Well, this is debatable. "Ogg" the bitstream format has a lot of technical problems which I can't remember at the moment, and Theora is rather lackluster when put up next to H.264 or a wavelet codec.
Vorbis is excellent, of course*, and it's possible that a Theora encoder could be tuned enough to be decent. But really remember that Ogg isn't an audio codec.
* though in the last test I saw, everything tied at first place at 128kbit; Vorbis is still beating HE-AAC below that.
GPL plugins to your own app that you didn't write can't go back and affect the copyright situation on your app. But that doesn't mean you can pretend things are plugins when they're actually required for use - I've seen video conversion apps, VisualHub and iSquint, that make you go and download ffmpeg (with --enable-gpl) separately so they can stay closed-source; but they wouldn't run without it, and I don't pretending it's an extra component could possibly help them legally. It hasn't come up as a problem, but only because nobody's told the ffmpeg developers about it.
I should say, the AR part is really good. If you don't mind wearing video goggles and having a Powerbook strapped to your back, the game overlaid onto what's actually in front of you is very well-done and quite immersive. But I don't think they'll attract any attention by using it to play Façade; setting up a really uneasy social situation is one thing, but having Trip asking you the same question ten times, or picking a completely random unrelated conversation because it didn't understand you at all, isn't quite the same.
I've been through AR Façade before, and no amount of AR would ever make up for what a terrible game Façade is. They think they have some awesome academic natural language game going on, but the parser is worse than practically any text adventure...
(Wait, you have to put a subject in these things? Why?)
I'd love a better free compiler, but I tried building FFmpeg on llvm-gcc 2.0 (darwin/x86) the other day and it kinda, well, sucked:(
Had to disable inline asm (it miscompiled h264 causing a crash and ICE'd on the MMX stuff), and two decoders (SNOW and Apple SMC never finished compiling). After that it ran slower than Apple gcc 4 on my test file.
Of course, ffmpeg is nothing like a normal program, and I have like no free time so I couldn't investigate further. I'll run some stuff by the web compiler and file bugs if it still ICEs, I guess.
> Sorry dude, but I consider Warcraft lore (not just that in WoW, but across the Warcraft games in general) to be up there with LOTR.
Really? I think LOTR has several more invented languages than Warcraft. Of course, the mythology is mostly Christian and a lot of the other stuff is from the Elder Edda, but you probably don't mean that.
Although, I think someone did explain to me why the dark portal was in a totally different place in WoW than it was in WC2 once.
Safari is seriously several times faster than Firefox, and now that I've seen the multitouch zoom, the UI on a Sidekick/other phones is nearly unusable. You might want a real keyboard if you want to use ssh (I guess that's what Linux phones are for?) but an iPhone clone wouldn't have one...
Video is decoded on a separate chip; it doesn't matter how fast the phone is, and badly-written OSes (this can't have as much engineering effort as OS X did) won't affect it either.
Yeah, good luck finding an x86/PPC->ARM binary recompiler for Skype.app. Open-source apps might be portable, but Skype isn't, and isn't available for the architecture at all.
Ambrosia's EV Nova was found to be pirated on >50% computers after they added Internet verification of serials, and it's a game, so nobody's going to go out and buy it AFTER they've finished it. All the anti-piracy arguments don't quite match up to reality for everything...
It's reported that the California trial was largely taken over by Scientologists, including the judge, who refused to admit any of his witnesses or defense evidence.
Xiph has an official Vorbis plugin for iTunes. I have a FLAC component, too, although I never checked to see how it works in iTunes. I can't see how it would matter though as it has a lossless format, and any lossless format is obviously just as good as any other one.
The ISO MPEG-4 format is based on QuickTime, because everything else is broken. They're not going to give up on it.
(Besides, I think it supports MPEG4/H264 in.mov)
CoreVideo is not a replacement for QT, it just does those fancy GPU ripple effects.
Of course, downloading QTAmateur to do this is free. And iMovie will do it.
The situation with 4chan is slightly different. We were of course violating their TOS with pornographic content, but they didn't give us the $2k+ after 180 days and they say they never will.
I've noticed a similar problem using Gimp-Print+ESP GhostScript drivers for my old Apple LaserWriter over the network. In my case, it seems the problem really is that espgs generates very inefficient Level 1 PostScript, and the old drivers were much better. Unfortunately they aren't supported in OS X.
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Well, this is debatable. "Ogg" the bitstream format has a lot of technical problems which I can't remember at the moment, and Theora is rather lackluster when put up next to H.264 or a wavelet codec.
Vorbis is excellent, of course*, and it's possible that a Theora encoder could be tuned enough to be decent. But really remember that Ogg isn't an audio codec.
* though in the last test I saw, everything tied at first place at 128kbit; Vorbis is still beating HE-AAC below that.
GPL plugins to your own app that you didn't write can't go back and affect the copyright situation on your app. But that doesn't mean you can pretend things are plugins when they're actually required for use - I've seen video conversion apps, VisualHub and iSquint, that make you go and download ffmpeg (with --enable-gpl) separately so they can stay closed-source; but they wouldn't run without it, and I don't pretending it's an extra component could possibly help them legally. It hasn't come up as a problem, but only because nobody's told the ffmpeg developers about it.
I should say, the AR part is really good. If you don't mind wearing video goggles and having a Powerbook strapped to your back, the game overlaid onto what's actually in front of you is very well-done and quite immersive. But I don't think they'll attract any attention by using it to play Façade; setting up a really uneasy social situation is one thing, but having Trip asking you the same question ten times, or picking a completely random unrelated conversation because it didn't understand you at all, isn't quite the same.
I've been through AR Façade before, and no amount of AR would ever make up for what a terrible game Façade is. They think they have some awesome academic natural language game going on, but the parser is worse than practically any text adventure...
(Wait, you have to put a subject in these things? Why?)
as opposed to Ron Paul, who thinks the EPA is violating your rights to make bonfires of the bones of minorities
optimizing compilers work a lot better on PPC :shh:
I'd love a better free compiler, but I tried building FFmpeg on llvm-gcc 2.0 (darwin/x86) the other day and it kinda, well, sucked :(
Had to disable inline asm (it miscompiled h264 causing a crash and ICE'd on the MMX stuff), and two decoders (SNOW and Apple SMC never finished compiling).
After that it ran slower than Apple gcc 4 on my test file.
Of course, ffmpeg is nothing like a normal program, and I have like no free time so I couldn't investigate further. I'll run some stuff by the web compiler and file bugs if it still ICEs, I guess.
> Sorry dude, but I consider Warcraft lore (not just that in WoW, but across the Warcraft games in general) to be up there with LOTR.
Really? I think LOTR has several more invented languages than Warcraft.
Of course, the mythology is mostly Christian and a lot of the other stuff is from the Elder Edda, but you probably don't mean that.
Although, I think someone did explain to me why the dark portal was in a totally different place in WoW than it was in WC2 once.
Safari is seriously several times faster than Firefox, and now that I've seen the multitouch zoom, the UI on a Sidekick/other phones is nearly unusable.
You might want a real keyboard if you want to use ssh (I guess that's what Linux phones are for?) but an iPhone clone wouldn't have one...
Video is decoded on a separate chip; it doesn't matter how fast the phone is, and badly-written OSes (this can't have as much engineering effort as OS X did) won't affect it either.
Yeah, good luck finding an x86/PPC->ARM binary recompiler for Skype.app.
Open-source apps might be portable, but Skype isn't, and isn't available for the architecture at all.
Goonfleet is dedicated to Space Libertarianism and not, in fact, to ruining the game and CCP employees' personal lives.
Rogers Cable is a Canadian ISP, not American.
Korea and Japan are much smaller, and their backbones are in awful shape. You can buy really fast internet but it doesn't go very fast either.
Now, Sweden, they're the ones to be jealous of.
A very good one is hard to write. In this case, I guess nobody buys his software because they all use the very good one.
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
Ambrosia's EV Nova was found to be pirated on >50% computers after they added Internet verification of serials, and it's a game, so nobody's going to go out and buy it AFTER they've finished it. All the anti-piracy arguments don't quite match up to reality for everything...
It's reported that the California trial was largely taken over by Scientologists, including the judge, who refused to admit any of his witnesses or defense evidence.
= &threadid=2313191
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s
You host your servers between two fault lines? I guess it's not as immediately bad.
Xiph has an official Vorbis plugin for iTunes. I have a FLAC component, too, although I never checked to see how it works in iTunes. I can't see how it would matter though as it has a lossless format, and any lossless format is obviously just as good as any other one.
The ISO MPEG-4 format is based on QuickTime, because everything else is broken. They're not going to give up on it. (Besides, I think it supports MPEG4/H264 in .mov)
CoreVideo is not a replacement for QT, it just does those fancy GPU ripple effects. Of course, downloading QTAmateur to do this is free. And iMovie will do it.
A decoder exists, so ffmpeg may get an encoder sometime soon, although ffmpeg never does anything 'soon'.
The situation with 4chan is slightly different. We were of course violating their TOS with pornographic content, but they didn't give us the $2k+ after 180 days and they say they never will.
Actually none of us have attention spans, so it doesn't really mean anything.
AAC beat LAME-encoded MP3. LAME can produce 128kbit files that do not have obvious annoying artifacts.
AAC is far, far better than the KaZaa/BladeEnc shit people think of when they think of "128kbit".
Allofmp3 is not paying as many royalties as iTMS is required to... because it's illegal.
iTMS has been publically stated as barely making a profit; they can't cut down the price much at all. Most goes to the RIAA already.
If you got rid of the RIAA it might result in better prices, but that is not a realistic solution.
I've noticed a similar problem using Gimp-Print+ESP GhostScript drivers for my old Apple LaserWriter over the network. In my case, it seems the problem really is that espgs generates very inefficient Level 1 PostScript, and the old drivers were much better. Unfortunately they aren't supported in OS X.