Their only legal form of attack is through the legal system. "Guerrilla" techniques such as this (should the **AA be responsible, of course), are illegal and someone should call them out on it. Regardless of what they think you're doing, they can't take the law into their own hands (after all, isn't that what they're pissed off that copyright infringers are doing?)
Re:Why? Because I can't get West Wing.
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TV Piracy is Next
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It's not the nets that have control over the waivers, it's the stations. Go bitch at them.
No, but being free does guarantee me the right to capture bits from the air, decode them, and store them for later viewing.
Who the hell are you to tell me that I can't have access to the raw video stream? What I do with that stream determines whether I'm breaking the law or not, not the mere fact that I'm capturing the stream.
I bet you're one of these RIAA/MPAA shills who advocate giving all benefits and rights to the content providers and giving the average person NOTHING except exactly what you say and not more. And worse, you want this done in perpetuity, so that there is no media that we can buy that doesn't require some kind of ongoing payment to retain a copy forever.
Fuck you. Being free doesn't guarantee you the right to tell me that I'm not smart enough to decide whether or not something is legal or moral, but that I have to have the law prevent me from doing what I want with this signal, as long as I don't redistribute it.
I second this. I use this exact adaptor, and other than rumble support (which I can't get to work), it works flawlessly. The dpad on a DualShock2 is the closest I've found to a real Nintendo dpad (which is actually patented). Most PC USB joypads are crappy because they've got those disc dpads that make it too easy to hit a diagonal. I've got one of the old Gravis Gamepad Pro's (which were styled like a PSX controller), and the dpad is HORRIBLE.
No, but reSID by Dag Lem is as close as you can currently get to a soft-SID, and it's being improved (he just released a new version not too long ago). reSID is the engine used in VICE (CCS64 has it's own SID emulation which I feel is not quite as good as reSID, although it's not horrid either).
Well, no, 100% accuracy IS a laudable goal. It's just stupid to bash ALL emulators because some are not quite so accurate.
With your mindset, there wouldn't be cycle-exact emulation of the C64. This would be all fine and dandy, except there would be tons more broken software ths way. Especially since an effect can be broken by a difference in ONE CPU CYCLE. And I'm talking MAJORLY broken. You know what causes PAL effects to bug on NTSC? The difference of TWO CYCLES PER LINE. That's IT (well, not exactly, there's also the different number of scanlines, but this is much less of a problem - the two cycle difference is 99% of fixing for PAL/NTSC).
That's because "OTHER POSTER" was not totally accurate. "Most" emulators do not fail to emulate games properly. Many emulators do not emulate the systems 100%, but the emulation is nonetheless good enough. For example, the Genesis emulators are nowhere NEAR cycle-exact emulation. But yet, they are good enough for 99% of games. If someone hacks a game, and they don't test it on real hardware, then of course you're going to have problems.
And for the emulators that ARE pretty much pixel perfect (CCS64 and VICE are, I know this for a FACT), then the "OTHER POSTER" completely loses his argument.
HDTV seems to be getting an all or nothing push rather than dangling a few samples out and seeing if the market bites. When LD failed, they just faded away, what happens if HDTV fails? Will there be a sudden reversion to standard signaling?
No, as I mentioned, the ATSC specification includes SD resolutions, of which many stations are already broadcasting. As SD is essentially a digital representation of a component NTSC signal, it's fairly trivial to operate NTSC equipment and then transcode it for broadcast (which is what every single station broadcasting SD is doing anyway).
If HD fails, it really means nothing for or against digital broadcasting in and of itself. Personally, I predict the big switch to HD will happen when you can buy an HD set for the average price of a current NTSC set. Which means that the big switch will take quite a long time, given the current pricing trends I've seen (even with 4:3 direct view CRTs, the price premium is still something like $150-$200).
Even if HD completely fails, digital terrestrial TV is here to stay. Even if SD becomes the normal broadcast resolution, this is easily transcoded to NTSC (cable and DSS already basically do this, albeit with differently formatted and encrypted data). So get your non-broadcast-flag-respecting equipment NOW.
Sony already has Blu-Ray writers. Unfortunately, I only know of one current application for them, and that is in the realm of professional video production. Sony's line of XDCAM equipment uses a form of Blu-Ray technology. To quote:
The new XDCAM disks include 23.3 GB of storage capacity as well as random access file selection. The disk itself is housed in a rugged plastic case that increases durability far beyond the normal DVD. Worthy of note is the differentiation between the blue-violet lasers used in the XDCAM and the Blu-ray laser technology found in consumer DVD products. XDCAM is one of the first commerical Blu-ray technology products to be announced. The XDCAM format makes use of a phase-change recording material to increase read/write speeds and also allows access by two simultaneous pickups.
No, it's nothing like MST. With MST, the guys are sitting there riffing on the ORIGINAL movie, and dubbing their comments in over top, using the film's audio as a bed. With this, it sounds like they are replacing the original audio entirely with their own live audio track. I'd also imagine they're not going for the whole 'matte black chromakey of theatre seats over the film' thing that MST did.
I doubt SDI will do much good with consumer PC hardware unless you want to spend even more money than what it costs just to buy this demod. Are there cheap 310M/ASI cards for commodity hardware?
HD's not being forced on anyone. There are thousands of SD (standard-def) digital terrestrial stations on the air in the US, and I know this for a fact. Of course, I'm sure the broadcast flag will apply there too, but I'm pedantic that way. Everytime someone claims 'HD is a mandatory upgrade', it crawls under my skin, because it's plain WRONG.
Digital is a means for the cable/satellite people to squeeze in more channels. Trouble is, they're too greedy, and they run the bitrate way lower than they should, in order to fit more channels on. Cable is worse for this than DBS because cable has that big chunk of analog cable that takes up quite a bit of bandwidth.
You could probably squeeze two high-quality digital channels in the space of one analog. Unfortunately, you can also fit four or five shitty-quality low-bitrate channels in that same space.
The grey bars are intended to lessen burnin on expensive plasma sets. Plasmas have worse burnin than CRTs, and the neutral grey helps mitigate that.
Not that it's not ass-ugly, that's for sure. But it might be better than turning on your plasma one day and seeing that the picture area outside the middle 4:3 area has the black burnt it.
This should definitely be an option in the receiver, however. Although this won't work with upconverted NTSC, as said upconverters also tend to have the gray/black setting, so you're likely to get a mix of grey and black bars.
Ah, I see. I've not used that particular chipset, so I had no idea it actually did capture in such a way.
If you have a good LD player with an S-Video port on it, then the player's comb filter may be of sufficient quality to use this instead of composite, along with something like the A/V Link. I use it with the output of the SA Explorer 3100 via S-Video, and the comb filters seem to be good enough for my tastes. A while back, I recorded the "Press Your Luck" documentary from Game Show Network to DVCPRO via the 3100, and when I recaptured that tape with the A/V Link, there was very little processing required to clean the signal up (mostly to get rid of the analog noise inherent from the fact that it was recorded from analog cable). The final result was excellent, I have viewed it on a real NTSC set and I would subjectively say that it was close to DVD quality, albeit not quite.
802.11b does not have the bandwidth for video of ANY quality, unless you're comfortable with watching shit, and certainly not when you're encoding the video in real-time (which drops the quality even more unless there is enough of a delay to do some bidi, of which 60 frames would be sufficient).
802.11g *does* have the bandwidth, given a good, fast, hardware encoder, and it'll have the quality too. So if you want to do this, make sure you invest in 802.11g equipment.
The ADSTech Pyro A/V Link is good for this too. Plus, I haven't gotten mine upgraded yet, but apparently they have fixed the problem where crappy sources drop frames like crazy (and apparently they're the only one to do it in firmware only, without using a hardware TBC). So if you buy a brand new one now, it should work good, even with VHS tapes.
I agree 100%. That's why studios use the high-dollar equipment, because it's the only equipment that delivers the quality and reliability that they need. PC-based editing is still hit-or-miss unless you buy a turnkey system, which will cost you more.
But yet, in the same regard, the cheap stuff IS good, because it brings the people the capability to do something they didn't have before. Plus, smaller studios WILL use the cheaper stuff simply because they don't have the money for the good stuff (for example, the production guy here uses Pinnacle Studio 9 to do commercial production).
Uncompressed video means you have to waste CPU time compressing the video if you want to record.
Not necessarily. You are correct, in the context of the average PC available today (even with a 200GB HD, that's only good enough for 200 minutes of uncompressed!). However, RAID a bunch of those 200GB drives together (say, 4 or 8, or even 10 - 2TB good enough for you?) and you suddenly have both the drive bandwidth and the storage space to record true uncompressed. Yes, I agree, for archival purposes you'll more than likely have to reencode, however this gives you full control over the encoding process, and thus the best possible quality given the settings used in the encoder.
Perhaps it's not so viable CURRENTLY, I'll agree. But most bleeding-edge technology is not viable during it's very early days. Give it some time, and these devices will have a more practical use.
It doesn't have a comb, but I use the ADSTech Pyro A/V Link to convert NTSC (it works with PAL too) to standard DV. You only need a comb filter when you're dealing with composite or less, anyway.
How did you come to the conclusion that your card stretches 640 pixels to 720? If you went solely on the width of the frame on your computer screen, then it's likely that your card really does capture at 720 pixels. Those 720 pixels are actually supposed to be horizontally thinner on a real NTSC display than they are when you display the video without any aspect ratio correction. For example, if you have an NTSC source with a circle in the center that appears to be a perfect circle on an NTSC set, when you capture it on the PC and display it unmodified, the circle WILL look horizontally fat. However, take that same source, after capturing, and play it back out on a device that supports 720x480 output to NTSC (nVidia cards do this), and it will look correct again.
If you're expecting perfect circles to stay perfect at 720 pixels capture, that will NEVER happen, because there simply isn't any more horizontal data to capture. If you want your final encoded file to have the correct aspect when played back on a square-pixel PC display, then resize it to 640x480 during the encode (NEVER resize vertically though, you'll mess up the fields). I personally recommend leaving the video at 720x480 and using a player such as DScaler to correct the aspect ratio - that way, you retain as much of the original resolution as possible. I find that encoding to Divx at a sufficient bitrate to fill a full CD-R with 30 minutes of video to give very high quality results (I do almost no processing during my encodes - only to clean up the existing video, never to delace it).
Anyway, you can't do any of these things with MPEG, because most editors don't do MPEG editing. Final Cut Pro and Premiere don't even do it (I've tried with v3 and v6 respectively). Why? Because it's lossy!
Hilarious. MJPG is "lossy" too and any editor that cannot do frame accurate editing on that ain't much of an editor.
He said MPEG, not MJPEG. MPEG, in the usual sense, is impossible to edit without transcoding to other formats, due to it's interframe compression. If you have an MPEG stream with nothing but I-frames, then you can theoretically edit that without any loss (but then the file will be much bigger and you'd just be better off using MJPEG).
Yes, MJPEG is lossy, but with the quality ramped up, it can still be quite good for real video. There is very little true 'uncompressed', even in the broadcast industry, outside of boards like the Toaster 2. Even devices that claim to be uncompressed typically compress the chroma by essentially resizing the chroma to half or one-fourth of the original width, then stretching it back out. True uncompressed is 24bpp (or 32bpp if you want to support an alpha channel) at whatever frame size you're working with, with the chroma resolution identical to the luma resolution. Of course, that can give you some unwieldy file sizes (standard D1 resolution, which is equivalent to NTSC, is 720x486 and runs at 27Mbps - about a gig per hour). Of course, you can use lossless codecs like Huffyuv to bring those file sizes down, but it's still quite large.
You do your delacing with the CPU. DScaler already works wonders with that concept. All the USB device has to do is send the same resolution that many other devices capture - 720x480/29.97fps or 720x576/25fps - and literally just run it through DScaler (preferably in Bob mode, as it uses less CPU time than other delacing methods, with only a very slight vertical softness). It would be foolish to delace before sending to the CPU, and would be enough to turn purists like me off to the device.
Plus, 60 fields per second is mathematically identical to 30 frames per second because each field is only half-height compared to the full frame.
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Their only legal form of attack is through the legal system. "Guerrilla" techniques such as this (should the **AA be responsible, of course), are illegal and someone should call them out on it. Regardless of what they think you're doing, they can't take the law into their own hands (after all, isn't that what they're pissed off that copyright infringers are doing?)
It's not the nets that have control over the waivers, it's the stations. Go bitch at them.
No, but being free does guarantee me the right to capture bits from the air, decode them, and store them for later viewing.
Who the hell are you to tell me that I can't have access to the raw video stream? What I do with that stream determines whether I'm breaking the law or not, not the mere fact that I'm capturing the stream.
I bet you're one of these RIAA/MPAA shills who advocate giving all benefits and rights to the content providers and giving the average person NOTHING except exactly what you say and not more. And worse, you want this done in perpetuity, so that there is no media that we can buy that doesn't require some kind of ongoing payment to retain a copy forever.
Fuck you. Being free doesn't guarantee you the right to tell me that I'm not smart enough to decide whether or not something is legal or moral, but that I have to have the law prevent me from doing what I want with this signal, as long as I don't redistribute it.
I second this. I use this exact adaptor, and other than rumble support (which I can't get to work), it works flawlessly. The dpad on a DualShock2 is the closest I've found to a real Nintendo dpad (which is actually patented). Most PC USB joypads are crappy because they've got those disc dpads that make it too easy to hit a diagonal. I've got one of the old Gravis Gamepad Pro's (which were styled like a PSX controller), and the dpad is HORRIBLE.
No, but reSID by Dag Lem is as close as you can currently get to a soft-SID, and it's being improved (he just released a new version not too long ago). reSID is the engine used in VICE (CCS64 has it's own SID emulation which I feel is not quite as good as reSID, although it's not horrid either).
Well, no, 100% accuracy IS a laudable goal. It's just stupid to bash ALL emulators because some are not quite so accurate.
With your mindset, there wouldn't be cycle-exact emulation of the C64. This would be all fine and dandy, except there would be tons more broken software ths way. Especially since an effect can be broken by a difference in ONE CPU CYCLE. And I'm talking MAJORLY broken. You know what causes PAL effects to bug on NTSC? The difference of TWO CYCLES PER LINE. That's IT (well, not exactly, there's also the different number of scanlines, but this is much less of a problem - the two cycle difference is 99% of fixing for PAL/NTSC).
That's because "OTHER POSTER" was not totally accurate. "Most" emulators do not fail to emulate games properly. Many emulators do not emulate the systems 100%, but the emulation is nonetheless good enough. For example, the Genesis emulators are nowhere NEAR cycle-exact emulation. But yet, they are good enough for 99% of games. If someone hacks a game, and they don't test it on real hardware, then of course you're going to have problems.
And for the emulators that ARE pretty much pixel perfect (CCS64 and VICE are, I know this for a FACT), then the "OTHER POSTER" completely loses his argument.
- HDTV seems to be getting an all or nothing push rather than dangling a few samples out and seeing if the market bites. When LD failed, they just faded away, what happens if HDTV fails? Will there be a sudden reversion to standard signaling?
No, as I mentioned, the ATSC specification includes SD resolutions, of which many stations are already broadcasting. As SD is essentially a digital representation of a component NTSC signal, it's fairly trivial to operate NTSC equipment and then transcode it for broadcast (which is what every single station broadcasting SD is doing anyway).If HD fails, it really means nothing for or against digital broadcasting in and of itself. Personally, I predict the big switch to HD will happen when you can buy an HD set for the average price of a current NTSC set. Which means that the big switch will take quite a long time, given the current pricing trends I've seen (even with 4:3 direct view CRTs, the price premium is still something like $150-$200).
Even if HD completely fails, digital terrestrial TV is here to stay. Even if SD becomes the normal broadcast resolution, this is easily transcoded to NTSC (cable and DSS already basically do this, albeit with differently formatted and encrypted data). So get your non-broadcast-flag-respecting equipment NOW.
No, it's nothing like MST. With MST, the guys are sitting there riffing on the ORIGINAL movie, and dubbing their comments in over top, using the film's audio as a bed. With this, it sounds like they are replacing the original audio entirely with their own live audio track. I'd also imagine they're not going for the whole 'matte black chromakey of theatre seats over the film' thing that MST did.
I've used one of those. Very nice hardware.
I doubt SDI will do much good with consumer PC hardware unless you want to spend even more money than what it costs just to buy this demod. Are there cheap 310M/ASI cards for commodity hardware?
HD's not being forced on anyone. There are thousands of SD (standard-def) digital terrestrial stations on the air in the US, and I know this for a fact. Of course, I'm sure the broadcast flag will apply there too, but I'm pedantic that way. Everytime someone claims 'HD is a mandatory upgrade', it crawls under my skin, because it's plain WRONG.
Digital is a means for the cable/satellite people to squeeze in more channels. Trouble is, they're too greedy, and they run the bitrate way lower than they should, in order to fit more channels on. Cable is worse for this than DBS because cable has that big chunk of analog cable that takes up quite a bit of bandwidth.
You could probably squeeze two high-quality digital channels in the space of one analog. Unfortunately, you can also fit four or five shitty-quality low-bitrate channels in that same space.
The grey bars are intended to lessen burnin on expensive plasma sets. Plasmas have worse burnin than CRTs, and the neutral grey helps mitigate that.
Not that it's not ass-ugly, that's for sure. But it might be better than turning on your plasma one day and seeing that the picture area outside the middle 4:3 area has the black burnt it.
This should definitely be an option in the receiver, however. Although this won't work with upconverted NTSC, as said upconverters also tend to have the gray/black setting, so you're likely to get a mix of grey and black bars.
"digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV"
That's funny, I monitor a digital terrestrial signal EVERY DAY that completely fills a 4:3 screen.
Digital doesn't mean HD, michael. You should have known that. There is digital SD (standard-def) too.
Ah, I see. I've not used that particular chipset, so I had no idea it actually did capture in such a way.
If you have a good LD player with an S-Video port on it, then the player's comb filter may be of sufficient quality to use this instead of composite, along with something like the A/V Link. I use it with the output of the SA Explorer 3100 via S-Video, and the comb filters seem to be good enough for my tastes. A while back, I recorded the "Press Your Luck" documentary from Game Show Network to DVCPRO via the 3100, and when I recaptured that tape with the A/V Link, there was very little processing required to clean the signal up (mostly to get rid of the analog noise inherent from the fact that it was recorded from analog cable). The final result was excellent, I have viewed it on a real NTSC set and I would subjectively say that it was close to DVD quality, albeit not quite.
802.11b does not have the bandwidth for video of ANY quality, unless you're comfortable with watching shit, and certainly not when you're encoding the video in real-time (which drops the quality even more unless there is enough of a delay to do some bidi, of which 60 frames would be sufficient).
802.11g *does* have the bandwidth, given a good, fast, hardware encoder, and it'll have the quality too. So if you want to do this, make sure you invest in 802.11g equipment.
The ADSTech Pyro A/V Link is good for this too. Plus, I haven't gotten mine upgraded yet, but apparently they have fixed the problem where crappy sources drop frames like crazy (and apparently they're the only one to do it in firmware only, without using a hardware TBC). So if you buy a brand new one now, it should work good, even with VHS tapes.
I agree 100%. That's why studios use the high-dollar equipment, because it's the only equipment that delivers the quality and reliability that they need. PC-based editing is still hit-or-miss unless you buy a turnkey system, which will cost you more.
But yet, in the same regard, the cheap stuff IS good, because it brings the people the capability to do something they didn't have before. Plus, smaller studios WILL use the cheaper stuff simply because they don't have the money for the good stuff (for example, the production guy here uses Pinnacle Studio 9 to do commercial production).
Not necessarily. You are correct, in the context of the average PC available today (even with a 200GB HD, that's only good enough for 200 minutes of uncompressed!). However, RAID a bunch of those 200GB drives together (say, 4 or 8, or even 10 - 2TB good enough for you?) and you suddenly have both the drive bandwidth and the storage space to record true uncompressed. Yes, I agree, for archival purposes you'll more than likely have to reencode, however this gives you full control over the encoding process, and thus the best possible quality given the settings used in the encoder.
Perhaps it's not so viable CURRENTLY, I'll agree. But most bleeding-edge technology is not viable during it's very early days. Give it some time, and these devices will have a more practical use.
It doesn't have a comb, but I use the ADSTech Pyro A/V Link to convert NTSC (it works with PAL too) to standard DV. You only need a comb filter when you're dealing with composite or less, anyway.
How did you come to the conclusion that your card stretches 640 pixels to 720? If you went solely on the width of the frame on your computer screen, then it's likely that your card really does capture at 720 pixels. Those 720 pixels are actually supposed to be horizontally thinner on a real NTSC display than they are when you display the video without any aspect ratio correction. For example, if you have an NTSC source with a circle in the center that appears to be a perfect circle on an NTSC set, when you capture it on the PC and display it unmodified, the circle WILL look horizontally fat. However, take that same source, after capturing, and play it back out on a device that supports 720x480 output to NTSC (nVidia cards do this), and it will look correct again.
If you're expecting perfect circles to stay perfect at 720 pixels capture, that will NEVER happen, because there simply isn't any more horizontal data to capture. If you want your final encoded file to have the correct aspect when played back on a square-pixel PC display, then resize it to 640x480 during the encode (NEVER resize vertically though, you'll mess up the fields). I personally recommend leaving the video at 720x480 and using a player such as DScaler to correct the aspect ratio - that way, you retain as much of the original resolution as possible. I find that encoding to Divx at a sufficient bitrate to fill a full CD-R with 30 minutes of video to give very high quality results (I do almost no processing during my encodes - only to clean up the existing video, never to delace it).
Hilarious. MJPG is "lossy" too and any editor that cannot do frame accurate editing on that ain't much of an editor.
He said MPEG, not MJPEG. MPEG, in the usual sense, is impossible to edit without transcoding to other formats, due to it's interframe compression. If you have an MPEG stream with nothing but I-frames, then you can theoretically edit that without any loss (but then the file will be much bigger and you'd just be better off using MJPEG).
Yes, MJPEG is lossy, but with the quality ramped up, it can still be quite good for real video. There is very little true 'uncompressed', even in the broadcast industry, outside of boards like the Toaster 2. Even devices that claim to be uncompressed typically compress the chroma by essentially resizing the chroma to half or one-fourth of the original width, then stretching it back out. True uncompressed is 24bpp (or 32bpp if you want to support an alpha channel) at whatever frame size you're working with, with the chroma resolution identical to the luma resolution. Of course, that can give you some unwieldy file sizes (standard D1 resolution, which is equivalent to NTSC, is 720x486 and runs at 27Mbps - about a gig per hour). Of course, you can use lossless codecs like Huffyuv to bring those file sizes down, but it's still quite large.
You do your delacing with the CPU. DScaler already works wonders with that concept. All the USB device has to do is send the same resolution that many other devices capture - 720x480/29.97fps or 720x576/25fps - and literally just run it through DScaler (preferably in Bob mode, as it uses less CPU time than other delacing methods, with only a very slight vertical softness). It would be foolish to delace before sending to the CPU, and would be enough to turn purists like me off to the device.
Plus, 60 fields per second is mathematically identical to 30 frames per second because each field is only half-height compared to the full frame.
Only if the emulator changes it's operation merely based on the game you are running. They don't own ALL handheld emulation.
Ah, I parsed that as "not been updated in eons". My bad.