolution (now all but 0.01% of websites are utterly unusable in 640x480 or below).
No cookies, no javascript, no background images, no BLINK element, no pop-up windows, etc. To make a site, you actually needed CONTENT, not overindulgent designers.
Actually, you just mentioned the difference... Blu-ray discs have a scratch-proof coating, so you no longer have to worry about damaging them.
No kidding. Nobody would be stupid enough to suggest people without HDTVs upgrade to an HD format. I can't even guess where you got the idea that you were a potential customer.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD do exactly that. The include support for DTS, as well as higher quality lossless codecs, and they are fully intended to include significantly more extras.
You definately don't need to increase storage by a factor of 10 to do that. Video resolution has an inverse relationship with bitrate, so you can have 6X the resolution, at around 2X the bitrate, and leave more than a full DVD worth of space for whatever extras you might want.
Many people have HDTVs, 99% of those that don't, will in the next couple years. Nobody expects anyone to buy an HDTV just so they can watch highdef discs.
So, with that, the barrier to entry is exactly the cost of the player... About $300 to $500 RIGHT NOW, and no doubt much lower in a couple years.
It's also ironic that with VHS to DVD, it was somewhat necessary to re-buy your movies on the new format, but it absolutely IS NOT with HD-DVD/Blu-ray, which can play standard DVDs perfectly well.
Let's not forget that when DVD players came out, most people didn't have the S-Video inputs on their TVs (remember RF converters everywhere?), or surround-sound systems. So requiring "decent home cinema setups" is just as much nonsense now, as it was when DVDs came out.
You're right, it's certainly not weak... It's just moronic.
Because all the NEW movies you buy can be in highdef.
It's ironic that people like yourself use this argument, because it was TRUE with VHS to DVD, but it utterly untrue with DVD to HD-DVD/Blu-ray.
Well:
Well the key point is that you CAN tell the difference between the two to begin with. Highdef is not 2X the resolution, but 6X, so you're SURE to be able to tell the difference.
You really need a higher resolution display to judge this, NOT better eyes... On my 26" HDTV, I can see all the MPEG-2 compression artifacts which I would swear couldn't possibly be there, when watched with a standard def TV. Low-res TVs filter/blur/smooth the picture so much that it masks detail. Not so on HDTVs, or computer monitors.
VHS to DVD was a 2-3X improvement.
DVD to highdef is a 6X improvement.
You're right, we should have bought-in YEARS AGO.
So... You're still using CDs?
Whoops! That one is doing quite well.
Blu-ray is really no more proprietary than HD-DVD (or Memory Stick for that matter).
"Eventually" being the key word. You've got an absolute minimum of 10 years+ before that could potentially happen, and it's more likely to take even longer.
In the mean time, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray will be adding more layers, pushing that date even further off into the future.
No, you wouldn't.
EVD is a glorified revision of DVDs (IMHO) 8 years too late.
The AVS video codec used is very computationally intensive, while still being (at best) somewhat lower quality than MPEG-2. It is used in lieu of other better codecs for Chinese propoganda purposes, and is completely impractical otherwise.
EVD (AT BEST) will be lucky to become the equivalent of the VCD format, in the next generation of cheap Chinese DVD player.
Well, it would make internet access more expensive in the US, so you would indirectly be affected by that in any number of ways. No doubt US-based websites would do more aggressive advertising on their sites, and you'd see fewer and fewer personal or non-profit websites, as the costs become prohibitive.
If you make calls to VoIP customers in the US, you may have more drop-outs. If you play online games, you'll find the US users have higher delays, etc.
Though it's possible, I really doubt they'll extend it to the backbone, so traffic from and to someone outside the US, that just happens to go through the US, shouldn't be affected.