I agree, Blackboard is a buggy PoS. Which is why I prefer ClassNavigator, which was founded by a buddy of mine who was also fed up with Blackboard and saw the market for a better solution.
There are lots of better solutions out there than Blackboard (Which is, for your information, also web-based). My college uses it, and I find it to be hopelessly buggy, not to mention damned hard to use. I mean, just the other day when attempting to use a discussion group, it spat out an error and kindly provided the entire SQL query on which the problem had occured.
I prefer ClassNavigator, which was founded by a friend of mine after he saw how poor Blackboard was, and saw the market for an actually GOOD solution. Unfortunately, it's not Mozilla-friendly, something about which I've been bugging him for ages.
These places are all so uppity they'd never consider anything less than highlevel colocation with high bandwidth costs, or in-house connections. And while that's fine for what they normally do, they shouldn't be complaining about RSS eating up much bandwidth if they won't consider all their options.
If GameSpy puts themselves out of reach for companies, companies will simply adopt another solution. GameSpy's loss, because this might cause companies to switch to another solution on both Mac and PC platforms to have a unified interface between their two software versions. Yes, it would require coding work to swap out Gamespy for another solution, but I'm sure some enterprising company will come up with a solution that is very similar to Gamespy in it's programming interfaces.
the team behind C&C: Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge and C&C Generals
It's not the same team. C&C Generals was the first C&C game to be designed by a team that had nothing to do with what used to be Westwood. This is one of the reasons that Generals strayed so far from the traditional C&C gameplay style... it's not really a C&C game.
Hopefully, however, they do mean that they will revisit the traditional C&C style gameplay for the new game. Otherwise, while they might produce a great game, it still won't be a C&C game.
Anyhow, I don't see why they're calling this film "Doom" anymore. It has nothing to do with the original concept whatsoever. In fact, other existing movies are probably closer to Doom than this movie is now.
Considering how Id software kept turning down studios because they wanted to change it so much, I'm surprised they've let it get this far out of hand.
Normally I'm all for banning speedhackers, but in this case, if it's NOT a PvP server, then why ban them? I participated in the beta, and I got sick of spending all my time running around. Probably 80 to 90% of the time spent playing is running from point A to point B. It's the primary reason I didn't bother buying the game.
You know you have a problem when people start using speedhacks to save themselves from running around. But instead of fixing the problem, Blizzard banned anybody who tried to fix it themselves. Good job listening to your customers, Blizzard.
Do I care to boast? Sure. I regularly stream 1.1mbit XviD over the net for my own personal use. It's not live, but it's still streaming. And it works just fine, despite being from Texas to Montreal.
You've made a lot of complaints to my reply, but I still haven't seen you actually attempt to refute what I've said. At least, I'm assuming that all the posts by "Anonymous Coward" are just the same, well, coward hiding behind his precious anonymity.
Satellite, yes, but the solution in question here is designed for cable tv, it seems. So broadcasting cable-quality video over the internet is a lot easier than satellite quality.
If you think this looks like VHS, I'd love to have your VCR, I've never seen a recordable VHS tape that looked half this good:) To me, comparing to my analog cable (On a Sony Wega TV), the sample I provided looks a lot better.
It's possible... DivX also supports preprocessing, but I left it off.
As per my previous reply, I decided to post a sample image from the test I ran.
First, an explanation. I compressed using single-pass encoding, since you can't do multipass on realtime content, and I wanted to be fair.
The video source was 640x352, and was compressed at 352x480. Unmodified DivX postprocessing was enabled.
The screenshot here you see is, on the left, the original, and on the right, the original stretched out to 640x480.
My conclusions:
1) The test would have been much better with higher quality source. My source should have had 480 lines of resolution, since I was stretching the file from 352 lines to 480 lines. Higher quality source uncompressed source would have led to much higher quality test results.
2) The image looks much sharper than what you typically see on analog cable TV.
And now the image (Sorry for the uncompressed TIF, I don't have a good PNG encoder handy, I did this all on a laptop from a classroom):
Yes, as I said, that's with discarding every other field/frame for deinterlacing, which knocks that 483 (Let's call it 480 for simplicity) down to about 240.
Of course, if you do good deinterlacing (I like motion compensated), you end up with that 480.
Still, analog cable doesn't get you 640 horizontal resolution. And this device is dealing with only analog cable.
You only get 640x480 AFTER you stretch the image to a 4:3 aspect ratio. But that's just the display res, there is no requirement to compress at that resolution. So TV would require something like half the bandwidth of true 640x480 video.
TV quality can certainly be acheived on 640x480 content at 768kbit, cut that in half, and, hey, look at that, we have 384kbit.
Cringley does indeed say that the feed is at 384kbit. However that is merely what he was told. Did he personally check a bandwidth graph to confirm that that was in fact the bandwidth being used? We've seen to many fraudulant magical compression demos to be fully trusting and accepting of that.
Schaffer said that his advances are in his pre-processing, not his compression. I don't think a video preprocessor is worth 6000$, certainly not when there are quite a few preprocessors out there that can probably do the same thing (Though, not knowing WHAT his preprocessor does...)
In the interest of fairness, I encoded some video at 352x480 at 384kbit. I was using DivX 5 Pro, which isn't the best codec out there, but it was what I had lying around.
The result of that test looked BETTER than what I see on standard cable TV. Which indicates to me that:
1) 384kbit is enough for TV quality 2) You can do what Schaffer is doing with regular MPEG-4 codecs 3) Analog cable sucks, and I need satellite TV
Who said anything about 640x480? That's significantly above TV quality, which is 352x240 if I recall correctly. And you can get pretty close to broadcast quality at 384kbit at that resolution.
Of course, that's assuming that you're discarding every other frame to do the deinterlacing. If you had a good motion compensated deinterlacer, you'd need a higher bitrate.
Also, please note that his solution doesn't use 384kbit, that's only the lowest usable setting. The site says that you need more bandwidth than that to get decent quality.
1) HydroQuebec exports almost a third of the energy 2) Either I'm stupid, or the gov't is, because they think HydroQuebec is exporting "Hydraulic" energy. Don't they mean "Hydro electric"?
No, I haven't, did you bother reaing the/. story? Let me quote a section for you:
It's basically MPEG-4, improved upon, that allows for what he calls 'best of class' streaming video over a normal broadband connection.
I said he probably is using somebody elses codec without improving on it. I think my position that this device of his isn't special in any way is pretty clear.
I just compressed high quality content at 320x240 with 384kbit (to MPEG-4) There were very not really any visible artifacts. The guy here claims that his capture card is special not because he has special MPEG-4 (Indeed, he probably uses a standard MPEG-4 encoder chip), but instead some sort of special pre-processing he does. That can be done in software, it doesn't require a 6000$ card.
Not even close. 1mbit good MPEG-4 video is near-DVD quality. As in, few artifacts at near-DVD res.
TV, we're talking 320x240 or thereabouts. Half the macroblocks, it stands to reason that roughly half the bitrate would give similar quality.
That said, the site claims that you should have MORE than 384kbit upstream to get good results. Half of 1mbit is 500kbit, and 500kbit is a bit more than 384kbit, so this is right in line with standard MPEG-4. Apply postprocessing on the decoding end and 500kbit would look great.
In addition, by "Most cable ISPs" I assume you mean the US, which is, to be honest, broadband backwater, and not a good example of typical upload speeds. For example, accross eastern canada speeds for DSL and cable range from 800 to 900kbit pre-overhead, for even the most basic connections.
That's the point, I don't see anything new about this thing. I could put together a box to do much the same thing for a hell of a lot less, and it'd do it just as good (Though changing the channel would require remote desktop or some custom code)
With a good XviD encode, considering this is TV res here (Can't remember the exact res, but about 320x240, or 320x480 if it's interlaced), I would imagine with a post processor that somewhere aroud 500 to 750 kbit MPEG-4 would provide the same quality as this guy's solution. And considering how he says that you need at least 384kbit upstream, but will do better with more (Read that as you need more to get his level of quality), it seems that his compression is no better than xvid. In fact, he probably took somebody elses MPEG-4 codec that was either already streamable, or took something like XviD and made it streamable... which isn't that hard to do.
I did RTFA, and I still didn't see anything special here. The quality issues with streaming video isn't the capture card (Fine, maybe you'd need a 100$ capture card instead of a 30$ capture card, but not 6000), but with the actual compression itself. And I highly doubt that this solution, considering how hacked together it is, contains a revolutionary new video codec that could substantially improve quality.
I can't think of anything this special capture card might do that would be worth anything over a normal capture card. Even a hardware MPEG-4 encoder would be pointless considering how this device is a regular PC and can encode in software without problem.
This "TV2Me" device is just a standard SFF PC with a TV tuner (http://spaceshift.net/images/pvs.jpg). And yet he charges 6500$ US for this.
Is it just me, or could I put together a box with all the same hardware for under 500$ US?
The ONLY unique thing about this thing is the streaming of the remote control over the net. Is that feature really worth $6000 US? I mean, it's just a convienience to avoid using remote desktop to change the channel.
So again, seems like either a scam or ripoff to me.
The concept sounds great, but this card looks to be incredibly slow. What's the good of an opensource 3D card if you can't use it to run any modern games?
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I agree, Blackboard is a buggy PoS. Which is why I prefer ClassNavigator, which was founded by a buddy of mine who was also fed up with Blackboard and saw the market for a better solution.
There are lots of better solutions out there than Blackboard (Which is, for your information, also web-based). My college uses it, and I find it to be hopelessly buggy, not to mention damned hard to use. I mean, just the other day when attempting to use a discussion group, it spat out an error and kindly provided the entire SQL query on which the problem had occured.
I prefer ClassNavigator, which was founded by a friend of mine after he saw how poor Blackboard was, and saw the market for an actually GOOD solution. Unfortunately, it's not Mozilla-friendly, something about which I've been bugging him for ages.
No matter how secure the disc is, it's impossible to stop someone from cracking the software itself.
If these sites would just take advantage of HTTP Compression and buy some cheaper bandwidth they wouldn't have a problem.
These places are all so uppity they'd never consider anything less than highlevel colocation with high bandwidth costs, or in-house connections. And while that's fine for what they normally do, they shouldn't be complaining about RSS eating up much bandwidth if they won't consider all their options.
If GameSpy puts themselves out of reach for companies, companies will simply adopt another solution. GameSpy's loss, because this might cause companies to switch to another solution on both Mac and PC platforms to have a unified interface between their two software versions. Yes, it would require coding work to swap out Gamespy for another solution, but I'm sure some enterprising company will come up with a solution that is very similar to Gamespy in it's programming interfaces.
the team behind C&C: Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge and C&C Generals
It's not the same team. C&C Generals was the first C&C game to be designed by a team that had nothing to do with what used to be Westwood. This is one of the reasons that Generals strayed so far from the traditional C&C gameplay style... it's not really a C&C game.
Hopefully, however, they do mean that they will revisit the traditional C&C style gameplay for the new game. Otherwise, while they might produce a great game, it still won't be a C&C game.
You mean Big Fucking/Frigging Gun?
Anyhow, I don't see why they're calling this film "Doom" anymore. It has nothing to do with the original concept whatsoever. In fact, other existing movies are probably closer to Doom than this movie is now.
Considering how Id software kept turning down studios because they wanted to change it so much, I'm surprised they've let it get this far out of hand.
Normally I'm all for banning speedhackers, but in this case, if it's NOT a PvP server, then why ban them? I participated in the beta, and I got sick of spending all my time running around. Probably 80 to 90% of the time spent playing is running from point A to point B. It's the primary reason I didn't bother buying the game.
You know you have a problem when people start using speedhacks to save themselves from running around. But instead of fixing the problem, Blizzard banned anybody who tried to fix it themselves. Good job listening to your customers, Blizzard.
Do I care to boast? Sure. I regularly stream 1.1mbit XviD over the net for my own personal use. It's not live, but it's still streaming. And it works just fine, despite being from Texas to Montreal.
You've made a lot of complaints to my reply, but I still haven't seen you actually attempt to refute what I've said. At least, I'm assuming that all the posts by "Anonymous Coward" are just the same, well, coward hiding behind his precious anonymity.
Satellite, yes, but the solution in question here is designed for cable tv, it seems. So broadcasting cable-quality video over the internet is a lot easier than satellite quality.
:) To me, comparing to my analog cable (On a Sony Wega TV), the sample I provided looks a lot better.
If you think this looks like VHS, I'd love to have your VCR, I've never seen a recordable VHS tape that looked half this good
It's possible... DivX also supports preprocessing, but I left it off.
As per my previous reply, I decided to post a sample image from the test I ran.
First, an explanation. I compressed using single-pass encoding, since you can't do multipass on realtime content, and I wanted to be fair.
The video source was 640x352, and was compressed at 352x480. Unmodified DivX postprocessing was enabled.
The screenshot here you see is, on the left, the original, and on the right, the original stretched out to 640x480.
My conclusions:
1) The test would have been much better with higher quality source. My source should have had 480 lines of resolution, since I was stretching the file from 352 lines to 480 lines. Higher quality source uncompressed source would have led to much higher quality test results.
2) The image looks much sharper than what you typically see on analog cable TV.
And now the image (Sorry for the uncompressed TIF, I don't have a good PNG encoder handy, I did this all on a laptop from a classroom):
http://teknews.net/~guspaz/sample.TIF
Yes, as I said, that's with discarding every other field/frame for deinterlacing, which knocks that 483 (Let's call it 480 for simplicity) down to about 240.
Of course, if you do good deinterlacing (I like motion compensated), you end up with that 480.
Still, analog cable doesn't get you 640 horizontal resolution. And this device is dealing with only analog cable.
You only get 640x480 AFTER you stretch the image to a 4:3 aspect ratio. But that's just the display res, there is no requirement to compress at that resolution. So TV would require something like half the bandwidth of true 640x480 video.
TV quality can certainly be acheived on 640x480 content at 768kbit, cut that in half, and, hey, look at that, we have 384kbit.
Cringley does indeed say that the feed is at 384kbit. However that is merely what he was told. Did he personally check a bandwidth graph to confirm that that was in fact the bandwidth being used? We've seen to many fraudulant magical compression demos to be fully trusting and accepting of that.
Schaffer said that his advances are in his pre-processing, not his compression. I don't think a video preprocessor is worth 6000$, certainly not when there are quite a few preprocessors out there that can probably do the same thing (Though, not knowing WHAT his preprocessor does...)
In the interest of fairness, I encoded some video at 352x480 at 384kbit. I was using DivX 5 Pro, which isn't the best codec out there, but it was what I had lying around.
The result of that test looked BETTER than what I see on standard cable TV. Which indicates to me that:
1) 384kbit is enough for TV quality
2) You can do what Schaffer is doing with regular MPEG-4 codecs
3) Analog cable sucks, and I need satellite TV
Who said anything about 640x480? That's significantly above TV quality, which is 352x240 if I recall correctly. And you can get pretty close to broadcast quality at 384kbit at that resolution.
Of course, that's assuming that you're discarding every other frame to do the deinterlacing. If you had a good motion compensated deinterlacer, you'd need a higher bitrate.
Also, please note that his solution doesn't use 384kbit, that's only the lowest usable setting. The site says that you need more bandwidth than that to get decent quality.
Some interesting things in there:
1) HydroQuebec exports almost a third of the energy
2) Either I'm stupid, or the gov't is, because they think HydroQuebec is exporting "Hydraulic" energy. Don't they mean "Hydro electric"?
No, I haven't, did you bother reaing the /. story? Let me quote a section for you:
It's basically MPEG-4, improved upon, that allows for what he calls 'best of class' streaming video over a normal broadband connection.
I said he probably is using somebody elses codec without improving on it. I think my position that this device of his isn't special in any way is pretty clear.
I suppose, I have no experience with IR devices or netcat. But from what I understand of it, that might do the trick.
I just compressed high quality content at 320x240 with 384kbit (to MPEG-4) There were very not really any visible artifacts. The guy here claims that his capture card is special not because he has special MPEG-4 (Indeed, he probably uses a standard MPEG-4 encoder chip), but instead some sort of special pre-processing he does. That can be done in software, it doesn't require a 6000$ card.
Compress what? The video? Any standard free MPEG-4 encoder will do just as good a job as this guy's box, based on his stated bandwidth requirements.
Because the capture cards don't appear to do to anything a much cheaper capture card and SFF can't do.
Not even close. 1mbit good MPEG-4 video is near-DVD quality. As in, few artifacts at near-DVD res.
TV, we're talking 320x240 or thereabouts. Half the macroblocks, it stands to reason that roughly half the bitrate would give similar quality.
That said, the site claims that you should have MORE than 384kbit upstream to get good results. Half of 1mbit is 500kbit, and 500kbit is a bit more than 384kbit, so this is right in line with standard MPEG-4. Apply postprocessing on the decoding end and 500kbit would look great.
In addition, by "Most cable ISPs" I assume you mean the US, which is, to be honest, broadband backwater, and not a good example of typical upload speeds. For example, accross eastern canada speeds for DSL and cable range from 800 to 900kbit pre-overhead, for even the most basic connections.
That's the point, I don't see anything new about this thing. I could put together a box to do much the same thing for a hell of a lot less, and it'd do it just as good (Though changing the channel would require remote desktop or some custom code)
With a good XviD encode, considering this is TV res here (Can't remember the exact res, but about 320x240, or 320x480 if it's interlaced), I would imagine with a post processor that somewhere aroud 500 to 750 kbit MPEG-4 would provide the same quality as this guy's solution. And considering how he says that you need at least 384kbit upstream, but will do better with more (Read that as you need more to get his level of quality), it seems that his compression is no better than xvid. In fact, he probably took somebody elses MPEG-4 codec that was either already streamable, or took something like XviD and made it streamable... which isn't that hard to do.
I did RTFA, and I still didn't see anything special here. The quality issues with streaming video isn't the capture card (Fine, maybe you'd need a 100$ capture card instead of a 30$ capture card, but not 6000), but with the actual compression itself. And I highly doubt that this solution, considering how hacked together it is, contains a revolutionary new video codec that could substantially improve quality.
I can't think of anything this special capture card might do that would be worth anything over a normal capture card. Even a hardware MPEG-4 encoder would be pointless considering how this device is a regular PC and can encode in software without problem.
This "TV2Me" device is just a standard SFF PC with a TV tuner (http://spaceshift.net/images/pvs.jpg). And yet he charges 6500$ US for this.
Is it just me, or could I put together a box with all the same hardware for under 500$ US?
The ONLY unique thing about this thing is the streaming of the remote control over the net. Is that feature really worth $6000 US? I mean, it's just a convienience to avoid using remote desktop to change the channel.
So again, seems like either a scam or ripoff to me.
The concept sounds great, but this card looks to be incredibly slow. What's the good of an opensource 3D card if you can't use it to run any modern games?