I believe that the reverse engineering provision only applies to making a compatible product with the player. In other words, creating CSS discs to work with a DVD player, not a DVD player to work with CSS discs.
Does anybody know if this also applies to libdvdcss and libdvdread? If so, that means it could once again be illegal for someone to watch an encrypted DVD in Linux. This makes it really difficult or impossible for someone to build and sell any Linux PC or HTPC capable of playing DVD's.
Oh well. Screw the DVD-CCA. I'm going to keep doing what I want, and next time I go to a movie theater, I'm going to hand out free CD's with a bootable Linux-based DVD player on them.
You know, it probably just gave/dev/dsp0 to the webcam and/dev/dsp1 to the SB. So, change your software to use/dev/dsp1, or set up your audio drivers to load after the USB/webcam drivers, and voila.
As for dependency handling with source code distribution, you should try Gentoo. The installation is about as hard as installing DOS back in the day (partition, format, install software), but software's a lot easier to install.
It's definitely worth learning the command line just to be able to type "emerge ardour" to install Ardour or "emerge alsa-driver alsa-lib alsa-tools alsa-utils ; rc-update add alsasound default" to install the latest sound card drivers.
Such sound distortions are not desired by the audiophile or professional community. Additionally, there are plugins for XMMS that can do anything you can do with Creative's drivers, like chorus, reverb (see Freeverb), echo, etc.
Gaming doesn't require hardware 3D; I can usually tell when, for example, someone's behind and to the right of me in Counterstrike with software.
What you describe seems only to happen on forums dominated by "teh 12-15 yr old 1337 s|r1pT Kidd3eZzz," or on Slashdot. There are good and bad users in every community. Linux has many good users.
Hello, I'm the developer of that TL880 driver linked to in the story. It would be really nice if everyone who owns such a card (MyHD, HiPix, WinTV-HD, AccessDTV) came on over and subscribed to the mailing list, and played with some of the software for a few minutes. The latest effort is to map the card's registers. A preliminary map that has nearly every register listed, but only detailed descriptions for enough registers to get the card displaying color bars, is located here. Also, as -tji mentioned in another post, ATI's set top box division is unwilling to provide any help to anyone not buying a minimum $25000 annual volume. So, if everyone who owns such a card could e-mail their card's manufacturer (i.e. Hauppauge, Telemann, MIT), as suggested on the How To Help page, asking them to try to arrange for help with the I2C-connected chips on the card, it would be great.
Thanks.
As for the PCHDTV, I just ordered an upgrade for my sytem from an Athlon XP1800+ to 2600+ with 333MHz FSB, and a Geforce FX 5200 for motion compensation, and I'll probably be ordering the PCHDTV soon. The useful parts of the code for the TL880 driver are the Oren VSB demodulator interface and the modified tuner.c which includes support for the dual input Philips NTSC/ATSC tuner. It's really annoying that the tuner and msp3400 modules in the kernel only attach to bttv drivers, rather than providing a generic interface that any new driver can hook to.
There's a thread on AVS Forum about using DVHS VCR's in Linux. It doesn't support D-Theater, so prerecorded shows won't work, but you can use the tools for transferring to/from a DVHS deck, Firewire-enabled tuner, or other MPEG2 TS over 1394 device.
It works great in Konqueror. Must be a bug in Internet Explorer. Lots of sites give me Javascript errors when I'm using IE ("Invalid character"). Since the card doesn't even have Windows drivers, why support the Windows browser?
HDTV uses a 4:2:0 color sampling, which means that the luminance channel is 1920x1080, and the two chrominance channels are 960x540. So, it's not 24 bits per pixel. It's more like 16. You might be able to squeeze it over a PCI bus, but an AGP video card ought to be able to do it on a fast enough system (2.4Ghz P4 or XP2600+ probably).
Since NVidia's binary drivers have support for motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform, the processor has less work to do, and can offload work to the video card. Since the data can be sent over the AGP bus, it should be possible to get full speed HDTV decoding.
The card comes with command line tools for recording HDTV streams as well, for those of us who love crontab. Rumor has it a basic Linux box with a fairly decent processor and 7200RPM hard drive is capable of running four of these cards at once, all recording to disk simultaneously.
Uh, duh... We were complaining about "Taxation without representation..." Sounds like greed to me.
Note that I'm not complaining. I'm very very happy the revolution took place and helped thrust a cold dagger into British imperialism.
Note that I have nothing against the British, just the once used policy of owning everything under the sun ("The sun never sets on the British empire"), taking over countries for business's sake, etc.
The modifications were ordered by the previous owner of the projector. They were made by someone who goes by the name of "Thumper" on the AVS forum. I believe that the usual modifications were realignment of the optics (though I think my optics are once again misaligned, as on the left side of the image the colors are separated by about two-thirds of a pixel in a prism-like fashion), and addition of a mask around the DLP chip to reduce halo. There may have been other things done to improve the contrast ratio and reduce unwanted scattered light as well.
Do you notice the conversion from DVD's 720x480 to your PC monitor's 1600x1200? No? Then you won't notice this either. The scaler in these things is probably at least as good as a basic PC video card, which is good enough for most semi-AV-enthusiastic people. Hardcore fanatics will, of course, never be satisfied until they're using a $20000 scaler/deinterlacer with their $45000 projector on $100/sqft screen material with a $250000 speaker/amp system.
The most important thing there was a High Dynamic Range display. They placed an LCD in front of a rear-projection display and the combined modulation results in a contrast range of 70000:1. This allows much more realistic images. The images I saw looked like a good slide projector, but could be better in a darker room. There was some registration problems, but they say they are working on using bright white LED's behind the LCD, resulting in a flat screen that is as sharp as an LCD. PS: they patented the idea, which for this I think is ok as long as they actually manufacture an open device, they were a little hesitant to say this, though the current driver is just a dual-headed graphics card and it seems hard to believe you could do much better than that.
This is obvious stuff. I described a similar idea once in an IRC channel quite a while ago, but using an LCD to modulate a front projection display, either pre-image or post-image.
A pre-image LCD would adjust the brightness of the light coming from the bulb to allow the full dynamic range of the DLP chip to be used even in darker scenes; a post-image LCD would be used to enhance scenes where one area is very bright and another area is very dark.
I'm very happy with my XGA DLP projector (Plus UP-1100P business projector with modifications to improve home theater quality). I've got it mounted from a vaulted ceiling using two unistrut (U-shaped channel with holes in it) lengths and threaded rod for adjustment, so mine's not too invisible. I use a 110" diagonal 4:3 painted area for my screen (88x66"). I just used flat white paint from Lowes. There is a place called Screen Goo that makes paint designed for projectors; on there you can find some cool pictures of a house where the projection screen was integrated into the room decor by painting it on the wall, with a decorative border. Without the projector on it just looks like a landscape with a white area and then clouds above. You can get some high-grade glass and put the projector in another room, with just a small hole in the wall, for noise elimination and complete removal of any sign of electronics (except for speakers, of course).
Some time when you're bored you might try reading the man pages for some of the commands in/bin and/sbin. You might find some really cool things you never knew existed (although on my system which is in/usr/bin...).
Remember, states have two senators. Orrin Hatch has a lot of seniority, but he's not all-powerful. Also, he's not an entirely bad person. I agree with many of the causes he fights for, and also disagree with many of his positions. The computer destruction comment was a bit off the wall, and probably inappropriate. That doesn't mean Utah is a lost cause.
I think that it's still on the books, but nobody's had it done. There is talk of repealing it (the firing squad). Personally, if I were to be executed by firing squad, I'd like two guys aiming at my head, one at my heart, rather than all three at my heart, as then I'd die faster. Luckily though, I have no plans of ever doing anything that would earn such a "reward."
Linus said 'The developer complained how "ugly" it was' in the interview, but if you check out the conversation in linux-kernel, you can see that this does not refer to 'the code' but rather 'the inclusion of the code in the linux kernel'.
The reason it was ugly was that it duplicates the function of some other code in the kernel.
It is hard to believe that the code was ugly. After all, it was written by ken/dmr and withstood 30 years of scrutiny.
The rest of the file was described as ugly; only the particular loop used in the SCO slide was written by Ken et. al. Other parts of the file were likely written by SGI. I've read the two main "ugly" lkml posts about that code, and I tend to concur. There are levels of abstraction/obfuscation through #define's and wrappers that are completely unnecessary, function prototypes in C source that already exist or should exist in headers elsewhere, etc.
The particular loop used in the slide is indeed a pretty nice and tight first fit allocator loop.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that the reverse engineering provision only applies to making a compatible product with the player. In other words, creating CSS discs to work with a DVD player, not a DVD player to work with CSS discs.
Does anybody know if this also applies to libdvdcss and libdvdread? If so, that means it could once again be illegal for someone to watch an encrypted DVD in Linux. This makes it really difficult or impossible for someone to build and sell any Linux PC or HTPC capable of playing DVD's.
Oh well. Screw the DVD-CCA. I'm going to keep doing what I want, and next time I go to a movie theater, I'm going to hand out free CD's with a bootable Linux-based DVD player on them.
256MB temporary swap file:
/tmp/swap /tmp/swap
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swap bs=1048576 count=256
mkswap
swapon
Try cp /boot/config /usr/src/linux-2.4.22/ (or wherever you have those files).
That should set your kernel up with Redhat's configuration, minus whatever patches Redhat applies to the kernel.
hard drives, memory sticks
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive (or similar)
modprobe usbstorage, mount -t auto
printers
Check out the CUPS web page, or if it's an HP, check out hpijs.sourceforge.net.
scanners
Check out the SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) project. I personally like the xsane-gimp program for scanning.
You know, it probably just gave /dev/dsp0 to the webcam and /dev/dsp1 to the SB. So, change your software to use /dev/dsp1, or set up your audio drivers to load after the USB/webcam drivers, and voila.
As for dependency handling with source code distribution, you should try Gentoo. The installation is about as hard as installing DOS back in the day (partition, format, install software), but software's a lot easier to install.
It's definitely worth learning the command line just to be able to type "emerge ardour" to install Ardour or "emerge alsa-driver alsa-lib alsa-tools alsa-utils ; rc-update add alsasound default" to install the latest sound card drivers.
It's really less intimidating than it sounds.
You hope the recycling bin is the future of Linux? Uh, that doesn't make any sense!
Why don't you submit a bug to the sound driver developers? They might have some suggestions for you to help them figure out what's wrong.
Such sound distortions are not desired by the audiophile or professional community. Additionally, there are plugins for XMMS that can do anything you can do with Creative's drivers, like chorus, reverb (see Freeverb), echo, etc.
Gaming doesn't require hardware 3D; I can usually tell when, for example, someone's behind and to the right of me in Counterstrike with software.
What you describe seems only to happen on forums dominated by "teh 12-15 yr old 1337 s|r1pT Kidd3eZzz," or on Slashdot. There are good and bad users in every community. Linux has many good users.
Hello, I'm the developer of that TL880 driver linked to in the story. It would be really nice if everyone who owns such a card (MyHD, HiPix, WinTV-HD, AccessDTV) came on over and subscribed to the mailing list, and played with some of the software for a few minutes. The latest effort is to map the card's registers. A preliminary map that has nearly every register listed, but only detailed descriptions for enough registers to get the card displaying color bars, is located here. Also, as -tji mentioned in another post, ATI's set top box division is unwilling to provide any help to anyone not buying a minimum $25000 annual volume. So, if everyone who owns such a card could e-mail their card's manufacturer (i.e. Hauppauge, Telemann, MIT), as suggested on the How To Help page, asking them to try to arrange for help with the I2C-connected chips on the card, it would be great.
Thanks.
As for the PCHDTV, I just ordered an upgrade for my sytem from an Athlon XP1800+ to 2600+ with 333MHz FSB, and a Geforce FX 5200 for motion compensation, and I'll probably be ordering the PCHDTV soon. The useful parts of the code for the TL880 driver are the Oren VSB demodulator interface and the modified tuner.c which includes support for the dual input Philips NTSC/ATSC tuner. It's really annoying that the tuner and msp3400 modules in the kernel only attach to bttv drivers, rather than providing a generic interface that any new driver can hook to.
There's a thread on AVS Forum about using DVHS VCR's in Linux. It doesn't support D-Theater, so prerecorded shows won't work, but you can use the tools for transferring to/from a DVHS deck, Firewire-enabled tuner, or other MPEG2 TS over 1394 device.
It works great in Konqueror. Must be a bug in Internet Explorer. Lots of sites give me Javascript errors when I'm using IE ("Invalid character"). Since the card doesn't even have Windows drivers, why support the Windows browser?
V4L2 is in 2.6, you just have to hunt around for it. I can't remember where it's categorized.
HDTV uses a 4:2:0 color sampling, which means that the luminance channel is 1920x1080, and the two chrominance channels are 960x540. So, it's not 24 bits per pixel. It's more like 16. You might be able to squeeze it over a PCI bus, but an AGP video card ought to be able to do it on a fast enough system (2.4Ghz P4 or XP2600+ probably).
Since NVidia's binary drivers have support for motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform, the processor has less work to do, and can offload work to the video card. Since the data can be sent over the AGP bus, it should be possible to get full speed HDTV decoding.
The card comes with command line tools for recording HDTV streams as well, for those of us who love crontab. Rumor has it a basic Linux box with a fairly decent processor and 7200RPM hard drive is capable of running four of these cards at once, all recording to disk simultaneously.
Uh, duh... We were complaining about "Taxation without representation..." Sounds like greed to me.
Note that I'm not complaining. I'm very very happy the revolution took place and helped thrust a cold dagger into British imperialism.
Note that I have nothing against the British, just the once used policy of owning everything under the sun ("The sun never sets on the British empire"), taking over countries for business's sake, etc.
The modifications were ordered by the previous owner of the projector. They were made by someone who goes by the name of "Thumper" on the AVS forum. I believe that the usual modifications were realignment of the optics (though I think my optics are once again misaligned, as on the left side of the image the colors are separated by about two-thirds of a pixel in a prism-like fashion), and addition of a mask around the DLP chip to reduce halo. There may have been other things done to improve the contrast ratio and reduce unwanted scattered light as well.
Do you notice the conversion from DVD's 720x480 to your PC monitor's 1600x1200? No? Then you won't notice this either. The scaler in these things is probably at least as good as a basic PC video card, which is good enough for most semi-AV-enthusiastic people. Hardcore fanatics will, of course, never be satisfied until they're using a $20000 scaler/deinterlacer with their $45000 projector on $100/sqft screen material with a $250000 speaker/amp system.
The most important thing there was a High Dynamic Range display. They placed an LCD in front of a rear-projection display and the combined modulation results in a contrast range of 70000:1. This allows much more realistic images. The images I saw looked like a good slide projector, but could be better in a darker room. There was some registration problems, but they say they are working on using bright white LED's behind the LCD, resulting in a flat screen that is as sharp as an LCD. PS: they patented the idea, which for this I think is ok as long as they actually manufacture an open device, they were a little hesitant to say this, though the current driver is just a dual-headed graphics card and it seems hard to believe you could do much better than that.
This is obvious stuff. I described a similar idea once in an IRC channel quite a while ago, but using an LCD to modulate a front projection display, either pre-image or post-image.
A pre-image LCD would adjust the brightness of the light coming from the bulb to allow the full dynamic range of the DLP chip to be used even in darker scenes; a post-image LCD would be used to enhance scenes where one area is very bright and another area is very dark.
I'm very happy with my XGA DLP projector (Plus UP-1100P business projector with modifications to improve home theater quality). I've got it mounted from a vaulted ceiling using two unistrut (U-shaped channel with holes in it) lengths and threaded rod for adjustment, so mine's not too invisible. I use a 110" diagonal 4:3 painted area for my screen (88x66"). I just used flat white paint from Lowes. There is a place called Screen Goo that makes paint designed for projectors; on there you can find some cool pictures of a house where the projection screen was integrated into the room decor by painting it on the wall, with a decorative border. Without the projector on it just looks like a landscape with a white area and then clouds above. You can get some high-grade glass and put the projector in another room, with just a small hole in the wall, for noise elimination and complete removal of any sign of electronics (except for speakers, of course).
Some time when you're bored you might try reading the man pages for some of the commands in /bin and /sbin. You might find some really cool things you never knew existed (although on my system which is in /usr/bin...).
Try a strings [windows_filename.ext] | grep -i bsd some time and find out.
As I recall it's in there somewhere. Remember that the BSD-based implementation was replaced at some point so you'll need to find the right version.
Remember, states have two senators. Orrin Hatch has a lot of seniority, but he's not all-powerful. Also, he's not an entirely bad person. I agree with many of the causes he fights for, and also disagree with many of his positions. The computer destruction comment was a bit off the wall, and probably inappropriate. That doesn't mean Utah is a lost cause.
Do they still use firing squads in Utah...
I think that it's still on the books, but nobody's had it done. There is talk of repealing it (the firing squad). Personally, if I were to be executed by firing squad, I'd like two guys aiming at my head, one at my heart, rather than all three at my heart, as then I'd die faster. Luckily though, I have no plans of ever doing anything that would earn such a "reward."
Linus said 'The developer complained how "ugly" it was' in the interview, but if you check out the conversation in linux-kernel, you can see that this does not refer to 'the code' but rather 'the inclusion of the code in the linux kernel'.
The reason it was ugly was that it duplicates the function of some other code in the kernel.
It is hard to believe that the code was ugly. After all, it was written by ken/dmr and withstood 30 years of scrutiny.
The rest of the file was described as ugly; only the particular loop used in the SCO slide was written by Ken et. al. Other parts of the file were likely written by SGI. I've read the two main "ugly" lkml posts about that code, and I tend to concur. There are levels of abstraction/obfuscation through #define's and wrappers that are completely unnecessary, function prototypes in C source that already exist or should exist in headers elsewhere, etc.
The particular loop used in the slide is indeed a pretty nice and tight first fit allocator loop.