Interesting to see that someone no longer associated with a site that's championing *free* software should be acting in so *proprietary* a fashion toward the rightful owners of the site.
So MS pays again, in the process, propping up a company with a questionable business model, and helping to further the notion that there is competition in the browser market, something which may be worth a good deal more than the $12 million paid.
It's puzzling to me that no one seems bothered by the new business model: sue MS and settle when your own product won't pay the rent. In fact, one could make a case that Opera had this in mind from the outset.
uh, yeah, but most appear to be as overloaded as the main site, and the few I've found that aren't, don't have the images -- in fact, many have nothing for release 2 at all.
If only those reactions were not so typical of the "community". I have been periodically exploring the viability of Linux for over 10 years, and have encountered such comments on every occasion that I have made public my experiences.
I won't deny that for many, Linux has been a good, useful, and reliable OS. But each time I have tried it, I have come away disappointed, for a number of reasons. My most recent experiences with SuSE and with Mandrake were not bad, but not great. Neither of them was able to handle my mainstream AGP card in the mode I prefer, and neither even showed that such a mode existed.
While I have been comfortably using Windows as my primary tool since the days of NT4, I have also been looking for alternatives. BeOS came closest to being something I would have switched to.
At any event, I am not in the pay of MS, and although my work depends on their OSes, I do keep hoping for a viable alternative.
As close as Linux is getting to viability in some respects, the desktop continues to disappoint. Or more accurately, the quality of many of the alternative apps on the Linux desktop disappoints. And like it or not, folks, the desktop is at the core of acceptance for anything beyond server farms.
Another of the areas of weakness for Linux has long been the documentation (or lack thereof.) In recent months, the situation has improved somewhat, as the LDP seems to have been fueled with some new energy. Still, to me an OS is merely a tool, and not a religion or a cause. I expect and require competent documentation.
Finally, as a developer for whom gcc is not the tool of choice, the various distributions appear to be a minefield of irregularity that makes DLL Hell look good. Although in the main, my interest is for turnkey systems where I can select a distro and stay with it, thereby reducing the problem substantially, I am yet mindful of the reality that the libraries shipped with any given distro tie me somewhat to that distro, or commit me to an expenditure of time that I wish to avoid in changing libraries.
Linux has many attractive features; it's least attractive feature, however, is the anarchical nature of its support.
When I was a child, doctors made housecalls. Then came increased regulations, and doctors couldn't afford to incur the overhead of all the driving time, so house calls disappeared. Then more regulations and judgments, and doctros upped their fees, and shortened the time of office visits. Then the government protected us stuill further with regulations and the population of lawyers soared, giving rise to further increases.
At this rate, we will all die from the protections the government places on us.
Does the poster of this article have any schooling in economics? It is axiomatic that any corporate overhead is paid for from sales. And, as Microsoft is a public corporation, they have a legal obligation to preserve shareholder value, so they can't simply elect to reduce profits to cover the judgments against them.
It always amazes me when I hear the bloodlust of people raving in favor of higher corporate taxes, since they're actually begging to pay higher hidden taxes themselves.
It's also pleasant for the manufacturers of 3-ring binders, and such, since the length of an A4 sheet is greater than the height of a US standard binder.
DCT is the underlying mechanism in motion JPEG, MPEG, DV, and others. Wavelets takes a different approach, as mentioned in the first reply.
While wavelets doesn't offer a breathtaking advantage in data rate vs. quality factor, it does appear to lend itself to a simpler implementation than does DCT, and unlike MPEG, which is very intensive on the encoder, wavelets places symmetrical burdens on encoder and decoder.
It was a core assumption in the design of MPEG that the world market for encoders was quite small (where have we heard that theme before???) Clearly, the assumption was false, and one advantage of switching to a wavelets technology would be reduced cost per unit for encoders.
and my ability to have midnight picnics on the pitcher's mound
Yikes! The holy of holies!!! I've never seen so much attention paid a pile of dirt in my life!
Scary!:) Were you in IT?
No, I first became involved working for a company that provided tech support to the production room. Later, I went on my own, freelanced into the room, and got better money and enjoyed it much more. All told, about 5 years of watching every Jays game from high home. I built the system that automated the control of a laser player to put commercials on the JumboTron, did roving support during games, and had the fun of reworking the room for the NBA draft (and then putting it back again in 8 hours!)
The hours were sometimes rough, but the crews were great, and everyone I had to deal with was really great to work with.
Of course, I got lots of exercise, too, replacing tubes in the J'Tron 3-5 times in the course of a game. Got to where I could locate the right one (from the back of the board) in about three tries, with a spotter in the control room. Can't say I miss the concrete dust, though... that space was full of it.
Earlier in your post you say that NTSC should be praised because it was developed at a time where there were no calculators or computers(which it should), and then chide PAL because of its problems with respect to digital processing.
Actually, I was criticizing the complex rationals that appear in it, rather than chiding them for not anticipating digital processing.
WRT flicker, most modern PAL sets hack around this...
Not surprised, as the transition to digital hits the sets themselves, but this wouldn't have been practical without a frame buffer in the set. I remember the first time I saw PAL on a large screen at a show in Switzerland -- it took me most of two days for my eyes to readjust to the slower frame rate, and tune out the flicker (but they did, which surprised me.)
I, however, don't understand what is wrong with RGB?
There's nothing wrong with RGB, but in an analog production switcher, a simple dissolve them requires balancing and tracking three-channel mix amps (I'll pass on that, thanks). It also triples all of the signal handling gear: 3 times the crosspoints, three times the connectors and cables, three times the amplifiers, and so on, and so on....
It wasn't until the mid 70's, as I recall, that people finally proved that to pass a 4.2MHz composite signal through the average plant meant that distribution amplifiers needed their 3dB point at >60MHz. And in those days, producing such an amp without creating an oscillator was a non-trivial exercise.
In digital, the problem is resolved by using a single digital chip to perform the A-D conversion and then decode the sampled NTSC or PAL into luma and color difference samples. Since the issue of alignment and matching is a function of IC process control, it's more easily done with precision than when the things were built up from parts. In the mid seventies, it was a big deal to get an 8 bit ADC that was reasonably free of sampling glitches. And in moderate volume, you might buy one for less than $2,000.
In the digital form, there are still issues. Listen to the arguments over 4:2:0 vs. 4:1:1 vs 4:2:2 some time. Then add lossy compression to the mix, and there's no finding sanity, in many circles.
If you want to dive into it in depth, Poynton's more recent book is excellent -- but not brief.
I would argue that "digital" mpeg encoding reduces quality.
And you may be right, depending on the incoming signal, the bitrate in use, and the GOP structure. The digital decoding chips that process the incoming analog signal actually provide some cleanup, compared to direct viewing. As to MPEG-2, if you are using IBBP sequences, and an adequate bitrate, there will be no visible degradation.
The use of 188 byte packets is only in MPEG Transport Streams, which are for delivery to set-top boxes. MPEG not being sent over network delivery can be in Program Stream format (as makes good sense on a video server), and the packets there are more commonly 2048 bytes.
1080i (etc.) HD formats. ARE a major step.
Most of the professionals I know find 720p enormously better than 1080i. Interlace was a cheat to gain effective bandwidth when the rest of the system was marginal. It's benefits now are questionable, but it's faults remain.
OK, my estimate is off, but the reality remains, there will be a slower uptake in smaller markets. And for what it's worth, the local news is generally the most profitable activity in these stations, as they get a higher rate than from their share of per minute network spot fees.
Of course, there's also the question of what HD format they select. Some will be less expensive than others. And if only used for the local news, then they needn't record for replay. Do they also use HDTV gear in the field?
(Apparently Americans believe that PAL stands for Picture Always Lousy).
Not at all, but neither do we accept the British claim of Peace At Last. PAL addressed some of the shortcomings of NTSC, but as it pre-dated the process of electronic editing, apparently the 8-field sequence nastiness wasn't foreseen. My own experience doesn't reach back quite that far, but it's always hard to design for processes that haven't been conceived.
For the curious, I suggest either (or both) of the books by Charles Poynton, as well as his articles at: http://www.poynton.com
Just because the government passes a law doesn't mean it will necessarily change anything.
In 2006, the analog transmitter licenses will expire. That does change something, in a big way. And yes, like it or not, over time hundreds of millions of television sets will be scrapped, and new ones bought. I'm surprised there hasn't been a major howling from the eco-freaks over this transition.
That definition was declared by the Brits, and SECAM was also defined as Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method.
I've worked in television for over 30 years, and although there are certainly shortcomings in the NTSC standard, they are dwarfed by the failings in the delivery systems (transmitters and cable systems), so that the resolution visible in the living room has typically been about 50% of that seen in production rooms.
Then you have probably not fully comprehended all the design features in the standard, nor allowed for the fact that all the design was accomplished in a time when calculators were mechanical monstrosities, and computer modeling simply didn't exist.
Though PAL has a slightly higher horizontal and vertical resolution, it also embodies mathematical relations that are anathema to digital processing. Moreover, with a frame rate of only 50Hz, it evidences significant flicker on scenes with large areas of high brightness (like almost any shot of the horizon in daylight.)
Yes, PAL has a better design in the color handling in the context of analog processing, but also has an eight field color sequence that made editing a pain, and has a 25Hz offset in the math that yields a painfully awkward non-integral relationship in digital processing. The solution in digital is to ignore that, and cheat, so once it's been handled in digital form, it's been altered from the original -- not enough to cause problems, but enough to have lost the purity the Europeans love to crow about.
SECAM is in no way better. It is simpler to decode, but the problems that arise from the use of FM color encoding make it impossible to eliminate folded sidebands (in digital terms, think aliasing), and as you note, SECAM signals cannot be combined, so production work had to be done in RGB (another nightmare), or more commonly, in PAL.
Not to be rude, but most of the American population lives outside of the dozen larget cities, and the transition outside those cities will be much slower to come. And HD, as opposed to SD, offers little attraction to the smaller broadcasters, who will have to spend a fortune to rebuild their plants, yet will not be able to increase their commercial rates to compensate.
Lower unemployment, more money flowing in the economy, and all the fat unhealthy people are gone! All because the FCC wanted HDTV.
(just kidding....or am I?)
Actually, I think this is the driving force for the FCC mandating the conversion. Plus, there is a push to free up spectrum for uses other than television.
In the beginning, nearly 30 years ago, the US rejected the format then being developed by NHK, probably in the belief that defining an American format would give American manufacturers a better shot at building the gear. Of course, by now, there aren't any American VTRs or cameras, or television sets, so that factor has pretty much disappeared.
One huge factor, however, is that when the analog signals are dropped, many millions of television sets become scrap, and all will need HD or SD ready sets. That's still an economic spur the politicians salivate over.
The frame rate in monochrome television was 30fps. In NTSC, it is 29.97fps. This leads to the need for "drop-frame" timecode, and other delights.
Drop-frame attempts to correct for the time errors by dropping two frame addresses periodically. The algorithm is that the first frame of the first second of each minute not evenly divisible by ten is identified as frame 2, not frame 0. The 18 frames per 10 minutes thus dropped reduces the cumulative error to a little more than 2 frames per 24 hours.
There are other techniques recommended for reducing the residual further.
Yes, the advent of CCD cameras has eliminated the hassles of registration that were such a headache in tubed cameras, and the availability of digital filtering has also helped to reduce artifacts in the encoded NTSC.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting to see that someone no longer associated with a site that's championing *free* software should be acting in so *proprietary* a fashion toward the rightful owners of the site.
I know Linux is distilled anarchy, but even so...
The sentence is unfortunately light, but the precedent is nice to see.
It's puzzling to me that no one seems bothered by the new business model: sue MS and settle when your own product won't pay the rent. In fact, one could make a case that Opera had this in mind from the outset.
Amazing. You can read all that I said, and only that one point gets your attention? I rest my case.
Look before you chastise.
I won't deny that for many, Linux has been a good, useful, and reliable OS. But each time I have tried it, I have come away disappointed, for a number of reasons. My most recent experiences with SuSE and with Mandrake were not bad, but not great. Neither of them was able to handle my mainstream AGP card in the mode I prefer, and neither even showed that such a mode existed.
While I have been comfortably using Windows as my primary tool since the days of NT4, I have also been looking for alternatives. BeOS came closest to being something I would have switched to.
At any event, I am not in the pay of MS, and although my work depends on their OSes, I do keep hoping for a viable alternative.
As close as Linux is getting to viability in some respects, the desktop continues to disappoint. Or more accurately, the quality of many of the alternative apps on the Linux desktop disappoints. And like it or not, folks, the desktop is at the core of acceptance for anything beyond server farms.
Another of the areas of weakness for Linux has long been the documentation (or lack thereof.) In recent months, the situation has improved somewhat, as the LDP seems to have been fueled with some new energy. Still, to me an OS is merely a tool, and not a religion or a cause. I expect and require competent documentation.
Finally, as a developer for whom gcc is not the tool of choice, the various distributions appear to be a minefield of irregularity that makes DLL Hell look good. Although in the main, my interest is for turnkey systems where I can select a distro and stay with it, thereby reducing the problem substantially, I am yet mindful of the reality that the libraries shipped with any given distro tie me somewhat to that distro, or commit me to an expenditure of time that I wish to avoid in changing libraries.
Linux has many attractive features; it's least attractive feature, however, is the anarchical nature of its support.
At this rate, we will all die from the protections the government places on us.
It always amazes me when I hear the bloodlust of people raving in favor of higher corporate taxes, since they're actually begging to pay higher hidden taxes themselves.
It's also pleasant for the manufacturers of 3-ring binders, and such, since the length of an A4 sheet is greater than the height of a US standard binder.
While wavelets doesn't offer a breathtaking advantage in data rate vs. quality factor, it does appear to lend itself to a simpler implementation than does DCT, and unlike MPEG, which is very intensive on the encoder, wavelets places symmetrical burdens on encoder and decoder.
It was a core assumption in the design of MPEG that the world market for encoders was quite small (where have we heard that theme before???) Clearly, the assumption was false, and one advantage of switching to a wavelets technology would be reduced cost per unit for encoders.
Gee, and after all we've been told about Windows being the only insecure platform.... who'da thunk it?
and my ability to have midnight picnics on the pitcher's mound
:) Were you in IT?
Yikes! The holy of holies!!! I've never seen so much attention paid a pile of dirt in my life!
Scary!
No, I first became involved working for a company that provided tech support to the production room. Later, I went on my own, freelanced into the room, and got better money and enjoyed it much more. All told, about 5 years of watching every Jays game from high home. I built the system that automated the control of a laser player to put commercials on the JumboTron, did roving support during games, and had the fun of reworking the room for the NBA draft (and then putting it back again in 8 hours!)
The hours were sometimes rough, but the crews were great, and everyone I had to deal with was really great to work with.
Of course, I got lots of exercise, too, replacing tubes in the J'Tron 3-5 times in the course of a game. Got to where I could locate the right one (from the back of the board) in about three tries, with a spotter in the control room. Can't say I miss the concrete dust, though... that space was full of it.
Small world, indeed.
Earlier in your post you say that NTSC should be praised because it was developed at a time where there were no calculators or computers(which it should), and then chide PAL because of its problems with respect to digital processing.
Actually, I was criticizing the complex rationals that appear in it, rather than chiding them for not anticipating digital processing.
WRT flicker, most modern PAL sets hack around this...
Not surprised, as the transition to digital hits the sets themselves, but this wouldn't have been practical without a frame buffer in the set. I remember the first time I saw PAL on a large screen at a show in Switzerland -- it took me most of two days for my eyes to readjust to the slower frame rate, and tune out the flicker (but they did, which surprised me.)
I, however, don't understand what is wrong with RGB?
There's nothing wrong with RGB, but in an analog production switcher, a simple dissolve them requires balancing and tracking three-channel mix amps (I'll pass on that, thanks). It also triples all of the signal handling gear: 3 times the crosspoints, three times the connectors and cables, three times the amplifiers, and so on, and so on....
It wasn't until the mid 70's, as I recall, that people finally proved that to pass a 4.2MHz composite signal through the average plant meant that distribution amplifiers needed their 3dB point at >60MHz. And in those days, producing such an amp without creating an oscillator was a non-trivial exercise.
In digital, the problem is resolved by using a single digital chip to perform the A-D conversion and then decode the sampled NTSC or PAL into luma and color difference samples. Since the issue of alignment and matching is a function of IC process control, it's more easily done with precision than when the things were built up from parts. In the mid seventies, it was a big deal to get an 8 bit ADC that was reasonably free of sampling glitches. And in moderate volume, you might buy one for less than $2,000.
In the digital form, there are still issues. Listen to the arguments over 4:2:0 vs. 4:1:1 vs 4:2:2 some time. Then add lossy compression to the mix, and there's no finding sanity, in many circles.
If you want to dive into it in depth, Poynton's more recent book is excellent -- but not brief.
I would argue that "digital" mpeg encoding reduces quality.
And you may be right, depending on the incoming signal, the bitrate in use, and the GOP structure. The digital decoding chips that process the incoming analog signal actually provide some cleanup, compared to direct viewing. As to MPEG-2, if you are using IBBP sequences, and an adequate bitrate, there will be no visible degradation.
The use of 188 byte packets is only in MPEG Transport Streams, which are for delivery to set-top boxes. MPEG not being sent over network delivery can be in Program Stream format (as makes good sense on a video server), and the packets there are more commonly 2048 bytes.
1080i (etc.) HD formats. ARE a major step.
Most of the professionals I know find 720p enormously better than 1080i. Interlace was a cheat to gain effective bandwidth when the rest of the system was marginal. It's benefits now are questionable, but it's faults remain.
OK, my estimate is off, but the reality remains, there will be a slower uptake in smaller markets. And for what it's worth, the local news is generally the most profitable activity in these stations, as they get a higher rate than from their share of per minute network spot fees.
Of course, there's also the question of what HD format they select. Some will be less expensive than others. And if only used for the local news, then they needn't record for replay. Do they also use HDTV gear in the field?
(Apparently Americans believe that PAL stands for Picture Always Lousy).
Not at all, but neither do we accept the British claim of Peace At Last. PAL addressed some of the shortcomings of NTSC, but as it pre-dated the process of electronic editing, apparently the 8-field sequence nastiness wasn't foreseen. My own experience doesn't reach back quite that far, but it's always hard to design for processes that haven't been conceived.
For the curious, I suggest either (or both) of the books by Charles Poynton, as well as his articles at:
http://www.poynton.com
Former professional video technician (at the SkyDome in Toronto)
Dome Productions, I'm guessing. I used to provide tech support for the JumboTron production crew at the SkyDome.
Small world.
Just because the government passes a law doesn't mean it will necessarily change anything.
In 2006, the analog transmitter licenses will expire. That does change something, in a big way. And yes, like it or not, over time hundreds of millions of television sets will be scrapped, and new ones bought. I'm surprised there hasn't been a major howling from the eco-freaks over this transition.
That definition was declared by the Brits, and SECAM was also defined as Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method.
I've worked in television for over 30 years, and although there are certainly shortcomings in the NTSC standard, they are dwarfed by the failings in the delivery systems (transmitters and cable systems), so that the resolution visible in the living room has typically been about 50% of that seen in production rooms.
I wouldn't go so far as to call NTSC "elegent"
Then you have probably not fully comprehended all the design features in the standard, nor allowed for the fact that all the design was accomplished in a time when calculators were mechanical monstrosities, and computer modeling simply didn't exist.
Though PAL has a slightly higher horizontal and vertical resolution, it also embodies mathematical relations that are anathema to digital processing. Moreover, with a frame rate of only 50Hz, it evidences significant flicker on scenes with large areas of high brightness (like almost any shot of the horizon in daylight.)
Yes, PAL has a better design in the color handling in the context of analog processing, but also has an eight field color sequence that made editing a pain, and has a 25Hz offset in the math that yields a painfully awkward non-integral relationship in digital processing. The solution in digital is to ignore that, and cheat, so once it's been handled in digital form, it's been altered from the original -- not enough to cause problems, but enough to have lost the purity the Europeans love to crow about.
SECAM is in no way better. It is simpler to decode, but the problems that arise from the use of FM color encoding make it impossible to eliminate folded sidebands (in digital terms, think aliasing), and as you note, SECAM signals cannot be combined, so production work had to be done in RGB (another nightmare), or more commonly, in PAL.
Not to be rude, but most of the American population lives outside of the dozen larget cities, and the transition outside those cities will be much slower to come. And HD, as opposed to SD, offers little attraction to the smaller broadcasters, who will have to spend a fortune to rebuild their plants, yet will not be able to increase their commercial rates to compensate.
Lower unemployment, more money flowing in the economy, and all the fat unhealthy people are gone! All because the FCC wanted HDTV.
(just kidding....or am I?)
Actually, I think this is the driving force for the FCC mandating the conversion. Plus, there is a push to free up spectrum for uses other than television.
In the beginning, nearly 30 years ago, the US rejected the format then being developed by NHK, probably in the belief that defining an American format would give American manufacturers a better shot at building the gear. Of course, by now, there aren't any American VTRs or cameras, or television sets, so that factor has pretty much disappeared.
One huge factor, however, is that when the analog signals are dropped, many millions of television sets become scrap, and all will need HD or SD ready sets. That's still an economic spur the politicians salivate over.
Can you provide a link to this "non-integer frame rate" please?
e ld_NTSC _sequence/index.html
Look here:
http://www.poynton.com/notes/video/Four-fi
What is a non-integer frame rate?
The frame rate in monochrome television was 30fps. In NTSC, it is 29.97fps. This leads to the need for "drop-frame" timecode, and other delights.
Drop-frame attempts to correct for the time errors by dropping two frame addresses periodically. The algorithm is that the first frame of the first second of each minute not evenly divisible by ten is identified as frame 2, not frame 0. The 18 frames per 10 minutes thus dropped reduces the cumulative error to a little more than 2 frames per 24 hours.
There are other techniques recommended for reducing the residual further.
what about the quality in video cameras
Yes, the advent of CCD cameras has eliminated the hassles of registration that were such a headache in tubed cameras, and the availability of digital filtering has also helped to reduce artifacts in the encoded NTSC.