3. You don't want to break the encryption, you NEED the encryption IN PLACE, as DVD players will NOT play unencrypted DVD movies, they expect CSS and will not play if it is not there.
As far as I know, this isn't the case - there are plenty of Region 0 (which I believe = unencrypted) titles about, espcially the non-movie titles like sports, documentaries and porn...
This seems to use something called EON but I've no idea what that is.
EON = Extended Other Network. It's what adds the "extra" functionality - stuff like Traffic/News switching, clock signals, Radiotext, and the PTY (programme type) searching.
Those of you in Europe or UK, how aware have you been of this 'feature' in car radios?
Very. My last two cars have had RDS tuners, as does everyone else's in my family. I'm currently sat at home listening to Radio 1 on my home tuner, with "Danny Rampling with The Lovegroove Dance Party on Radio 1" scrolling by on the display (care of Radiotext).
Can't wait till we get mainstream digital radio tuners - the text services on them are fantastic.
btw, I can disable the TA (traffic) and News EON switching on all of my tuners. In fact, I'd quite like some RDS service that I can tune to and it'll swtich frequency to the nearest pirate station. It's a bast scanning through for some station that may or may not be on the air..
qube
Vincent didn't kill anyone..
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Vincent plans to voyage into space in only a few days if he can avoid the gene police, who are trying to track him through an eyelash he left behind on an office floor after killing a superior who discovered his secret.
Do your research Katz (or actually bother to watch the film.. ) - the person who killed him was Vincent's mission director, desperate that the mission would go ahead.
Vincent was implicated in the crime because his eyelash was picked up, scanned and was found to belong to an in-valid. As Gattaca was a high-security establishment (blood checking on entry, etc), they assumed that the in-valid *must* have done it.
Did you watch the film, or just quickly read an (incorrect) plot summary?
Yes, as we've got a 32" widescreen I know:) Better than streching a 4:3 image (ours has a "panoramic" mode that can chop a little off to reduce the distortion), but still not as ideal as 16:9 for everything:)
You have two eyes, both with a field of view - take the field of view of each eye and you end up with a horizontal rectangular shape (approximately). That area is about the same shape as a widescreen picture, which is probably why it's prevailed as the cinema format of choice.
Besides, anyone who make a movies these days are thinking ahead to video and TV playback. They make sure they can fit what's important in a 4:3 area, while the rest of the scene is useless fluff or scenery. If they can't fit it all in, they play that clever trick where they squash the scene to make more of it fit in the same horizontal space.
Why should a director have to be thinking in terms of 4:3? If they wanted to limit themselves like that, why don't they just forget widescreen and go with 4:3 from the start?
Take a look at what you're missing - there's a good "Widescreen Unravelled" feature at DVDTimes (sorry, can't link direct to pages)
It's not a no-win situation - in the UK, we have widescreen TVs at decent prices (I've got a catalogue here with a 28" widescreen TV for 350UKP), DVD players are coming right down in price and a good stock of Widescreen videos and DVDs (especially in the retail market). Much of our TV content is screened in 14:9 widescreen as well.
In the UK, people are seeing sense and buying widescreen sets at a fantastic rate. When will the Americans catch up?:)
Here in the UK, the BBC and others are commited to broadcasting a lot of widescreen content. Most new BBC productions are now widescreen, including stuff like soaps (Eastenders).
Unfortunately, much of the BBC's "widescreen" output is in the 14:9 format (ie, thin black bars), which pleases no-one. Owners of regular 4:3 sets don't like having black bars, and owners of 16:9 (ie. standard widescreen) don't like having to stretch the picture to fit.
Generally though, it's a start - if a slightly botched compromise.
All of the big audio companies are investing their time and money into Minidisc - not only players and recorders that are tiny, but when you need more space, just pop in another cheap (under 1 UKP) disc for another 74 minutes.
As they've gone so far with MD, why would they bother making an MP3-based device? It not only competes directly with MD, but to achieve the same functionality (ie real-time recording from microphones, line-level sources etc) they'd have to comply with the RIAA and include SCMS copy protection (something a bit difficult with mp3 files)
MP3 also has a bit of a bad rep with the public - it's widely associated with music piracy, something that the audio companies don't want to contend with.
Audio companies also aren't very good at doing PC stuff (Sony being one of the few exceptions), and vice versa. The current MP3 player manufacturers really need to get some good audio people on their teams - brushed metal casings and good quality headphone amps are what's expected of a portable audio device.
Before anyone asks, NO you can't quickly dump MP3s onto them - but I just set up a playlist of MP3s and let it record to MD while i work/eat/whatever.
In-car players are a lot cheaper than an empeg as well (would you be happy with a $1000 headunit sitting in your car when you're away?)
http://www.minidisc.org
Until I can get an MP3 player that can record live concerts and friend's DJ sets, they'll stay on the shelf. MP3 players are a bit of a geektoy. Minidisc is just so much more flexible for the same cost, nicer players and not tied to the PC.
(if this sounds like an MP3-bashing post it isn't. I've just finished ripping over 150 of my CDs to MP3 - the technology's great, but MP3 players really suck).
1) "Instant" track access - how easy and quick will this be when there are 150+ songs on a disc? There could be a fair delay when you first put in a disc and it indexes it, and just imagine pressing >>| over 100 times to get to the track you want..
2) This thing looks horrible. If I was dropping $300 on an audio device I'd expect a sleek metallic device similar to the high-end Sony Discmans(men?).
3) It'll be too big and probably too heavy to be truly portable. Doesn't matter for in-car use (better off with an empeg though), but it's not going to sway many Rio or Minidisc users.
4) Support for every bitrate under the sun *must* be there. With the memory limit (in effect) now 650mb, there's no need to re-encode stuff like you have to for the Rio (just to squeeze a decent amount of music into that 32mb)
I've been saying "some sort of CD-based device for mp3 would rule" for some time, but thinking about it the only place it would be really good would be in a cheaper version of the empeg in-car player. I certainly wouldn't lug one of them with me when I'm just walking to/from places. I ditched my discman for a MiniDisc recorder for that very reason..
Unless you want to distribute the music via the internet (with the consent of the artist ofcourse), why compress it on your HD? I use my good old CD player and record player, or even a walkman to hear music... The quality is even better, since it the music doesn't have to go through the process of ripping, compressing, decompressing and reproduction by a soundcard...
I sure hope MP3 won't replace the CD, the way the CD replaced the record, because imnsho this time it would be a downgrade.
In my case, I've got over 200 albums on CD. Because I'm a uni student, it's hassle transporting them to/from uni every time, plus I don't really have space to store them all in my (small) uni room.
The other aspect is cost and theft - 200 CDs cost a lot to insure, wheras the 20 CDRs that they're compressed onto cost barely anything.
And when I need music for a journey or something, I can just burn an audio CD for my discman (or put it on MiniDisc when I finally get one).
I'm a lazy b*stard as well - the CDs are on a shelf across the room and I'd have to get up to find something:)
Ops, how silly of me - AudioGrabber not AudioCatalist - which I find to be the comercial rip off of AudioGrabber design for the need-to-be-idiot-proof-masses.
The Audiograbber UI was licenced/sold to Xing for use in their Audiocatalyst product.
However, I was wondering as my ears are not that good, how in fact these conclusions are made. What mathematical/scientific process determines that the quality of one mp3 encoder is better than another if they encode the same file at the same bitrate?
Encode the same track with the different encoders, then hook up a decent amp & speakers (or a good set of headphones) up to your soundcard, and listen to the tracks back to back.
Alternatively you could take the mp3s you created, decompress them back to.wav and burn them on to a CD as audio. Then you can listen to the differences on a normal hifi CD player.
Like most audio things, quality isn't really something that can be measured in numbers - plus it's different things to different people. Pick the encoder that produces the sound that you're happiest with, screw what other people think.
(But I'd say just this - Xing sucks badly, it's quick but I'd rather take an extra 10 mins per CD)
So what's your point? It's a sleight against laptop users because they won't produce a software-only client?
The blame can only lie with the laptop manufacturers, and I can see exactly why they wouldn't want a (very) hot-running, power hungy component on board. Laptops have totally different operating critera to desktops. You can't have the best of both worlds - laptops will always be a very poor choice for gaming.
>Geek: "But GL, in 1979 you said you planned 9 >episodes."
>GL: "eh, I changed my mind, I don't know if I >can milk it all that far."
Bear in mind that Star Wars (Ep4) was studio-funded and it's not the smartest thing to go into a meeting with people funding you and saying "Hey! I've got another 8 to do after this". He was being realistic at the start, and making sure that his first major film was one nicely starting and ending package.
It was only after the success of Star Wars that he realised ESB and RJ could go ahead.
In reality, clocking Celeron 300As *is* that easy. Mine doesn't even need more cooling than the standard heatsink and fan (retail CPU), and it's totally stable with 2.1V core.
Remember, the Celerons use the same core as the PII-350/400/450, with the addition of on-board cache (cooled by the same HS/fan rather than sitting there in a stuffy cartridge).
This box has been running at 450 or 464 every day doing RC5. Overclocking isn't something for everyone, I make sure people know the risks assocoated with it before I'll help them build/clock their Celerons. But in reality, the risks are very low. If it dies, just go back to bios and knock it down a bit. Even when I couldn't get into bios (attempt at 600+mhz), it was just a single jumper on the board to reset it back to defaults.
It's simple; know what you're doing, check the CPU temperature and test your chosen speed/voltage thoroughly before settling on it.
Re:I'm all for competition but.. (dual celerons)
on
Athlon Benchmarks Out
·
· Score: 1
If I was shopping for a new system.. I'd either get a really cheap and reasonably fast cel or.. really cheap and kickass fast dual cel. The word is making dual cel systems is painless now, with some adapters or something.
Abit have their BP6 motherboard out shortly (2 PPGA sockets there on the board - plug and play), or you can buy socket adaptors with jumpers to set SMP on (from MSI).
Intel doesn't seem to like this much - there are rumours now of them revising the celeron to properly disable SMP. If you've been hankering for dual celeron, buy those CPUs now..
Yeah, it has to be said - Minidisc kicks ass over hardware MP3 players right now.
Neat little media (that's $2 a pop), fantastically well built players & recorders, reasonably priced in-car units, support from all the major audio companies, and no worries for the future - any audio signal you can send down a wire you can put onto a minidisc.
OK cons - you can't put audio onto a disc at more than realtime, plus the SCMS system (there to keep RIAA happy) can be a pain, but nowhere near as much as their vision of MP3 will be..
Hardware MP3 playback seems to be an expensive, impractical way of doing things.
Re:I want a CD based device -suitable CDROM drive?
on
Diamond spins off Rio
·
· Score: 1
Are there any cdrom drives that would actually stand up to the abuse of in-car use?
Come to think of it, a robust hard disk would help too..
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, this isn't the case - there are plenty of Region 0 (which I believe = unencrypted) titles about, espcially the non-movie titles like sports, documentaries and porn...
-- qube
ftp://quake3arena .co.uk/pub/quake3/source/win32/Q3AGameSource.exe (1.3Mb)
qube
http://www.quake3arena.co.uk
EON = Extended Other Network. It's what adds the "extra" functionality - stuff like Traffic/News switching, clock signals, Radiotext, and the PTY (programme type) searching.
qube
Very. My last two cars have had RDS tuners, as does everyone else's in my family. I'm currently sat at home listening to Radio 1 on my home tuner, with "Danny Rampling with The Lovegroove Dance Party on Radio 1" scrolling by on the display (care of Radiotext).
Can't wait till we get mainstream digital radio tuners - the text services on them are fantastic.
btw, I can disable the TA (traffic) and News EON switching on all of my tuners. In fact, I'd quite like some RDS service that I can tune to and it'll swtich frequency to the nearest pirate station. It's a bast scanning through for some station that may or may not be on the air..
qube
Do your research Katz (or actually bother to watch the film.. ) - the person who killed him was Vincent's mission director, desperate that the mission would go ahead.
Vincent was implicated in the crime because his eyelash was picked up, scanned and was found to belong to an in-valid. As Gattaca was a high-security establishment (blood checking on entry, etc), they assumed that the in-valid *must* have done it.
Did you watch the film, or just quickly read an (incorrect) plot summary?
qube
Sony have a 24" widescreen monitor out. Similar height to a 21", but with a couple more inches on either side.
Info: The Sony Multiscan GDM-W900 24-inch Graphic Display
Nice, but it'd both kill my wallet and my desk :)
qube
Yes, as we've got a 32" widescreen I know :) Better than streching a 4:3 image (ours has a "panoramic" mode that can chop a little off to reduce the distortion), but still not as ideal as 16:9 for everything :)
qube
OK, look at it this way:
You have two eyes, both with a field of view - take the field of view of each eye and you end up with a horizontal rectangular shape (approximately). That area is about the same shape as a widescreen picture, which is probably why it's prevailed as the cinema format of choice.
Besides, anyone who make a movies these days are thinking ahead to video and TV playback. They make sure they can fit what's important in a 4:3 area, while the rest of the scene is useless fluff or scenery. If they can't fit it all in, they play that clever trick where they squash the scene to make more of it fit in the same horizontal space.
Why should a director have to be thinking in terms of 4:3? If they wanted to limit themselves like that, why don't they just forget widescreen and go with 4:3 from the start?
Take a look at what you're missing - there's a good "Widescreen Unravelled" feature at DVDTimes (sorry, can't link direct to pages)
It's not a no-win situation - in the UK, we have widescreen TVs at decent prices (I've got a catalogue here with a 28" widescreen TV for 350UKP), DVD players are coming right down in price and a good stock of Widescreen videos and DVDs (especially in the retail market). Much of our TV content is screened in 14:9 widescreen as well.
In the UK, people are seeing sense and buying widescreen sets at a fantastic rate. When will the Americans catch up? :)
qube
Unfortunately, much of the BBC's "widescreen" output is in the 14:9 format (ie, thin black bars), which pleases no-one. Owners of regular 4:3 sets don't like having black bars, and owners of 16:9 (ie. standard widescreen) don't like having to stretch the picture to fit.
Generally though, it's a start - if a slightly botched compromise.
qube
All of the big audio companies are investing their time and money into Minidisc - not only players and recorders that are tiny, but when you need more space, just pop in another cheap (under 1 UKP) disc for another 74 minutes.
As they've gone so far with MD, why would they bother making an MP3-based device? It not only competes directly with MD, but to achieve the same functionality (ie real-time recording from microphones, line-level sources etc) they'd have to comply with the RIAA and include SCMS copy protection (something a bit difficult with mp3 files)
MP3 also has a bit of a bad rep with the public - it's widely associated with music piracy, something that the audio companies don't want to contend with.
Audio companies also aren't very good at doing PC stuff (Sony being one of the few exceptions), and vice versa. The current MP3 player manufacturers really need to get some good audio people on their teams - brushed metal casings and good quality headphone amps are what's expected of a portable audio device.
Before anyone asks, NO you can't quickly dump MP3s onto them - but I just set up a playlist of MP3s and let it record to MD while i work/eat/whatever.
In-car players are a lot cheaper than an empeg as well (would you be happy with a $1000 headunit sitting in your car when you're away?)
http://www.minidisc.org
Until I can get an MP3 player that can record live concerts and friend's DJ sets, they'll stay on the shelf. MP3 players are a bit of a geektoy. Minidisc is just so much more flexible for the same cost, nicer players and not tied to the PC.
(if this sounds like an MP3-bashing post it isn't. I've just finished ripping over 150 of my CDs to MP3 - the technology's great, but MP3 players really suck).
:)
qube
1) "Instant" track access - how easy and quick will this be when there are 150+ songs on a disc? There could be a fair delay when you first put in a disc and it indexes it, and just imagine pressing >>| over 100 times to get to the track you want..
2) This thing looks horrible. If I was dropping $300 on an audio device I'd expect a sleek metallic device similar to the high-end Sony Discmans(men?).
3) It'll be too big and probably too heavy to be truly portable. Doesn't matter for in-car use (better off with an empeg though), but it's not going to sway many Rio or Minidisc users.
4) Support for every bitrate under the sun *must* be there. With the memory limit (in effect) now 650mb, there's no need to re-encode stuff like you have to for the Rio (just to squeeze a decent amount of music into that 32mb)
I've been saying "some sort of CD-based device for mp3 would rule" for some time, but thinking about it the only place it would be really good would be in a cheaper version of the empeg in-car player. I certainly wouldn't lug one of them with me when I'm just walking to/from places. I ditched my discman for a MiniDisc recorder for that very reason..
qube
Unless you want to distribute the music via the internet (with the consent of the artist ofcourse), why compress it on your HD? I use my good old CD player and record player, or even a walkman to hear music... The quality is even better, since it the music doesn't have to go through the process of ripping, compressing, decompressing and reproduction by a soundcard...
I sure hope MP3 won't replace the CD, the way the CD replaced the record, because imnsho this time it would be a downgrade.
In my case, I've got over 200 albums on CD. Because I'm a uni student, it's hassle transporting them to/from uni every time, plus I don't really have space to store them all in my (small) uni room.
The other aspect is cost and theft - 200 CDs cost a lot to insure, wheras the 20 CDRs that they're compressed onto cost barely anything.
And when I need music for a journey or something, I can just burn an audio CD for my discman (or put it on MiniDisc when I finally get one).
I'm a lazy b*stard as well - the CDs are on a shelf across the room and I'd have to get up to find something :)
Plextor are still the best (up to 24x ripping with the 40x drives). Expensive but they're genuinely quick, quality drives.
There used to be a list of drives and ripping speeds on mp3.com - anyone know what happened to it?
Ops, how silly of me - AudioGrabber not AudioCatalist - which I find to be the comercial rip off of AudioGrabber design for the need-to-be-idiot-proof-masses.
The Audiograbber UI was licenced/sold to Xing for use in their Audiocatalyst product.
However, I was wondering as my ears are not that good, how in fact these conclusions are made. What mathematical/scientific process determines that the quality of one mp3 encoder is better than another if they encode the same file at the same bitrate?
Encode the same track with the different encoders, then hook up a decent amp & speakers (or a good set of headphones) up to your soundcard, and listen to the tracks back to back.
Alternatively you could take the mp3s you created, decompress them back to .wav and burn them on to a CD as audio. Then you can listen to the differences on a normal hifi CD player.
Like most audio things, quality isn't really something that can be measured in numbers - plus it's different things to different people. Pick the encoder that produces the sound that you're happiest with, screw what other people think.
(But I'd say just this - Xing sucks badly, it's quick but I'd rather take an extra 10 mins per CD)
Qube
So what's your point? It's a sleight against laptop users because they won't produce a software-only client?
The blame can only lie with the laptop manufacturers, and I can see exactly why they wouldn't want a (very) hot-running, power hungy component on board. Laptops have totally different operating critera to desktops. You can't have the best of both worlds - laptops will always be a very poor choice for gaming.
Get over it.
>Geek: "But GL, in 1979 you said you planned 9 >episodes."
>GL: "eh, I changed my mind, I don't know if I >can milk it all that far."
Bear in mind that Star Wars (Ep4) was studio-funded and it's not the smartest thing to go into a meeting with people funding you and saying "Hey! I've got another 8 to do after this". He was being realistic at the start, and making sure that his first major film was one nicely starting and ending package.
It was only after the success of Star Wars that he realised ESB and RJ could go ahead.
or so legend has it anyway..
In reality, clocking Celeron 300As *is* that easy. Mine doesn't even need more cooling than the standard heatsink and fan (retail CPU), and it's totally stable with 2.1V core.
Remember, the Celerons use the same core as the PII-350/400/450, with the addition of on-board cache (cooled by the same HS/fan rather than sitting there in a stuffy cartridge).
This box has been running at 450 or 464 every day doing RC5. Overclocking isn't something for everyone, I make sure people know the risks assocoated with it before I'll help them build/clock their Celerons. But in reality, the risks are very low. If it dies, just go back to bios and knock it down a bit. Even when I couldn't get into bios (attempt at 600+mhz), it was just a single jumper on the board to reset it back to defaults.
It's simple; know what you're doing, check the CPU temperature and test your chosen speed/voltage thoroughly before settling on it.
Abit have their BP6 motherboard out shortly (2 PPGA sockets there on the board - plug and play), or you can buy socket adaptors with jumpers to set SMP on (from MSI).
Intel doesn't seem to like this much - there are rumours now of them revising the celeron to properly disable SMP. If you've been hankering for dual celeron, buy those CPUs now..
Yeah, it has to be said - Minidisc kicks ass over hardware MP3 players right now.
Neat little media (that's $2 a pop), fantastically well built players & recorders, reasonably priced in-car units, support from all the major audio companies, and no worries for the future - any audio signal you can send down a wire you can put onto a minidisc.
OK cons - you can't put audio onto a disc at more than realtime, plus the SCMS system (there to keep RIAA happy) can be a pain, but nowhere near as much as their vision of MP3 will be..
Hardware MP3 playback seems to be an expensive, impractical way of doing things.
Are there any cdrom drives that would actually stand up to the abuse of in-car use?
Come to think of it, a robust hard disk would help too..