Okay, I recompiled mplayer with the use-qtx-codecs enabled, and subsequently downloaded ffmpeg and compiled it again, and this time it'll play the first frame of the Matrix movie, and the audio, but not the video.
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG decoder)
A bit later, we get...
Checking audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit... AF_pre: af format: 2 bps, 2 ch, 44100 hz, little endian signed int AF_pre: 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps) Building audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit... Starting playback... mjpeg: JFIF header found (version: 1.1) mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c2) VDec: Codec did not set sh->disp_w and sh->disp_h, trying workaround. Error while decoding frame!37 ct: -0.009 3/ 3 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0% mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)0.015 5/ 5 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0% mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf) mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)
After a few screens of this, I get:
MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: decode_audio - MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
disassembly. For details, see DOCS/bugreports.html#crash.b. - MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your gcc
version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read DOCS/bugreports.html
and follow the instructions there. We can't and won't help unless you provide
this information when reporting a possible bug. SoundConverterEndConversion:0 SoundConverte rClose:0
If anyone can help out with this, I'd appreciate it. I don't have any trouble watching other quicktimes with this...
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG decoder)
AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) Building audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit... Start playing... mjpeg: JFIF header found (version: 1.1) mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c2) VDec: codec didn't set sh->disp_w and sh->disp_h, trying to workaround! VDec: vo config request - 0 x 0 (preferred csp: Planar YV12) VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 3) Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied. VO: invalid dimensions! FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver!
FATAL: Couldn't initialize video filters (-vop) or video output (-vo)!
The Matrix Revisited has a 10-minute feature that explains how it came about. The Wachowskis got some of the best and brightest animators in Japan (and a couple from outside of Japan) to do some anime shorts for them. The animators, all of whom were enthralled with The Matrix, were only too happy to oblige. (And why shouldn't they be? The Wachowskis stole the memes from their anime; they were only just taking them back again.:)
The announcement of the Animatrix last year did answer one burning question...it was mentioned in news stories that, aside from Final Fantasy, Square USA would produce only one other bit of animation--a short film--but it was never mentioned what it was. Then, when it was announced, a lot of people were going, "Ohhhh!"
That's kind of why I find this Animatrix short so interesting. The dialogue in The Matrix does indeed make the machines out to be evil. But this anime places more of the blame--a lot more of it--on the humans of the day, whose luddism and fear and unwillingness to reach an agreement with the machines who just wanted to live in peace apparently led to the whole thing.
It becomes a lot harder to blame the machines for creating the Matrix after seeing this short.
This Matrix comic, which is the only one on the site to have Wachowski co-credit (so far as I know) gives an expanded version of the domestic-droid murder incident shown in this anime...so I think that it is indeed safe to assume that this short was co-written by the Wachowskis.
Because humans suffer from a regrettable tendancy to anthropomorphize machines. Presumably, they wear construction helmets so you can differentiate them from the remarkably similar domestic-service or other models.
It would be much more sensible to ask what a robot is doing sitting on risers for a "lunch break," or why they have a zillion of them pulling a cargo container up the ramp great-pyramid-construction style.
Incidentally, this Matrix comic strip is a good companion-piece to the current animated short.
There's another article about this in Gamepro. A sharp-eyed Miyazaki fan noticed that Future Boy Conan, an early Miyazaki TV series, appears on one of the cards in one of the lower pictures.
Funny...in the Niven et al book Fallen Angels (the book that makes notable references to RMS), one of the methods used to get around the totalitarian anti-literature government is to retrofit regular gameboys to serve as covert e-book devices. Looks like life's imitating art.
Speaking of the iPod, I've heard a rumor that the next one will have sixty gigs of storage and a touch-sensitive screen, and be Apple's entry into the fully-functional PDA market. No idea if it's true, but it sure would be neat if it were.
...I have no way of knowing: is this 2-disc set going to be substantially different from The Matrix plus The Matrix Revisited which are available now? I mean, I already have both of them. I don't see why I should have to pick up another.
I think, that when >99% of an activity is illegal, it is at least reasonably safe to generalize from that illegal activity to cover the whole. This sort of semantic nitpicking really doesn't help, and only makes those who do it look like a bunch of whiners.
Oh, come on! At least 95%, and probably more like 99%, of peer-to-peer file trading by volume is "stolen" intellectual property. There's very little demand for anything else. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise, or to claim that one permitted file somehow makes up for a million "stolen" ones.
The punishment is way out of proportion to the crime...but in the vast majority of cases, it is a crime.
I'm fortunate enough to hang out on-line with the folks writing the pen-and-paper roleplaying game. They're very cool people, and I believe that they're going to make an excellent game.
This morning, I burned my last two CDROMs into coasters and needed to get more...so I headed over to the bookstore on the college campus near my apartment, figuring that even if I had to pay a little more for one or two CDROMs there, it would be less bother than driving across town to Best Buy. I arrived at opening time...to find the bookstore completely dark. I knocked on the door, and one of the student workers came out and explained that the university had taken all its computers off-line today because of a "big computer virus attack" that hit last night. "You might see something about it in the news," said worker said sagely. "It was world-wide." And so the bookstore was closed. And they couldn't sell me a single CD-ROM.
I ended up going up the street to Walgreen's and getting a 10-pack there...for probably what 2 or 3 blank CDROMs would have run me at the campus bookstore, so I suppose I can't really complain too much that university stupidity saved me some money. It was extremely annoying at the time, though.
Ask Hypatia what you want to read, at the website you will see in brackets thusly:. Through the miracle of collaborative filtering, she can come up with a list of books at least as likely as anything anyone here can give you.
According to what I've heard on the Miyazaki mailing list, the "Spider Man: Return of the Green Goblin" animated VHS tape includes a trailer for Laputa that says it's coming soon, and the insert on the "Country Bears" R1 DVD claims Kiki's is coming soon, "for the first time on DVD."
A non-Disney company has done a good job with a Miyazaki film--that being Manga Video, and their subbed and dubbed DVD of Castle of Cagliostro. Sure they didn't do anything with the original mono sound, it wasn't anamorphic, and there were no extras to speak of...but the subtitles were good and the dub was decent.
(And I've tried to help make up for the extras it didn't have by recording my own DVDTracks mp3 commentary for it.:)
I really didn't expect much good out of the Totoro DVD. It was just a hasty pump-and-dump of the one Miyazaki movie they had onto DVD just as they had it in order to capitalize...just like all those generic animated fairy tale tapes that come out right at the same time as a Disney movie. Even Fox's laserdisc of it way back when was pan and scan...clearly, that's all they had to work with. On the bright side, at least the price is low...
The article claims the kid's applied for a patent to protect his browser.
Aren't patent applications supposed to be found in some database somewhere? Can someone dig up the application and see just what's so special about what his browser does?
Don't toss out those spray paint cans yet...
on
Palm Kills Off Graffiti
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I expect that someone will come up with a hack or add-on application that mimics graffiti for future PalmOS machines, just the same way you can install alternate handwriting recognition systems for today's. So folks who're so well-trained in graffiti that it shows up in household notes they write probably won't have to worry too much about the Palm of the future.
Some would say that Japan's culture has a deep basis in imitation--first the numerous inventions and innovations from nearby China, and in more recent times the electronics that we introduced to them in the post-war years. It's almost a cultural imperative.
Re:Interesting possibilities...
on
Cross-Site-TRACE
·
· Score: 2
Nonetheless, for those who remember the 1970s, the escalation in prices does appear substantial. Figures obtained from R.R. Bowker, the company of record for information about the publishing industry, show that, from 1975 to 2000, the price of the average hardcover book of fiction went up 200 percent to $24.96. Average prices for hardcover poetry and drama books increased 211 percent to $33.57. Nonfiction hardcovers went up 123 percent to $40.29. The largest increase was in the juvenile category, which climbed 227 percent to arrive at the current average of $18.40.
Still, adjust these figures for inflation and you get a different story, says Robert Sahr, an associate professor of political science at Oregon State University who studies media coverage of complex matters such as budgeting and economic policies. He found that the cost of hardcover fiction in real dollars had actually gone down 2 percent, while poetry and drama and juvenile categories had risen only a few percentage points. Nonfiction hardcovers had decreased in real price by 27 percent.
As for whether authors will release their books this way in the hope of getting "noticed" by a traditional publisher...well, it's already happened, a few times. It's even happened recently, what with John Scalzi's Old Man's War having been picked up by Tor--the very same publisher who's publishing Doctorow's Magic Kingdom--after being posted online. (Though ironically, it's now been removed from the website since Tor's picked it up.) But I think that overall, the chances of such a thing happening are really infinitessimal. After all, how many people who've posted their stuff on the Internet haven't been picked up for publication? I know I haven't.
Not really all THAT groundbreaking...
on
Cross-Site-TRACE
·
· Score: 2
Technically, Baen already broke the ground. Hey, they've given away an entire CD-ROM of books, under the same terms. Granted, they didn't use a specific license, but it says right there on the disk that you're allowed to copy and share but not sell its contents.
It sure is nice to see Doctorow jumping on the bandwagon, though.
Re:why would i buy?
on
Cross-Site-TRACE
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You might want to say, "Hey, man, right on, kudos!" and support him with some money. (Heck, you don't even have to buy the book to do that; you could probably paypal him a few bucks and say it's pay-back in lieu of buying the book.) Or you might simply like the book enough that you want to have a professional-looking dead-tree version to stick on your shelf, or to lend to someone who doesn't like reading electronically and wouldn't understand being handed a bound printout.
You probably find it hard to conceive of paying for something you could get for free, but not everybody does...not by a long-shot. In fact, as I mentioned in this comment, doing something quite similar has worked wonders for Baen. Blockquoth Jim Baen:
Baen has experienced a mysterious 50% increase in gross dollar sales in the previous year. Also, our "sellthrough" (percentage of books placed in the market that sell to end-point customers) has improved from the rather startling 63% to the truly stunning 74%. I'm tentatively blamiing this on my wacko e-net proclivities. (Insert a Crazy Eddie ad pastiche here)
People who prefer print books but wouldn't otherwise look at Baen's titles in the store are taking free ganders (or even buying the e-versions first!), reading for long enough that they like it, and going out to place an order. Judging from what he says on the linked page and in the introduction to the free e-version of his book, Doctorow seems to be hoping that much the same thing will happen to him...and who's to say that it won't?
Slashdot Mirror
I ended up using wget, which resumed the transfer whenever it peered out.
Not that it made any difference in being able to watch the thing; mplayer doesn't support its stream type yet. Thankfully, I have Crossover.
Oh well...there's always Crossover.
Okay, I recompiled mplayer with the use-qtx-codecs enabled, and subsequently downloaded ffmpeg and compiled it again, and this time it'll play the first frame of the Matrix movie, and the audio, but not the video.
e rClose:0
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG decoder)
A bit later, we get...
Checking audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit...
AF_pre: af format: 2 bps, 2 ch, 44100 hz, little endian signed int
AF_pre: 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian)
AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps)
Building audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit...
Starting playback...
mjpeg: JFIF header found (version: 1.1)
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c2)
VDec: Codec did not set sh->disp_w and sh->disp_h, trying workaround.
Error while decoding frame!37 ct: -0.009 3/ 3 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0%
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)0.015 5/ 5 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0%
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (cf)
After a few screens of this, I get:
MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: decode_audio
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
disassembly. For details, see DOCS/bugreports.html#crash.b.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your gcc
version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read DOCS/bugreports.html
and follow the instructions there. We can't and won't help unless you provide
this information when reporting a possible bug.
SoundConverterEndConversion:0
SoundConvert
If anyone can help out with this, I'd appreciate it. I don't have any trouble watching other quicktimes with this...
I've installed the Quicktime stuff from that site, and this happens when I try to play it:
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 5986->176400 (47.9 kbit)
Selected audio codec: [qdmc] afm:qtaudio (Quicktime QDMC/QDM2 audio decoders)
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG decoder)
AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian)
Building audio filter chain for 44100Hz/2ch/16bit -> 44100Hz/2ch/16bit...
Start playing...
mjpeg: JFIF header found (version: 1.1)
mjpeg: unsupported coding type (c2)
VDec: codec didn't set sh->disp_w and sh->disp_h, trying to workaround!
VDec: vo config request - 0 x 0 (preferred csp: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 3)
Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied.
VO: invalid dimensions!
FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver!
FATAL: Couldn't initialize video filters (-vop) or video output (-vo)!
The Matrix Revisited has a 10-minute feature that explains how it came about. The Wachowskis got some of the best and brightest animators in Japan (and a couple from outside of Japan) to do some anime shorts for them. The animators, all of whom were enthralled with The Matrix, were only too happy to oblige. (And why shouldn't they be? The Wachowskis stole the memes from their anime; they were only just taking them back again. :)
The announcement of the Animatrix last year did answer one burning question...it was mentioned in news stories that, aside from Final Fantasy, Square USA would produce only one other bit of animation--a short film--but it was never mentioned what it was. Then, when it was announced, a lot of people were going, "Ohhhh!"
That's kind of why I find this Animatrix short so interesting. The dialogue in The Matrix does indeed make the machines out to be evil. But this anime places more of the blame--a lot more of it--on the humans of the day, whose luddism and fear and unwillingness to reach an agreement with the machines who just wanted to live in peace apparently led to the whole thing.
It becomes a lot harder to blame the machines for creating the Matrix after seeing this short.
Whoops, typo in the link. I meant to say, this Matrix comic
This Matrix comic, which is the only one on the site to have Wachowski co-credit (so far as I know) gives an expanded version of the domestic-droid murder incident shown in this anime...so I think that it is indeed safe to assume that this short was co-written by the Wachowskis.
Because humans suffer from a regrettable tendancy to anthropomorphize machines. Presumably, they wear construction helmets so you can differentiate them from the remarkably similar domestic-service or other models.
It would be much more sensible to ask what a robot is doing sitting on risers for a "lunch break," or why they have a zillion of them pulling a cargo container up the ramp great-pyramid-construction style.
Incidentally, this Matrix comic strip is a good companion-piece to the current animated short.
There's another article about this in Gamepro. A sharp-eyed Miyazaki fan noticed that Future Boy Conan, an early Miyazaki TV series, appears on one of the cards in one of the lower pictures.
Funny...in the Niven et al book Fallen Angels (the book that makes notable references to RMS), one of the methods used to get around the totalitarian anti-literature government is to retrofit regular gameboys to serve as covert e-book devices. Looks like life's imitating art.
Speaking of the iPod, I've heard a rumor that the next one will have sixty gigs of storage and a touch-sensitive screen, and be Apple's entry into the fully-functional PDA market. No idea if it's true, but it sure would be neat if it were.
...I have no way of knowing: is this 2-disc set going to be substantially different from The Matrix plus The Matrix Revisited which are available now? I mean, I already have both of them. I don't see why I should have to pick up another.
It's a good time to move up to giFT.
I think, that when >99% of an activity is illegal, it is at least reasonably safe to generalize from that illegal activity to cover the whole. This sort of semantic nitpicking really doesn't help, and only makes those who do it look like a bunch of whiners.
Oh, come on! At least 95%, and probably more like 99%, of peer-to-peer file trading by volume is "stolen" intellectual property. There's very little demand for anything else. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise, or to claim that one permitted file somehow makes up for a million "stolen" ones.
The punishment is way out of proportion to the crime...but in the vast majority of cases, it is a crime.
I'm fortunate enough to hang out on-line with the folks writing the pen-and-paper roleplaying game. They're very cool people, and I believe that they're going to make an excellent game.
This morning, I burned my last two CDROMs into coasters and needed to get more...so I headed over to the bookstore on the college campus near my apartment, figuring that even if I had to pay a little more for one or two CDROMs there, it would be less bother than driving across town to Best Buy. I arrived at opening time...to find the bookstore completely dark. I knocked on the door, and one of the student workers came out and explained that the university had taken all its computers off-line today because of a "big computer virus attack" that hit last night. "You might see something about it in the news," said worker said sagely. "It was world-wide." And so the bookstore was closed. And they couldn't sell me a single CD-ROM.
I ended up going up the street to Walgreen's and getting a 10-pack there...for probably what 2 or 3 blank CDROMs would have run me at the campus bookstore, so I suppose I can't really complain too much that university stupidity saved me some money. It was extremely annoying at the time, though.
Ask Hypatia what you want to read, at the website you will see in brackets thusly:. Through the miracle of collaborative filtering, she can come up with a list of books at least as likely as anything anyone here can give you.
According to what I've heard on the Miyazaki mailing list, the "Spider Man: Return of the Green Goblin" animated VHS tape includes a trailer for Laputa that says it's coming soon, and the insert on the "Country Bears" R1 DVD claims Kiki's is coming soon, "for the first time on DVD."
A non-Disney company has done a good job with a Miyazaki film--that being Manga Video, and their subbed and dubbed DVD of Castle of Cagliostro. Sure they didn't do anything with the original mono sound, it wasn't anamorphic, and there were no extras to speak of...but the subtitles were good and the dub was decent.
:)
(And I've tried to help make up for the extras it didn't have by recording my own DVDTracks mp3 commentary for it.
I really didn't expect much good out of the Totoro DVD. It was just a hasty pump-and-dump of the one Miyazaki movie they had onto DVD just as they had it in order to capitalize...just like all those generic animated fairy tale tapes that come out right at the same time as a Disney movie. Even Fox's laserdisc of it way back when was pan and scan...clearly, that's all they had to work with. On the bright side, at least the price is low...
The article claims the kid's applied for a patent to protect his browser.
Aren't patent applications supposed to be found in some database somewhere? Can someone dig up the application and see just what's so special about what his browser does?
I expect that someone will come up with a hack or add-on application that mimics graffiti for future PalmOS machines, just the same way you can install alternate handwriting recognition systems for today's. So folks who're so well-trained in graffiti that it shows up in household notes they write probably won't have to worry too much about the Palm of the future.
Some would say that Japan's culture has a deep basis in imitation--first the numerous inventions and innovations from nearby China, and in more recent times the electronics that we introduced to them in the post-war years. It's almost a cultural imperative.
Technically, Baen already broke the ground. Hey, they've given away an entire CD-ROM of books, under the same terms. Granted, they didn't use a specific license, but it says right there on the disk that you're allowed to copy and share but not sell its contents.
It sure is nice to see Doctorow jumping on the bandwagon, though.
You probably find it hard to conceive of paying for something you could get for free, but not everybody does...not by a long-shot. In fact, as I mentioned in this comment, doing something quite similar has worked wonders for Baen. Blockquoth Jim Baen:People who prefer print books but wouldn't otherwise look at Baen's titles in the store are taking free ganders (or even buying the e-versions first!), reading for long enough that they like it, and going out to place an order. Judging from what he says on the linked page and in the introduction to the free e-version of his book, Doctorow seems to be hoping that much the same thing will happen to him...and who's to say that it won't?