When I was in the emergency room with chest pain and they handed me a form, with a place for my SSN on it, and I asked if I had to give it, and they said "you won't be seen until you fill it out," what would you have done?
I would have said, "No problem! My SS# is 1234-56-7890."
You can be less obvious about it if you like, but I find being extremely vocal and obvious about such issues works better in the long run.
This isn't a court where you have been sworn-in. You can lie your ass off, Mr. Smith, and it's still illegal for them to turn you away. Besides, few have any way to verify it anyhow.
The picture quality is not that much greater than regular DVD.
Right... 6X higher resolution isn't that much...
(1920*1080) / (720*480) = 6.00
You need an HD TV to take advantage of the higher resolution, but few people have them
And you needed S-video and 5.1 channel surround-sounce recievers to take advantage of the quality improvements of DVDs, but few people had them when DVDs were first comming out.
Many TVs had no S-Video port and people were not going to spend $hundreds to buy another TV for marginal picture improvement. Those that did have an S-Video port have only one and that was being used by the VCR, cable or satellite box.
Using the numbers in that article, 1080i is equivalent to 648p.
You can't use a simple number to adequately compare interlaced and progressive material, no matter what that number happens to be.
During low-motion scenes, interlaced 1080i video will look just as good as a progressive 1080p picture, minus a few possible artifacts of spacial aliasing.
During very fast motion, 1080i can potentially look as bad as half the (vertical) resolution, although it will still look as if it is double the frame-rate (540p60) due to the interlacing. That's the reason why 1080i is most popular, even when progressive modes are available, and 1080p30 would use somewhat less bandwidth.
That's why many people prefer 720p to 1080i.
720p also happens to be 60fps, twice the frame-rate of 1080. The smoother motion, and lack of aliasing due to interlacing has more to do with it than resolution.
In fact, you go back and say the number is actually 864p, which is higher res than 720p, so I can't see how you can support this statement at all.
Your comparison is rather one-sided. Interlacing will affect the vertical resolution, but not the horizontal. Calling it 648p (or 864p) makes it sound as if 720p is almost as high-res, when in fact, the width is still 50% larger than 720p, making even 648p higher res than 720p.
Does anyone remember the format war between DCC and MiniDisc? While each did get their adopters neither really faired well in the overall market, since nobody saw real reasons to adopt them.
Why do people always tout audio as examples?
99% of people CAN'T HEAR any sound improvements over what CDs can produce. It's at the upper limit of your ears. Your eyes, however, have a LONG, LONG way to go.
MiniDisc and DCC, in particular, were no worse sounding that CDs, AT BEST. Their quality was actually lower than CDs, not higher. That would be like introducing SVHS now that DVDs have caught on, and asking whether it will catch-on.
Drop the DRM and the region encoding and I will be willing to consider them.
Funny, I bet you have plenty of DVDs, despite their DRM and region encoding. Have you forgotten about the/. boycott already?
I got it four or five years ago, when I was making a multimedia PC out of a Shuttle XPC case. The thing is DAMN quiet.
I had my nice, quiet Samsung drive for about 2 years before it turned into a buzzsaw.
They use a lot of different methods to keep noise down, but the one that would be the most benefital... allowing you to set it to a lower speed... is only NOW being introduced in their latest DVD drives.
Even when it was new, my Samsung DVD drive would work wonderfully 9 out of 10 times, but on the 10th disc, it would be louder than any other drive I've owned. I found ejecting, cleaning, and reinserting the DVD, sometimes 5+ times, could usually take care of that, but it's a ridiculous ammount of hassle.
But what really bothered me about the 16X speed was that it uses significant power and made the DVDs seriously hot after watching a disc for a couple hours. That can't be good for the DVDs, or the computer the drive is in.
So, I actually went BACK to my Pioneer DVD drive I had before I bought the Samsung. The Pioneer drive was loud, and did not allow setting the speed with the normal calls (hdparm) BUT the Windows software they offer does toggle it between 16X and 3X, and it will store that speed in the firmware, so you can then put it back and use it in your Linux machine after.
Even if Samsung fixed the noise, speed, and quality problems, it wouldn't be enough to make me buy a new drive from them... The Pioneer DVD drive is slot-loading, which is so much better than a tray loader that it's hard to describe. It takes you from struggling with a tray for 30 seconds for every disc, to inserting and removing discs before you've even had to think about it.
I just wish Pioneer would make their drives a hair quieter (and speed-setable under Linux), then it would be as silent as the Samsung drive was when at it's best. Still, I'm happy with it, as is.
so I think a feasible cost for a MythTV media PC today is 400 GBP or about US$800. Not quite US$300, admittedly, but less than your US$1000-2000 estimate.
But the subject isn't about a MythTV DVR at all. It's ONLY about playing DVDs, so you can omit the TV tuner cards, and go with the smallest hard drive you can find. You also don't need an infrared keyboard/mouse, just a simple remote.
I only watch DVDs. they have menus, I want a GUI for them to use the features.
A GUI has nothing at all to do with DVD menus. Your DVD player certainly doesn't have a GUI at all.
last time I checked Mplayer still did not have DVD menus,
It's not officially part of MPlayer yet, but the dvdnav patch has been working fine for probably 6 months now.
Besides, I just prefer MPlayer. You certainly can use Xine via a remote control quite easily, if you prefer that over MPlayer.
and took long to find the CCS keys
It's been 4+ years since that was the situation. Unless you have explictly disabled mplayer's built-in CSS support (dvdkit2) when you compiled it, DVDs are decrypted instantly.
it was 4 years ago when i started messing with ALSA's SPDIF output. Thanks but no thanks,
I'm not sure what "messing" you were doing 4 years ago. These days, it's just a question of telling the player to use hwac3 output (for AC3 or DTS), and everything just works.
as i said, said machine was a gaming rig.
As I said: PEBKAC. It's a terrible idea, all around. PC gaming and movie viewing are far too different to coexist without such "issues".
as soon as Linux has a decent DVD player [...], and it support native HDTV modes and SPDIF optical out, I will put one together
My contracts with Verizon, Earthlink, Charter, etc., had no such provisions. I just finished reading through Comcast's because of another post in this thread, and it makes no mention of throttling either.
So, it seems it is now up to YOU to show a case of an ISP contract where they DO explicitly mentioned throttling.
Strange but last time I looked there wasn't a guarantee of service in any ISP contract
There's a huge difference between lack of a guarantee (best effort delivery), and actively impeding the service.
Besides that, no matter what the contract says, they are still legally obligated to uphold the terms they've advertised, which means 5Mbits/sec (or whichever speed).
$300 for a media center PC sounds like a great deal. Do you have a link to where I can buy one at that price?
I never said anything about Windows Media Center, if that's what you're implying. There's no reason at all you would need or want it.
For a PC that can playback DVDs, you can use an incredibly low-end CPU, motherboard, RAM, etc. Anything above 400MHz should be fine. I'll leave it to you to price that out.
The IR remote control will go for about $15, and an extremely good videocard can be had for well under $100. It gets somewhat more pricey if you want HDTV playback, but that's really not in contention here.
If you are really looking for a multimedia experience, and audio/video quality is important, the first step is getting rid of all the fans.
Not at all. A $20 investment in some decent fans, and you won't hear them unless your ear is pressed up against the case. Put it in your multimedia cabinet with other components, and you're set. The DVD drive is going to be far louder than anything else.
Recent hard drives don't have the high-pitched whine they used-to. The only noise you get now is from the heads seeking, and that's easily adjustable in software: hdparm -M 128/dev/hda
-my wife hated to mess around with my pc just to watch a disc -i did not find a decent remote control -playback software was a lot more complicated than the one the DVD player has
All these are PEBKAC errors...
Buy an IR reciever for $15, and use it with ANY REMOTE you have, to control your PC (just configure LIRC for it).
Use MPlayer (a GUI would just get in the way).
Then just write a script that will start playing your DVD when you press a button on the remote... One that will open your filemanager to the folder with all your videos, etc.
A beginner can put it all together in a couple days. Someone who has done it before can set it up in a couple hours.
- problems started after a driver upgrade (spdif sound disappeared on my ASUS A8n SLI after installing recent NFORCE drivers)...
Why did you even want to upgrade your drivers? Once you get it working, leave it alone. As long as your doing it with something non-Windows, it will continue to chug along for years to come, if you don't fool with it.
It uses XVMC motion compensation to cut down on CPU usage
Actually, XWMC is a funny thing. With as fast of a CPU as you've got, I fully expect XVMC is using up more CPU time than software decoding would (assuming non-highdef material).
and the quality blows anything else I've seen out of the water.
The quality has nothing to do with XVMC, and everything to do with exactly what this article is all about (videocard and decoding software)...
In the eyes of the ISP, they're selling you a 3Mb pipe for burst traffic,
It's a shame their ads and the terms in the contract THEY wrote-up doesn't have any mention of this inconvenient little fact...
The average person uses nowhere near the bandwidth of his connection, and that allows them to charge cheaper rates by overselling.
It also allows them to charge MORE EXPENSIVE rates, as the people using almost no bandwidth are being charged far in excess of what they need. If ISPs would just offer cheaper, lower-speed packages (perhaps with high-speed burst), there would be NO PROBLEM.
When your business model is a problem, you don't start violating your contracts to maintain that model.
People bitch that ISPs "oversubscribe", and that we can't really deliver our advertised bandwidth to everyone all of the time. This is true, but how do you think we manage to sell people 5Mb connections for $40/month? Do you know how much 5Mb of bandwidth costs and ISP?
I know it sounds insenitive, but it really needs to be said: "It's not my job to make sure your business model turns a profit."
Your the one in control. You write-up the contract any way you wish, and the customers' only choice is to accept or refuse. If you aren't able to provide 5Mbit connections, then clearly make it a point in your contract that you're limiting them to a maximum ammount of throughput, or something similar.
Honor your contracts, don't complain that you can't. Making contracts "on the margin," so to speak, gets lots of people thrown in prison all the time, when things don't go their way.
What's more... singling out bittorrent, or P2P in general, is insane. The same things can be done with http, ftp, etc. If you're going to restrict traffic, at least do it in a sane way, which applies to ALL the bits, and doesn't unfairly penalize one protocol/technology over another.
In otherwords (as the article suggests), nothing that you can't get out of a typical PC's video card with the right settings on ffdshow.
Not quite. ffdshow has the best inverse telecine filter around (pullup), but no motion-adaptive deinterlacer, I'm afraid. mcdeint was only recently introduced to MPlayer (ffdshow uses mplayer filters) and it is completely unoptimized as of yet, so you only get 2-3fps with it.
On a *nix system (using mplayer directly), the situation is better. You can use tfields (with -vo gl) to output interlaced (and mixed telecined) material in absolutely 100% perfect quality to a progressive display (ie. 30fps interlaced material on a 60fps screen).
Sadly, that is a bit of a gap in mplayer/ffdshow's capabilities.
including the maximum possible sales tax payable in the region advertised.
So nation-wide adverts should be at a distinct disadvantage to local adverts?
If you're advertising in a state with no taxs, your quoted price will be MUCH lower than those advertised across the entire country, and forced to quote the "maximum possible sales tax" (probably 10% higher).
The government already stepped in and created the monopolies that the telcos enjoy.
They didn't really CREATE them... that's why it's called a "natural" monopoly. You can't have 500 phone companies getting permission to install telephone poles in your yard, digging up the roads, etc.
The problem isn't that it's a monopoly... The problem is that the government refuses to treat it like the monopoly it is, and regulate it accordingly.
so the real price comparison is the cost of the media PC + the graphics card vs. the high end DVD player.
Gee... A $300 computer vs. a $4000 high-end DVD player...
You're right, it's a much tougher call that way. Particularly since the computer can play digital videos of any kind, from any source, and not just DVDs.
So you're an ignorant fool now for asking for scientific verification before claiming something is better?
When the difference is overwhelmingly obvious, yes. Particularly when you aren't asking for any such thing where VHS is involved.
That's doubly true when you've already stated: "the quality difference from DVDs -> HD-DVD/Blu-ray isn't as great". Backtracking now, and saying you want confirmation, is a pretty transparent move.
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I would have said, "No problem! My SS# is 1234-56-7890."
You can be less obvious about it if you like, but I find being extremely vocal and obvious about such issues works better in the long run.
This isn't a court where you have been sworn-in. You can lie your ass off, Mr. Smith, and it's still illegal for them to turn you away. Besides, few have any way to verify it anyhow.
Right... 6X higher resolution isn't that much...
(1920*1080) / (720*480) = 6.00
And you needed S-video and 5.1 channel surround-sounce recievers to take advantage of the quality improvements of DVDs, but few people had them when DVDs were first comming out.
Many TVs had no S-Video port and people were not going to spend $hundreds to buy another TV for marginal picture improvement. Those that did have an S-Video port have only one and that was being used by the VCR, cable or satellite box.
You can't use a simple number to adequately compare interlaced and progressive material, no matter what that number happens to be.
During low-motion scenes, interlaced 1080i video will look just as good as a progressive 1080p picture, minus a few possible artifacts of spacial aliasing.
During very fast motion, 1080i can potentially look as bad as half the (vertical) resolution, although it will still look as if it is double the frame-rate (540p60) due to the interlacing. That's the reason why 1080i is most popular, even when progressive modes are available, and 1080p30 would use somewhat less bandwidth.
720p also happens to be 60fps, twice the frame-rate of 1080. The smoother motion, and lack of aliasing due to interlacing has more to do with it than resolution.
In fact, you go back and say the number is actually 864p, which is higher res than 720p, so I can't see how you can support this statement at all.
Your comparison is rather one-sided. Interlacing will affect the vertical resolution, but not the horizontal. Calling it 648p (or 864p) makes it sound as if 720p is almost as high-res, when in fact, the width is still 50% larger than 720p, making even 648p higher res than 720p.
Source? I have a very hard time believing that. Even the smallest CRT HDTVs are 1080i.
Why do people always tout audio as examples?
99% of people CAN'T HEAR any sound improvements over what CDs can produce. It's at the upper limit of your ears. Your eyes, however, have a LONG, LONG way to go.
MiniDisc and DCC, in particular, were no worse sounding that CDs, AT BEST. Their quality was actually lower than CDs, not higher. That would be like introducing SVHS now that DVDs have caught on, and asking whether it will catch-on.
Funny, I bet you have plenty of DVDs, despite their DRM and region encoding. Have you forgotten about the
I had my nice, quiet Samsung drive for about 2 years before it turned into a buzzsaw.
They use a lot of different methods to keep noise down, but the one that would be the most benefital... allowing you to set it to a lower speed... is only NOW being introduced in their latest DVD drives.
Even when it was new, my Samsung DVD drive would work wonderfully 9 out of 10 times, but on the 10th disc, it would be louder than any other drive I've owned. I found ejecting, cleaning, and reinserting the DVD, sometimes 5+ times, could usually take care of that, but it's a ridiculous ammount of hassle.
But what really bothered me about the 16X speed was that it uses significant power and made the DVDs seriously hot after watching a disc for a couple hours. That can't be good for the DVDs, or the computer the drive is in.
So, I actually went BACK to my Pioneer DVD drive I had before I bought the Samsung. The Pioneer drive was loud, and did not allow setting the speed with the normal calls (hdparm) BUT the Windows software they offer does toggle it between 16X and 3X, and it will store that speed in the firmware, so you can then put it back and use it in your Linux machine after.
Even if Samsung fixed the noise, speed, and quality problems, it wouldn't be enough to make me buy a new drive from them... The Pioneer DVD drive is slot-loading, which is so much better than a tray loader that it's hard to describe. It takes you from struggling with a tray for 30 seconds for every disc, to inserting and removing discs before you've even had to think about it.
I just wish Pioneer would make their drives a hair quieter (and speed-setable under Linux), then it would be as silent as the Samsung drive was when at it's best. Still, I'm happy with it, as is.
But the subject isn't about a MythTV DVR at all. It's ONLY about playing DVDs, so you can omit the TV tuner cards, and go with the smallest hard drive you can find. You also don't need an infrared keyboard/mouse, just a simple remote.
A GUI has nothing at all to do with DVD menus. Your DVD player certainly doesn't have a GUI at all.
It's not officially part of MPlayer yet, but the dvdnav patch has been working fine for probably 6 months now.
Besides, I just prefer MPlayer. You certainly can use Xine via a remote control quite easily, if you prefer that over MPlayer.
It's been 4+ years since that was the situation. Unless you have explictly disabled mplayer's built-in CSS support (dvdkit2) when you compiled it, DVDs are decrypted instantly.
I'm not sure what "messing" you were doing 4 years ago. These days, it's just a question of telling the player to use hwac3 output (for AC3 or DTS), and everything just works.
As I said: PEBKAC. It's a terrible idea, all around. PC gaming and movie viewing are far too different to coexist without such "issues".
You're a few years late.
My contracts with Verizon, Earthlink, Charter, etc., had no such provisions. I just finished reading through Comcast's because of another post in this thread, and it makes no mention of throttling either.
So, it seems it is now up to YOU to show a case of an ISP contract where they DO explicitly mentioned throttling.
There's a huge difference between lack of a guarantee (best effort delivery), and actively impeding the service.
Besides that, no matter what the contract says, they are still legally obligated to uphold the terms they've advertised, which means 5Mbits/sec (or whichever speed).
(ignoring the rest of your trolling...)
I never said anything about Windows Media Center, if that's what you're implying. There's no reason at all you would need or want it.
For a PC that can playback DVDs, you can use an incredibly low-end CPU, motherboard, RAM, etc. Anything above 400MHz should be fine. I'll leave it to you to price that out.
The IR remote control will go for about $15, and an extremely good videocard can be had for well under $100. It gets somewhat more pricey if you want HDTV playback, but that's really not in contention here.
Ah yes, the Darwin Awards. The people issuing them, and the people that believe the stories, are the REAL morons.
Not at all. A $20 investment in some decent fans, and you won't hear them unless your ear is pressed up against the case. Put it in your multimedia cabinet with other components, and you're set. The DVD drive is going to be far louder than anything else.
Recent hard drives don't have the high-pitched whine they used-to. The only noise you get now is from the heads seeking, and that's easily adjustable in software: hdparm -M 128
All these are PEBKAC errors...
Buy an IR reciever for $15, and use it with ANY REMOTE you have, to control your PC (just configure LIRC for it).
Use MPlayer (a GUI would just get in the way).
Then just write a script that will start playing your DVD when you press a button on the remote... One that will open your filemanager to the folder with all your videos, etc.
A beginner can put it all together in a couple days. Someone who has done it before can set it up in a couple hours.
Why did you even want to upgrade your drivers? Once you get it working, leave it alone. As long as your doing it with something non-Windows, it will continue to chug along for years to come, if you don't fool with it.
PEBKAC
Actually, XWMC is a funny thing. With as fast of a CPU as you've got, I fully expect XVMC is using up more CPU time than software decoding would (assuming non-highdef material).
The quality has nothing to do with XVMC, and everything to do with exactly what this article is all about (videocard and decoding software)...
It's a shame their ads and the terms in the contract THEY wrote-up doesn't have any mention of this inconvenient little fact...
It also allows them to charge MORE EXPENSIVE rates, as the people using almost no bandwidth are being charged far in excess of what they need. If ISPs would just offer cheaper, lower-speed packages (perhaps with high-speed burst), there would be NO PROBLEM.
When your business model is a problem, you don't start violating your contracts to maintain that model.
Not at all. Who says they can only sell "Unlimited" throughput at a specific maximum bandwidth.
That's the business/advertising model they WANT, not something they are limited to.
I know it sounds insenitive, but it really needs to be said: "It's not my job to make sure your business model turns a profit."
Your the one in control. You write-up the contract any way you wish, and the customers' only choice is to accept or refuse. If you aren't able to provide 5Mbit connections, then clearly make it a point in your contract that you're limiting them to a maximum ammount of throughput, or something similar.
Honor your contracts, don't complain that you can't. Making contracts "on the margin," so to speak, gets lots of people thrown in prison all the time, when things don't go their way.
What's more... singling out bittorrent, or P2P in general, is insane. The same things can be done with http, ftp, etc. If you're going to restrict traffic, at least do it in a sane way, which applies to ALL the bits, and doesn't unfairly penalize one protocol/technology over another.
Not quite. ffdshow has the best inverse telecine filter around (pullup), but no motion-adaptive deinterlacer, I'm afraid. mcdeint was only recently introduced to MPlayer (ffdshow uses mplayer filters) and it is completely unoptimized as of yet, so you only get 2-3fps with it.
On a *nix system (using mplayer directly), the situation is better. You can use tfields (with -vo gl) to output interlaced (and mixed telecined) material in absolutely 100% perfect quality to a progressive display (ie. 30fps interlaced material on a 60fps screen).
Sadly, that is a bit of a gap in mplayer/ffdshow's capabilities.
So nation-wide adverts should be at a distinct disadvantage to local adverts?
If you're advertising in a state with no taxs, your quoted price will be MUCH lower than those advertised across the entire country, and forced to quote the "maximum possible sales tax" (probably 10% higher).
I was with you up until there, though.
They didn't really CREATE them... that's why it's called a "natural" monopoly. You can't have 500 phone companies getting permission to install telephone poles in your yard, digging up the roads, etc.
The problem isn't that it's a monopoly... The problem is that the government refuses to treat it like the monopoly it is, and regulate it accordingly.
How can you blame consumers for being stuck with only one or two choices for broadband?
It's a duopoly (at BEST), and should be regulated as such, instead of pretending there's any kind of a free market here.
Well they are SUPPOSED to do a wonderful job at motion-adaptive deinterlacing, and 3:2 pulldown reversal.
Not to mention having high-end video chips that have more accurate color reproduction, prevent aliasing artifacts, etc.
Gee... A $300 computer vs. a $4000 high-end DVD player...
You're right, it's a much tougher call that way. Particularly since the computer can play digital videos of any kind, from any source, and not just DVDs.
When the difference is overwhelmingly obvious, yes. Particularly when you aren't asking for any such thing where VHS is involved.
That's doubly true when you've already stated: "the quality difference from DVDs -> HD-DVD/Blu-ray isn't as great". Backtracking now, and saying you want confirmation, is a pretty transparent move.