Theora is basically a cleaned up VP3, and is likely to remain so. Although some visual improvements may sneak in along the way, this is not the main focus of the project, which is to convert VP3 from being a Windows only mess into a portable cross-platform codec which plays well with the Ogg container format.
Previous tests by places such as Doom 9 have shown that VP3 is beaten by the various pseudo-MPEG4 encoders, although not embarassingly. I imagine that this situation will continue: DivX/XviD/etc. will continue to have marginally better quality.
I bought an Epson C80 in November (quite soon after they were released), and it's worked flawlessly ever since on a medium workload (about 10 pages a day). They have quite large print cartridges compared to many other inkjets, and cyan/magenta/yellow are seperated, so you waste less ink.
Just remember to *never* buy a cheap inkjet - their build quality is usually atrocious. Always get the best model you can afford.
I would really like to know what the KDE developers and leaders really feel for Gnome and vice a versa.. some interesting interview will be that!
Most of them don't have any opinions either way - the main KDE/Gnome developers normally run an exclusively KDE/Gnome desktop, and so don't think about the other desktop at all. They're a very good example of convergent evolution. There *are* some times when something passes from one desktop to another, but they're relatively infrequent (for example, the Gnome 2 icons are *very* influenced by the KDE 2 ones, and in the other direction the KDE file manager got an improved look-n-feel after the release of Nautilus).
cut a section of the.wav file, flac it up, and post it as a bug on Xiph's bugzilla page (bugs.xiph.org). They can't improve the encoder until they know about failure cases.
Indeed - and I'm very happy that it's my department that keep this journal going. But it's only a very small drop in a very very large bucket, and I haven't seen very many journals following suit.
Part of the problem is that the publishing rights for most of the journals are owned by two or three *incredibly* large conglomorates - who really seem to be squeezing as much money as they can from the journals in the last few years. For example, the cost of 'buying' the right to make a copy of an article in something like 'Advanced in Applied Mathematics' is double what it was five years ago.
Happier now. Note that they've changed their position on this at least 3 times. I'm glad that they've finally given credit to XviD. However, this doesn't change the problem.
They didn't ask the XviD authors for permission to offer the GPL-derived work under a non-GPL licence (of course, it could be that all uses are licenced under GPL now, which might be interesting - as it would mean they'd have to GPL all the software which is aggregated with it as well).
Yes, they have made the source code available. However, they nowhere state that it is a derivative work of XviD (although they state that it was 'inspired' by XviD) - they are claiming complete copyright over it.
Why should you care?
It's not a licencing issue - it's a copyright issue. If a have some GPL code, and I own the copyright, then I have the right to relicence the code any way I wish (including giving a company the right to use it in a closed source application - probably for a fee). If I have GPL code which I do *not* own the copyright for, then I have *no* rights to relicence.
This is a similar situation to that facing Mozilla a few months ago - they wanted to relicence the code, but couldn't unless they could contact *every single copyright owner* to get consent (and in Mozilla's case this meant every contributor of a significant patch).
Sigma Designs have taken someone elses code, and claimed copyright over it. This copyright claim (if it were correct) gives them the right to use the stolen code in closed source applications -- and it *is* being used in closed source and hardware applications.
So it doesn't matter that Sigma have opened the source to the stolen code. That's the smaller evil.
I wish there was some kind of P2P network to only offer legal content.
eTree is one answer - trading of lossless audio recordingings of music by bands that allow taping of concerts (note that the eTree site is down at the moment, so I've linked to the Google cache).
Because Gnutella wasn't designed, it was hacked up in a weekend as a little closed source Windows file sharing app. Completely unscalable, completely insecure.
After AOL stamped on the writer to remove the program, lots of people reverse engineered the protocol (which was almost trivially easy), and wrote their own clients. Because it was the time of dot-com mania, lots of commercial and semi commercial applications sprung up using the same protocol, without any of the authors ever bothering to consider whether the protocol was usable at all.
It's only now, about 3 years later, that we're finally seeing work to move 'Gnutella' into a more workable system (see the superpeer system of Gnucleus, for example).
Yes - my 4/5 may have no connection to a 4/5 given to a different sample, or to a 4/5 given by a different person. In fact, he should have done the ranking to the individual results as well, which would further reduce the 'power'.
Unless we can have a set scale of non-transparency which we can guarantee is being adhered to (which is only the case in certain special circumstances), all we can keep is the ordinal information.
If you read the thread on HydrogenAudio (which is the message board where most of these tests / codecs are discussed), you'll find the following information from Monty, the lead developer of Vorbis:
Ogg had a very low bitrate (in the forties) on all the classical samples, which is the way it should have been (Classical solos with their deep noise floors and simple harmonics are relatively easy). But the real reason Ogg scored so low in both (and Beauty Slept as well) was a) the tuning behind noise normalization is still not perfect. This is the very first release of that feature, and the test found flaws b) also the first release of new, more aggressive stereo modes and I think that they too need more analysis infrastructure driving them.
I expect Ogg's performance on Liszt and Bach to be very subpar NN performance. The poor performance on BeautySlept and Waiting was most likely insufficient stereo analysis. Ogg had the infrastructure to win those four samples, but the encoder didn't know how to do it yet (because I didn't know it would be necessary).
I think I can confidently state that a 128kbit/s encode in *any* encoder will reduce the file size by exactly the same amount (to 128/1440 of the original size, to be exact).
This means that you are perpetually beholden on the developers to make a version available for your particularly OS. Not a problem if you're a Windows user, admittedly.
2) The format infringes on a number of the patents applicable to all MPEG audio compression (as it is a highly-modified version of MPEG1 layer 2).
This means that it's very unlikely ever to appear in either portable players, or built in to players such as WinAmp -- it took 6 months of patent searching before they allowed Vorbis in by default.
Vorbis is 'good enough', and free in just about every sense you can think of. 'good enough' (in this case, at least MP3 quality) is often all you need to win the battle.
Slashdot Mirror
That's Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading effort (much more fun than that *other* DP).
On the whole I'd rather look at him than listen to him sing 'Freeeeeee the software'.
Does Ruby still have the perl-style variable warts? I'll start looking at the language as soon as those go away.
I don't see why.
"You may only use this software for 'x' days after installation" is a template for an incountable number of software licences.
Theora is basically a cleaned up VP3, and is likely to remain so. Although some visual improvements may sneak in along the way, this is not the main focus of the project, which is to convert VP3 from being a Windows only mess into a portable cross-platform codec which plays well with the Ogg container format.
Previous tests by places such as Doom 9 have shown that VP3 is beaten by the various pseudo-MPEG4 encoders, although not embarassingly. I imagine that this situation will continue: DivX/XviD/etc. will continue to have marginally better quality.
What the fuck are you on?
Seriously. My job's getting me down a bit and I could do with some cheering up.
Oh come on! News like that and no link or credible source?!?
"Pajama Crisis" is Emmett Plant, Xiph's CEO.
I bought an Epson C80 in November (quite soon after they were released), and it's worked flawlessly ever since on a medium workload (about 10 pages a day). They have quite large print cartridges compared to many other inkjets, and cyan/magenta/yellow are seperated, so you waste less ink.
Just remember to *never* buy a cheap inkjet - their build quality is usually atrocious. Always get the best model you can afford.
Most of them don't have any opinions either way - the main KDE/Gnome developers normally run an exclusively KDE/Gnome desktop, and so don't think about the other desktop at all. They're a very good example of convergent evolution. There *are* some times when something passes from one desktop to another, but they're relatively infrequent (for example, the Gnome 2 icons are *very* influenced by the KDE 2 ones, and in the other direction the KDE file manager got an improved look-n-feel after the release of Nautilus).
cut a section of the .wav file, flac it up, and post it as a bug on Xiph's bugzilla page (bugs.xiph.org). They can't improve the encoder until they know about failure cases.
Indeed - and I'm very happy that it's my department that keep this journal going. But it's only a very small drop in a very very large bucket, and I haven't seen very many journals following suit.
Part of the problem is that the publishing rights for most of the journals are owned by two or three *incredibly* large conglomorates - who really seem to be squeezing as much money as they can from the journals in the last few years. For example, the cost of 'buying' the right to make a copy of an article in something like 'Advanced in Applied Mathematics' is double what it was five years ago.
Good try, but that's actually an antonym of the world you were *thinking* of, which is probably 'energised' (-ized for the Americans in the house).
Enervated means "To deprive of nerve, force, strength, or courage; to render feeble or impotent; to make effeminate; to impair the moral powers of."
Happier now. Note that they've changed their position on this at least 3 times. I'm glad that they've finally given credit to XviD. However, this doesn't change the problem.
They didn't ask the XviD authors for permission to offer the GPL-derived work under a non-GPL licence (of course, it could be that all uses are licenced under GPL now, which might be interesting - as it would mean they'd have to GPL all the software which is aggregated with it as well).
Yes, they have made the source code available. However, they nowhere state that it is a derivative work of XviD (although they state that it was 'inspired' by XviD) - they are claiming complete copyright over it.
Why should you care?
It's not a licencing issue - it's a copyright issue. If a have some GPL code, and I own the copyright, then I have the right to relicence the code any way I wish (including giving a company the right to use it in a closed source application - probably for a fee). If I have GPL code which I do *not* own the copyright for, then I have *no* rights to relicence.
This is a similar situation to that facing Mozilla a few months ago - they wanted to relicence the code, but couldn't unless they could contact *every single copyright owner* to get consent (and in Mozilla's case this meant every contributor of a significant patch).
Sigma Designs have taken someone elses code, and claimed copyright over it. This copyright claim (if it were correct) gives them the right to use the stolen code in closed source applications -- and it *is* being used in closed source and hardware applications.
So it doesn't matter that Sigma have opened the source to the stolen code. That's the smaller evil.
eTree is one answer - trading of lossless audio recordingings of music by bands that allow taping of concerts (note that the eTree site is down at the moment, so I've linked to the Google cache).
Similar to, but less funny than, the LossyZip licence.
Because Gnutella wasn't designed, it was hacked up in a weekend as a little closed source Windows file sharing app. Completely unscalable, completely insecure.
After AOL stamped on the writer to remove the program, lots of people reverse engineered the protocol (which was almost trivially easy), and wrote their own clients. Because it was the time of dot-com mania, lots of commercial and semi commercial applications sprung up using the same protocol, without any of the authors ever bothering to consider whether the protocol was usable at all.
It's only now, about 3 years later, that we're finally seeing work to move 'Gnutella' into a more workable system (see the superpeer system of Gnucleus, for example).
There are at least two integer Vorbis decoders out there - a GPL one, and a closed source optimised one called Tremor.
Because the story is more than 30 minutes old, so all the moderators have got bored and moved on. :)
Yes - my 4/5 may have no connection to a 4/5 given to a different sample, or to a 4/5 given by a different person. In fact, he should have done the ranking to the individual results as well, which would further reduce the 'power'.
Unless we can have a set scale of non-transparency which we can guarantee is being adhered to (which is only the case in certain special circumstances), all we can keep is the ordinal information.
But only WMA is claimed to be 'CD quality' at 64kbit/s :)
After this test, we can quite comprehensively rebut that piece of misinformation, at least.
I think I can confidently state that a 128kbit/s encode in *any* encoder will reduce the file size by exactly the same amount (to 128/1440 of the original size, to be exact).
The corresponding problems with MPC are:
1) The encoder is closed source.
This means that you are perpetually beholden on the developers to make a version available for your particularly OS. Not a problem if you're a Windows user, admittedly.
2) The format infringes on a number of the patents applicable to all MPEG audio compression (as it is a highly-modified version of MPEG1 layer 2).
This means that it's very unlikely ever to appear in either portable players, or built in to players such as WinAmp -- it took 6 months of patent searching before they allowed Vorbis in by default.
Vorbis is 'good enough', and free in just about every sense you can think of. 'good enough' (in this case, at least MP3 quality) is often all you need to win the battle.
Please moderate the parent up - unlike the grandparent, this anonymous coward actually knows what he is talking about.