So you agree that if I'm looking for constant "quality" and I don't give a whoop what the filesize ends up being, I'm better off with one-pass crf?
I'm not trying to argue here, I'm looking for advice. Generally, what I find says "do 2-pass", but I have reason to believe that that advice is more generally for "the scene". The same scene that continues to release files using an.avi container. Obviously, not dedicated to rigorous quality.
Again, I'm not making a moral judgement. I've certainly spent a lot of time subscribed to services [Easynews, among others] that facilitate this sort of behavior. I didn't really want to get into the debate with you, because I don't think this sort of behavior makes you a bad person... I was just making a joke.
However, you've got a few misconceptions here in your reply:
1. Being guilty of copyright violation requires one to deprive the rights holder of something. It doesn't. The law says you can't have a copy without the permission of the rights holder, and you don't have permission, so you're in violation.
2. You wronged the rights-holder by illegally copying the material. Whether you got any value from that act is irrelevant. This is where you are similar to a kleptomaniac, who rarely, if ever, steals something of value. Paperclips, pieces of paper, and other valueless items are common. The rights-holder doesn't have to suffer any "damage".
3. I was very careful to make a distinction between "stealing" and "violating copyright". I don't believe that copyright violation is theft, and I don't like the moniker "pirate". I am absolutely against things like DRM, as well as the insane penalties that are handed down to casual violators (commercial violators are another thing entirely).
I've done it, but I don't pretend I'm in the right because the music/movie/book/whatever industry has some sort of "failed business model". The law in the country where I live provides them exclusive rights to their creations, and no matter how unfair it may be (in my opinion), it's (currently) the law.
The OP specifically stated he did not want to take up photography as a hobby. That means he doesn't want to have to learn about depth-of-field, manual focus, aperture, or any of the things the SLR would teach him. He just wants better pictures than his smartphone gives him. Just about any no-matter-how-cheap point&shoot will do that.
I think that's the opposite of true. SLRs were complex enough that a whole new category of camera was invented to make photography simple for non-professionals, namely the "point-and-shoot" category.
Go with just about any point-and-shoot from Canon, Nikon, or whatever happens to be on sale at your local wallyworld today. They're all going to take much better pictures than your smartphone.
The question, then, is what bitrate to choose? I currently encode all my stuff using CRF set to 18, which produces (in my opinion) high quality encodes, when paired with all the other settings I use. This lets me target a certain output "quality", regardless of input material.
If I were to, as you suggest, target a certain bitrate, then what bitrate should I choose for a given input? Should I encode my animated shows for my kids at the same rate as my live action movies? Should I use the same bitrate for low-action chick flicks as I do for special effects movies? What if I don't have a good understanding of the "cost" of the frames in a given input?
It is my understanding that crf, while not "perfectly optimal", takes pretty much all the guesswork out of it, and gives you a constant output quality, if not the best-possible file size for the chosen quality level. That doesn't matter to me, as disk space is cheap, and a few more MBs doesn't make a lick of difference to me.
I have a fast internet connection and a monthly subscription to a premium newsgroup provider (Giganews.) I've been using newsgroups for over 15 years and never saw the benefit of bittorrent. Have I downloaded many discs that I probably won't ever watch? Sure, I admit there's a bit of hoarding/collecting going on. There's some TV shows that I was downloading for years and never watched. I pretty much stopped doing that though, and now I only download movies or TV shows that my wife or I actually intend to watch.
You know, people like you who act in the physical world are known as kleptomaniacs. You're just a copyright violator, but that doesn't make it less (technically) against the law. The upshot, of course, is that kleptomania is classified as a mental disorder. You could probably get yourself a pass for parking in the best spots!
(Note that I'm not making a moral judgement here, just pointing out the obvious facts)
+...yeah. It's easier to pirate than use modern video media to it's full potential.
Well, as long as you're unwilling to pay for AnyDVD, it's easier to pirate. Once you've covered that hurdle, however (and I did, because I got tired of navigating the mess of tools required to rip my wife's collection of >150 DVDs), it's incredibly easy to use AnyDVD to rip to the HDD, and Handbrake to encode. That way, I get full control over what gets ripped and how well it's encoded (I have Handbrake set up for a very high quality encode, because time is not a premium). It was worth it for me.
You're confused. You might be able to get Windows to download the USB device driver (assuming it wasn't USB Mass Storage, which it is), but it wouldn't download a filesystem driver. Filesystems aren't devices.
This is now way, way offtopic, but you do understand that MSIL isn't interpreted, right? It's ALWAYS compiled to native code (either JIT or previously) before it's run.
When Microsoft did this (with.NET to the JVM), it was denounced as an evil business strategy. Is it OK when Apple does it to MP3 players and smartphones?
The data I found claims that Mountain Dew has 4.5 mg/floz of caffeine, where coffee has anywhere between 5.5 mg/floz and over 50 mg/floz (espresso). Drip coffee is right in the middle at 18 mg/floz.
Actually 5 will get you 10 when all is said and done it'll come down to a little thing called DirectX. As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP (there is a hacked DirectX 10 beta for XP and i've tried it but frankly its buggy as hell) and i'm willing to bet my last dollar they are using DirectX to speed rendering and any video.
Bzzt. WPF for Vista and WPF for XP share the exact same codebase. My uneducated guess is that DirectX 10 not being backported to XP has something to do with WDDM.
For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro
You keep writing this. I swear I've read it about 15 times now. I'm sure Microsoft would like to know this, as it probably represents the most thorough and scientific market research they have available.
I only hope this will be the final nail in the coffin for the sweaty monkey and the board will make him 'pursue other interests' as he makes the Pepsi guy look competent
Personally I won't be bothered if Windows 8 makes it. As long as Metro can be disabled, it doesn't bother me at all. For tablets, it's probably the obvious choice. The Metro UI on WP7 is generally accepted to be quite functional (though I've never used it myself). As a retailer, it strikes me as odd that you'd wish failure on a product that has the potential to be a big seller itself, as well as a big driver of new hardware sales. Not that I'd defend Ballmer, I think he's made a general mess of things, as most short-sighted share-price-driven executive inevitably does.
I have what I consider to be a "good job" in the field, and the only college I ever attended was the local community college (and not much of that... a couple semesters is all).
Perhaps someday someone will implement a reliable and innovative social platform that allows users to opt-in, or not, to exposing personal information to the company running the show and/or others.
It won't happen, because it wouldn't be profitable. If I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath. You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that Facebook's goal was to enable social networking, and the privacy problems were an accident, a poor implementation. Facebook does exactly what Facebook was designed to do, i.e. extract personal information from people and make it available to paying customers. This is also what Google+ does. It's no accident.
The real problem is that everyone (read: end users) wants memory usage to be a simple black-and-white "in use or free" number, when in reality it's MUCH more complex than that. Even most developers don't understand it very well.
This fact is, however, very good for the small-but-profitable business of selling "RAM cleaners" which do nothing but allocate a giant chunk of RAM to force the OS to swap out everything to disk, and then release it in order to drive up some imaginary "free RAM" number.
Seriously? Is anyone at your current company under the illusion that you would not leave for a high enough offer? People can pretend all they want, but the reality is that your current employer bought you from your previous employer. Every new person they hire, they are hiring away from another company, likely at a higher rate. What's the big surprise here? Of course your skills are for sale - that's why you're working. If they are not willing to pay market value for your skills then move on.
Yeah, my current employer "bought" me from a call center, over eleven years ago, for $36k. Now, I'm making nearly 3x that salary. I come and go when I please, essentially work on what I feel like working on, and I get to be an asshole and a curmudgeon, and noone can call me on it. There are benefits other than salary.
I suppose I'm rather baffled by the whole logic here; what, then, should he do? Refuse the current job offer and stay where he's at, but keep it a secret? How does that prove loyalty at all? Nobody knows about it. Or he could refuse the current job offer and then tell his current employer he was offered a job somewhere else but refused. That just sounds needy and pathetic - does that prove loyalty? Or does that prove you're too chickenshit to stand up and ask for a reasonable raise?
What he ought to do is decide whether working for the new company benefits him more than working for the old company. Whether it's worth giving up the friendships, relationships, intangible benefits, and other goodies he's built up in exchange for the larger salary and the possibility of new intangible benefits down the road. Early this year, I took a new job with a giant financial firm, and while the pay was indeed nice, the working environment was NOT what it was cracked up to be. It was a nightmare, and so I returned here about about 10 weeks. Not everyone would have this opportunity, but in my case, I'm sure glad I did.
Or he could man up and explain the situation to his boss. If his boss has a clue and his workplace isn't a hellhole, they might offer him a small raise. If they are hostile to the whole idea, then he's better off quitting and moving on anyway. I've never had a problem discussing stuff like this with my boss, she is intelligent and reasonable and understands that I have bills to pay and a family to feed. I don't work for the love of working, I work because I need a paycheck. If I can get a bigger paycheck by negotiating a little bit, what's the harm in that? If you work at a company that considers something like this untrustworthy, then maybe you should reevaluate the situation.
The problem is that it marks you as someone who's looking for a new job. Even if you get your counter-offer, your employer knows it's merely a matter of time. Those "intangibles" tend to disappear rather quickly at that point. If you're working strictly for a salary, then by all means, go for the counteroffer, but for the rest of us, it's not worth turning our workplace hostile for a little more money.
This is not just my advice, this is the generally accepted wisdom:
One particular corner of my parents' house would distort CRT monitors (rotate them, actually). This corner, unfortunately, was where my bedroom was. I had to pay a bit extra for the monitor with the "rotate" knob so I could dial it back in.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that was my take. "W7 took X units-of-time, and W8 may take X+Y!"
In related news, an anonymous reader notes that IDC predicts Windows 8 will be irrelevant to the traditional PC market.
Unlike the latest release of random Linux/BSD distro XYZ, which is totally relevant in the market.
So you agree that if I'm looking for constant "quality" and I don't give a whoop what the filesize ends up being, I'm better off with one-pass crf?
I'm not trying to argue here, I'm looking for advice. Generally, what I find says "do 2-pass", but I have reason to believe that that advice is more generally for "the scene". The same scene that continues to release files using an .avi container. Obviously, not dedicated to rigorous quality.
Again, I'm not making a moral judgement. I've certainly spent a lot of time subscribed to services [Easynews, among others] that facilitate this sort of behavior. I didn't really want to get into the debate with you, because I don't think this sort of behavior makes you a bad person... I was just making a joke.
However, you've got a few misconceptions here in your reply:
I've done it, but I don't pretend I'm in the right because the music/movie/book/whatever industry has some sort of "failed business model". The law in the country where I live provides them exclusive rights to their creations, and no matter how unfair it may be (in my opinion), it's (currently) the law.
The OP specifically stated he did not want to take up photography as a hobby. That means he doesn't want to have to learn about depth-of-field, manual focus, aperture, or any of the things the SLR would teach him. He just wants better pictures than his smartphone gives him. Just about any no-matter-how-cheap point&shoot will do that.
I think that's the opposite of true. SLRs were complex enough that a whole new category of camera was invented to make photography simple for non-professionals, namely the "point-and-shoot" category.
Go with just about any point-and-shoot from Canon, Nikon, or whatever happens to be on sale at your local wallyworld today. They're all going to take much better pictures than your smartphone.
The question, then, is what bitrate to choose? I currently encode all my stuff using CRF set to 18, which produces (in my opinion) high quality encodes, when paired with all the other settings I use. This lets me target a certain output "quality", regardless of input material.
If I were to, as you suggest, target a certain bitrate, then what bitrate should I choose for a given input? Should I encode my animated shows for my kids at the same rate as my live action movies? Should I use the same bitrate for low-action chick flicks as I do for special effects movies? What if I don't have a good understanding of the "cost" of the frames in a given input?
It is my understanding that crf, while not "perfectly optimal", takes pretty much all the guesswork out of it, and gives you a constant output quality, if not the best-possible file size for the chosen quality level. That doesn't matter to me, as disk space is cheap, and a few more MBs doesn't make a lick of difference to me.
I have a fast internet connection and a monthly subscription to a premium newsgroup provider (Giganews.) I've been using newsgroups for over 15 years and never saw the benefit of bittorrent. Have I downloaded many discs that I probably won't ever watch? Sure, I admit there's a bit of hoarding/collecting going on. There's some TV shows that I was downloading for years and never watched. I pretty much stopped doing that though, and now I only download movies or TV shows that my wife or I actually intend to watch.
You know, people like you who act in the physical world are known as kleptomaniacs. You're just a copyright violator, but that doesn't make it less (technically) against the law. The upshot, of course, is that kleptomania is classified as a mental disorder. You could probably get yourself a pass for parking in the best spots!
(Note that I'm not making a moral judgement here, just pointing out the obvious facts)
+...yeah. It's easier to pirate than use modern video media to it's full potential.
Well, as long as you're unwilling to pay for AnyDVD, it's easier to pirate. Once you've covered that hurdle, however (and I did, because I got tired of navigating the mess of tools required to rip my wife's collection of >150 DVDs), it's incredibly easy to use AnyDVD to rip to the HDD, and Handbrake to encode. That way, I get full control over what gets ripped and how well it's encoded (I have Handbrake set up for a very high quality encode, because time is not a premium). It was worth it for me.
You're confused. You might be able to get Windows to download the USB device driver (assuming it wasn't USB Mass Storage, which it is), but it wouldn't download a filesystem driver. Filesystems aren't devices.
This is now way, way offtopic, but you do understand that MSIL isn't interpreted, right? It's ALWAYS compiled to native code (either JIT or previously) before it's run.
When Microsoft did this (with .NET to the JVM), it was denounced as an evil business strategy. Is it OK when Apple does it to MP3 players and smartphones?
Where'd you get your data?
The data I found claims that Mountain Dew has 4.5 mg/floz of caffeine, where coffee has anywhere between 5.5 mg/floz and over 50 mg/floz (espresso). Drip coffee is right in the middle at 18 mg/floz.
Hell, even Starbucks' decaf has .8 mg/floz.
That's exactly what he was saying. The asshole can help it, he just refuses to.
... but not so useful if you prefer to be a law-abiding citizen, and you're mature enough to have developed some willpower.
My card has a picture of me on the back. Verifying my signature is somewhat redundant.
Actually 5 will get you 10 when all is said and done it'll come down to a little thing called DirectX. As we all know DirectX 10 and 11 weren't backported to XP because they were calling parts of the new WPF that would have been a royal bitch to rewrite for XP (there is a hacked DirectX 10 beta for XP and i've tried it but frankly its buggy as hell) and i'm willing to bet my last dollar they are using DirectX to speed rendering and any video.
Bzzt. WPF for Vista and WPF for XP share the exact same codebase. My uneducated guess is that DirectX 10 not being backported to XP has something to do with WDDM.
For those of us that's seen the Metro UI, which i personally think is gonna bomb HARD as i've shown the screencaps to over 120 customer so far and have YET to get a SINGLE positive comment about Metro
You keep writing this. I swear I've read it about 15 times now. I'm sure Microsoft would like to know this, as it probably represents the most thorough and scientific market research they have available.
I only hope this will be the final nail in the coffin for the sweaty monkey and the board will make him 'pursue other interests' as he makes the Pepsi guy look competent
Personally I won't be bothered if Windows 8 makes it. As long as Metro can be disabled, it doesn't bother me at all. For tablets, it's probably the obvious choice. The Metro UI on WP7 is generally accepted to be quite functional (though I've never used it myself). As a retailer, it strikes me as odd that you'd wish failure on a product that has the potential to be a big seller itself, as well as a big driver of new hardware sales. Not that I'd defend Ballmer, I think he's made a general mess of things, as most short-sighted share-price-driven executive inevitably does.
It is possible to acquire a degree without student loans...
I have what I consider to be a "good job" in the field, and the only college I ever attended was the local community college (and not much of that... a couple semesters is all).
But how are you supposed to spend your off-hours getting drunk and chasing women if you're WORKING and STUDYING when you're not in class?
You do know that college is more about parties than education, right?
Perhaps someday someone will implement a reliable and innovative social platform that allows users to opt-in, or not, to exposing personal information to the company running the show and/or others.
It won't happen, because it wouldn't be profitable. If I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath. You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that Facebook's goal was to enable social networking, and the privacy problems were an accident, a poor implementation. Facebook does exactly what Facebook was designed to do, i.e. extract personal information from people and make it available to paying customers. This is also what Google+ does. It's no accident.
it is a borrower's responsibility to only borrow within their means
it absolutely IS the bank's fault
Doublethink much?
The real problem is that everyone (read: end users) wants memory usage to be a simple black-and-white "in use or free" number, when in reality it's MUCH more complex than that. Even most developers don't understand it very well.
This fact is, however, very good for the small-but-profitable business of selling "RAM cleaners" which do nothing but allocate a giant chunk of RAM to force the OS to swap out everything to disk, and then release it in order to drive up some imaginary "free RAM" number.
Seriously? Is anyone at your current company under the illusion that you would not leave for a high enough offer? People can pretend all they want, but the reality is that your current employer bought you from your previous employer. Every new person they hire, they are hiring away from another company, likely at a higher rate. What's the big surprise here? Of course your skills are for sale - that's why you're working. If they are not willing to pay market value for your skills then move on.
Yeah, my current employer "bought" me from a call center, over eleven years ago, for $36k. Now, I'm making nearly 3x that salary. I come and go when I please, essentially work on what I feel like working on, and I get to be an asshole and a curmudgeon, and noone can call me on it. There are benefits other than salary.
I suppose I'm rather baffled by the whole logic here; what, then, should he do? Refuse the current job offer and stay where he's at, but keep it a secret? How does that prove loyalty at all? Nobody knows about it. Or he could refuse the current job offer and then tell his current employer he was offered a job somewhere else but refused. That just sounds needy and pathetic - does that prove loyalty? Or does that prove you're too chickenshit to stand up and ask for a reasonable raise?
What he ought to do is decide whether working for the new company benefits him more than working for the old company. Whether it's worth giving up the friendships, relationships, intangible benefits, and other goodies he's built up in exchange for the larger salary and the possibility of new intangible benefits down the road. Early this year, I took a new job with a giant financial firm, and while the pay was indeed nice, the working environment was NOT what it was cracked up to be. It was a nightmare, and so I returned here about about 10 weeks. Not everyone would have this opportunity, but in my case, I'm sure glad I did.
Or he could man up and explain the situation to his boss. If his boss has a clue and his workplace isn't a hellhole, they might offer him a small raise. If they are hostile to the whole idea, then he's better off quitting and moving on anyway. I've never had a problem discussing stuff like this with my boss, she is intelligent and reasonable and understands that I have bills to pay and a family to feed. I don't work for the love of working, I work because I need a paycheck. If I can get a bigger paycheck by negotiating a little bit, what's the harm in that? If you work at a company that considers something like this untrustworthy, then maybe you should reevaluate the situation.
The problem is that it marks you as someone who's looking for a new job. Even if you get your counter-offer, your employer knows it's merely a matter of time. Those "intangibles" tend to disappear rather quickly at that point. If you're working strictly for a salary, then by all means, go for the counteroffer, but for the rest of us, it's not worth turning our workplace hostile for a little more money.
This is not just my advice, this is the generally accepted wisdom:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/28/counter-offer-employer-lead-careers-cx_hr_0630counteroffer.html
http://frugaldad.com/2008/02/05/accepting-company-counter-offer-can-be-risky-move/
http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/nov2004/ca2004114_2710_ca009.htm
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/it-recruiter/why-you-should-not-accept-a-counter-offer-2359
One particular corner of my parents' house would distort CRT monitors (rotate them, actually). This corner, unfortunately, was where my bedroom was. I had to pay a bit extra for the monitor with the "rotate" knob so I could dial it back in.
Irritating.
My drives were never wiped, however.