It's a different municipality, but it's all within the Urban Growth Boundary, which determines the real borders of Metro Portland. Few of the companies I cited are in Portland proper.
If you read the lyrics, you'll note the incident ends with the cops giving him a ride home once they figured out that Jello wasn't actually the source of the problem. Hardly a Bull Conner moment.
Also, given the era of the song and its geography, he almost certainly ran into some "cruisers." Lots of kids back then would drive down Burnside slowly, showing off in their cars. Typically suburban kids. Very annoying. Typically drunk and Testosteroned.
I'd bet $10 they were from Beaverton. Rich kids from Portland didn't drive trucks much back then - they drove their parents old Volvo station wagons.
No, it's WHEN you're compiling that you play with the kids:).
Really, though, the only way to be a technical person with kids is to not do the technical stuff when they're around. Everyone gets annoyed, and nothing productive gets done.
Lots of stuff goes on in Portland, we're just too shy to toot our horns like that showoff California. Plus we are highly diversified, without single companies or industries dominating.
Lots of video companies have big divisions here, like Grass Valley, Sharp Labs, InFocus, FLIR, Planar Systems, Tektronix, PixelWorks. Intel, Fujitsu and all those chip companies do a lot of design and fabrication here. We're the athletic shoe capital of the world, with both Nike and Adidas America here. That means a lot of local ad agency work. And my neighborhood is positively infested with shoe designers. Really, there must be six shoe designers who live within five blocks of my house.
And if you're into knives, we're one of the knife manufacture capitals. Leatherman is based here, as are myriad others.
We don't have nearly the startup culture of California, though. People who live in Portland tend to be here for the lifestyle - we're one of the few places in the USA which has made an effective attempt to limit urban sprawl. We have a lot of dense neighborhoods with SIDEWALKS. Nothing like taking the kids for a stroll around the block, which might take two hours visiting all the neighbors. But the beach and the mountains are each only about 80 minutes away, and almost everywhere in the city is within a mile or so of a park.
Not a great place to strike it rich, but it's a wonderful place to balance doing interesting work and having a rich life outside of work.
I've lived in Oregon all my life but for college, so here's my insider's view of the self-serve issue.
1) Oregonians are cheap.
2) Oregonians are tired of being rained on.
So, basically, people here knew that if there was self-serve gas, they'd have to use it because it was cheaper. But then they'd get wet. So it's easier to outlaw self-serve, so everyone has to share the same luxury.
Makes complete sense if you've lived here long enough.
Not so much. If you want to model your chest, move to LA. Nike and Adidas America are both based here - if you want to model your feet, work in Portland:)*.
No, I meant the Junior Parade, which is grade 8 and under. I live a few blocks from the parade route, and saw LOTS of. Much lower key - if one gets inspired, one can jump in and join the parade pretty much at will (which is what my son's preschool class did).
Another plus for Portland - we have an Air America affiliate.
And you don't have to pump your own gas.
Or pay sales tax.
And if you live in a Qwest area, you can get 1500/968 DSL for $50/month.
And it's a real hub for video technology companies.
Compared to his homeland, he'll probably find the weather here pleasantly warm. Snow only every couple of years.
And you get used to the rain after a while - it's normally pretty light. We had a children's parade here yesterday, and even though it was raining, the whole neighborhood turned up. In hats.
A real Portlander doesn't use an umbrella or hat. We just embrace our inner sogginess.
Dude, if you're writing a screenplay, you need to be using style sheets that specify the correct capitalization automatically, as well as everything else. Don't tell me you wrote a ~120 page document entirely with manual formatting, where the formatting changed every ~6 lines.
Well, it's not like anyone distributes uncompressed video today!
I'm sure it would be compressed at least 30:1, and probably more like 100:1. With that many pixels, the quality of each one is less than with, say, a 320x240.
By the time sets like this are readily available, I bet we'll have codecs that could usefully drive that size image at maybe 40 Mbps. A lot of bandwidth today, but not inconceivable. Dual-layer blue laser DVD could do a 2 hour movie at those bitrates.
That seems like a questionable methadology to me. If the use couldn't tell the difference, it seems like that should be an automatic 5. Dropping cases where there isn't a perceptible difference woud tend to underrate the quality of the best encoders.
Actually, you'd get about 2:1 compression with Apple's lossles codec (for whatever fundamental reason, almost all lossless codecs, video and audio, work out to around 2:1 compression on average with natural content).
And since the average audio CD isn't full, I imagine you could get nearly 150 CD's on an iPod in that mode.
Still, I happily use 320 Kbps MP3 on mine, same as I use on my server for SqueezeBox access. I used to convert to 128 Kbps AAC for the iPod, but that was too much management trouble. Now I can just copy the files.
5 - the compression efficiency difference isn't THAT big.
If Ogg was 25% the size of a MP3 of the equivalent quality, it'd be a slam dunk. But if it's 80% of the difference, that's not really enough of a motivation to switch. MP3 is widely compatible, and "good enough" for a wide variety of applications.
Now, if we ever get widely available parametric stereo versions of HE AAC that you can dance to at 24 Kbps, things might change...
Bear in mind that WMA9 "Standard" is a legacy codec for Microsoft these days. They haven't revved the bitstream in years, in order to keep backwards compatibility.
There are new WMA9 codecs, though. WMA9 Professional, which goes up to 96 KHz 24-bit 7.1. It does have a 2-pass VBR 128 Kbps 44.1 stereo mode, and it'd be interesting to see that included in a future version of this test.
There is also WMA9 voice, which is better thought of as "WMA9 narrowband" since it includes a music mode as well. Only up to 22 KHz mono @ 20 Kbps, though, so it's really meant for modem streaming kinds of applications.
I'm a little surprised that they didn't including HE AAC, a more recent MPEG-4 audio codec. It's best known in its AAC+ implementation from Coding Technologies. It's definitely entertainment quality at 48 Kbps at 44.1 stereo.
Anyone know why it got left off?
We also have parametric stereo AAC coming as well, which should be able to do entertainment quality at 24 Kbps.
Re:OK, how do I use this with Adobe Premiere?
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
If it's in Cinepak, it's already encoded, and isn't on a DVD-Video. I don't see the connection you're drawing?
However, if you're asking is it okay to use ripping tools to acquire your own content, or with the explicit permission of the copyright holder, yes. I have clients who do this legally all the time.
6:1 encoding time is brutal? Whipersnappers!
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
6 hours to encode 1 hour of 720x480 30fps? Back when I was making 320250 15 fps Cinepak video, 1 minute of source took 80! minutes to encode on my Powermac 8100/80. And we were dancing in the aisles at that speed!
6:1 on a 4 year old machine. Pshaw.
Re:DRM doesn't happen at the codec level
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
XVID is a MPEG-4 Part 2 encoder. It's compatible with MPEG-4 decoders supported by lots of companies, like Apple. Files made with XVID can be used in all kinds of commercial applications, like mobile video players. I don't think content providers really care about the "open"-ness of this particular implementation it one way or another.
DRM doesn't happen at the codec level
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
DRM is normally done at the packet level, not the codec level. One could easily apply, say, Windows Media or Intertrust DRM with a file encoded with XVID. XVID doesn't have any meaningful effect on DRM pro or con.
Since XVID is a MPEG-4 Part 2 codec, any DRM system that can encrypt MPEG-4 can do XVID-encode files.
Well, that's assuming you want to keep the ad funded market. I don't see TV as intrinsically needing advertisements. That's a historical artifact caused by the lack of DRM in the analog era - if everyone gets the content for free, you can't sell it directly, and hence ads.
With video on demand technology, content producers could just sell their content directly to the customer, ad free. Certainly a LOT simpler, although a real change for the viewer perspective. And could lead to better programming - companies would only make what they thought people would be willing to pay for. Family Guy would do a heck of a lot better than whatever sitcom followed Friends that year.
Today, a TV station is a company that owns bandwidth, gives away content, and sells advertising. The first two could rapidly become different companies, and the advertising part could go away or change dramatically.
Well, it can depend, when converting from lossy source to lossy delivery, it's best to keep things in the same codec so that macroblocks are aligned, quantization can be reused, etcetera. However, if a codec is enough better, the source might have so many fewer artifacts that it still winds up being a better source. This is especially true if any processing were going to be applied that would chance pixel positions, and hence block alignment.
You're right as a rule of thumb, but there would be practical exceptions to that rule.
Has the Dirac bitstream been locked down, or is that still in development?
Was the bitstream designed for optimized implementation on DSPs, or any other kind of environment? I gather that performance optimization is at the very earliest stages, so it's too early for metrics, of course. But I'd love to know what kind of eventual portability is available. Do you think it'll be able to run on the same T1 DSPs that handle AVC and VC-9, and at the same frame size?
How parallelizable are the encoders and/or decoders?
Is it implementable entirely via integer math like AVC, or are there floating point operations required like in MPEG-2?
Is there support for lossless encoding? 10-bit per channel?
Does it have per-block interlace mode switching like MPEG-2?
Anything else about it you could share with a codec nerd?
Well, if it really is license free, it'll save some money on both encoders and decoders over AVC/H.264 and VC-9, the big competitors for the next generation video codec to replace MPEG-2.
However, for HD today, the DSPs cost a lot more than the license fee. The real trick for cost effectiveness will be in decode complexity. If a codec can offer the compression efficiency of AVC or VC-9, but can run on a much cheaper DSP, there would be a market for it.
The cited "2x better than MPEG-2" isn't that impressive in itself - both AVC and VC-9 can make a decent claim for "2-3x better." However, these things are pretty hard to quantify with a multiple.
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That's the mystery. There ARE roofs over the pumps. I guess Oregonians lots the habit of looking up a long time ago. Never any good news up there.
It's a different municipality, but it's all within the Urban Growth Boundary, which determines the real borders of Metro Portland. Few of the companies I cited are in Portland proper.
If you read the lyrics, you'll note the incident ends with the cops giving him a ride home once they figured out that Jello wasn't actually the source of the problem. Hardly a Bull Conner moment.
Also, given the era of the song and its geography, he almost certainly ran into some "cruisers." Lots of kids back then would drive down Burnside slowly, showing off in their cars. Typically suburban kids. Very annoying. Typically drunk and Testosteroned.
I'd bet $10 they were from Beaverton. Rich kids from Portland didn't drive trucks much back then - they drove their parents old Volvo station wagons.
No, it's WHEN you're compiling that you play with the kids :).
Really, though, the only way to be a technical person with kids is to not do the technical stuff when they're around. Everyone gets annoyed, and nothing productive gets done.
Play with 'em hard, and put 'em to bed early.
Lots of stuff goes on in Portland, we're just too shy to toot our horns like that showoff California. Plus we are highly diversified, without single companies or industries dominating.
Lots of video companies have big divisions here, like Grass Valley, Sharp Labs, InFocus, FLIR, Planar Systems, Tektronix, PixelWorks. Intel, Fujitsu and all those chip companies do a lot of design and fabrication here. We're the athletic shoe capital of the world, with both Nike and Adidas America here. That means a lot of local ad agency work. And my neighborhood is positively infested with shoe designers. Really, there must be six shoe designers who live within five blocks of my house.
And if you're into knives, we're one of the knife manufacture capitals. Leatherman is based here, as are myriad others.
We don't have nearly the startup culture of California, though. People who live in Portland tend to be here for the lifestyle - we're one of the few places in the USA which has made an effective attempt to limit urban sprawl. We have a lot of dense neighborhoods with SIDEWALKS. Nothing like taking the kids for a stroll around the block, which might take two hours visiting all the neighbors. But the beach and the mountains are each only about 80 minutes away, and almost everywhere in the city is within a mile or so of a park.
Not a great place to strike it rich, but it's a wonderful place to balance doing interesting work and having a rich life outside of work.
I've lived in Oregon all my life but for college, so here's my insider's view of the self-serve issue.
1) Oregonians are cheap.
2) Oregonians are tired of being rained on.
So, basically, people here knew that if there was self-serve gas, they'd have to use it because it was cheaper. But then they'd get wet. So it's easier to outlaw self-serve, so everyone has to share the same luxury.
Makes complete sense if you've lived here long enough.
Not so much. If you want to model your chest, move to LA. Nike and Adidas America are both based here - if you want to model your feet, work in Portland :)*.
No, I meant the Junior Parade, which is grade 8 and under. I live a few blocks from the parade route, and saw LOTS of. Much lower key - if one gets inspired, one can jump in and join the parade pretty much at will (which is what my son's preschool class did).
Another plus for Portland - we have an Air America affiliate.
And you don't have to pump your own gas.
Or pay sales tax.
And if you live in a Qwest area, you can get 1500/968 DSL for $50/month.
And it's a real hub for video technology companies.
Compared to his homeland, he'll probably find the weather here pleasantly warm. Snow only every couple of years.
And you get used to the rain after a while - it's normally pretty light. We had a children's parade here yesterday, and even though it was raining, the whole neighborhood turned up. In hats.
A real Portlander doesn't use an umbrella or hat. We just embrace our inner sogginess.
Dude, if you're writing a screenplay, you need to be using style sheets that specify the correct capitalization automatically, as well as everything else. Don't tell me you wrote a ~120 page document entirely with manual formatting, where the formatting changed every ~6 lines.
Well, it's not like anyone distributes uncompressed video today!
I'm sure it would be compressed at least 30:1, and probably more like 100:1. With that many pixels, the quality of each one is less than with, say, a 320x240.
By the time sets like this are readily available, I bet we'll have codecs that could usefully drive that size image at maybe 40 Mbps. A lot of bandwidth today, but not inconceivable. Dual-layer blue laser DVD could do a 2 hour movie at those bitrates.
That seems like a questionable methadology to me. If the use couldn't tell the difference, it seems like that should be an automatic 5. Dropping cases where there isn't a perceptible difference woud tend to underrate the quality of the best encoders.
Actually, it was 2-pass VBR, so a bitrate could be specified. 1-pass VBR is quality limited for WM codecs.
The WMA9 codecs are somewhat unique in that they have modes like 2-pass CBR, peak constrained 2-pass VBR, and an unconstrained 2-pass VBR.
Actually, you'd get about 2:1 compression with Apple's lossles codec (for whatever fundamental reason, almost all lossless codecs, video and audio, work out to around 2:1 compression on average with natural content).
And since the average audio CD isn't full, I imagine you could get nearly 150 CD's on an iPod in that mode.
Still, I happily use 320 Kbps MP3 on mine, same as I use on my server for SqueezeBox access. I used to convert to 128 Kbps AAC for the iPod, but that was too much management trouble. Now I can just copy the files.
And if I might add another
5 - the compression efficiency difference isn't THAT big.
If Ogg was 25% the size of a MP3 of the equivalent quality, it'd be a slam dunk. But if it's 80% of the difference, that's not really enough of a motivation to switch. MP3 is widely compatible, and "good enough" for a wide variety of applications.
Now, if we ever get widely available parametric stereo versions of HE AAC that you can dance to at 24 Kbps, things might change...
Bear in mind that WMA9 "Standard" is a legacy codec for Microsoft these days. They haven't revved the bitstream in years, in order to keep backwards compatibility.
There are new WMA9 codecs, though. WMA9 Professional, which goes up to 96 KHz 24-bit 7.1. It does have a 2-pass VBR 128 Kbps 44.1 stereo mode, and it'd be interesting to see that included in a future version of this test.
There is also WMA9 voice, which is better thought of as "WMA9 narrowband" since it includes a music mode as well. Only up to 22 KHz mono @ 20 Kbps, though, so it's really meant for modem streaming kinds of applications.
I'm a little surprised that they didn't including HE AAC, a more recent MPEG-4 audio codec. It's best known in its AAC+ implementation from Coding Technologies. It's definitely entertainment quality at 48 Kbps at 44.1 stereo.
Anyone know why it got left off?
We also have parametric stereo AAC coming as well, which should be able to do entertainment quality at 24 Kbps.
If it's in Cinepak, it's already encoded, and isn't on a DVD-Video. I don't see the connection you're drawing?
However, if you're asking is it okay to use ripping tools to acquire your own content, or with the explicit permission of the copyright holder, yes. I have clients who do this legally all the time.
6 hours to encode 1 hour of 720x480 30fps? Back when I was making 320250 15 fps Cinepak video, 1 minute of source took 80! minutes to encode on my Powermac 8100/80. And we were dancing in the aisles at that speed!
6:1 on a 4 year old machine. Pshaw.
XVID is a MPEG-4 Part 2 encoder. It's compatible with MPEG-4 decoders supported by lots of companies, like Apple. Files made with XVID can be used in all kinds of commercial applications, like mobile video players. I don't think content providers really care about the "open"-ness of this particular implementation it one way or another.
DRM is normally done at the packet level, not the codec level. One could easily apply, say, Windows Media or Intertrust DRM with a file encoded with XVID. XVID doesn't have any meaningful effect on DRM pro or con.
Since XVID is a MPEG-4 Part 2 codec, any DRM system that can encrypt MPEG-4 can do XVID-encode files.
Well, that's assuming you want to keep the ad funded market. I don't see TV as intrinsically needing advertisements. That's a historical artifact caused by the lack of DRM in the analog era - if everyone gets the content for free, you can't sell it directly, and hence ads.
With video on demand technology, content producers could just sell their content directly to the customer, ad free. Certainly a LOT simpler, although a real change for the viewer perspective. And could lead to better programming - companies would only make what they thought people would be willing to pay for. Family Guy would do a heck of a lot better than whatever sitcom followed Friends that year.
Today, a TV station is a company that owns bandwidth, gives away content, and sells advertising. The first two could rapidly become different companies, and the advertising part could go away or change dramatically.
Well, it can depend, when converting from lossy source to lossy delivery, it's best to keep things in the same codec so that macroblocks are aligned, quantization can be reused, etcetera. However, if a codec is enough better, the source might have so many fewer artifacts that it still winds up being a better source. This is especially true if any processing were going to be applied that would chance pixel positions, and hence block alignment.
You're right as a rule of thumb, but there would be practical exceptions to that rule.
Has the Dirac bitstream been locked down, or is that still in development?
Was the bitstream designed for optimized implementation on DSPs, or any other kind of environment? I gather that performance optimization is at the very earliest stages, so it's too early for metrics, of course. But I'd love to know what kind of eventual portability is available. Do you think it'll be able to run on the same T1 DSPs that handle AVC and VC-9, and at the same frame size?
How parallelizable are the encoders and/or decoders?
Is it implementable entirely via integer math like AVC, or are there floating point operations required like in MPEG-2?
Is there support for lossless encoding? 10-bit per channel?
Does it have per-block interlace mode switching like MPEG-2?
Anything else about it you could share with a codec nerd?
Well, if it really is license free, it'll save some money on both encoders and decoders over AVC/H.264 and VC-9, the big competitors for the next generation video codec to replace MPEG-2.
However, for HD today, the DSPs cost a lot more than the license fee. The real trick for cost effectiveness will be in decode complexity. If a codec can offer the compression efficiency of AVC or VC-9, but can run on a much cheaper DSP, there would be a market for it.
The cited "2x better than MPEG-2" isn't that impressive in itself - both AVC and VC-9 can make a decent claim for "2-3x better." However, these things are pretty hard to quantify with a multiple.