There's a site that runs benchmarks on dvd players. In a sense, it's a selective benchmark, focusing mainly on deinterlacer performance. The DVP-642 scores a 52/100, meaning that it has some bugs, and if a disc is authored incorrectly (as many are), the picture will look rather poor. In that respect, it's not a fancy pants player like this one or this one
I'm not even sure that it's the "best bang for the buck"-- looks like the Toshiba SD760 is rather decent, though.
There are a number of discs in my collection (Dancer in the Dark, Monty Python's Meaning of Life..) that are quite painful to watch on a player with a buggy deinterlacer. They can be enjoyed for what they are on a bug free player.
You might argue that the deinterlacer is itself a luxury feature that shouldn't matter to people still trying to figure out how to connect it to a RF-only TV. But at a certain point, you've just got to move on... Most TVs sold today have at least component inputs.
The resolution is halved in each direction-- a 1080*1920 (1080p) signal is picture to 540*960. I'm not sure what happens to a 720p picture.
I get the impression that most people won't notice-- a well calibrated HDTV set displaying HD material can be truly stunning, but many people seem to be satisfied with DVD over composite.
DVI-- Digital Video Interface. What most of us have been using to connect LCDs to our computers. Some DVI ports have analog pins, for backwards compatibility with CRTs.
HDMI-- High Definition Multimedia Interface. Digital Video plus Digital Audio. A dongle can be used to convert it into DVI.
HDCP- High Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection. The key exchange/ encryption protocol used to encrypt DVI or HDCP. Some DVI devices can use HDCP. Most if not all HDMI devices can.
If your projector's DVI port supports HDCP, then you can connect most any HDMI source to it, with the proper cables and adaptors. Likewise, if you have a DVI source, you can connect it to a HDMI display.
Oh, stuff it with your damn chav stereotype. Even though you describe it as a "chav culture", you don't think of them as having any sort of culture, they're just the "other"-- a convenient scapegoat.
A few years back, Sony tried to release a new format that was incompatible with computers-- SACD. Promising surround sound, and resolution superior to that of a Compact Disc, the format competed with DVD-Audio, which was playable on PCs. Neither proved to be very popular-- consumers preferred to listen to sub-CD resolution, stereo-only tracks.
I don't really think that DVD-Audio's PC compatibility helped it that much. In 1997, when DVD-Video was first released, the best video displays were to be found on PCs. But, for the most part, PC audio is horrible, and a lister needs a good system to distinguish DVD-AUdio from CD (or, in the case of surround, dts) anyway.
It's been my impression that Microsoft has been actively courting the media companies. They actively promote HD-DVD. Windows DRM is heavily promoted. Microsoft has its Zune, and some sort of Zune music store. It's not about begrudgingly crippling their operating system to satisfy the MPAA's demands. It's about turning a moribund operating system into an exciting new profit center-- extending the monopoly into new markets.
kdka is a "clear channel" station. Such stations are allowed to increase their power at night, and the signal is refracted by the ionosphere. Note that this has nothing to do with Clear Channel Communications.
Jesus, the idea of people spending thousands of dollars and using chromacity charts to get a perfect audio visual experience, so they can watch Will and Grace is actually very funny.
Eh. Some people like to get the most out of their TV and DVD. I mean, one doesn't want to be thinking that so-and so looks a little orange, one just wants to enjoy to enjoy the movie. A set doesn't have to be calibrated very often.
Actually this sort of thing puts the phrase 'slightly fuzzy' from the article in to perspective. Presumably the only people that will buy high definition stuff at the moment are at the extreme end of the benefit/cost curve, spending hundreds of dollars to get essentially undetectable increases in performance. The idea that they will settle for any degradation in signal quality seems pretty remote to be honest. Maybe that's the point though, that they need to replace every piece of electronics in their house with proper ultra expensive stuff to get the best quality, whereas without content protection, pretty much anything digital looks and sounds ok. E.g with DVD players and LCD TVs, most people buy low end Chinese imports from the sort of manufacturer that it's hard to see keeping a license to decrypt protected content.
The larger the screen (actually, the more the screen fills the field of view,) the more noticeable the fuzz. Basically, some people like to have their living rooms be comparable to a small movie theater-- and at the larger screen sizes, a fuzzy screen is distracting. I don't have a screen that large, it's just ultra sharp.
I actually use a chinese DVD player that transmits a digital picture using plaintext. You can hook up any LCD with a DVI, and the picture will be very nice indeed. It only upsamples DVD pictures to HD, though.
"Will and Grace" was shot on 35mm film, which has comparable resolution to hdtv.
while searching for that little prroduction detail, I came across another reference to HD versions of "Will and Grace"
A while back, NBC broadcast a "live" episode of Will and Grace, that on this set produced the most solid, three-dimensional images I have ever seen on a television. The actors appeared as "fleshy entities," not as electronic images flashed on a screen. It was partly due to the lighting as that illusion has not quite been created on The Tonight Show, Late Night With David Letterman, or Saturday Night Live, though all three shows dazzle in every way displayed on this set compared to my CRT-based reference RPTV.
HD programs are shot using film, or HD Video cameras. It's downsampled, and cropped or letter boxed for analog broadcast. Most of the networks primetime lineup is shot and shown for HD. My local CBS station even shows local news in HD. It's a more detailed, more realistic picture.
As for 'Finding Nemo', the raison d'etre of that type of movie is eye candy. The movie loses a lot of its power when rendered into 480i. In 720p, the picture looks a lot more luminescent, and there's a bit more illusion of depth. If ABC had not shown it in HD, I probably would not have watched it. By showing in HD, they changed it from being a "fish movie" into "a visually interesting piece of computer animation."
But hey, if you don't like TV, HDTV won't make it better-- it just provides a better picture and sound. If you don't like "House", being able to read the X-rays and books and ogle a slightly more detailed version of Dr. Cameron won't necessarily make you reconsider your loathing of the show, It's just a more enjoyable version of "House."
It's not the same. More pixels. better colors, a wider aspect ratio. It's clearer, the sound is dolby digital-- usually 5.1. Oh sure, there are times when the broadcaster simply upconverts a 480i signal-- but true HD content is readily available. A few days back, I caught Finding Nemo-- and the picture quality dramatically outclassed a mere DVD.. Yes, unlike a simple DVD, there were commercials, and time compression, but the eye candy... If you want to see what hdtv really looks like, look here
Oh yeah, and that all digital surround sound system, well it isn't going to work at all so you need to go buy an analog one.
They want you to invest in hdmi audio. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly good time to buy one, what with hdmi 1.3 coming out sometime in the future.
Indeed. This would appear to require that yet another cable be threaded through the walls. Yes, there's a USB Multiswitch over wireless thing, but that sounds like a kludge.
On other hand, a family would not have to buy more than one flash drive, keyboard or mouse,
The premise is flawed. It would seem that calculating the last digit of pi would involve calculating pi out to the last digit:
3 3.1 3.14 3.142 3.1416 3.14159 and so on, until the last digit is reached. Pi is infinite, so the calculation grows and grows until the physical limits of the PS3 are reached.
To defend against allegations that one's policies will lead eventually to an untenable moral outrage, it is not enough to call these arguments "a slippery slope." Some slopes are slippery. A better tactic is to argue that there are in fact boundaries to your proposals-- bright lines that cannot accidentally be crossed by the unwary.
But this defense of surveillance does not give me any comfort.
Graham Gerrard from the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said there were safeguards against the abuse of surveillance by officers.
"The police use of surveillance is probably the most regulated of any group in society," he told the BBC.
"Richard Thomas was particularly concerned about unseen, uncontrolled or excessive surveillance. Well, any of the police surveillance that is unseen is in fact controlled and has to be proportionate otherwise it would never get authorised."
Two appendices purport to give glimpses into life in britain in 2006 and 2016. The 2016 scenario reminds me of the later simulations in A Mind Forever Voyaging
In residential areas, public area CCTV has almost entirely become Open-Circuit Television (OCTV). All under 18s are currently barred from entering or leaving the Estate from 6pm until 6am. For Sara, this means that to see her best friend, Aleesha, outside school hours, one of them has to risk an encounter with the estate's Community Wardens, who are armed with tazers and tend to shot first and ask questions later.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a site that runs benchmarks on dvd players. In a sense, it's a selective benchmark, focusing mainly on deinterlacer performance. The DVP-642 scores a 52/100, meaning that it has some bugs, and if a disc is authored incorrectly (as many are), the picture will look rather poor. In that respect, it's not a fancy pants player like this one or this one
I'm not even sure that it's the "best bang for the buck"-- looks like the Toshiba SD760 is rather decent, though.
There are a number of discs in my collection (Dancer in the Dark, Monty Python's Meaning of Life..) that are quite painful to watch on a player with a buggy deinterlacer. They can be enjoyed for what they are on a bug free player.
You might argue that the deinterlacer is itself a luxury feature that shouldn't matter to people still trying to figure out how to connect it to a RF-only TV. But at a certain point, you've just got to move on... Most TVs sold today have at least component inputs.
The resolution is halved in each direction-- a 1080*1920 (1080p) signal is picture to 540*960. I'm not sure what happens to a 720p picture.
I get the impression that most people won't notice-- a well calibrated HDTV set displaying HD material can be truly stunning, but many people seem to be satisfied with DVD over composite.
Quick vocabulary lesson.
DVI-- Digital Video Interface. What most of us have been using to connect LCDs to our computers. Some DVI ports have analog pins, for backwards compatibility with CRTs.
HDMI-- High Definition Multimedia Interface. Digital Video plus Digital Audio. A dongle can be used to convert it into DVI.
HDCP- High Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection. The key exchange/ encryption protocol used to encrypt DVI or HDCP. Some DVI devices can use HDCP. Most if not all HDMI devices can.
If your projector's DVI port supports HDCP, then you can connect most any HDMI source to it, with the proper cables and adaptors. Likewise, if you have a DVI source, you can connect it to a HDMI display.
Oh, stuff it with your damn chav stereotype. Even though you describe it as a "chav culture", you don't think of them as having any sort of culture, they're just the "other"-- a convenient scapegoat.
It's noting new. S/PDIF has a copy protection bit that sometimes can get in the way.
A few years back, Sony tried to release a new format that was incompatible with computers-- SACD. Promising surround sound, and resolution superior to that of a Compact Disc, the format competed with DVD-Audio, which was playable on PCs. Neither proved to be very popular-- consumers preferred to listen to sub-CD resolution, stereo-only tracks.
I don't really think that DVD-Audio's PC compatibility helped it that much. In 1997, when DVD-Video was first released, the best video displays were to be found on PCs. But, for the most part, PC audio is horrible, and a lister needs a good system to distinguish DVD-AUdio from CD (or, in the case of surround, dts) anyway.
It's been my impression that Microsoft has been actively courting the media companies. They actively promote HD-DVD. Windows DRM is heavily promoted. Microsoft has its Zune, and some sort of Zune music store. It's not about begrudgingly crippling their operating system to satisfy the MPAA's demands. It's about turning a moribund operating system into an exciting new profit center-- extending the monopoly into new markets.
kdka is a "clear channel" station. Such stations are allowed to increase their power at night, and the signal is refracted by the ionosphere. Note that this has nothing to do with Clear Channel Communications.
I'm shocked. Really I am. I do have a life. It involves watching TV, and ....
oh, I see.
High-Definition Television Promises Sharper Crap.
The show is still shit though, isn't it?
Shiny gleaming shit!
Jesus, the idea of people spending thousands of dollars and using chromacity charts to get a perfect audio visual experience, so they can watch Will and Grace is actually very funny.
Eh. Some people like to get the most out of their TV and DVD. I mean, one doesn't want to be thinking that so-and so looks a little orange, one just wants to enjoy to enjoy the movie. A set doesn't have to be calibrated very often.
Actually this sort of thing puts the phrase 'slightly fuzzy' from the article in to perspective. Presumably the only people that will buy high definition stuff at the moment are at the extreme end of the benefit/cost curve, spending hundreds of dollars to get essentially undetectable increases in performance. The idea that they will settle for any degradation in signal quality seems pretty remote to be honest. Maybe that's the point though, that they need to replace every piece of electronics in their house with proper ultra expensive stuff to get the best quality, whereas without content protection, pretty much anything digital looks and sounds ok. E.g with DVD players and LCD TVs, most people buy low end Chinese imports from the sort of manufacturer that it's hard to see keeping a license to decrypt protected content.
The larger the screen (actually, the more the screen fills the field of view,) the more noticeable the fuzz. Basically, some people like to have their living rooms be comparable to a small movie theater-- and at the larger screen sizes, a fuzzy screen is distracting. I don't have a screen that large, it's just ultra sharp.
I actually use a chinese DVD player that transmits a digital picture using plaintext. You can hook up any LCD with a DVI, and the picture will be very nice indeed. It only upsamples DVD pictures to HD, though.
while searching for that little prroduction detail, I came across another reference to HD versions of "Will and Grace"
source
HD programs are shot using film, or HD Video cameras. It's downsampled, and cropped or letter boxed for analog broadcast. Most of the networks primetime lineup is shot and shown for HD. My local CBS station even shows local news in HD. It's a more detailed, more realistic picture.
As for 'Finding Nemo', the raison d'etre of that type of movie is eye candy. The movie loses a lot of its power when rendered into 480i. In 720p, the picture looks a lot more luminescent, and there's a bit more illusion of depth. If ABC had not shown it in HD, I probably would not have watched it. By showing in HD, they changed it from being a "fish movie" into "a visually interesting piece of computer animation."
But hey, if you don't like TV, HDTV won't make it better-- it just provides a better picture and sound. If you don't like "House", being able to read the X-rays and books and ogle a slightly more detailed version of Dr. Cameron won't necessarily make you reconsider your loathing of the show, It's just a more enjoyable version of "House."
It's not the same. More pixels. better colors, a wider aspect ratio. It's clearer, the sound is dolby digital-- usually 5.1. Oh sure, there are times when the broadcaster simply upconverts a 480i signal-- but true HD content is readily available. A few days back, I caught Finding Nemo-- and the picture quality dramatically outclassed a mere DVD.. Yes, unlike a simple DVD, there were commercials, and time compression, but the eye candy...
If you want to see what hdtv really looks like, look here
You can see the new HD version of the FBI Warning here. Oooh. Shiny...
Oh yeah, and that all digital surround sound system, well it isn't going to work at all so you need to go buy an analog one.
They want you to invest in hdmi audio. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly good time to buy one, what with hdmi 1.3 coming out sometime in the future.
A duplication that somehow looks and sounds a lot better. Must be the extra pixels.
Indeed. This would appear to require that yet another cable be threaded through the walls. Yes, there's a USB Multiswitch over wireless thing, but that sounds like a kludge.
On other hand, a family would not have to buy more than one flash drive, keyboard or mouse,
The premise is flawed. It would seem that calculating the last digit of pi would involve calculating pi out to the last digit:
3
3.1
3.14
3.142
3.1416
3.14159 and so on, until the last digit is reached. Pi is infinite, so the calculation grows and grows until the physical limits of the PS3 are reached.
But it's possible to calculate the nth binary digit of pi without first calculating the preveious (n-1> digits. Since there is no final digit, n is undefined, and thus the calculation cannot even begin. The load on the processor remains zero, and the PS3's power remains in reserve. The PS3 is also capable of determining whether a problem is NP or P, before wasting its time calculating things for puny humans.
The Bush administration believes that the USGS is part of the executive branch--- a unitary executive branch, at that.
I guess they fixed this little problem, then.
Community Climate System Model. Enjoy.
Looks a bit cluttered.
Where's the science? Where are the links to scientific journals?
But this defense of surveillance does not give me any comfort.
"Proportionate" is a slippery slope.
Congress is fully complicit in its abdication of duty.