When we have media that hold 100+ gigs rather than a niggly 5-10 gigs at the same price, compression will serve no useful purpose.
I'm not sure about that. Uncompressed video is gigantic. Huge. An hour of uncompressed video takes up about 70 gb, assuming it's regular NTSC rez. Thus you could barely fit a movie on your 100 gig media. It's much better just to use high quality lossy compression, such as MPEG-2 or Xvid or soemthing. If you crank the bitrates high enough, there is no visible artifacting or quality loss.
I'd much rather have 10 hours of HDTV video rather than an hour of uncompressed. Uncompressed video will only be feasable once media can hold hundreds of gigabytes, rather than the 9 gigs that dual layer DVDs hold today.
If 1080 produced 30 full frames per second, that would be all fine and dandy, but you don't seem to realize that it's not full frames.
NTSC interlacing does 60 fields per second, and 29.97 FPS. Thus it takes two passes to do 30 full frames per second. So it is a true 30 FPS. I don't notice interlacing too much, except if I am standing really close to the TV and I am looking at the edges of objects, which do appear jagged and flickery due to the interlacing.
I saw a 1080i 24" or so Samsung CRT at Best Buy a few weeks ago for $399. That was a damn good deal, just a little more money than a comparable high quality NTSC tv. I will personally wait, however, until 1080p sets, true HDTV, become available cheaply.
It's about an inch taller and depending on the model, the same thickness or thinner then a deck of cards. IIRC, the Archos is about the size of a paperback novel
There are hard disk based mp3 players that are smaller than the iPod. Heck, they even have 1" MP3 players now. Check out the Rio Nitrus. It's got a 1" hd. It's as small as many flash players. By the way, there are newer Archos like the video one I mentioned above that are only slightly larger than an iPod.
It looks to me like most of their (older?) audio-only models use the AAs. It seems that their video models use the internal batteries. I'd definitely prefer regular AAs.
That's supposedly the most promising fusion reaction. That 'n' is a fast neutron. Whatever it collides with is going to be carrying an extra neutron, and will either fission, or become an isotope (radioactive, of course).
That neutron is the complete entire point of the fusion reaction. In future power production reactors, the chamber is surrounded by a layer of lithium. This lithium is transmuted into tritium when hit by a neutron. Of course this process also produces heat, which is obviously used for power generation. This tritium fuels the reactor along with deuterium. The reaction produces helium.
The only radioactive waste is the low level radioactivity of the reactor after decommissioning. But it isn't any more dangerous than garden variety toxic waste. Certainly not nearly as bad as coal slag.
There are, to my knowledge, no other hard drive based music players using 1.8" hard drives...they all use giant, powerhungry 2.5" models like a laptop. Therefore, there are no other models that are truly handheld, no other models with are really pocket sized.
Ipod dimensions-.78 inches x 2.43 inches x 4.02 inches
The Archos is much chunkier as you can see. There are hard drive MP3 players that are actually smaller than the iPod.
But the Archos is not that much larger. Most of the larger size is due to the rubber things on the corners. But, the Archos seems to be the most feature laden product. At $359, the 20gb Archos it is cheaper than a comparable 20gb iPod.
But the iPod only plays MP3s. The Archos not only plays MP3s, but WMA and Ogg. It encodes MP3, as well.
But the really impressive thing is that it can play video. It also has a color LCD display that can play divx or xvid. It can encode divx from a video input, thus it functions as a PVR, which is completely beyond the capabilities of the iPod. It also has video out, so you can connect it to a tv.
It seems that the cheaper Archos is the better, more versatile player.
Apple's support has a long standing reputation for being friendly and helpful. Everyone knows the products and peripherals are priced higher than PC products - but you shouldn't mind paying for superior design and quality in hardware. Don't compare apples + oranges (compare Mac hardware to standard hardware.)
I call bullshit. The iPod's non-replaceable battery is obviously not superior design. There are smaller hard disk MP3 players that have user servicable batteries. And it ain't superior quality. Also Apple doesn't make most of their own components. You aren't paying for superior apple design and quality. It's just another third party manufacturer.
Apple sacrifices function to improve form. Sure their stuff is pretty. But I don't care about pretty. I want function. At a tech class that I used to go to, we primarily worked on PCs. The PCs were extremely reliable. Over the course of a year we had one hard drive failure and one PS failure. Out of about 50 computers, that is pretty good.
We had one G4 cube. It was very pretty. Lots of lucite. The Apple engineers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that a typical power switch would look stupid. It had a power button on top that was heat sensitive or something. Unfortunately, it never worked. We had to take off the case to turn on the computer.
And after a while the PS failed. It was just about the most useless computer I've ever seen in my life.
Do you really want that thing built in the US? I'd rather it was somewhere remote, personally.
You do know that there are several fusion reactors already in the US, including a Tokomak at Princeton. Also, fusion does not pose any danger at all. It cannot melt down and the only waste left over is ordinary helium. Fission is not anything like fusion at all. Heck, even fission reactors have a better safety record than coal, for example.
Yes, that's one of the things that makes France more democratic than the US, because one person's "free expression of religion" is an attempt at religious indoctrination to others.
Muslim headdresses are an attempt at indoctrination? There is a push in France to ban Islamic headdresses in schools. They are very anti-muslim, you see.
Both Japan and France have a ton of cities... shouldn't the reactor be in some really remote location, like either a desert, or up in Alaska? The world's biggest fusion reactor has the potential to cause the world's biggest reactor disaster... so it should probably be far away from everything.
Uh, if you know anything about fusion reactors, you'd know that they are incapable of having a meltdown like some types of fission reactores.
Of course, let's not all forget that it will still only be a fraction of the size of THE SUN, which is already a working fusion reactor, spewing a virtually infinite amount of energy at us all the time. We should just make giant solar cells everywhere, and be done with it.
Do you know how expensive solar panels are? The best method for producing power now is good old fission. There are new reactor designs that are meltdown proof, cheap, and efficient.
Frankly, I think this whole thing is stupid. What bad would come of a French fusion reactor? It's not like they're going to steal it and use it to power Iraq or something.
Although I'd prefer the US, if it is going to be in a foreign country, I really don't care where the reactor is located. But, oddly enough the French did sell the Iraqis a reactor for plutonium production. It was destroyed by the Israelis in 1982. That basically put the kibosh in their nuclear program for a long time.
The camp was owned by a family that was a freind of the camp - they were in the process of selling the camp property at fair market value to the camp itself.
Then Paul came in with $BIGNUM and swiped the camp.
So, yes, someone sold out for $BIGNUM.
And yes, Paul Allan is still a JERK. Fucking with a summer-camp is just being an ass.
Wow. Not only are you incoherent, but you are also completely incorrect. Paul Allen purchased the property. The camp was relocated. The camp still exists, but in a different location.
Even if the camp was demolished and the poor kiddies have to find another place to go over the summer, I don't fucking care. It is a free market economy. The owners of the property sold it fairly to Paul Allen. Both parties consented. I don't see the problem.
It is a fact of life that things often get demolished to put other things. It's just the way it is. Sure it sometimes is sad to see old buildings get demolished to put in new buildings, but that's just how things work.
Andrew Carnegie, one of his rivals as a billionaire also became famous for his charities, Carnegie Hall and numerous libraries. I believe he actually left only a small fraction of his wealth to his family when he passed away.
Tell that to the exploited workers in his factories when they were beaten, arrested, and/or killed by police for striking. Sure he gave some of his money to charity, but you are mistaken if you think Carnegie was friendly towards the poor. He was a pure bastard, as was many of the 19th century industrialists. Bill Gates gives away billions of dollars to charity. And he sure as hell doesn't exploit his workers either.
let's exploit the workers and make them live in miserable conditions. Then let's reap our profits from this exploitation. Now, after we've made thourough use of the power large sums of money affords, let's give it away and build museums. Now, we fill these museums full of art depicting the struggle/misery/plight of the downtrodden. Finally, we add insult to injury and call the whole process "edificaiton".
My dream is to allow Bill Gates to exploit me in his sweatshops at Redmond. Man, that would be the life. I could be a millionare too like my MS sweatshop-working cousin.
I got the same drive the other day, complete with only 1 blank dvd-r and crappy burning software, and dispite how much it claims to be 4x DVD+-R I cant get it to burn at over 2X in Nero 6. What has been your experience? I'm half tempted to take it back and get a 4x Sony or some trusted brand
If you are talking about the Lite-On drives, I wouldn't get a Sony to replace it. Sony drives are repackaged Lite-Ons.
Some say that with hardware getting cheaper and HD space no longer at a premium, mp3 and other compression schemes have very little hope of surviving the next decade. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the record companies actually release their catalogs in an even better quality format than wav.
2 questions: What is the bitrate at which the human ear can distinguish quality from crap?
There is no better format than WAV, as it is uncompressed audio. However, there are two new formats called DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD, both of which store uncompressed audio data on a DVD. Since DVDs hold 7 times more data than a CD, the sound can be much higher quality. You can actually buy SACDs of quite a few albums now. The great thing is that they are dual layered discs. One layer has just conventional CD audio on it that is playable on all current players.
The MP3 bitrate in which the vast majority of the population cannot distinguish from CD is 256 kbps, from what I've heard. If you used Ogg, this number would be closer to 190 or even 168, as it is a far superior codec.
Many audiophiles use FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, which will give you WAV quality lossless sound at around a third the size.
At what point will compression become obsolete? A couple years down the road, when I have maybe 500-1000 gigs of storage, I may see no reason to encode my audio that I rip from CDs. An entire album would take up about 600 megabytes. That is an infestimal portion of such a huge amount of storage. However, compression still will be needed to distribute songs over the internet.
Vorbis, even at 7.5, or 10, is lossy. It's not acceptable. Every time you encode to it, data is thrown away. Sure, it might be fine and dandy for your crappy headphones and small portable, but try using it for A) archiving your music collection, or B) storing audio files you've created.
What other alternative do you propose? Ogg is the best codec for bitrates 256. All codecs are lossy, with the exception of a few like FLAC. They take a 50 mb WAV down to 5 mb by throwing away stuff you (hopefully) cannot hear.
Ogg does this better than any other codec, including MP3. There is no better option unless you want huge wave files or not quite so huge but pretty large FLAC files. I really don't think you could tell, in practice, the difference between a 224 or even a 190 kbps Ogg and a CD, in a blind test.
Ogg files do not decompress as simply as MP3s. More processing activity == more power used == less battery life. So Ogg is dead in the portable market.
The excess power taken up by that is exceedingly minimal. Absolutely nothing compared to the power going to your headphones, for example. In my experience, OggDrop, the encoder I use, encodes much faster than Lame. If this power consumption was such a problem, then why do you think so many mp3 player manufacturers have Ogg support?
People here seem to have the misconception that Ogg is hardly ever used. It's very popular. Make no mistake.
I use eMule quite a bit. There is a huge, huge amount of Ogg music and RAR-archived albums on the eDonkey network. It's already very well established. In addition to that, a huge number of video files, close to 50%, on that network have Ogg audio. Everyone who at all cares about digital music has the ogg codec. Even electronics companies are taking notice. Many new MP3 players have Ogg support.
Seriously, what's wrong with a VCR? You can even record the tapes digitally
A VCR sucks. I use my computer as a tvr, with a very cheap but decent quality ATI TV Wonder VE. I don't think you realize how completely different a PVR/computer with a tv tuner is.
I have a program that downloads TV listings, so I simply choose what programs I want to record. I can choose as many programs as I want. I don't need to mess around with poor quality VHS tapes that wear out. It's all stored on my hard drive. I can access any part of any file almost instantly. No tedious rewinding or fastforwarding.
And, since my video card has tv out, I can watch recorded shows on my television while doing other work on my regular monitor.
You dont have a 62" HDTV. VCD's are unwatchable and artifacts are visible on even well encoded (original) DVDs.
You're right, I don't. And 99% of the population doesn't either. There is no video standard that is available in the U.S. (besides digital VHS) that can offer HDTV resolutions. By the way, VCD quality is shit. It's worse than VHS. It's 1150 kbps mpeg1. What you want is SVCD, mpeg2 480x480, or CVD, which is mpep2 352x480. SVCD can have video bitrates up to about 2500 kbps. And it can be variable bitrate, as well, not VCD's constant bitrate.
Anyway, for a normal 24" tv, SVCD is perfectly acceptable, and damn better than VHS by a longshot. Everything will look like shit on a 62" tv.
Note that this burner only does the '+' formats. Any DVD burner worth its salt these days should be able to do both '+' and '-' formats. I'd stick with Pioneer or Sony for now -- they do all formats, have good quality/reliability, and their prices are coming down.
Also, new 8x recorders are coming.
Also, new double-layer recorders are coming.
Good point. I'm holding off for the dual layer burners myself. But, there's always the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. By the time the dual layer burners come out, the Blu Ray dvds might not be too far off in the horizon. So I might actually end up holding off for those, if their price ever gets >$300. Mmmm. 25 gb on a single 12 mm disc.
I also like dvd::rip for its clustering abilitites, where is used to take me 2-3 hours to transcode and convert down to VCD format now only takes around a half an hour.
Try encoding DVD video using CVD resolution, 352x480. You can fit about three hours of video on a DVD using about 3000 kbps. That is still higher than the bitrate you would be using for SVCDs. Considering that you would be able to fit three hours rather than 1, it would actually be slightly cheaper than burning (S)vcds.
Quality loss?! Thats half the bitrate! Does it give you the option of splitting across two disks?
Yes, there would be quality loss. But remember, the bitrate would still be a sky-high 4000 kbps. Have you ever seen an SVCD before? I burn those all the time. I can encode nearly perfect quality video, much better than VHS, at 2000 kbps. You don't see any artifacting at all unless you get close and examine the picture carefully. At double the bitrate, burned DVDs would hardly be lacking for quality, assuming whoever encoded it knew what they are doing, and used a good encoder like TMPGENC.
However, there will be dual layer burners coming out in March. These will store 9 gigs just like the commercially produced dvds. Although I'm sure the media would be ridiculously overpriced.
Re:speed is not a concern
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DVD-Rs go 8x
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Who cares about DVD-9? Blu-Ray (17GB+) burners are already shipping in Japan... admittedly they cost several thousand dollars apiece right now.
By the time they become widely available the storage capacity of Blu Rays will become inadequate for many users, just like DVD.
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When we have media that hold 100+ gigs rather than a niggly 5-10 gigs at the same price, compression will serve no useful purpose.
I'm not sure about that. Uncompressed video is gigantic. Huge. An hour of uncompressed video takes up about 70 gb, assuming it's regular NTSC rez. Thus you could barely fit a movie on your 100 gig media. It's much better just to use high quality lossy compression, such as MPEG-2 or Xvid or soemthing. If you crank the bitrates high enough, there is no visible artifacting or quality loss.
I'd much rather have 10 hours of HDTV video rather than an hour of uncompressed. Uncompressed video will only be feasable once media can hold hundreds of gigabytes, rather than the 9 gigs that dual layer DVDs hold today.
If 1080 produced 30 full frames per second, that would be all fine and dandy, but you don't seem to realize that it's not full frames.
NTSC interlacing does 60 fields per second, and 29.97 FPS. Thus it takes two passes to do 30 full frames per second. So it is a true 30 FPS. I don't notice interlacing too much, except if I am standing really close to the TV and I am looking at the edges of objects, which do appear jagged and flickery due to the interlacing.
I saw a 1080i 24" or so Samsung CRT at Best Buy a few weeks ago for $399. That was a damn good deal, just a little more money than a comparable high quality NTSC tv. I will personally wait, however, until 1080p sets, true HDTV, become available cheaply.
It's about an inch taller and depending on the model, the same thickness or thinner then a deck of cards. IIRC, the Archos is about the size of a paperback novel
There are hard disk based mp3 players that are smaller than the iPod. Heck, they even have 1" MP3 players now. Check out the Rio Nitrus. It's got a 1" hd. It's as small as many flash players. By the way, there are newer Archos like the video one I mentioned above that are only slightly larger than an iPod.
It looks to me like most of their (older?) audio-only models use the AAs. It seems that their video models use the internal batteries. I'd definitely prefer regular AAs.
That's supposedly the most promising fusion reaction. That 'n' is a fast neutron. Whatever it collides with is going to be carrying an extra neutron, and will either fission, or become an isotope (radioactive, of course).
That neutron is the complete entire point of the fusion reaction. In future power production reactors, the chamber is surrounded by a layer of lithium. This lithium is transmuted into tritium when hit by a neutron. Of course this process also produces heat, which is obviously used for power generation. This tritium fuels the reactor along with deuterium. The reaction produces helium.
The only radioactive waste is the low level radioactivity of the reactor after decommissioning. But it isn't any more dangerous than garden variety toxic waste. Certainly not nearly as bad as coal slag.
There are, to my knowledge, no other hard drive based music players using 1.8" hard drives...they all use giant, powerhungry 2.5" models like a laptop. Therefore, there are no other models that are truly handheld, no other models with are really pocket sized.
.78 inches x 2.43 inches x 4.02 inches
Ipod dimensions-
Archos AV120 - 4.3" x 3.1" x 1.1"
The Archos is much chunkier as you can see. There are hard drive MP3 players that are actually smaller than the iPod.
But the Archos is not that much larger. Most of the larger size is due to the rubber things on the corners. But, the Archos seems to be the most feature laden product. At $359, the 20gb Archos it is cheaper than a comparable 20gb iPod.
But the iPod only plays MP3s. The Archos not only plays MP3s, but WMA and Ogg. It encodes MP3, as well.
But the really impressive thing is that it can play video. It also has a color LCD display that can play divx or xvid. It can encode divx from a video input, thus it functions as a PVR, which is completely beyond the capabilities of the iPod. It also has video out, so you can connect it to a tv.
It seems that the cheaper Archos is the better, more versatile player.
Apple's support has a long standing reputation for being friendly and helpful. Everyone knows the products and peripherals are priced higher than PC products - but you shouldn't mind paying for superior design and quality in hardware. Don't compare apples + oranges (compare Mac hardware to standard hardware.)
I call bullshit. The iPod's non-replaceable battery is obviously not superior design. There are smaller hard disk MP3 players that have user servicable batteries. And it ain't superior quality. Also Apple doesn't make most of their own components. You aren't paying for superior apple design and quality. It's just another third party manufacturer.
Apple sacrifices function to improve form. Sure their stuff is pretty. But I don't care about pretty. I want function. At a tech class that I used to go to, we primarily worked on PCs. The PCs were extremely reliable. Over the course of a year we had one hard drive failure and one PS failure. Out of about 50 computers, that is pretty good.
We had one G4 cube. It was very pretty. Lots of lucite. The Apple engineers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that a typical power switch would look stupid. It had a power button on top that was heat sensitive or something. Unfortunately, it never worked. We had to take off the case to turn on the computer.
And after a while the PS failed. It was just about the most useless computer I've ever seen in my life.
Do you really want that thing built in the US? I'd rather it was somewhere remote, personally.
You do know that there are several fusion reactors already in the US, including a Tokomak at Princeton. Also, fusion does not pose any danger at all. It cannot melt down and the only waste left over is ordinary helium. Fission is not anything like fusion at all. Heck, even fission reactors have a better safety record than coal, for example.
Yes, that's one of the things that makes France more democratic than the US, because one person's "free expression of religion" is an attempt at religious indoctrination to others.
Muslim headdresses are an attempt at indoctrination? There is a push in France to ban Islamic headdresses in schools. They are very anti-muslim, you see.
Both Japan and France have a ton of cities... shouldn't the reactor be in some really remote location, like either a desert, or up in Alaska? The world's biggest fusion reactor has the potential to cause the world's biggest reactor disaster... so it should probably be far away from everything.
Uh, if you know anything about fusion reactors, you'd know that they are incapable of having a meltdown like some types of fission reactores.
Of course, let's not all forget that it will still only be a fraction of the size of THE SUN, which is already a working fusion reactor, spewing a virtually infinite amount of energy at us all the time. We should just make giant solar cells everywhere, and be done with it.
Do you know how expensive solar panels are? The best method for producing power now is good old fission. There are new reactor designs that are meltdown proof, cheap, and efficient.
Frankly, I think this whole thing is stupid. What bad would come of a French fusion reactor? It's not like they're going to steal it and use it to power Iraq or something.
Although I'd prefer the US, if it is going to be in a foreign country, I really don't care where the reactor is located. But, oddly enough the French did sell the Iraqis a reactor for plutonium production. It was destroyed by the Israelis in 1982. That basically put the kibosh in their nuclear program for a long time.
The camp was owned by a family that was a freind of the camp - they were in the process of selling the camp property at fair market value to the camp itself.
Then Paul came in with $BIGNUM and swiped the camp.
So, yes, someone sold out for $BIGNUM.
And yes, Paul Allan is still a JERK. Fucking with a summer-camp is just being an ass.
Wow. Not only are you incoherent, but you are also completely incorrect. Paul Allen purchased the property. The camp was relocated. The camp still exists, but in a different location.
Even if the camp was demolished and the poor kiddies have to find another place to go over the summer, I don't fucking care. It is a free market economy. The owners of the property sold it fairly to Paul Allen. Both parties consented. I don't see the problem.
It is a fact of life that things often get demolished to put other things. It's just the way it is. Sure it sometimes is sad to see old buildings get demolished to put in new buildings, but that's just how things work.
Andrew Carnegie, one of his rivals as a billionaire also became famous for his charities, Carnegie Hall and numerous libraries. I believe he actually left only a small fraction of his wealth to his family when he passed away.
Tell that to the exploited workers in his factories when they were beaten, arrested, and/or killed by police for striking. Sure he gave some of his money to charity, but you are mistaken if you think Carnegie was friendly towards the poor. He was a pure bastard, as was many of the 19th century industrialists. Bill Gates gives away billions of dollars to charity. And he sure as hell doesn't exploit his workers either.
let's exploit the workers and make them live in miserable conditions. Then let's reap our profits from this exploitation. Now, after we've made thourough use of the power large sums of money affords, let's give it away and build museums. Now, we fill these museums full of art depicting the struggle/misery/plight of the downtrodden. Finally, we add insult to injury and call the whole process "edificaiton".
My dream is to allow Bill Gates to exploit me in his sweatshops at Redmond. Man, that would be the life. I could be a millionare too like my MS sweatshop-working cousin.
I got the same drive the other day, complete with only 1 blank dvd-r and crappy burning software, and dispite how much it claims to be 4x DVD+-R I cant get it to burn at over 2X in Nero 6. What has been your experience? I'm half tempted to take it back and get a 4x Sony or some trusted brand
If you are talking about the Lite-On drives, I wouldn't get a Sony to replace it. Sony drives are repackaged Lite-Ons.
Some say that with hardware getting cheaper and HD space no longer at a premium, mp3 and other compression schemes have very little hope of surviving the next decade. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the record companies actually release their catalogs in an even better quality format than wav.
2 questions:
What is the bitrate at which the human ear can distinguish quality from crap?
There is no better format than WAV, as it is uncompressed audio. However, there are two new formats called DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD, both of which store uncompressed audio data on a DVD. Since DVDs hold 7 times more data than a CD, the sound can be much higher quality. You can actually buy SACDs of quite a few albums now. The great thing is that they are dual layered discs. One layer has just conventional CD audio on it that is playable on all current players.
The MP3 bitrate in which the vast majority of the population cannot distinguish from CD is 256 kbps, from what I've heard. If you used Ogg, this number would be closer to 190 or even 168, as it is a far superior codec.
Many audiophiles use FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, which will give you WAV quality lossless sound at around a third the size.
At what point will compression become obsolete?
A couple years down the road, when I have maybe 500-1000 gigs of storage, I may see no reason to encode my audio that I rip from CDs. An entire album would take up about 600 megabytes. That is an infestimal portion of such a huge amount of storage. However, compression still will be needed to distribute songs over the internet.
Vorbis, even at 7.5, or 10, is lossy. It's not acceptable. Every time you encode to it, data is thrown away. Sure, it might be fine and dandy for your crappy headphones and small portable, but try using it for A) archiving your music collection, or B) storing audio files you've created.
What other alternative do you propose? Ogg is the best codec for bitrates 256. All codecs are lossy, with the exception of a few like FLAC. They take a 50 mb WAV down to 5 mb by throwing away stuff you (hopefully) cannot hear.
Ogg does this better than any other codec, including MP3. There is no better option unless you want huge wave files or not quite so huge but pretty large FLAC files. I really don't think you could tell, in practice, the difference between a 224 or even a 190 kbps Ogg and a CD, in a blind test.
Ogg files do not decompress as simply as MP3s. More processing activity == more power used == less battery life. So Ogg is dead in the portable market.
The excess power taken up by that is exceedingly minimal. Absolutely nothing compared to the power going to your headphones, for example. In my experience, OggDrop, the encoder I use, encodes much faster than Lame. If this power consumption was such a problem, then why do you think so many mp3 player manufacturers have Ogg support?
People here seem to have the misconception that Ogg is hardly ever used. It's very popular. Make no mistake.
I use eMule quite a bit. There is a huge, huge amount of Ogg music and RAR-archived albums on the eDonkey network. It's already very well established. In addition to that, a huge number of video files, close to 50%, on that network have Ogg audio. Everyone who at all cares about digital music has the ogg codec. Even electronics companies are taking notice. Many new MP3 players have Ogg support.
Ogg is big now. It's not just some obscure codec.
Seriously, what's wrong with a VCR? You can even record the tapes digitally
A VCR sucks. I use my computer as a tvr, with a very cheap but decent quality ATI TV Wonder VE. I don't think you realize how completely different a PVR/computer with a tv tuner is.
I have a program that downloads TV listings, so I simply choose what programs I want to record. I can choose as many programs as I want. I don't need to mess around with poor quality VHS tapes that wear out. It's all stored on my hard drive. I can access any part of any file almost instantly. No tedious rewinding or fastforwarding.
And, since my video card has tv out, I can watch recorded shows on my television while doing other work on my regular monitor.
You dont have a 62" HDTV. VCD's are unwatchable and artifacts are visible on even well encoded (original) DVDs.
You're right, I don't. And 99% of the population doesn't either. There is no video standard that is available in the U.S. (besides digital VHS) that can offer HDTV resolutions. By the way, VCD quality is shit. It's worse than VHS. It's 1150 kbps mpeg1. What you want is SVCD, mpeg2 480x480, or CVD, which is mpep2 352x480. SVCD can have video bitrates up to about 2500 kbps. And it can be variable bitrate, as well, not VCD's constant bitrate.
Anyway, for a normal 24" tv, SVCD is perfectly acceptable, and damn better than VHS by a longshot. Everything will look like shit on a 62" tv.
Note that this burner only does the '+' formats. Any DVD burner worth its salt these days should be able to do both '+' and '-' formats. I'd stick with Pioneer or Sony for now -- they do all formats, have good quality/reliability, and their prices are coming down.
Also, new 8x recorders are coming.
Also, new double-layer recorders are coming.
Good point. I'm holding off for the dual layer burners myself. But, there's always the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. By the time the dual layer burners come out, the Blu Ray dvds might not be too far off in the horizon. So I might actually end up holding off for those, if their price ever gets >$300. Mmmm. 25 gb on a single 12 mm disc.
I also like dvd::rip for its clustering abilitites, where is used to take me 2-3 hours to transcode and convert down to VCD format now only takes around a half an hour.
Try encoding DVD video using CVD resolution, 352x480. You can fit about three hours of video on a DVD using about 3000 kbps. That is still higher than the bitrate you would be using for SVCDs. Considering that you would be able to fit three hours rather than 1, it would actually be slightly cheaper than burning (S)vcds.
Quality loss?! Thats half the bitrate! Does it give you the option of splitting across two disks?
Yes, there would be quality loss. But remember, the bitrate would still be a sky-high 4000 kbps. Have you ever seen an SVCD before? I burn those all the time. I can encode nearly perfect quality video, much better than VHS, at 2000 kbps. You don't see any artifacting at all unless you get close and examine the picture carefully. At double the bitrate, burned DVDs would hardly be lacking for quality, assuming whoever encoded it knew what they are doing, and used a good encoder like TMPGENC.
However, there will be dual layer burners coming out in March. These will store 9 gigs just like the commercially produced dvds. Although I'm sure the media would be ridiculously overpriced.
Who cares about DVD-9? Blu-Ray (17GB+) burners are already shipping in Japan... admittedly they cost several thousand dollars apiece right now.
By the time they become widely available the storage capacity of Blu Rays will become inadequate for many users, just like DVD.