High brightness LED's actualy give out ultraviolet light which is then used in combination with a phosphor to produce visable high intensity light of virtualy any colour. Maybe they have got around this problem in some way, but I have seen one of these high brightness LED's burn for 3 years and it's gone from so bright you can't look at it to about the same brightness as a white 5mm circle of the same intensity as this white background that you are looking at now.
(Yes ok you might have your screen set brighter than mine or darker than mine, but I get the general idea)
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I'm sorry about the spelling in this post, firefox doesn't check spelling by context and my dyslexic brain doesn't do it very well ether. Dyslexia is kindof annoying at times.
As for the scaling 1360 to 1366 you'll be glad to know that the maker of my panel Relisys have gone bust, but if you get offered one cheep take note of this strange oddity. I'm half tempted to try to reverse engineer the firmware to allow native resolution. Whilst on the subject of oddities the PC analog input of this same panel is a bit pink.
Flat displays
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Any flat panel display is only as good as its video processor. Usually its kindof related to the price.
LCD displays work by running a backlight at full whack and blocking light pixel by pixel and boy can you feel it, just put your hand in front of one and feel the heat coming from it. Larger LCD displays can be quite a drain on your electricity supply as well as your wallet. LCD also tend to run higher screen resolutions than plasmas.
Without decent video processing also tend to make standard (low definition) TV look horrific and seem to make MPEG artifacts look much more noticeable.
Plasmas on the other hand tend to be of lower screen resolution and also seem to mostly have non-square pixels ie run 1024x768 but stretched to 16:9, this is important if you want to run a PC into your display. Other things I have noticed are dithering to produce some colours and also flicker (which I have never seen on an LCD screen).
That said, Plasmas seem to give a much sharper looking image than LCD (I think this may be due to a small black border round each pixel) Low def TV looks great on a plasma and there are never any viewing angle problems. Black looks black and not gray. Power wize even on large plasmas the power requirements average out as less than those of LCD displays.
Alot of the larger displays I have come across (mostly LCD) seem to be at some odd ball screen res 1366x768 this is a totaly stupid size because its not divisible by 8. Most graphics cards have a hard time driving a screen of this resolution.
The screen I have is of this size but only supports a PC input of 1360x768@60 so anything I throw up from my PC has 5 blury areas because it tries to scale 1360 to 1366
If you are looking to run a screen from your PC check the following: Does the display have both DVI and DB15 Inputs (useful not essential) Does it support its native screen res on both the DB15 and the DVI (pretty essential) Does it support a refresh higher than 60Hz on the DB15 (pretty essential) Does it have at least one HDMI input (most if not all cable / sat boxes need this for HDTV)
Its worth a note that 1366x768 is not a hi-def broadcast resolution and any hi-def broadcast material is going to have to be scaled through that same video scaler that does such a bad job of upscaling low-def TV.
One way to get round this problem with upscaling low def TV is to do it on your PC. I get outstanding results using a brooktree 848 based capture card (yup thats the old style wintv card) and a linux program called tvtime (http://tvtime.sf.net). As far as I know there is something for windows called descaler. Tvtime actually seems to reduce mpeg artifacting.
The problem with using a PC is that there is no way to sync whats going out with whats coming in. If both input and output are 60Hz you will get a problem known as tairing.
Tairing (for those who don't know) Is where the top and bottom of the picture seems to break away from each other, its mostly noticeable on side to side panning movements and the effect is like that of a postcard where someone has cut it in 2 with a knife and put the 2 bits back together, but not quite in the right place
One way to reduce this effect is to run your display at a higher refresh IE 70-80hz. Its unlikely that the DVI connector will support this so you'll have to choose the DB15 analog route. This does not get rid of the tairing, but causes it to happen in a random place with every frame (which is less noticeable to the eye)
Its also worth noting that there are some displays that are native hi-def resolution ie 1280x720 and 1920x1080. These displays will give the best results when running at these native resolutions. I live in the UK and here our HD TV is broadcast in 1080i so there is very little point in getting a 1280x720 display.
If you want to run a PC at 1920x1080 its hard to read standard 11 point fonts at 10ft distance on a 42" display (which is what we have at work)
I cant see how the court hasn't thrown this out. Macrovision is an ANALOG system that puts slowly verying square pulses in the blanking region of an ANALOG video signal, quite how this relates to the DIGITAL Millennium Copyright Act I don't know. Macrovision was developed well before the millennium and its not digital in any way shape or form.
My panasonic dvd player / recorder even outputs this on the progressive YUV output, this upsets my flatpanel display, I have to revert to the interlaced S-video connection.
I since discovered its alot easyer to just run xine on the linux pc I have connected to it. One day I might cobble together a few 556 timers and a 4066 switch to just chop out the macrovision.
I wonder how durable these cards would be? I get through a debit/credit card about every 2 months. They just delaminate in my back pocket. I've actualy had chips fall off some. Are we going to have to wear them like the ID tags some people wear to work? I've also killed many a chip card with the static discharge when I get out of my car. I wonder how much info will be stored on the card I'll bet its just a number that hooks into a database. Even if it isn't the info will be stored off card so they can issue you a new one should the old one become broken/ unreadable. So wait a min what we are saying here? The govenment give us a card with a chip on it and take our biometric details and put them into a database but lead us into thinking these details are only held on the card.
Just a thought most of us brits have a national insurance card with a nice unique number on it.
I guess this means that authorities will be able to pull up a picture of you before they even see you and have a record of your biometric data (I wonder if this includes DNA?)
Sorry for being dumb but wtf is a buckyball?
on
Buckyballs Kill Fish
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I'm totaly cluesless here, it sounds like its some kids toy?
Use ether Ices2 or Darkice. Both these take audio from your sound card and encode it in real time. This is then sent to your streaming server. I have tried plugins for xmms but couldn't get them to work. (You may have more luck than me) xmms.org has a few streaming plugins.
Unless you have an emu10k1 type card that can record what it plays you'll need to use the alsa soundcard drivers. On most of the pc's I own this gives me a capture channel allowing recording of anything my sound card is playing.
I also found that the crossfade plugin for xmms works like a dream:)
I have a sony in car cd player, the one that can play mp3s but not copy protected cds. I was a little annoyed until I found that my old pioneer 6 disc scsi cdrom drive drm624x that I used to run on my amiga (its 4.4x not 24x speed btw) could rip copy protected cds flawlessly when used with cdparanoia (linux cd ripper utill made by the same people as ogg vorbis). Ebay has these units for $15 each. They can be got elsewhere I suspect that Google may be able to help there.
That's not quite true, light guns and pens work by tracking the raster as it scans the screen so long as there is suffcient brightness, it should work regardless of colour, its simply a timing issue. The reason you see flashing in the screen is to ensure there is enough brightness for the sensor in the gun to work, you could just turn up the brightness on your monitor. Light guns work best on slow scanning screens (TV's and tube type projector TV's) something like that will not work on an lcd screen or an lcd projector. There are ways around this, for instance you could use an IR laser to scan the target area, use an IR sensor in the gun and hey presto you have a flicker free display that you can use a light gun with. I guess if you were going to do that you may as well setup a camera pointing at the screen, fit your light gun with a laser pointer and use the camera to track where your gun is firing, it would most likely be easyer to setup and look a whole lot cooler plus would make targeting a whole lot easyer:)
Being someone who uses Linux as his primary os, you may wonder what on earth I'm doing with an AOL account. Well the reason is simple, portability. I run about 40 or so linux boxes in various places, I'm basicly on call 24 hours a day to support these for my customers. This means that if I travel about I can jack into any phone line and not worry about isp call charges. AOL is the only ISP in the UK to offer toll free internet access across all the UK telcos. There are a few others who will offer toll free from BT lines only and at twice the cost of AOL too! I value the service AOL provides so much that I went out a purchased a vmware licence so I can connect to AOL and still run linux underneath. Now if only there were some way to connect to AOL using linux that works in the uk I could be rid of vmware and its M$ os
And what happends if the program you are watching has its advert breaks timed differently to other channels?? Your set top box tunes to a targeted ad and you miss an ad sized chunk of your program.
How would this ever work?
The only way I could see it working is if groups of channels timed ads to be at the same time.
Hold on! ads at the same times? I'll bet it wouldn't be long before someone (me maybe) figured out that with set advert breaks you could set your pvr to skip them:)
On the other hand it would be quite cool to intercept the change channel signal and use it to pause a pvr's recording
Im not sure how well this world work, but Maplin Electronics are doing an ISA card that is a pc in one. Its intended as a way to upgrade your old 486 or even 386 to a PIII spec system. It has onboard 10/100 nic, gfx, ide and even sound etc and can take up to a p3 1gig socket370 cpu. If you got a standard case I'm guessing you could run 4 or these babys in a standard atx case. (Although im not sure what you could do about powering it.) The board supports both at and atx power, it would not be hard to devide power from a suitably powerfull psu. A 400w psu would be fine for 2 of these cards You might push it to 3 but a 4th would require an aditional psu. I dont know who makes this board or if maplin have it on their website http://www.maplin.co.uk
Some of us are dyslexic and find spelling a real problem. spell checkers have been a god send for me. I realy hope that the mozilla spell checker gets made into a suable product.
I have a Yamaha DVD player (Philips guts inside it) deregioning it was as simple as typing in a code on the remote, admittedly you did have to use a non-standard rc5 (philips remote code, not crypto-ssl) code to enable this. I was quite suprised to find that philips have been very sneeky, as now when a disc in inserted that is not region 2 (the native region of my player) the player reboots and boots up in the new region that its read from the disc, thus defeating RCE. As now the player is the correct region for that disc. There is only one problem with this player, and thats relating the layer changing on the matrix, about 2 seconds of footage is lost due to premeture layer change:(((
I have a 10 metre usb extention cable, it runs along side 2 cat5 cables, one for lan and the other carrying kvm data. I run it to my linux router which is up in the attic (to keep things quiet). In order to get 10m out of usb I used 2 x 5 metre usb(A) to usb(B) cables and a 5 port minihub, the cables cost me 5(ukp) each from Tesco of all places, and the hub was 15(ukp) from maplin electronics. It all works like a dream and only set me back 25(ukp) I think this must be working at both high and low speed as I'm running a speedtouch usb adsl modem on the end of the usb as well as my keyboard and mouse. I was even toying with the idea of usb speakers if I can find some that are supported by linux and are available in the UK.
Maybe someone could help me out with tails of usb audio experiances.
I have to say that most music that I have downloaded, I have eventualy gone out and purchaced, with the exception of the music that has been deleted. Why must good music that is aparently still selling well, have its life brought to an artificial end at the hand of some record company's director. Surely this amounts to fixing the charts? Whats the point in having charts if they are going to be fixed like this? A recent example is the the Elvis Track that was No 1 here in the UK for a few weeks (not that I personaly liked it) but BMG chose to cut off supply to record shops in order to "let some other artist (note one of their own) have a go". I personaly will continue to download music that is "DELETED" as stupid record companys leave me no other choice.
Although people seem to be quoting massive resolutions for digital image to film transfer, in most of the theaters I've visited (even the good ones) you would not be able to take advantage of resolutions like that. I'm guessing that due to inperpections in the screen shape and curviture, the picture is focused for optimum coverage which can be quite out of focas. Anyway the digital cinema standard is only 1280x1024. Check out the The Barco website for more info.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh they do fade with time,
High brightness LED's actualy give out ultraviolet light which is then used in combination with a phosphor to produce visable high intensity light of virtualy any colour.
Maybe they have got around this problem in some way, but I have seen one of these high brightness LED's burn for 3 years and it's gone from so bright you can't look at it to about the same brightness as a white 5mm circle of the same intensity as this white background that you are looking at now.
(Yes ok you might have your screen set brighter than mine or darker than mine, but I get the general idea)
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day.
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I'm sorry about the spelling in this post, firefox doesn't check spelling by context and my dyslexic brain doesn't do it very well ether. Dyslexia is kindof annoying at times.
As for the scaling 1360 to 1366 you'll be glad to know that the maker of my panel Relisys have gone bust, but if you get offered one cheep take note of this strange oddity. I'm half tempted to try to reverse engineer the firmware to allow native resolution. Whilst on the subject of oddities the PC analog input of this same panel is a bit pink.
Any flat panel display is only as good as its video processor. Usually its kindof related to the price.
LCD displays work by running a backlight at full whack and blocking light pixel by pixel and boy can you feel it, just put your hand in front of one and feel the heat coming from it. Larger LCD displays can be quite a drain on your electricity supply as well as your wallet. LCD also tend to run higher screen resolutions than plasmas.
Without decent video processing also tend to make standard (low definition) TV look horrific and seem to make MPEG artifacts look much more noticeable.
Plasmas on the other hand tend to be of lower screen resolution and also seem to mostly have non-square pixels ie run 1024x768 but stretched to 16:9, this is important if you want to run a PC into your display. Other things I have noticed are dithering to produce some colours and also flicker (which I have never seen on an LCD screen).
That said, Plasmas seem to give a much sharper looking image than LCD (I think this may be due to a small black border round each pixel) Low def TV looks great on a plasma and there are never any viewing angle problems.
Black looks black and not gray.
Power wize even on large plasmas the power requirements average out as less than those of LCD displays.
Alot of the larger displays I have come across (mostly LCD) seem to be at some odd ball screen res 1366x768 this is a totaly stupid size because its not divisible by 8. Most graphics cards have a hard time driving a screen of this resolution.
The screen I have is of this size but only supports a PC input of 1360x768@60 so anything I throw up from my PC has 5 blury areas because it tries to scale 1360 to 1366
If you are looking to run a screen from your PC check the following:
Does the display have both DVI and DB15 Inputs (useful not essential)
Does it support its native screen res on both the DB15 and the DVI (pretty essential)
Does it support a refresh higher than 60Hz on the DB15 (pretty essential)
Does it have at least one HDMI input (most if not all cable / sat boxes need this for HDTV)
Its worth a note that 1366x768 is not a hi-def broadcast resolution and any hi-def broadcast material is going to have to be scaled through that same video scaler that does such a bad job of upscaling low-def TV.
One way to get round this problem with upscaling low def TV is to do it on your PC.
I get outstanding results using a brooktree 848 based capture card (yup thats the old style wintv card) and a linux program called tvtime (http://tvtime.sf.net). As far as I know there is something for windows called descaler. Tvtime actually seems to reduce mpeg artifacting.
The problem with using a PC is that there is no way to sync whats going out with whats coming in. If both input and output are 60Hz you will get a problem known as tairing.
Tairing (for those who don't know)
Is where the top and bottom of the picture seems to break away from each other, its mostly noticeable on side to side panning movements and the effect is like that of a postcard where someone has cut it in 2 with a knife and put the 2 bits back together, but not quite in the right place
One way to reduce this effect is to run your display at a higher refresh IE 70-80hz. Its unlikely that the DVI connector will support this so you'll have to choose the DB15 analog route. This does not get rid of the tairing, but causes it to happen in a random place with every frame (which is less noticeable to the eye)
Its also worth noting that there are some displays that are native hi-def resolution ie 1280x720 and 1920x1080. These displays will give the best results when running at these native resolutions. I live in the UK and here our HD TV is broadcast in 1080i so there is very little point in getting a 1280x720 display.
If you want to run a PC at 1920x1080 its hard to read standard 11 point fonts at 10ft distance on a 42" display (which is what we have at work)
Finally My best advice is t
Cows are a major cause of methane, a so called green house gas.
So are we going to sue them for farting?
I cant see how the court hasn't thrown this out.
Macrovision is an ANALOG system that puts slowly verying square pulses in the blanking region of an ANALOG video signal, quite how this relates to the DIGITAL Millennium Copyright Act I don't know.
Macrovision was developed well before the millennium and its not digital in any way shape or form.
My panasonic dvd player / recorder even outputs this on the progressive YUV output, this upsets my flatpanel display, I have to revert to the interlaced S-video connection.
I since discovered its alot easyer to just run xine on the linux pc I have connected to it.
One day I might cobble together a few 556 timers and a 4066 switch to just chop out the macrovision.
I wonder how durable these cards would be? I get through a debit/credit card about every 2 months. They just delaminate in my back pocket. I've actualy had chips fall off some. Are we going to have to wear them like the ID tags some people wear to work?
I've also killed many a chip card with the static discharge when I get out of my car. I wonder how much info will be stored on the card I'll bet its just a number that hooks into a database. Even if it isn't the info will be stored off card so they can issue you a new one should the old one become broken/ unreadable. So wait a min what we are saying here? The govenment give us a card with a chip on it and take our biometric details and put them into a database but lead us into thinking these details are only held on the card.
Just a thought most of us brits have a national insurance card with a nice unique number on it.
I guess this means that authorities will be able to pull up a picture of you before they even see you and have a record of your biometric data (I wonder if this includes DNA?)
I'm totaly cluesless here, it sounds like its some kids toy?
Use ether Ices2 or Darkice. Both these take audio from your sound card and encode it in real time. This is then sent to your streaming server. I have tried plugins for xmms but couldn't get them to work. (You may have more luck than me) xmms.org has a few streaming plugins.
:)
Unless you have an emu10k1 type card that can record what it plays you'll need to use the alsa soundcard drivers. On most of the pc's I own this gives me a capture channel allowing recording of anything my sound card is playing.
I also found that the crossfade plugin for xmms works like a dream
I have a sony in car cd player, the one that can play mp3s but not copy protected cds. I was a little annoyed until I found that my old pioneer 6 disc scsi cdrom drive drm624x that I used to run on my amiga (its 4.4x not 24x speed btw) could rip copy protected cds flawlessly when used with cdparanoia (linux cd ripper utill made by the same people as ogg vorbis). Ebay has these units for $15 each. They can be got elsewhere I suspect that Google may be able to help there.
That's not quite true, light guns and pens work by tracking the raster as it scans the screen so long as there is suffcient brightness, it should work regardless of colour, its simply a timing issue. The reason you see flashing in the screen is to ensure there is enough brightness for the sensor in the gun to work, you could just turn up the brightness on your monitor. Light guns work best on slow scanning screens (TV's and tube type projector TV's) something like that will not work on an lcd screen or an lcd projector. There are ways around this, for instance you could use an IR laser to scan the target area, use an IR sensor in the gun and hey presto you have a flicker free display that you can use a light gun with. I guess if you were going to do that you may as well setup a camera pointing at the screen, fit your light gun with a laser pointer and use the camera to track where your gun is firing, it would most likely be easyer to setup and look a whole lot cooler plus would make targeting a whole lot easyer :)
Being someone who uses Linux as his primary os, you may wonder what on earth I'm doing with an AOL account. Well the reason is simple, portability. I run about 40 or so linux boxes in various places, I'm basicly on call 24 hours a day to support these for my customers. This means that if I travel about I can jack into any phone line and not worry about isp call charges. AOL is the only ISP in the UK to offer toll free internet access across all the UK telcos. There are a few others who will offer toll free from BT lines only and at twice the cost of AOL too! I value the service AOL provides so much that I went out a purchased a vmware licence so I can connect to AOL and still run linux underneath. Now if only there were some way to connect to AOL using linux that works in the uk I could be rid of vmware and its M$ os
And what happends if the program you are watching has its advert breaks timed differently to other channels?? Your set top box tunes to a targeted ad and you miss an ad sized chunk of your program.
:)
How would this ever work?
The only way I could see it working is if groups of channels timed ads to be at the same time.
Hold on! ads at the same times? I'll bet it wouldn't be long before someone (me maybe) figured out that with set advert breaks you could set your pvr to skip them
On the other hand it would be quite cool to intercept the change channel signal and use it to pause a pvr's recording
Im not sure how well this world work, but Maplin Electronics are doing an ISA card that is a pc in one.
Its intended as a way to upgrade your old 486 or even 386 to a PIII spec system.
It has onboard 10/100 nic, gfx, ide and even sound etc and can take up to a p3 1gig socket370 cpu. If you got a standard case I'm guessing you could run 4 or these babys in a standard atx case. (Although im not sure what you could do about powering it.) The board supports both at and atx power, it would not be hard to devide power from a suitably powerfull psu. A 400w psu would be fine for 2 of these cards You might push it to 3 but a 4th would require an aditional psu. I dont know who makes this board or if maplin have it on their website http://www.maplin.co.uk
Some of us are dyslexic and find spelling a real problem. spell checkers have been a god send for me. I realy hope that the mozilla spell checker gets made into a suable product.
whats that app thats running on the right side of the screenshot?
I have a Yamaha DVD player (Philips guts inside it) :(((
deregioning it was as simple as typing in a code on the remote, admittedly you did have to use a non-standard rc5 (philips remote code, not crypto-ssl) code to enable this. I was quite suprised to find that philips have been very sneeky, as now when a disc in inserted that is not region 2 (the native region of my player) the player reboots and boots up in the new region that its read from the disc, thus defeating RCE. As now the player is the correct region for that disc. There is only one problem with this player, and thats relating the layer changing on the matrix, about 2 seconds of footage is lost due to premeture layer change
I have a 10 metre usb extention cable, it runs along side 2 cat5 cables, one for lan and the other carrying kvm data. I run it to my linux router which is up in the attic (to keep things quiet).
In order to get 10m out of usb I used 2 x 5 metre usb(A) to usb(B) cables and a 5 port minihub, the cables cost me 5(ukp) each from Tesco of all places, and the hub was 15(ukp) from maplin electronics. It all works like a dream and only set me back 25(ukp)
I think this must be working at both high and low speed as I'm running a speedtouch usb adsl modem on the end of the usb as well as my keyboard and mouse. I was even toying with the idea of usb speakers if I can find some that are supported by linux and are available in the UK.
Maybe someone could help me out with tails of usb audio experiances.
I have to say that most music that I have downloaded, I have eventualy gone out and purchaced, with the exception of the music that has been deleted. Why must good music that is aparently still selling well, have its life brought to an artificial end at the hand of some record company's director. Surely this amounts to fixing the charts? Whats the point in having charts if they are going to be fixed like this? A recent example is the the Elvis Track that was No 1 here in the UK for a few weeks (not that I personaly liked it) but BMG chose to cut off supply to record shops in order to "let some other artist (note one of their own) have a go". I personaly will continue to download music that is "DELETED" as stupid record companys leave me no other choice.
Dont say that, or the bbc will start charging a license for the internet
Although people seem to be quoting massive resolutions for digital image to film transfer, in most of the theaters I've visited (even the good ones) you would not be able to take advantage of resolutions like that. I'm guessing that due to inperpections in the screen shape and curviture, the picture is focused for optimum coverage which can be quite out of focas. Anyway the digital cinema standard is only 1280x1024. Check out the The Barco website for more info.