Actually I had a DVI capture device sitting on my desk Friday. It was set up for at least 720p and compressed to MJPEG2000. It sure as hell wasn't cheap, but it is possible with today's technology.
Well, I was thinking of sending an uncompressed 1080 signal over eg. the PCI bus, or trying to store it to a HD in realtime. With built-in lossy encoding on the capture card, it's certainly possible, but of course you lose even more quality that way, and it's much, much more expensive.
So let's just say it's extremely impractical, and far, far too much hassle for casual use, but not impossible.
they're throwing in stuff about manufacturing companies offering below-U.S. minimum wage, work hours,
That would be a little tricky to do, but yes, a good idea.
and child labor laws in other countries, right?
If you make it illegal for children to work, in countries where there is no welfare system, all you'll get is a lot of children starving to death.
How does that make sense?
Just because employees are overworked and underpaid, that doesn't result in human-rights activists getting executed. Google, keeping their logs in China, does.
In the last ten years any capable geek has had the opportunity to make truckloads of money doing things of questionable legality. Offshore gambling & porn, to name two.
Neither requires a LOT of skill, so the talent pool is very large, so the money to be made isn't very significant.
Or how about the cable/satellite descrambler boxes (for sale only in Canada, of course).
Yes, that's a much better example, except it's still a very small market, unlike this... When people can't watch their movies on their $3,000 HDTVs because they bought them before HDCP, they'll spend several hundred dollars on a grey/black-market box to do the conversion. When people can't make backup copies of their DVDs, you'll see a lot of money being thrown around to get software and hardware which makes that possible.
Your comments seem to assume time doesn't move on and technology doesn't become cheaper and easier.
No. Although DVI capture may become possible with standard PC hardware in the next several years, it certainly won't be cheap. It also won't EVER become possible to rip at faster-than-realtime because a HD-DVD/Blu-ray player won't play at more than 1X. Encoding to h.264 will get less painful in the future, but these other issues will never be completely overcome. Unlike their on-disc encryption, which will likely be broken wide-open before the above is even practical.
Hmm....since when did watching TV become a "RIGHT" in the US?
Since TV became the most popular source for news (definately a RIGHT, since the inception of the USA), as well as the main source for emergency alerts/notification (Emergency Alert System).
Virtually every place that sells discs have a return policy that states something like "opened discs may only be exchanged for another copy of the same disc".
Even better. Since you can't return it, exchange it, day after day, for a month. Pretty soon, they'll be begging you to take a refund.
Last time I checked, one needed around a 2.5 GHz P4 to decode 1080i MPEG2 in software.
Not even close. My 1.66GHz Athlon stays under 50% load when playing back 1080i MPEG-2.
With XVMC, it stays at about 40% load playing the same video, so my system is almost at the crossover point, where hardware acceleration becomes counter-productive.
I certainly could reduce it by cutting the buffering (at present, it's running at about 14 megabytes, or around two seconds), but I'd be doing so at the risk of running into problems if the system gets tied up doing something else long enough for the buffer to be exhausted (swapping, deleting files, etc.).
I believe you've completely and totally missed my point.
Simply playing through a capture card isn't the problem - playing through a system configured as a usable PVR is, and that's what the discussion was about.
My system is configured as a usable DVR, and it can playback just fine without any buffering. It does not run MythTV or Freevo.
I think you lost me. With a reasonbly fast CPU, decoding in software (MPlayer, Xine, VLC, ffplay, etc) is FASTER than XVMC, including higher resolutions like 1080.
MPEG-2 decoding takes practically no time, it's displaying it that uses up CPU cycles, and display with eg. OpenGL or even XV will be quite a bit faster.
And, as I said, you aren't just stuck with MPEG-2. You can playback any video codec. Otherwise, you'll be waiting for a week to watch your movie, as the video is re-encoded to MPEG-2 in the background... MPEG-2 is nearly dead.
I can hardly wait. The sheer ammount of money to be had will be astronomical.
A few years of digital prohibition, where the more skilled among us can make truckloads of money building grey/black-market hardware, workarounds, etc.
"Hollywood gave you ample they were going to rape you, and yet you didn't bend over."
Sorry, no. I'm extremely glad that companies are in direct opposition to HDCP. We'll find out, once and for all, if the computer industry needs Hollywood, or if Hollywood needs the computer industry...
It's a ridiculous restriction anyhow. It's not like DVI-capture cards are a dime a dozen (or even possible with current hardware for that matter). It's not like anyone would WANT to capture the uncompressed digital stream and waste their time recompressing that back to it's original size. It's just another insane move by Hollywood.
Stick to bittorrent, and/or standard DVDs, if they don't change their tune.
5 years from now something like MythTV won't even be possible because A) hardware required to receive signals won't be available on linux
ATSC tuners are legal, and should be for the foreseeable future, since the broadcast flag was struck down.
The DMCA specifically allows (clean room) reverse engineering for compatibility, which means decrypting your cable/satellite signal should be legal, as well as breaking HDCP (or at least reasonably light shades of grey).
B) patents C) it will be outright illegal and you will face jailtime for unauthorized recording of your cable feed.
Don't let me interrupt your fear-mongering, but you're being extremely vague. Other than the DMCA, what laws, patents, etc., do you claim will stop people from legally building a DVR?
The delay exists because the "live TV" signal that's displayed on the screen is actually played from the buffered data, and it takes a short period of time for the system to buffer enough data before it displays it.
Bzzzt. You've got a MPEG capture card, which introduces significant delays. A standard capture card can be very near as responsive as a TV, although it's not exactly a simple task to watch it live and record it simultaneously.
Your second problem is MythTV is buffering far more data than necessary. Using something like MPlayer directly will vastly cut-down on the delay.
Ironically, he is right, even though he hasn't been modded up, while you are wrong, and have been repeatedly modded up...
What attracted me to this platform was the CN400 H/W MPEG2 decoder chip it includes that is capable of deciding HD MPEG2 resolutions (up to 1080i) -- xine plays 1080i on this platform with the 1.0 GHz CPU about 30% idle.
Many ATI/NVidia/Intel videocards can do hardware MPEG-1/2 decoding. I have such a card, and I NEVER use it. You can't do any postprocessing, deinterlacing, inverse telecine, noise removal, etc. Plus, it's completely useless for MPEG-4, WMV3 (aka VC-1, aka WMV9), H.264, etc., which is the format you'll find a large portion of HDTV content available in (T2 DVD, IMAX DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray DVDs, P2P downloads, etc.)
Meanwhile, even on a 1GHz CPU (not a 1GHz VIA CPU, a REAL 1GHz CPU!) decoding in software, outputting to XV, GL, VIDIX, etc., will be FASTER than hardware decoding.
I would STRONGLY recomend staying the hell away from VIA. I made that mistake once, myself. You can expect better performance from an AMD/Intel chip clocked at about half what a VIA chip is, and the AMD/Intel chips will be lower power as well.
Find yourself a LV PIII-1.0GHz (12.1W max), an ULV Pentium M-753 1.2GHz (5.5W TDP), an Athlon 4-1.2G (25W max), an Opteron-840EE 1.4GHz (30W TDP), or a mTurion MT-34 1.8GHz (25W TDP) if you're dedicated to ultra-low power, fanless CPUs. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with a cheaper system, and a few quiet, variable 80mm fans.
lavc/h264, however, needs a much faster CPU right now. I believe that's simply due to a lack of optimization, and the situation should improve.
But ext2 (and ext3) store a block list that grows in proportion to the size of the file itself. That's fine for small or highly fragmented files, but it's a waste of space and I/O bandwidth when you have big, unfragmented files.
You can use a large block-size and greatly reduce the ammount of wasted space and overhead (which is rather small to begin with, actually). You've got to expect that kind of overhead from just about any filesystem, and something like journaling will only add more.
If you've got something else in mind, feel free to speak-up.
That would be a concern only in the most extreme cases, and rarely even then. Being able to catch fish on-the-fly means you can pack the sub with much less meat, and more fruits, vegtables, vitamins, etc.
Plus, it would even be possible to run a greenhouse. You've got unlimited electricity, and plenty of fertilizer already... (yes, I cringed at the thought myself)
Worse, the sub would be spending all of its time fishing instead of actually doing its job.
That's very unlikely. They should be going through schools of fish in the normal course of their duties. They shouldn't have to go out of their way at all to catch a large supply of fish. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if some subs detoured through lobster or crab territory more often.
You seem to put a lot more burden on Netflix than other companies. When a phone company advertises low rates, then raise them a few months later, they don't go out and buy thousands of ads to notify you that their rates when up. It makes no sense.
If your travel agent gave you a false flyer, they would be at-fault, not the locals who made them 30 years ago.
What I'm looking for is a WORM-optimized FS that also has good journaling methods to prevent data loss due to some natural disaster while data is being shifted around.
Ext2fs mounted with the 'sync' option.
For large sequential writes, nothing could possibly be more reliable or any faster. Your hard drive's pure IO speed will be the bottleneck unless you are writing to multiple files simultaneously, in which case fancy filesystems come in handy.
If that doesn't suit your needs, you haven't described them well enough for anyone to understand.
Blockbuster is notorious for either not carrying titles or carrying shitty, edited versions of the titles they DO carry. See Requiem for a Dream as an example. It's only been recently that Blockbuster has started doing away with non-widescreen DVDs, too.
Forget about being Edited for content, and Pan & Scan DVDs. The thing that pisses me off the most is that whatever they use for DVD encoding totally fucks up the colors beyond recognition. Recording the screen with a camcorder would look FAR better.
I can hardly sit through a single 90 minute Blockbuster DVD because the picture is so painful to even look at.
they're expecting to get permanent copies of as many DVDs as they want, by getting the DVD, copying it, and sending it back the next day. I would call that "freeloading," as well as "illegal" and "ruining it for the rest of us."
It's not "freeloading" because they are paying for the service. There's no law that says you have to be a profitable customer. Do you NOT buy items on sale just because you know they don't make a profit for the company?
Also, it's not strictly illegal, although nobody wants you to know that. It does, legally, fall under the precedent of "time-shifting" the movies you've rented.
As for decrypting the DVDs in the first place... The clean-room, reverse-engineered libdvdcss code should be legal by most accounts, and certainly legal on Linux or any other OSes which don't have commercial DVD-playing programs available for sale.
As for the last count, I have to wonder why Netflix doesn't, and doesn't encourage customers to, mail two DVDs in a single envelope. It would halve postage, which is said to be the primary operating cost.
but just the fact that they're doing it isn't at all surprising if so many people are abusing the service.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Just one question. How are copiers any worse than frequent watchers? I mean, do you really believe people are renting movie after movie from netflix, copying them, and NOT WATCHING what they've copied? Or do you believe they are involved in extensive schemes to rent 3 months worth of movies in one month, cancel their service for 2, and start again? Because the Netflix throttling system wouldn't help in that senario anyhow.
How is copying a movie hurting netflix again, or are you just taking the opportunity to expound your own beliefs on a seperate subject (and in that case, paid or unpaid)?
Show me where they do that. I've watched their commercials and other ads very closely since I first heard about the class-action lawsuit, and I noticed that they completely removed the "unlimited rentals" mention in all their ads. I just checked Netflix.com as well, and no mention of unlimited rentals there either.
Maybe there's a vestage here and there, but they really aren't advertising unlimited rentals anymore, as you claim.
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Well, I was thinking of sending an uncompressed 1080 signal over eg. the PCI bus, or trying to store it to a HD in realtime. With built-in lossy encoding on the capture card, it's certainly possible, but of course you lose even more quality that way, and it's much, much more expensive.
So let's just say it's extremely impractical, and far, far too much hassle for casual use, but not impossible.
That would be a little tricky to do, but yes, a good idea.
If you make it illegal for children to work, in countries where there is no welfare system, all you'll get is a lot of children starving to death.
Just because employees are overworked and underpaid, that doesn't result in human-rights activists getting executed. Google, keeping their logs in China, does.
That is a HUGE difference.
Neither requires a LOT of skill, so the talent pool is very large, so the money to be made isn't very significant.
Yes, that's a much better example, except it's still a very small market, unlike this... When people can't watch their movies on their $3,000 HDTVs because they bought them before HDCP, they'll spend several hundred dollars on a grey/black-market box to do the conversion. When people can't make backup copies of their DVDs, you'll see a lot of money being thrown around to get software and hardware which makes that possible.
Wasting time, not doing the work I should be doing... just like everyone else.
Ah hah!
No. Although DVI capture may become possible with standard PC hardware in the next several years, it certainly won't be cheap. It also won't EVER become possible to rip at faster-than-realtime because a HD-DVD/Blu-ray player won't play at more than 1X. Encoding to h.264 will get less painful in the future, but these other issues will never be completely overcome. Unlike their on-disc encryption, which will likely be broken wide-open before the above is even practical.
It's just nonsense to disallow analog output.
Since TV became the most popular source for news (definately a RIGHT, since the inception of the USA), as well as the main source for emergency alerts/notification (Emergency Alert System).
Even better. Since you can't return it, exchange it, day after day, for a month. Pretty soon, they'll be begging you to take a refund.
Not even close. My 1.66GHz Athlon stays under 50% load when playing back 1080i MPEG-2.
With XVMC, it stays at about 40% load playing the same video, so my system is almost at the crossover point, where hardware acceleration becomes counter-productive.
(using mplayer-cvs -vo gl, Geforce4 440 MX AGP, Slackware 10, etc)
Yes, that was pretty much the point of my post. VIA's CPUs are painfully slow.
I believe you've completely and totally missed my point.
My system is configured as a usable DVR, and it can playback just fine without any buffering. It does not run MythTV or Freevo.
I think you lost me. With a reasonbly fast CPU, decoding in software (MPlayer, Xine, VLC, ffplay, etc) is FASTER than XVMC, including higher resolutions like 1080.
MPEG-2 decoding takes practically no time, it's displaying it that uses up CPU cycles, and display with eg. OpenGL or even XV will be quite a bit faster.
And, as I said, you aren't just stuck with MPEG-2. You can playback any video codec. Otherwise, you'll be waiting for a week to watch your movie, as the video is re-encoded to MPEG-2 in the background... MPEG-2 is nearly dead.
I can hardly wait. The sheer ammount of money to be had will be astronomical.
A few years of digital prohibition, where the more skilled among us can make truckloads of money building grey/black-market hardware, workarounds, etc.
What Hollywood appologist crap.
"Hollywood gave you ample they were going to rape you, and yet you didn't bend over."
Sorry, no. I'm extremely glad that companies are in direct opposition to HDCP. We'll find out, once and for all, if the computer industry needs Hollywood, or if Hollywood needs the computer industry...
It's a ridiculous restriction anyhow. It's not like DVI-capture cards are a dime a dozen (or even possible with current hardware for that matter). It's not like anyone would WANT to capture the uncompressed digital stream and waste their time recompressing that back to it's original size. It's just another insane move by Hollywood.
Stick to bittorrent, and/or standard DVDs, if they don't change their tune.
ATSC tuners are legal, and should be for the foreseeable future, since the broadcast flag was struck down.
The DMCA specifically allows (clean room) reverse engineering for compatibility, which means decrypting your cable/satellite signal should be legal, as well as breaking HDCP (or at least reasonably light shades of grey).
Don't let me interrupt your fear-mongering, but you're being extremely vague. Other than the DMCA, what laws, patents, etc., do you claim will stop people from legally building a DVR?
No, actually you are.
Bzzzt. You've got a MPEG capture card, which introduces significant delays. A standard capture card can be very near as responsive as a TV, although it's not exactly a simple task to watch it live and record it simultaneously.
Your second problem is MythTV is buffering far more data than necessary. Using something like MPlayer directly will vastly cut-down on the delay.
Ironically, he is right, even though he hasn't been modded up, while you are wrong, and have been repeatedly modded up...
Bad mods, no cookie!
Wow... Just, wow.
Can anyone decipher that?
Many ATI/NVidia/Intel videocards can do hardware MPEG-1/2 decoding. I have such a card, and I NEVER use it. You can't do any postprocessing, deinterlacing, inverse telecine, noise removal, etc. Plus, it's completely useless for MPEG-4, WMV3 (aka VC-1, aka WMV9), H.264, etc., which is the format you'll find a large portion of HDTV content available in (T2 DVD, IMAX DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray DVDs, P2P downloads, etc.)
Meanwhile, even on a 1GHz CPU (not a 1GHz VIA CPU, a REAL 1GHz CPU!) decoding in software, outputting to XV, GL, VIDIX, etc., will be FASTER than hardware decoding.
I would STRONGLY recomend staying the hell away from VIA. I made that mistake once, myself. You can expect better performance from an AMD/Intel chip clocked at about half what a VIA chip is, and the AMD/Intel chips will be lower power as well.
Find yourself a LV PIII-1.0GHz (12.1W max), an ULV Pentium M-753 1.2GHz (5.5W TDP), an Athlon 4-1.2G (25W max), an Opteron-840EE 1.4GHz (30W TDP), or a mTurion MT-34 1.8GHz (25W TDP) if you're dedicated to ultra-low power, fanless CPUs. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with a cheaper system, and a few quiet, variable 80mm fans.
lavc/h264, however, needs a much faster CPU right now. I believe that's simply due to a lack of optimization, and the situation should improve.
Yes, I assume this would be a non-issue, given this situation.
That's an very interesting paper. It does, however, seem to refute your claim that block allocation is "a waste of space and I/O bandwidth":
http://ext2.sourceforge.net/2005-ols/paper-html/n
It would seem that extents will only really increase performance when CPU time is rather limited.
I really wouldn't take that as evidence of much. NTFS could be benefiting from architectural differences, hiding the real time taken.
You can use a large block-size and greatly reduce the ammount of wasted space and overhead (which is rather small to begin with, actually). You've got to expect that kind of overhead from just about any filesystem, and something like journaling will only add more.
If you've got something else in mind, feel free to speak-up.
That would be a concern only in the most extreme cases, and rarely even then. Being able to catch fish on-the-fly means you can pack the sub with much less meat, and more fruits, vegtables, vitamins, etc.
Plus, it would even be possible to run a greenhouse. You've got unlimited electricity, and plenty of fertilizer already... (yes, I cringed at the thought myself)
That's very unlikely. They should be going through schools of fish in the normal course of their duties. They shouldn't have to go out of their way at all to catch a large supply of fish. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if some subs detoured through lobster or crab territory more often.
You seem to put a lot more burden on Netflix than other companies. When a phone company advertises low rates, then raise them a few months later, they don't go out and buy thousands of ads to notify you that their rates when up. It makes no sense.
If your travel agent gave you a false flyer, they would be at-fault, not the locals who made them 30 years ago.
Ext2fs mounted with the 'sync' option.
For large sequential writes, nothing could possibly be more reliable or any faster. Your hard drive's pure IO speed will be the bottleneck unless you are writing to multiple files simultaneously, in which case fancy filesystems come in handy.
If that doesn't suit your needs, you haven't described them well enough for anyone to understand.
I feel hungry.
Forget about being Edited for content, and Pan & Scan DVDs. The thing that pisses me off the most is that whatever they use for DVD encoding totally fucks up the colors beyond recognition. Recording the screen with a camcorder would look FAR better.
I can hardly sit through a single 90 minute Blockbuster DVD because the picture is so painful to even look at.
It's not "freeloading" because they are paying for the service. There's no law that says you have to be a profitable customer. Do you NOT buy items on sale just because you know they don't make a profit for the company?
Also, it's not strictly illegal, although nobody wants you to know that. It does, legally, fall under the precedent of "time-shifting" the movies you've rented.
As for decrypting the DVDs in the first place... The clean-room, reverse-engineered libdvdcss code should be legal by most accounts, and certainly legal on Linux or any other OSes which don't have commercial DVD-playing programs available for sale.
As for the last count, I have to wonder why Netflix doesn't, and doesn't encourage customers to, mail two DVDs in a single envelope. It would halve postage, which is said to be the primary operating cost.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Just one question. How are copiers any worse than frequent watchers? I mean, do you really believe people are renting movie after movie from netflix, copying them, and NOT WATCHING what they've copied? Or do you believe they are involved in extensive schemes to rent 3 months worth of movies in one month, cancel their service for 2, and start again? Because the Netflix throttling system wouldn't help in that senario anyhow.
How is copying a movie hurting netflix again, or are you just taking the opportunity to expound your own beliefs on a seperate subject (and in that case, paid or unpaid)?
Show me where they do that. I've watched their commercials and other ads very closely since I first heard about the class-action lawsuit, and I noticed that they completely removed the "unlimited rentals" mention in all their ads. I just checked Netflix.com as well, and no mention of unlimited rentals there either.
Maybe there's a vestage here and there, but they really aren't advertising unlimited rentals anymore, as you claim.