If a dongle connected to a coax frightens you, just use the USB extention cable (which I believe they include in the package), and think of it as a REALLY small break-out box.
There. Problem fixed.
If *that* is not good enough for somebody, I'll gladly sell them my EyeTV 500 (which connects via firewire) for the price of one of the new hybrids. Not because I give a rip about analog signals, but because I tend to stuff my firewire connection to the gills with external drives and what-not, so shifting the TV input to USB2 would work out really well for me.
However, if good sound is what you want, lossless is the way to go. If saving space to fit as many songs as you can get on a portable player is the priority, AAC gives you acceptable sound at a *very* low bit rate. If you're not willing to compress something beyond 192 or so, I just think it's a waste not to go ahead and use lossless.
Anything between the two extremes is a kind of "no man's land", where you are neither maximizing space nor ensuring nit-picky quality.
For that matter, would you install something else when iTunes gives you AAC and apple lossless?
Actually, it also gives you VBR MP3, if that's what does it for you. All the iTunes encoder really lacks is ogg vorbis and FLAC.
(And WMA I guess, but that's total shit, so who needs it?)
I feel there are two situations in which one stores compressed music:
1. For use with flash-based players or other space-limited applications. Under these circumstances, a high-quality-per-low-bitrate codec is paramount. 128-bit AAC really shines in this category. VBR MP3 at a slightly higher bitrate is sometimes regarded as a nice compromise if your equipment does not play AAC.
2. For use with home audio or high-volume portable players, where computer hard drives are cheap and ever getting cheaper. Here, you want quality above all else. Lossless storage (FLAC, Apple, etc.) is the only way to go that makes any sense at all.
WMA does not fit either category, and is therefore pretty much worthless, IMHO.
Personally, I buy CD's and rip everything to lossless myself, but I have bought some things on iTunes. For example, their J-Pop selection, while limited, offers a lot of songs at a very tiny fraction of what they cost in Japan. Also, the single-song purchase flexibility is nice for novelty acts and one-hit wonders. I love listening to "Meaning of Life" by Disturbed when I'm working out, but would never be interested in buying the whole album. iTMS is nice for stuff like that. I just wish they offered the option of lossless tracks.
Yes. However given that Lucas didn't plan or know any of that when he wrote Empire, I'm curious what his original intention was.
I had heard that Luke actually does die in some early scripts, however that may have been one of Lucas's famous decoys.
I suspect that he fully intended to leave it open-ended.
Like I said, it was there so you, as the first-time viewer, would not automatically "know" that Luke would survive into the next movie. Just as you were supposed to think Han was dead up until the point where Lando reassured Chewie, when Darth lops Luke's hand off, you were meant to feel, "holy shit, Luke's about to die." By adding that line, it presents the vague possibility of the trilogy being resolved *without* the help of the main hero, so you can't sit back comfortably and say, "no way he gets killed here. They've got a whole other movie to make!"
Also, vague foreshadowing is the serial writer's best friend. Having Yoda toss out that line means that he can do just about *anything* to expand the scope of the story and pretend that it's what Yoda was talking about.
First of all, you can't just buy the originals. You must buy the re-edits to get the originals as a "bonus" feature.
Oh, so *that's* what a split hair looks like!
Hey, you're the one who specified that they were releasing the originals "no more, no less." The reality is, that you can't buy the originals. You must buy the turded-up versions (which many of us already own, since Lucas once said definitively that he would NEVER release the originals on DVD) in order to get your hands on them.
Who knows. But is it really worth getting all bunged out about?
I don't know what that means. Are you British? Apparently "bunged" means "thrown" or "tossed" there. Urban Dictionary defined it as, "To have previously had sexual intercourse with." Where does this "bunged out" expression come from, exactly? I'm not asking to be a dick, I actually want to know.
Given the context, I'm going to assume you mean "distressed" or perhaps "overly agitated", in which case, I can assure you that there's no need to worry. Text always tends to seem more emphatic than speaking. When I write something like "Fuck George Lucas", it merely means that I'm dismissing his worth as a human being, it doesn't mean I'm choking back tears or anything. Don't worry, I'm not "bunged" (or whatever) "out" about this. I'm just not willing to to take it up the ass from this infamous film maker.
Aaaanyway... I could have bought the bootlegs long ago, yes.
However, I generally disapprove of supporting the black market with my dollars. It took this final and deliberate "fuck you" from George Lucas to reach the conclusion that, when it comes to his intellectual property, I simply don't give a crap about his copyrights anymore. I can't think of a single artist in the entire world who has abused the state-granted "limited monopoly" on his creative works to a greater extent than he has, and I say "enough is enough." I've spent hundreds of dollars on his products over the years, and if this is the kind of loyalty he wants to have towards his customers then he'll never make another cent off me again.
First of all, when Star Trek was at its peak of popularity, a full 65% of Americans considered themselves fans.
Secondly, a rather significant percentage of people with child fetishes are "Peter Pan" cases themselves, who have difficulty letting go of their childhood. If they enjoyed Star Trek in their teens, they would be likely to still decorate their homes with Trekkie swag in their 30s and 40s.
So, it's not surprising in the least that a lot of kiddie pr0n fans are Trekkies, but the corollary does not follow. Most Trekkies are not sexually deviant, apart from maybe a thing for "Klingon Forhead Bumps."
If the prequels are to be believed, Obi-wan is fully aware that Luke and Leia are siblings, because he was there when they were born!
Furthermore, Yoda never says "another potential Jedi" or "another Skywalker" in Empire. He just implies that there is another "hope." This line was clearly put there to give you a sense of uncertainty about whether Luke would survive his encounter with Darth Vader.
It's during his death in "Jedi" when he finally tells Luke "There is another Skywalker."
The only other thing you could take as a hint is that Luke was able to throw his thoughts out to Liea... but that was clearly Luke's power in effect there, not Leia's. He's calling to Leia because she's the one living person in the Universe which he knew could save him and which he still completely trusted. Han saved his life, but last time they spoke, Han was leaving the alliance to repay his debts to Jabba.
I can honestly say that if Lucas had released a proper restoration of the original theatrical release version of these films, in a proper high-quality DVD format (such as anamorphic SuperBit), I would have cheerfully shelled out $90 per film to finally own these great movies, which were monumental events in film history, in a no-compromise format.
I'm positive that I'm not the only person who feels that way.
Lacking that, I shall pursue the best available copies I can get. That would be the bootlegs.
Even if the LD set was the best available source (it wasn't), the fact remains that a good-quality anamorphic transfer would have been trivially easy to do, and furthermore is really a minimum base-line for a DVD release of a major film these days. It's been four years since I've bought or even seen a movie DVD in a resolution lower than widescreen 480p.
To do less than that is inexcusable. Lucas has released a product which is inferior to what the pirates are offering.
All I'm sayin' is...People asked for Theatrical, they got Theatrical. No more. No less.
That's not even close to the truth.
First of all, you can't just buy the originals. You must buy the re-edits to get the originals as a "bonus" feature.
Secondly, the Theatrical release of the original trilogy was on superb 70mm film prints. It pushes current DVD technology to the very limit to represent anything close to how good those films looked on the big screen. Furthermore, "THX Sound" was invented as a way of insuring that theaters would have the kind of audio quality Lucas believed his films demanded. Every film the guy has ever released has always been put out with the very best media presentation available at the time... until now.
Non-anamorphic widescreen means presenting the movie below the 480p resolution of a DVD, because all lines outside of the "Letterbox" area are simply dropped, resulting in a film which is in a resolution not much better than the 320x240 iPod downloads which even Apple has moved above for their downloaded films.
Fuck George Lucas. I never buy bootlegs, and I've waited for YEARS for him to finally come through on this, but I've had it with this asshole. He actually thinks I should be happy to pay for a product which is inferior to what the pirates are putting out! I'm going to get my hands on bootleg LD rips, and be content with that as the best format the original movies will probably ever again exist in.
The outline of the story of nine movies was written before any of them were shot. This is a myth based on some comments Lucas made during some interviews regarding Empire
The truth is, he wrote a long movie which started in the middle to feel like a Saturday serial, and upon realizing it was too long to shoot, he took the first thrid of his idea and created Star Wars.
Empre and Jedi did not follow the remaining script ideas which he had written to the letter. For example, the scenes with the Ewoks were originally conceived to be a planet of Wookies, and the idea of Leah and Luke being siblings was never part of the original script.
The Prequels were cut from whole cloth. He did not have that part of the story written at all before he began the original trilogy.
Oh, and the claim that he was drawing from Joseph Campbell's mythology concepts: Also after-the-fact revisionist bullshit. He stole far more from Kurosawa, Asimov, Herbert, and Kirby than he ever did from "The Hero With A Thousand Faces."
At least, for the first trilogy. For the prequel, he layed on that "Power of Myth" crap so thick, there was hardly any room for a story (which is just as well, since the story stinks on ice.)
If I cared about hearing about the existence of every Apple announcement, I'd read Apple Hot News, not Slashdot.
If I didn't care to see articles about Apple, I'd block those stories in my Slashdot preferences, not piss and moan like a whiney bitch trying to ruin everybody else's fun.
Bad news for old iPod owners. The 3rd gen player, anyway.
While iTunes updates to tag files for gapless playback, the older iPods can't support it. I just tried it, and there's still the small hit of silence as it goes from one track to another.
This is a huge bummer... for whoever I'm selling my old iPod to, anyway.
None of those are free, either. PBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, all of those have a huge list of HD content as well, and they are FREE.
(In fact, my computer just got done recording tonight's "House" as I write this.)
HBO has, on average, on show worth watching, and it's usually not worth paying HBO premiums (above and beyond basic cable) for. I Netflix, borrow (or buy, if I find cheap used copies) the DVDs, or download rips for that *one* show which I care about (used to be The Sopranos, now it's The Wire), which still look damn good.
Discover is mostly documentary stuff. I get enough of that from PBS-HD and the 5 other digital channels my local PBS station broadcasts in my market. All free.
INHD? Wuzzat?
FOX Sports would be nice, but not really worth a monthly fee to me. If I want to watch sports, I'd find it more fun to go out to a sports bar and watching with a crowd over greasy food and beer. If it's a big "event" sports game that I would want to host a party to view, such as the Superbowl or the NCAA championship, it's already FREE FREE FREE on my home TV set.
As for Comedy Central shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report"... all their really funny bits end up on YouTube eventually anyway.
Thanks to usenet, I'm even watching new Doctor Who episodes a full year before people with the Sci-Fi Channel and a TiVo are watching it, and it looks about as good as their picture does once they set their compression to a level where it can store as much stuff as they want to see.
Like I said, paying for cable is something that only people who can't get a signal need to bother with. I'm getting as much TV as I really want.
I'm sure Ars or Tom's Hardware or somebody will break down how it actually works sometime in the next few weeks. I majored in the humanities, so I'll just use it and leave it to people like that to explain it.:)
It sounds like the fix must be something people were hoping they would do for some time now: Add a meta-tag which declares how much "silece" was added at the ending (and possibly the beginning) of each track by the encoder, and then synch up the files in the memory buffer so they roll right from one to the next.
I wonder if they will use some kind of meta-data wrapper for MP3 files acquired from other sources, since there is nothing in the default MP3 headers for storing such info. I know a lot of people who still use MP3s on their iPod, out of fear that they might want to switch platforms to a non-AAC player someday, and don't want to archive files losslessly (for some reason). It would be a bummer for them if they need to re-encode everything to take advantage of this feature.
If that's the biggest difference in worldview between you and your girlfriend, I think mayby you should just let it slide. She likes cute gadgets. Apple makes cute gadgets. Buy her a cute gadget from Apple and be happy that she doesn't want big shiny rocks (which cost several times as much) for her Christmas present instead.
Gapless is what's been keeping me from upgrading as well. I've got an old black-and-white 20GB iPod which I've been using the hell out of for years now (I've burned through two batteries on it, and was planning on buying yet another in a few months.)
Color screens did not make me want to replace it. Nor did photos. Nor did putting the buttons on the clickwheel. Nor did the longer battery life. Nor did videos.
But gapless playback? They hooked me. I RAN to the Apple Store over my lunch hour, only to be told to "check again tomorrow", which I most certainly will do.
The sweet thing about this is, since it also plays videos and a smattering of time-killer games, I can sell off both my old iPod and my souped-up PSP to friends who want them, and just about break even on the upgrade! w00t!
I get just over 20 (with four of them being low-res duplicates most of the time, admitedly).
However, I only watch one at a time. How many do you watch at once on cable?
Last time I had cable was when I was a college student, but from what I've seen at other people's homes, it's gone from "50 channels and noting on" to "400 channels and nothing on" in the last thirty years.
The consistant truth is that there are usually only a half dozen shows on TV in any given year worth even considering worth your time. The rest of it is all just a means of uselessly idling when nothing better is going on in your life, and we've got the Internet for that now.
Almost all movies are shot in widescreen. In order to display them in 4:3, you have to remove content.
It's not quite as simple as that.
Actually, a great deal of movies are shot to fit both formats. Most, in fact.
In a movie theater, the projectionist is expected to "mat" the top and bottom off to fit the image to whatever shape the screen is.
On TV, an editor "crops" the sides off, but leaves in more of the top and bottom.
Any good movie director knows that both things will be done to the movie before anybody sees it, and makes sure that all the really important visual information is kept within the middle of the screen as much as possible. The only exeptions are "event" movies which they didn't really want you watching at home anyway, such as "2001".
For a good example of stuff that a projectionist is supposed to mat out, take a look at an old VHS recording of Star Wars. If you watch the top of the screen, you will see boom mics falling into the shot on occasion. That's because you are looking at a part of the image which theater-goers never saw.
The standard which most knowledgable film critics are pushing the movie industry to move towards is not "16:9", but "OAR" ("Original Aspect Ratio"). In other words, whatever ratio the creators of the movie meant the movie to be seen in, that's what should be sold on the DVD. If that's 4:3, then so be it.
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If a dongle connected to a coax frightens you, just use the USB extention cable (which I believe they include in the package), and think of it as a REALLY small break-out box.
There. Problem fixed.
If *that* is not good enough for somebody, I'll gladly sell them my EyeTV 500 (which connects via firewire) for the price of one of the new hybrids. Not because I give a rip about analog signals, but because I tend to stuff my firewire connection to the gills with external drives and what-not, so shifting the TV input to USB2 would work out really well for me.
OTOH ~300kbps WMA is better than 128kbps AAC
It is, in that it sounds slightly better.
However, if good sound is what you want, lossless is the way to go. If saving space to fit as many songs as you can get on a portable player is the priority, AAC gives you acceptable sound at a *very* low bit rate. If you're not willing to compress something beyond 192 or so, I just think it's a waste not to go ahead and use lossless.
Anything between the two extremes is a kind of "no man's land", where you are neither maximizing space nor ensuring nit-picky quality.
For that matter, would you install something else when iTunes gives you AAC and apple lossless?
Actually, it also gives you VBR MP3, if that's what does it for you. All the iTunes encoder really lacks is ogg vorbis and FLAC.
(And WMA I guess, but that's total shit, so who needs it?)
I feel there are two situations in which one stores compressed music:
1. For use with flash-based players or other space-limited applications. Under these circumstances, a high-quality-per-low-bitrate codec is paramount. 128-bit AAC really shines in this category. VBR MP3 at a slightly higher bitrate is sometimes regarded as a nice compromise if your equipment does not play AAC.
2. For use with home audio or high-volume portable players, where computer hard drives are cheap and ever getting cheaper. Here, you want quality above all else. Lossless storage (FLAC, Apple, etc.) is the only way to go that makes any sense at all.
WMA does not fit either category, and is therefore pretty much worthless, IMHO.
Personally, I buy CD's and rip everything to lossless myself, but I have bought some things on iTunes. For example, their J-Pop selection, while limited, offers a lot of songs at a very tiny fraction of what they cost in Japan. Also, the single-song purchase flexibility is nice for novelty acts and one-hit wonders. I love listening to "Meaning of Life" by Disturbed when I'm working out, but would never be interested in buying the whole album. iTMS is nice for stuff like that. I just wish they offered the option of lossless tracks.
Yes. However given that Lucas didn't plan or know any of that when he wrote Empire, I'm curious what his original intention was.
I had heard that Luke actually does die in some early scripts, however that may have been one of Lucas's famous decoys.
I suspect that he fully intended to leave it open-ended.
Like I said, it was there so you, as the first-time viewer, would not automatically "know" that Luke would survive into the next movie. Just as you were supposed to think Han was dead up until the point where Lando reassured Chewie, when Darth lops Luke's hand off, you were meant to feel, "holy shit, Luke's about to die." By adding that line, it presents the vague possibility of the trilogy being resolved *without* the help of the main hero, so you can't sit back comfortably and say, "no way he gets killed here. They've got a whole other movie to make!"
Also, vague foreshadowing is the serial writer's best friend. Having Yoda toss out that line means that he can do just about *anything* to expand the scope of the story and pretend that it's what Yoda was talking about.
First of all, you can't just buy the originals. You must buy the re-edits to get the originals as a "bonus" feature.
Oh, so *that's* what a split hair looks like!
Hey, you're the one who specified that they were releasing the originals "no more, no less." The reality is, that you can't buy the originals. You must buy the turded-up versions (which many of us already own, since Lucas once said definitively that he would NEVER release the originals on DVD) in order to get your hands on them.
Who knows. But is it really worth getting all bunged out about?
I don't know what that means. Are you British? Apparently "bunged" means "thrown" or "tossed" there. Urban Dictionary defined it as, "To have previously had sexual intercourse with." Where does this "bunged out" expression come from, exactly? I'm not asking to be a dick, I actually want to know.
Given the context, I'm going to assume you mean "distressed" or perhaps "overly agitated", in which case, I can assure you that there's no need to worry. Text always tends to seem more emphatic than speaking. When I write something like "Fuck George Lucas", it merely means that I'm dismissing his worth as a human being, it doesn't mean I'm choking back tears or anything. Don't worry, I'm not "bunged" (or whatever) "out" about this. I'm just not willing to to take it up the ass from this infamous film maker.
Aaaanyway... I could have bought the bootlegs long ago, yes.
However, I generally disapprove of supporting the black market with my dollars. It took this final and deliberate "fuck you" from George Lucas to reach the conclusion that, when it comes to his intellectual property, I simply don't give a crap about his copyrights anymore. I can't think of a single artist in the entire world who has abused the state-granted "limited monopoly" on his creative works to a greater extent than he has, and I say "enough is enough." I've spent hundreds of dollars on his products over the years, and if this is the kind of loyalty he wants to have towards his customers then he'll never make another cent off me again.
First of all, when Star Trek was at its peak of popularity, a full 65% of Americans considered themselves fans.
Secondly, a rather significant percentage of people with child fetishes are "Peter Pan" cases themselves, who have difficulty letting go of their childhood. If they enjoyed Star Trek in their teens, they would be likely to still decorate their homes with Trekkie swag in their 30s and 40s.
So, it's not surprising in the least that a lot of kiddie pr0n fans are Trekkies, but the corollary does not follow. Most Trekkies are not sexually deviant, apart from maybe a thing for "Klingon Forhead Bumps."
The "hint" in question:
Obi-wan: "That boy is our last hope."
Yoda: "No. There is another."
If the prequels are to be believed, Obi-wan is fully aware that Luke and Leia are siblings, because he was there when they were born!
Furthermore, Yoda never says "another potential Jedi" or "another Skywalker" in Empire. He just implies that there is another "hope." This line was clearly put there to give you a sense of uncertainty about whether Luke would survive his encounter with Darth Vader.
It's during his death in "Jedi" when he finally tells Luke "There is another Skywalker."
The only other thing you could take as a hint is that Luke was able to throw his thoughts out to Liea... but that was clearly Luke's power in effect there, not Leia's. He's calling to Leia because she's the one living person in the Universe which he knew could save him and which he still completely trusted. Han saved his life, but last time they spoke, Han was leaving the alliance to repay his debts to Jabba.
So are you saying I can be arrested for my CD copy of Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy", which features naked children on the cover?
Or the DVD of Superman (the first of the Christopher Reeves films), in which you can clearly see a little boy's penis for a couple seconds?
More proof that it's getting to be time for Libertarians to form a new country somewhere.
I can honestly say that if Lucas had released a proper restoration of the original theatrical release version of these films, in a proper high-quality DVD format (such as anamorphic SuperBit), I would have cheerfully shelled out $90 per film to finally own these great movies, which were monumental events in film history, in a no-compromise format.
I'm positive that I'm not the only person who feels that way.
Lacking that, I shall pursue the best available copies I can get. That would be the bootlegs.
Even if the LD set was the best available source (it wasn't), the fact remains that a good-quality anamorphic transfer would have been trivially easy to do, and furthermore is really a minimum base-line for a DVD release of a major film these days. It's been four years since I've bought or even seen a movie DVD in a resolution lower than widescreen 480p.
To do less than that is inexcusable. Lucas has released a product which is inferior to what the pirates are offering.
All I'm sayin' is...People asked for Theatrical, they got Theatrical. No more. No less.
That's not even close to the truth.
First of all, you can't just buy the originals. You must buy the re-edits to get the originals as a "bonus" feature.
Secondly, the Theatrical release of the original trilogy was on superb 70mm film prints. It pushes current DVD technology to the very limit to represent anything close to how good those films looked on the big screen. Furthermore, "THX Sound" was invented as a way of insuring that theaters would have the kind of audio quality Lucas believed his films demanded. Every film the guy has ever released has always been put out with the very best media presentation available at the time... until now.
Non-anamorphic widescreen means presenting the movie below the 480p resolution of a DVD, because all lines outside of the "Letterbox" area are simply dropped, resulting in a film which is in a resolution not much better than the 320x240 iPod downloads which even Apple has moved above for their downloaded films.
Fuck George Lucas. I never buy bootlegs, and I've waited for YEARS for him to finally come through on this, but I've had it with this asshole. He actually thinks I should be happy to pay for a product which is inferior to what the pirates are putting out! I'm going to get my hands on bootleg LD rips, and be content with that as the best format the original movies will probably ever again exist in.
The outline of the story of nine movies was written before any of them were shot. This is a myth based on some comments Lucas made during some interviews regarding Empire
The truth is, he wrote a long movie which started in the middle to feel like a Saturday serial, and upon realizing it was too long to shoot, he took the first thrid of his idea and created Star Wars.
Empre and Jedi did not follow the remaining script ideas which he had written to the letter. For example, the scenes with the Ewoks were originally conceived to be a planet of Wookies, and the idea of Leah and Luke being siblings was never part of the original script.
The Prequels were cut from whole cloth. He did not have that part of the story written at all before he began the original trilogy.
Oh, and the claim that he was drawing from Joseph Campbell's mythology concepts: Also after-the-fact revisionist bullshit. He stole far more from Kurosawa, Asimov, Herbert, and Kirby than he ever did from "The Hero With A Thousand Faces."
At least, for the first trilogy. For the prequel, he layed on that "Power of Myth" crap so thick, there was hardly any room for a story (which is just as well, since the story stinks on ice.)
If I cared about hearing about the existence of every Apple announcement, I'd read Apple Hot News, not Slashdot.
If I didn't care to see articles about Apple, I'd block those stories in my Slashdot preferences, not piss and moan like a whiney bitch trying to ruin everybody else's fun.
Bad news for old iPod owners. The 3rd gen player, anyway.
While iTunes updates to tag files for gapless playback, the older iPods can't support it. I just tried it, and there's still the small hit of silence as it goes from one track to another.
This is a huge bummer... for whoever I'm selling my old iPod to, anyway.
None of those are free, either. PBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, all of those have a huge list of HD content as well, and they are FREE.
(In fact, my computer just got done recording tonight's "House" as I write this.)
HBO has, on average, on show worth watching, and it's usually not worth paying HBO premiums (above and beyond basic cable) for. I Netflix, borrow (or buy, if I find cheap used copies) the DVDs, or download rips for that *one* show which I care about (used to be The Sopranos, now it's The Wire), which still look damn good.
Discover is mostly documentary stuff. I get enough of that from PBS-HD and the 5 other digital channels my local PBS station broadcasts in my market. All free.
INHD? Wuzzat?
FOX Sports would be nice, but not really worth a monthly fee to me. If I want to watch sports, I'd find it more fun to go out to a sports bar and watching with a crowd over greasy food and beer. If it's a big "event" sports game that I would want to host a party to view, such as the Superbowl or the NCAA championship, it's already FREE FREE FREE on my home TV set.
As for Comedy Central shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report"... all their really funny bits end up on YouTube eventually anyway.
Thanks to usenet, I'm even watching new Doctor Who episodes a full year before people with the Sci-Fi Channel and a TiVo are watching it, and it looks about as good as their picture does once they set their compression to a level where it can store as much stuff as they want to see.
Like I said, paying for cable is something that only people who can't get a signal need to bother with. I'm getting as much TV as I really want.
That makes sense. Cool.
:)
I'm sure Ars or Tom's Hardware or somebody will break down how it actually works sometime in the next few weeks. I majored in the humanities, so I'll just use it and leave it to people like that to explain it.
In fact, the shiny rocks have close to no intrinsic functionality or value.
;)
Unless you value getting laid, that is.
Ooo... so they fixed for the old-school iPods too!?
Thanks! That's good to know!
(Time to go bust up all those "joined" tracks on Dark Side of the Moon tonight. ^_^)
Exactly correct.
It sounds like the fix must be something people were hoping they would do for some time now: Add a meta-tag which declares how much "silece" was added at the ending (and possibly the beginning) of each track by the encoder, and then synch up the files in the memory buffer so they roll right from one to the next.
I wonder if they will use some kind of meta-data wrapper for MP3 files acquired from other sources, since there is nothing in the default MP3 headers for storing such info. I know a lot of people who still use MP3s on their iPod, out of fear that they might want to switch platforms to a non-AAC player someday, and don't want to archive files losslessly (for some reason). It would be a bummer for them if they need to re-encode everything to take advantage of this feature.
If that's the biggest difference in worldview between you and your girlfriend, I think mayby you should just let it slide. She likes cute gadgets. Apple makes cute gadgets. Buy her a cute gadget from Apple and be happy that she doesn't want big shiny rocks (which cost several times as much) for her Christmas present instead.
Gapless is what's been keeping me from upgrading as well. I've got an old black-and-white 20GB iPod which I've been using the hell out of for years now (I've burned through two batteries on it, and was planning on buying yet another in a few months.)
Color screens did not make me want to replace it.
Nor did photos.
Nor did putting the buttons on the clickwheel.
Nor did the longer battery life.
Nor did videos.
But gapless playback? They hooked me. I RAN to the Apple Store over my lunch hour, only to be told to "check again tomorrow", which I most certainly will do.
The sweet thing about this is, since it also plays videos and a smattering of time-killer games, I can sell off both my old iPod and my souped-up PSP to friends who want them, and just about break even on the upgrade! w00t!
I get just over 20 (with four of them being low-res duplicates most of the time, admitedly).
However, I only watch one at a time. How many do you watch at once on cable?
Last time I had cable was when I was a college student, but from what I've seen at other people's homes, it's gone from "50 channels and noting on" to "400 channels and nothing on" in the last thirty years.
The consistant truth is that there are usually only a half dozen shows on TV in any given year worth even considering worth your time. The rest of it is all just a means of uselessly idling when nothing better is going on in your life, and we've got the Internet for that now.
Almost all movies are shot in widescreen. In order to display them in 4:3, you have to remove content.
It's not quite as simple as that.
Actually, a great deal of movies are shot to fit both formats. Most, in fact.
In a movie theater, the projectionist is expected to "mat" the top and bottom off to fit the image to whatever shape the screen is.
On TV, an editor "crops" the sides off, but leaves in more of the top and bottom.
Any good movie director knows that both things will be done to the movie before anybody sees it, and makes sure that all the really important visual information is kept within the middle of the screen as much as possible. The only exeptions are "event" movies which they didn't really want you watching at home anyway, such as "2001".
For a good example of stuff that a projectionist is supposed to mat out, take a look at an old VHS recording of Star Wars. If you watch the top of the screen, you will see boom mics falling into the shot on occasion. That's because you are looking at a part of the image which theater-goers never saw.
The standard which most knowledgable film critics are pushing the movie industry to move towards is not "16:9", but "OAR" ("Original Aspect Ratio"). In other words, whatever ratio the creators of the movie meant the movie to be seen in, that's what should be sold on the DVD. If that's 4:3, then so be it.
Paying for cable is for people who can't get a signal.
The few cable shows I give a shit about I can watch via NetFlix and/or torrent files.
A big honkin' $50 UHF antenna, and I'm watching Lost, House, and all the "event" sports matches in HD for free. Fuck the cable companies!
Why would I want cable HDTV when over-the-air HDTV is Free (as in beer)???