I can understand most of the choices, but I have to ask: why is Xvid listed? It seems so completely arbitrary. It's not the only MPEG-4 codec, it's not only open source MPEG-4 codec, and many people agree that it's not even the best of the open source MPEG-4 codecs...
If you want to list a video codec, why not http://ffmpeg.sf.net/ ? Not only do they have a great (and fast!) MPEG-4 encoder, they also have hundreds of other codecs, many reverse engineered, and incredibly optimized.
If you're doing anything with video on Unix, you can be sure you're using ffmpeg. MPlayer, VLC, Xine, Avidemux, MythTV, etc. all get most of their functionality out of ffmpeg.
Seems like the thing Xvid has going for it is good publicity...
Your eyes (or, rather, your eyes and your brain) are probably tuned to the CRT since you've been using that setup for a decade...
Can't speak for the poster, but I can assure you that it goes much deeper than that in my case. I tried exclusively using an LCD for well-over a year, before I gave up and switch back to my nice, soft, warm, CRT. LCDs are really intolerable.
You may not have much of a choice -- CRT's are getting much more difficult to source these days, and when your current one dies, you may not even be able to buy a CRT that suits you!
Now that's just crazy. Sure, fewer companies are making CRTs, but they're guaranteed to be around for decades and decades to come. LCDs aren't even remotely close to competing with them on response time and contrast ratio. Then there are things like viewing angles, multiple "native" resolutions, price, etc. Projection HDTVs are mostly CRTs. Inexpensive HDTVs are direct-view CRTs (and a 1920x1080 res is plenty good enough for use as a computer monitor).
The problem though is that no ordinary, or even slightly advanced, computers users know these commandlines and how they interact.
Windows is in exactly the same boat.
How many people understand the registry, and the intracies of making system changes via that method? How many people edit.ini/.inf files? How many people know how to use the command-line tools in Windows?
Despite it's huge installed base, I'd say there are fewer people that can really fix a Windows system than there are that know everything about Linux.
As someone else already said, the answer in Windows is "You have to reinstall." You could do the same thing with Linux, but if you know a little bit about the system, you don't have to. If the market-share situation was reversed, Linux would be exponetially easier (due to nice online guides, millions of mailing lists where every possible question has been answered, etc) and Windows would be far, far more obscure, and nobody would put the effor into figuring out the insanely complex problems of making it work right. Reinstall!
Why should average shopper buy a BD or HD title if they already have it on DVD?
They shouldn't. They really, really shouldn't.
However, when considering buying a NEW title, you might want to compare the price to the HD-DVD/Blu-ray discs next to it...
How many consumers already think that DVD IS Hi Def?
It DOESN'T MATTER! Hi-Def is just a term, that people may not understand. Put them in-front of a standard and a high-def TV, and they'll know the difference, even if they don't know the terminology.
The ONLY way BD/HD will surpass DVD is when the cost of a BD/HD title is less than a standard DVD and we don't see that happening at all, ever.
WTF? The DVD standard includes both lossy and lossless audio codecs. So your point is not true.
Standard DVD allows the use of uncompressed PCM audio, but no lossless compression codecs at all. You'll never see it used because of that. DVDs just aren't big enough to be able to fit 6 channel uncompressed PCM and decent quality video as well. That's the only reason why DTS even gained a foothold.
I believe it is also a requirment that NTSC DVDs have at least one AC3 audio track, making PCM less attractive still.
You can have an infinite number of horizontal pixels from a perfect (and theoretically impossible) PAL signal.
Impossible is right. You're talking about the theoretical, and I'm talking about reality.
PAL is 50 fields per second (50Hz), 25 frames per second. Doubling this gives 100Hz. The reason you use 100Hz is that it is very easy to go from 50Hz to 100Hz - you just display every field twice.
Thank you, Mr. Obvious.
This reduces flicker, since the flicker is caused by the brightness curve of phosphor on the back of the screen, not the number of frames in the source image.
Obviously, if your eyes can see the phosphor dimming at a 50Hz refresh, they can also see the difference between 25FPS and 60FPS material. That was my point. It was merely an example.
Yes, there, they lied. Here, we have verifiable evidence that this is a fact. We know the exact materials being used, and we know it's really a necessity, so they can't cheap-out later.
Even if you can have 7 layers in the standard it is still stuck at 7.
No, there's not an upward limit to the standard. As technology improves, so too can the media. It has a limit, but it's something that can continue to be improved for several decades before it hits a wall, and another (backwards compatible) standard might be introduced. Since the current standards are the max of HDTVs, and TV standards stay steady for about 50 years, and are most often backwards compatible.
And it is hard to believe such a pancake contraption would be cheaper than a chip-in-a-pen.
A chunk of plastic is always going to be cheaper, until we reach the upper limits of what "light" can do, which is a long way away.
You seem to favor disks. I don't like disks. You need cases for them.
Actually, I prefer discs with caddies. Minidiscs, magneto-optical discs, zip disks, etc. Still, I don't like discs so much as I hate paying for the far more expensive and less capable alternatives.
Putty/WinSCP/Filezilla put SSH.com's Windows software to shame.
ClamAV ClamWin
Unfortunately, it still doesn't have continuous, transparent file scanning. So, for the time being, GrisoftAVG/FreeAV are far better.
There are literally hundreds more I could list, but the single most important is BuzzSaw for continuous, transparent, background, filesystem defragmentation.
Adding fuel alternative is easy with turbine engines.
Why the deication to turbines? How about Sterling engines, steam/boiler engines, or any other heat-engine (other than ICEs)? Even diesel engines will work with a very wide range of fuels.
An unmitigated lie, which has been addressed time and time again. Why do people keep posting this crap? You might as well post a comment saying that geostationary satellites won't work, because the earth is flat.
Admitedly, biodiesel looks to be a much cheaper and more effecient option than ethanol, but both are unquestionably energy producers.
It is all about the licensing revenue. It is a long-term money maker and is pure profit.
Exactly. Which is why you can't make a DVD with (free) MP2 audio instead of AC3, even though ALL DVD players can play MP2 thanks to VCDs and MP3 playback. Dolby must have thrown a lot of money at the DVD consortium to get that disabled for absolutely no reason.
There will be virtually no difference in viewing movies in 1080I versus 1080p because they were shot in 24fps originally.
Not true. With 1080i, you have to put up with the judder artifacts caused by 3:2 pulldown, as well as flickering, temporal/spatial aliasing, etc. A 1080p display can be set to display at 1080p@24fps, so you'll have exactly the same framerate as if you were watching film directly. It's a big improvement over watching it with 3:2 pulldown and display interlacing.
(just like in the theater).
You must go to the crappiest theatre if you see motion studder.
Now when you upconvert an interlace source (which film is not) to progressive you can get terrible artifacts, but this also depends on the quality of the upconvert hardware/software.
Sorry, but it works both ways. Converting progressive material to interlaced will also give you numerous bad artifacts, and these can't be eliminated no matter how good the hardware/software doing the conversion happens to be.
For 24fps film 1080I is much better than 720p. 720p is probably a good choice for sports however for all the reasons listed above.
It's not that simple. It goes back to interlacing vs. progressive. If the film has a lot of fast panning and action, it will break-up if displayed interlaced (1080i). If it's mostly slow pans and smaller movement, then it's better at a higher interlaced resolution (which is also debatable because you also get aliasing, flicker, etc).
If it is in a sealed unit, why would it be more suseptible than an exposed data surface?
Because electronics fail. A chunk of plastic with a reflective surface is not susceptible to humidity, power surges, static shock, etc.
The "format" is irrelavent. Any decompression is done by the stick, not the player.
Ah hah. I had no idea just how insane your idea really was meant to be. So you propose a memory stick doing all of it's own video decoding? In that case, you've got 99.99% of the electronics on the stick, why not just include a video output on the stick, and plug it directly into the TV? In that case, your media sticks would be INSANELY expensive.
The data surface is exposed
In Bluray, the "data surface" is now going to be "screwdriver proof", so it's hardly a concern any longer.
and the content size is fixed into the standard.
Not really. There's a lot of flexibility in the standard. With DVDs, you only have single and dual layer, but with Blu-ray and HD-DVD, you can chose from single layer discs, up to a disc with a dozen layers.
Besides, you get backwards compatibility with discs, so you don't have to buy a new copy of your DVDs when you get a new player. People WANT to buy a new copy of most things to get them in much higher quality, which would be the exact same problem with your "media stick".
Notice that normal, crappy, unadvanced divx BEATS some of the best H.264 codecs
No I didn't notice that at all. In fact, I saw no cases where MPEG-4 beats H.264 in quality. They say MPEG-4 is relatively close, but their comparsions are purely based on PSNR, which is a useful comparison, but generally does not reflect actual quality.
Xvid with MPEG4 yields far better quality at present.
That is just simply factually completely incorrect.
As for digiami, that's just an insane load of moronic bullshit in a press release. There's absolutely no evidence at all to back it up, and their completely insane claims would need a hell of a lot of evidence for anyone to believe them.
Pure nonsense. H.264 is a codec, and the successor to MPEG-4 (eg. Divx/Xvid/fmp4). A quick search on google would tell any idiot that much.
FFMPEG/Lavc codec supports it
Lavc has an h.264 decoder, but not an encoder (x264 is the only free one right now). It does, however, have a MPEG-4 encoder and decoder.
There is 0 distinguishable difference in quality
Pure nonsense. You can't squeeze something down to a fraction of it's size, with a lower-tech (less CPU-intensive) video codec, and expect to get a fraction as much quality from it. Of course, if you're watching this on a tiny, low-res PC monitor, it's no wonder you can't tell the difference.
there is also the OGM format that is even more advanced than h264, so what?
OGM is a file format, H.264 is a video codec. There is a difference.
1) $8k HDTV plasma, expensive player, $40 movies that look about the same if the picture comes from a VCR.
Nobody has any idea how much the movies will cost. Plasma displays certainly don't start at $8000, but I would recomend LCD/CRT/DLP instead.
2) HDTV lcd/crt that is overpriced because of the label and I still need player/movies.
HDTVs are not only NOT overpriced, they are far, far less expensive than equivalent size/resolution PC monitors.
3) Non HDTV lcd/crt with the same or superior resolution/quality, and viewing HD content on a mythtv box
Hmmm. I'm getting the feeling you don't actually understand what HDTV means.
or PC that also allows me to browse the web from my TV, listen to music I saved from my CD, have instant access to hundreds of movies that I backed up from DVD, play games, do video and voip, etc.
I never said you couldn't hook your PC up to an HDTV. The problem is with your assertion that downloading movies would be better than having an HDDVD/Bluray disc format, and the whole "10Xs the quality" complete nonsense.
Its a no brainer.
Yes, I have been getting that impression about you.
I was actually referring to the fact that although SACD is technically better, the average person really can't tell the difference, hence SACD's failure to become popular.
Yes you were, but I was pointing out that it's a crappy comparison.
CD to SACD was lossless, just switching to higher sampling frequencies.
DVD audio is not lossless by any stretch of the imagination. HD-DVD/Blu-ray audio, however, includes lossless audio compression codecs. So, as I said, the comparison is much closer to MP3 vs. CD.
But thanks for making my point for me
You've completely lost me there. I don't see where I could possibly have made your point at all... I just see you talking and agreeing with yourself.
Unfortunately... the interface has to stay the same... Sory, no improvements in reading speed for the next years in the future, because that would be incompatible.
A pen-drive-like interface does not care how many groves or how much RAM is inside.
Okay, but then you have a huge ammount of duplication of electronics (every pen drive has it's own controller) which leads to much higher costs (compare a DVD-R to a multi-GB flash drive) and far less flexibility. Plus the added complexity would lead to your "media" getting damaged, not just the media-player.
Plus it would require much more complexity in the player to support this universal high-speed interface. Not to mention that you'll need a new player every few years for the next format/resolution stored on this standard "media".
The price will be relatively astronomical. Right now, I can buy a DVD player, plus a movie, for less than the cheapest pen drive, so small it's unable to hold even a short, low res video clip. "Chunks of plastic" have pen drives beat, and they don't eliminate the need to buy a new player every decade or so.
Besides, I really don't see the point. There are mini-CD/DVDs if that's what you are interested in. Since the inital introduction of CDs, backwards compatibility has been 100%, and should continue into the distant future.
Pure nonsense. NTSC is exactly DVD quality. The spec was written to match the maximum NTSC could do. NTSC is 720x483 with about 704 of the width viewable, so DVDs are 720x480, with junk on the sides.
If you'd care to explain how "exactly the same" is "not even close", I'd like to hear it.
I assume that ac3 compression is smart enough to take advantage of cross-tack similarities?
Yes it is, but make no mistake, that doesn't really give you too much of an improvement. Off the top of my head, I'd say it's maybe 15% (bitrate) better.
Somebody should come up with a FLAC-like algorithm for 5.1 surround that takes advantage of this fact.
I would also add that the cheaper RF modulators ruined the signal so much, that DVDs didn't look any better than VHS, and was often worse (darker, digital artifacts, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Orange Goop is wonderful stuff: http://www.goophandcleaner.com/orange_v2.htm
Oil, Tree Sap, Caulk, Gasoline, Grease, etc. Much cheaper than "Lava" too. Go for the "liquid", not the cream (easier to wash off).
I can understand most of the choices, but I have to ask: why is Xvid listed? It seems so completely arbitrary. It's not the only MPEG-4 codec, it's not only open source MPEG-4 codec, and many people agree that it's not even the best of the open source MPEG-4 codecs...
If you want to list a video codec, why not http://ffmpeg.sf.net/ ? Not only do they have a great (and fast!) MPEG-4 encoder, they also have hundreds of other codecs, many reverse engineered, and incredibly optimized.
If you're doing anything with video on Unix, you can be sure you're using ffmpeg. MPlayer, VLC, Xine, Avidemux, MythTV, etc. all get most of their functionality out of ffmpeg.
Seems like the thing Xvid has going for it is good publicity...
Not if the single monitor is a WIDESCREEN. 16:9 works just fine.
Can't speak for the poster, but I can assure you that it goes much deeper than that in my case. I tried exclusively using an LCD for well-over a year, before I gave up and switch back to my nice, soft, warm, CRT. LCDs are really intolerable.
Now that's just crazy. Sure, fewer companies are making CRTs, but they're guaranteed to be around for decades and decades to come. LCDs aren't even remotely close to competing with them on response time and contrast ratio. Then there are things like viewing angles, multiple "native" resolutions, price, etc. Projection HDTVs are mostly CRTs. Inexpensive HDTVs are direct-view CRTs (and a 1920x1080 res is plenty good enough for use as a computer monitor).
Video players like MPlayer disable DPMS/Xscreensaver during playback, and re-enable it when they exit.
"xset dpms force off"
Make it a menu option, or bind the command to a keyboard shortcut. See, now you have a purpose for that "Windows" key...
You can change the threshold for that.
Windows is in exactly the same boat.
How many people understand the registry, and the intracies of making system changes via that method? How many people edit
Despite it's huge installed base, I'd say there are fewer people that can really fix a Windows system than there are that know everything about Linux.
As someone else already said, the answer in Windows is "You have to reinstall." You could do the same thing with Linux, but if you know a little bit about the system, you don't have to. If the market-share situation was reversed, Linux would be exponetially easier (due to nice online guides, millions of mailing lists where every possible question has been answered, etc) and Windows would be far, far more obscure, and nobody would put the effor into figuring out the insanely complex problems of making it work right. Reinstall!
They shouldn't. They really, really shouldn't.
However, when considering buying a NEW title, you might want to compare the price to the HD-DVD/Blu-ray discs next to it...
It DOESN'T MATTER! Hi-Def is just a term, that people may not understand. Put them in-front of a standard and a high-def TV, and they'll know the difference, even if they don't know the terminology.
I can't see any basis for this opinion at all.
Standard DVD allows the use of uncompressed PCM audio, but no lossless compression codecs at all. You'll never see it used because of that. DVDs just aren't big enough to be able to fit 6 channel uncompressed PCM and decent quality video as well. That's the only reason why DTS even gained a foothold.
I believe it is also a requirment that NTSC DVDs have at least one AC3 audio track, making PCM less attractive still.
Impossible is right. You're talking about the theoretical, and I'm talking about reality.
Thank you, Mr. Obvious.
Obviously, if your eyes can see the phosphor dimming at a 50Hz refresh, they can also see the difference between 25FPS and 60FPS material. That was my point. It was merely an example.
Yes, there, they lied. Here, we have verifiable evidence that this is a fact. We know the exact materials being used, and we know it's really a necessity, so they can't cheap-out later.
No, there's not an upward limit to the standard. As technology improves, so too can the media. It has a limit, but it's something that can continue to be improved for several decades before it hits a wall, and another (backwards compatible) standard might be introduced. Since the current standards are the max of HDTVs, and TV standards stay steady for about 50 years, and are most often backwards compatible.
A chunk of plastic is always going to be cheaper, until we reach the upper limits of what "light" can do, which is a long way away.
Actually, I prefer discs with caddies. Minidiscs, magneto-optical discs, zip disks, etc. Still, I don't like discs so much as I hate paying for the far more expensive and less capable alternatives.
Putty/WinSCP/Filezilla put SSH.com's Windows software to shame.
Unfortunately, it still doesn't have continuous, transparent file scanning. So, for the time being, GrisoftAVG/FreeAV are far better.
There are literally hundreds more I could list, but the single most important is BuzzSaw for continuous, transparent, background, filesystem defragmentation.
Why the deication to turbines? How about Sterling engines, steam/boiler engines, or any other heat-engine (other than ICEs)? Even diesel engines will work with a very wide range of fuels.
That's a nice new feature and all, but it doesn't make it a hybrid. In fact, all diesel-electric locomotives are ALREADY (serial) hybrids.
I sincerely hope the word "hybrid" doesn't go the way of "hack" "pirate" "schitzophrenic" "literal" and "broadband".
An unmitigated lie, which has been addressed time and time again. Why do people keep posting this crap? You might as well post a comment saying that geostationary satellites won't work, because the earth is flat.
Admitedly, biodiesel looks to be a much cheaper and more effecient option than ethanol, but both are unquestionably energy producers.
Retract that comment. You have 20 seconds to comply.
http://cd.textfiles.com/carousel/GIFA/ED209.GIF
Exactly. Which is why you can't make a DVD with (free) MP2 audio instead of AC3, even though ALL DVD players can play MP2 thanks to VCDs and MP3 playback. Dolby must have thrown a lot of money at the DVD consortium to get that disabled for absolutely no reason.
Not true. With 1080i, you have to put up with the judder artifacts caused by 3:2 pulldown, as well as flickering, temporal/spatial aliasing, etc. A 1080p display can be set to display at 1080p@24fps, so you'll have exactly the same framerate as if you were watching film directly. It's a big improvement over watching it with 3:2 pulldown and display interlacing.
You must go to the crappiest theatre if you see motion studder.
Sorry, but it works both ways. Converting progressive material to interlaced will also give you numerous bad artifacts, and these can't be eliminated no matter how good the hardware/software doing the conversion happens to be.
It's not that simple. It goes back to interlacing vs. progressive. If the film has a lot of fast panning and action, it will break-up if displayed interlaced (1080i). If it's mostly slow pans and smaller movement, then it's better at a higher interlaced resolution (which is also debatable because you also get aliasing, flicker, etc).
Because electronics fail. A chunk of plastic with a reflective surface is not susceptible to humidity, power surges, static shock, etc.
Ah hah. I had no idea just how insane your idea really was meant to be. So you propose a memory stick doing all of it's own video decoding? In that case, you've got 99.99% of the electronics on the stick, why not just include a video output on the stick, and plug it directly into the TV? In that case, your media sticks would be INSANELY expensive.
In Bluray, the "data surface" is now going to be "screwdriver proof", so it's hardly a concern any longer.
Not really. There's a lot of flexibility in the standard. With DVDs, you only have single and dual layer, but with Blu-ray and HD-DVD, you can chose from single layer discs, up to a disc with a dozen layers.
Besides, you get backwards compatibility with discs, so you don't have to buy a new copy of your DVDs when you get a new player. People WANT to buy a new copy of most things to get them in much higher quality, which would be the exact same problem with your "media stick".
No I didn't notice that at all. In fact, I saw no cases where MPEG-4 beats H.264 in quality. They say MPEG-4 is relatively close, but their comparsions are purely based on PSNR, which is a useful comparison, but generally does not reflect actual quality.
That is just simply factually completely incorrect.
As for digiami, that's just an insane load of moronic bullshit in a press release. There's absolutely no evidence at all to back it up, and their completely insane claims would need a hell of a lot of evidence for anyone to believe them.
Pure nonsense. H.264 is a codec, and the successor to MPEG-4 (eg. Divx/Xvid/fmp4). A quick search on google would tell any idiot that much.
Lavc has an h.264 decoder, but not an encoder (x264 is the only free one right now). It does, however, have a MPEG-4 encoder and decoder.
Pure nonsense. You can't squeeze something down to a fraction of it's size, with a lower-tech (less CPU-intensive) video codec, and expect to get a fraction as much quality from it. Of course, if you're watching this on a tiny, low-res PC monitor, it's no wonder you can't tell the difference.
OGM is a file format, H.264 is a video codec. There is a difference.
Nobody has any idea how much the movies will cost. Plasma displays certainly don't start at $8000, but I would recomend LCD/CRT/DLP instead.
HDTVs are not only NOT overpriced, they are far, far less expensive than equivalent size/resolution PC monitors.
Hmmm. I'm getting the feeling you don't actually understand what HDTV means.
I never said you couldn't hook your PC up to an HDTV. The problem is with your assertion that downloading movies would be better than having an HDDVD/Bluray disc format, and the whole "10Xs the quality" complete nonsense.
Yes, I have been getting that impression about you.
Yes you were, but I was pointing out that it's a crappy comparison.
CD to SACD was lossless, just switching to higher sampling frequencies.
DVD audio is not lossless by any stretch of the imagination. HD-DVD/Blu-ray audio, however, includes lossless audio compression codecs. So, as I said, the comparison is much closer to MP3 vs. CD.
You've completely lost me there. I don't see where I could possibly have made your point at all... I just see you talking and agreeing with yourself.
Unfortunately... the interface has to stay the same... Sory, no improvements in reading speed for the next years in the future, because that would be incompatible.
Okay, but then you have a huge ammount of duplication of electronics (every pen drive has it's own controller) which leads to much higher costs (compare a DVD-R to a multi-GB flash drive) and far less flexibility. Plus the added complexity would lead to your "media" getting damaged, not just the media-player.
Plus it would require much more complexity in the player to support this universal high-speed interface. Not to mention that you'll need a new player every few years for the next format/resolution stored on this standard "media".
The price will be relatively astronomical. Right now, I can buy a DVD player, plus a movie, for less than the cheapest pen drive, so small it's unable to hold even a short, low res video clip. "Chunks of plastic" have pen drives beat, and they don't eliminate the need to buy a new player every decade or so.
Besides, I really don't see the point. There are mini-CD/DVDs if that's what you are interested in. Since the inital introduction of CDs, backwards compatibility has been 100%, and should continue into the distant future.
Pure nonsense. NTSC is exactly DVD quality. The spec was written to match the maximum NTSC could do. NTSC is 720x483 with about 704 of the width viewable, so DVDs are 720x480, with junk on the sides.
If you'd care to explain how "exactly the same" is "not even close", I'd like to hear it.
Yes it is, but make no mistake, that doesn't really give you too much of an improvement. Off the top of my head, I'd say it's maybe 15% (bitrate) better.
They have, and they're included on both formats.
Bravo!
I would also add that the cheaper RF modulators ruined the signal so much, that DVDs didn't look any better than VHS, and was often worse (darker, digital artifacts, etc).