Then it's probably a lame-ass compression job. Even anime can do fine with no more than 5Mb average. Anything more is a misguided compressionist setting the ceiling up too high and causing "bit-stuffing" in the MPEG stream.
First, what's the point of progressive scan DVD players?
In addition to the obvious point of getting rid of interlace, there's the issue of something called "3:2 pulldown". That's when the 24fps (frames/sec) of film is converted to 30fps NTSC, which is 60 fields/sec. I don't remember exactly but it's something like for every two frames of film, three fields are put in the video. If you were to single-step the frames, every third would have the flickery images of two frames if viewed on a cheap TV set, or every on every other line if viewed on a computer...or when viewed on an expensive set, whether HTDV or with a "line doubler".
Progressive scan can't do much to help movies that have the 3:2 pulldown performed before the MPEG encode, and encoded at 30fps. But DVD allows the MPEG stream to say that it's 24fps and have the player do the pulldown. If the player is designed to output 480p video, it can change its pulldown algorithm.
There is one other aspect of line doubling that can cause problems. If a video is recorded with an NTSC camera, the interlace will cause the second field to be of the same scene 1/60 sec later, whereas on a film image, they would have been from the exact same moment in time. If objects are moving fast, the alternate-lines effect will appear on a line-doubled image.
So to take full advantage of progressive scan, a DVD will have to be mastered properly, and filmed with film or a 480p video camera, but even without those, you will still get reduced flicker from your TV set.
And in case you were wondering what happens with 25fps PAL video, video transfers are often done with a 1:1 conversion, causing the PAL videos to be 4% faster than real time!
mastered from a brand-new 1080p, 24sf high-definition digital telecine transfer." That's great and all, but how are they getting this quality?
Do you even know what a telecine transfer is? Because your question was answered right before you asked it. A telecine transfer is when they take a reel of film and make a transfer to an electronic format, whether NTSC analog or HD video. Film has a LOT more resolution than 1080p HDTV.
Ever gone to Blockbuster and brought back a single movie that weighed 10 lbs and had to have it's own seat?
And if you lived in Texas, you had to make sure not to leave it in your car while you stopped off at the grocery store on the way back or you'd have a nice piece of modern art when you got home.
Running time was limited. You had to get up half-way through a fairly short movie, to turn the disc over, or insert an entirely different disc.
Running time was indeed a big problem. Many movies are like 90 minutes long, and can fit on a single disc, and auto-flip players help, but there are enough movies long enough to require two discs, and (aside from a few exotic players with two disc capability) you would have to get up and swap discs.
Sometimes a movie could be time-compressed to fit on a disc (the original release of the Star Wars trilogy was done this way), but this really couldn't be done once LD found its niche a Home Theatre format.
And then there was the issue of side breaks. Many movies (especially the ones that had a "FIRST WIDESCREEN RELEASE" sticker on them) had side breaks in the middle of a scene, sometimes even when there was enough time left over on the second side to make a good side break (Time Bandits is a good example of this) In a way, it was the old VHS/Beta issue of tape length all over again.
Not that this was exclusively an LD problem, though. I understand that the VHS release of The Blues Brothers had a tape break in the middle of a scene, at 120:00! This can be seen on the DVD as a layer change at the same point, which while not nearly as annoying still can cause a 1/2 second delay on many players.
Higher prices than VHS.
Which brings up the reasons why DVD was successful. In a way, it was like Laserdisc 2.0, in that it had the advantage of being able to see the problems of LD and avoid them. Cost was the main one, since it would cost less than $1/disc to press, even in the early days (vs $8/LD), so prices could be competitive with VHS. It was easy to handle (except for double-sided DVD, which you don't see much of these days). It had multi-audio support (which had stretched LD to its limits), and subtitle support, both important for foreign movies, though they blew it when they only allowed 3 colors for subtitles. It had a case form factor similar to VHS, which could also be used for video game and cheap PC software titles.
Another thing about DVD is that it happened at the intersection of being able to create a disc with large enough data capacity, and having sufficient compression technology to fit 120 minutes of video into a single layer disc. In short, it happened exactly when it was possible to happen.
More like $35-$45 a title, unless your "heyday" is the last two years when crates of LDs were being blown out for $10 a disc or less. (That just happened to be when I discovered LD. I still have a lot of 'em.)
The real problem with LD was that it cost $8/disc just to manufacture, and it didn't seem like economies of scale would do much to reduce that. When LD was first released, the companies thought they would be cheaper, but they hadn't figured in the cost of clean rooms, which they didn't realize they needed until after they produced a lot of crap quality discs for a few years (aka Discovision).
It's also a rather daunting format to handle (a big heavy piece of acrylic with data on both sides), and at the full 1800 RPM, the rotation noise can be pretty scary.
Concorde really was a status symbol for it's 30 years, just like sailing on the QE2 used to be also.
Indeed. Many Concorde customers were regulars, who usually got the same seat on each trip. It was an amazing coincidence that the one that crashed was a charter flight full of tourists. If it hadn't, there would have been dozens of celebrities and important business people among the dead. In contrast, the only one I'm aware of from 9/11 is the founder of Akamai.
There is nothing better than watching concorde coming home on those special occasions when it is taken off normal flying patterns, they close the road and it flies right over your head, amazing.
I came close. Once I got to see the Shuttle (on its 747 "tow truck") shortly after takeoff.
I sniffed the packets from this duplicate article, and the evil bit was not set! I demand Slashdot immediately implement RFC3514 for all duplicate articles!
Apollo 13's problem was fixed without an EVA. Columbia's problem was on the outside and couldn't be fixed without an EVA, plus it was configured with a science module in the cargo bay, making EVA more difficult. Also, Apollo 13 was actually two spacecraft in one, since they had the Lunar Module.
Farscape is one of the too few reasons for me to pay for cable TV. I haven't seen any of the third or fourth seasons.
But not only did I get to see the finale episode tonight, I saw it in one of the better ways possible. Before it ran, there was a panel with Virginia Hey and Lani Tupu. And no, they have no idea what's going to happen with the series.
Virginia talked about the makeup: 3-5 hours, the only way she can handle it is to ignore it, and it has caused some health problems. She likes hugging people, and that blue got over everyone, to the point where they once made her wear a "NO HUGGING" sign. She did shave her head and eyebrows for the part. She also talked about when she got her work visa paperwork back from the INS, she was totally floored to see her job described as an "alien of extraordinary ability". Turns out that was just the standard INS lingo. (Just looked at her site... she was that girl in that Mad Max movie?!)
Anyhow, the cliffhanger ending wasn't exactly a nice thing to do to the viewers, what with the series being cancelled. But at least it seems to have tied up a lot of loose ends before leaving a few new ones.
A quick note about the bash script. It seems that whoever wrote it didn't have a Pismo, which reports numbers for two battery bays, listing the right battery bay first.
Did you try removing and re-inserting the battery first? I thought it was my new BTI battery doing this, but maybe it was a system software change at about the time my second Apple battery died. It will charge up all the way if I let it discharge sufficiently, but it will not "top off" the battery if it loses a few percent from being in sleep mode. I suspect the topping off was the reason my first two (Apple branded) batteries lasted a little over a year each.
and the battery meter would report that it was calculating the time until it would be fully charged.
This is a bug that appeared in 10.2.0. My Pismo happily showed that the battery was charged in the battery menu right up through 10.1.5. Then Jagwyre came out and when it was full it would say "calculating". I think they finally fixed that in 10.2.4, but then my hard drive died and I re-installed from the 10.2.3 full install CD-ROMs that Apple thoughtfully provided to developers a month or so ago, and I just haven't felt the need to go back to 10.2.4.
This is why I will definitely get AppleCare for my next Powerbook. Because (in my experience with my Pismo) Li-ion battery life sucks. Three years of AppleCare means at least two free batteries, right?:-)
Being on my third Pismo battery now, that would be my experience. I think it's because the Apple batteries try to always top off the charge. Now I'm using a BTI, and it avoids charging the battery until it first dips below 95% or so. Right now it's plugged into the wall and holding at 93%.
I did have some suspicion that OS X in general contributed to the death of my first battery, especially since the public beta and 10.0 didn't shut down everything on the Pismo, and sleep mode drained the battery a lot faster than 9.x. But I was already running at least 10.1 when I started using my second battery.
You'll know your battery is a couple of months from death when the discharge pattern is such that the % capacity suddenly drops off to zero when it's at 75% or more.
I am not impressed with lithium-ion batteries. In contrast, nickel-metal hydride isn't supposed to have a memory effect. And it's possible to get NiMH AA cells from Wal-Mart. I wish someone would make a battery module for the Pismo that takes a bunch of AA NiMH cells. Since the charge pattern is supposed to be controlled by a CPU in the battery module, this should be do-able.
Slashdot Mirror
Now all they need to do is buy the Beatles library from Michael Jackson and Sony.
Then it's probably a lame-ass compression job. Even anime can do fine with no more than 5Mb average. Anything more is a misguided compressionist setting the ceiling up too high and causing "bit-stuffing" in the MPEG stream.
In addition to the obvious point of getting rid of interlace, there's the issue of something called "3:2 pulldown". That's when the 24fps (frames/sec) of film is converted to 30fps NTSC, which is 60 fields/sec. I don't remember exactly but it's something like for every two frames of film, three fields are put in the video. If you were to single-step the frames, every third would have the flickery images of two frames if viewed on a cheap TV set, or every on every other line if viewed on a computer...or when viewed on an expensive set, whether HTDV or with a "line doubler".
Progressive scan can't do much to help movies that have the 3:2 pulldown performed before the MPEG encode, and encoded at 30fps. But DVD allows the MPEG stream to say that it's 24fps and have the player do the pulldown. If the player is designed to output 480p video, it can change its pulldown algorithm.
There is one other aspect of line doubling that can cause problems. If a video is recorded with an NTSC camera, the interlace will cause the second field to be of the same scene 1/60 sec later, whereas on a film image, they would have been from the exact same moment in time. If objects are moving fast, the alternate-lines effect will appear on a line-doubled image.
So to take full advantage of progressive scan, a DVD will have to be mastered properly, and filmed with film or a 480p video camera, but even without those, you will still get reduced flicker from your TV set.
And in case you were wondering what happens with 25fps PAL video, video transfers are often done with a 1:1 conversion, causing the PAL videos to be 4% faster than real time!
Do you even know what a telecine transfer is? Because your question was answered right before you asked it. A telecine transfer is when they take a reel of film and make a transfer to an electronic format, whether NTSC analog or HD video. Film has a LOT more resolution than 1080p HDTV.
And if you lived in Texas, you had to make sure not to leave it in your car while you stopped off at the grocery store on the way back or you'd have a nice piece of modern art when you got home.
Running time was limited. You had to get up half-way through a fairly short movie, to turn the disc over, or insert an entirely different disc.
Running time was indeed a big problem. Many movies are like 90 minutes long, and can fit on a single disc, and auto-flip players help, but there are enough movies long enough to require two discs, and (aside from a few exotic players with two disc capability) you would have to get up and swap discs.
Sometimes a movie could be time-compressed to fit on a disc (the original release of the Star Wars trilogy was done this way), but this really couldn't be done once LD found its niche a Home Theatre format.
And then there was the issue of side breaks. Many movies (especially the ones that had a "FIRST WIDESCREEN RELEASE" sticker on them) had side breaks in the middle of a scene, sometimes even when there was enough time left over on the second side to make a good side break (Time Bandits is a good example of this) In a way, it was the old VHS/Beta issue of tape length all over again.
Not that this was exclusively an LD problem, though. I understand that the VHS release of The Blues Brothers had a tape break in the middle of a scene, at 120:00! This can be seen on the DVD as a layer change at the same point, which while not nearly as annoying still can cause a 1/2 second delay on many players.
Higher prices than VHS.
Which brings up the reasons why DVD was successful. In a way, it was like Laserdisc 2.0, in that it had the advantage of being able to see the problems of LD and avoid them. Cost was the main one, since it would cost less than $1/disc to press, even in the early days (vs $8/LD), so prices could be competitive with VHS. It was easy to handle (except for double-sided DVD, which you don't see much of these days). It had multi-audio support (which had stretched LD to its limits), and subtitle support, both important for foreign movies, though they blew it when they only allowed 3 colors for subtitles. It had a case form factor similar to VHS, which could also be used for video game and cheap PC software titles.
Another thing about DVD is that it happened at the intersection of being able to create a disc with large enough data capacity, and having sufficient compression technology to fit 120 minutes of video into a single layer disc. In short, it happened exactly when it was possible to happen.
The real problem with LD was that it cost $8/disc just to manufacture, and it didn't seem like economies of scale would do much to reduce that. When LD was first released, the companies thought they would be cheaper, but they hadn't figured in the cost of clean rooms, which they didn't realize they needed until after they produced a lot of crap quality discs for a few years (aka Discovision).
It's also a rather daunting format to handle (a big heavy piece of acrylic with data on both sides), and at the full 1800 RPM, the rotation noise can be pretty scary.
Indeed. Many Concorde customers were regulars, who usually got the same seat on each trip. It was an amazing coincidence that the one that crashed was a charter flight full of tourists. If it hadn't, there would have been dozens of celebrities and important business people among the dead. In contrast, the only one I'm aware of from 9/11 is the founder of Akamai.
I came close. Once I got to see the Shuttle (on its 747 "tow truck") shortly after takeoff.
So I should start using Ibm instead of IBM? :-)
Well it's not our fault that they don't know to use 16-color GIFs instead of JPGs when it's all a bunch of flood-filled line art! I mean, FURRFU!
Indeed. If it's so irrelevant, why do I still see so many Code Red hits in my Apache access logs?
Good thing I just read this a couple of hours ago, it's probably slashdotted to bits by now. (I got the link from an earlier /. article.)
The best part is when you go on a picnic, you can plug it into your laptop!
I sniffed the packets from this duplicate article, and the evil bit was not set! I demand Slashdot immediately implement RFC3514 for all duplicate articles!
Apollo 13's problem was fixed without an EVA. Columbia's problem was on the outside and couldn't be fixed without an EVA, plus it was configured with a science module in the cargo bay, making EVA more difficult. Also, Apollo 13 was actually two spacecraft in one, since they had the Lunar Module.
So it should work great in Iraq, right?
Except that this is Slashdot, so it should be renamed as the "Mongolian Beowulf Cluster-fuck technique".
But not only did I get to see the finale episode tonight, I saw it in one of the better ways possible. Before it ran, there was a panel with Virginia Hey and Lani Tupu. And no, they have no idea what's going to happen with the series.
Virginia talked about the makeup: 3-5 hours, the only way she can handle it is to ignore it, and it has caused some health problems. She likes hugging people, and that blue got over everyone, to the point where they once made her wear a "NO HUGGING" sign. She did shave her head and eyebrows for the part. She also talked about when she got her work visa paperwork back from the INS, she was totally floored to see her job described as an "alien of extraordinary ability". Turns out that was just the standard INS lingo. (Just looked at her site... she was that girl in that Mad Max movie?!)
Anyhow, the cliffhanger ending wasn't exactly a nice thing to do to the viewers, what with the series being cancelled. But at least it seems to have tied up a lot of loose ends before leaving a few new ones.
All right! RFC3251 over 802.11b!
$ ioreg -p IODeviceTree -w 0 -n battery | grep oltaget y"=10000,
g e"=1200,"Capacity"=4050,"Current"=3867})
| | | "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Voltage"=0,"Flags"=131,"Amperage"=1200,"Capaci
"Current"=0},{"Voltage"=12554,"Flags"=7,"Ampera
The bash script ends up doing this:
voltage=0 flags=131/0x083 amperage=1200 capacity=10000 current=0 voltage=12542 flags=7 amperage=1200 capacity=4050 current=3809 [0.0%]
And it's absolutely correct, too. My right battery bay, which contains a CD-ROM drive, has a 0.0% charge.
Did you try removing and re-inserting the battery first? I thought it was my new BTI battery doing this, but maybe it was a system software change at about the time my second Apple battery died. It will charge up all the way if I let it discharge sufficiently, but it will not "top off" the battery if it loses a few percent from being in sleep mode. I suspect the topping off was the reason my first two (Apple branded) batteries lasted a little over a year each.
and the battery meter would report that it was calculating the time until it would be fully charged.
This is a bug that appeared in 10.2.0. My Pismo happily showed that the battery was charged in the battery menu right up through 10.1.5. Then Jagwyre came out and when it was full it would say "calculating". I think they finally fixed that in 10.2.4, but then my hard drive died and I re-installed from the 10.2.3 full install CD-ROMs that Apple thoughtfully provided to developers a month or so ago, and I just haven't felt the need to go back to 10.2.4.
This is why I will definitely get AppleCare for my next Powerbook. Because (in my experience with my Pismo) Li-ion battery life sucks. Three years of AppleCare means at least two free batteries, right? :-)
That's only for Wallstreet batteries. It won't run on anything newer, not even a Lombard or Pismo.
I did have some suspicion that OS X in general contributed to the death of my first battery, especially since the public beta and 10.0 didn't shut down everything on the Pismo, and sleep mode drained the battery a lot faster than 9.x. But I was already running at least 10.1 when I started using my second battery.
You'll know your battery is a couple of months from death when the discharge pattern is such that the % capacity suddenly drops off to zero when it's at 75% or more.
I am not impressed with lithium-ion batteries. In contrast, nickel-metal hydride isn't supposed to have a memory effect. And it's possible to get NiMH AA cells from Wal-Mart. I wish someone would make a battery module for the Pismo that takes a bunch of AA NiMH cells. Since the charge pattern is supposed to be controlled by a CPU in the battery module, this should be do-able.
Wow! A keyboard with all of the feel of the famous Atari 400 keyboard!