Of course there's barely 4 channels worth of HD I'd want to record at once
The system only supports recording two streams at once. That's two OTA digital TV streams, two satellite streams, or one of each. Any combination of HD and SD.
The average consumer cares little about sound quality.
Nonsense. The average consumer cares very much about sound quality. It's just that for the average consumer, sound quality is a binary value. Either it sounds good or it doesn't. It's boolean.
Some people think sound quality needs to be described using a 64-bit long long, so they can talk with great precision about just exactly how good something sounds. These people are whackos and are best ignored.
An MP3 at 128 kbps does not sound good. It gets a zero in the sound quality column. An MP3 at 192 kbps, or an AAC at 128 kbps, sounds good. It gets a one.
The average consumer cares very much about sound quality. They just don't bother describing it with a great deal of precision.
...in the US political sense a war is formally declared against a country
The War of 1812; the Mexican-American War, 1846; the Spanish-American War, 1898; the First World War, 1917; the Second World War, 1941.
Those are the five formal declarations of war that have passed the Congress of the United States. There are some interesting omissions from that list, don't you think? The Civil War, for example, is not on that list. At no time was a declaration of war issued from the Congress regarding the little unpleasantness between 1861 and 1865. That nastiness on the Korean peninsula that started in 1950? Also conspicuously absent.
Between the non-wars of, for example, 1861-1865 and 1950-present and the formally declared wars cited above we have events that can best be described as "Congressionally authorized uses of military force." These include all instances in which the Congress of the United States has authorized the waging of war without a formal declaration of war. There are 11 such instances in our history: the undeclared war with France, 1798; the first Barbary War, 1801; the second Barbary War, 1815; the African slave war, 1820; the war with Paraguay, 1859; the first Lebanese civil war, 1958; the war in Vietnam, 1964; the second Lebanese civil war, 1982; the liberation of Kuwait, 1991; the Afghanistan war, 2001; and the liberation of Iraq, 2003.
Please define the differences, practical, ethical, or moral, between, for example, the Spanish-American War and the Civil War.
However, that doesn't stop all our politicians and the talking heads on the news from saying we are at war with several different things, such as drugs (inanimate objects), terrorism (acts of killing), or the one that grates on my nerve the most: "The War on Terror(tm)" Terror is a feeling, a state of mind...are they actually suggesting that they are going to fight a war against people being deathly afraid?
Your failure to understand the intricacies of the English language is not the problem here. If you lack the capacity to grasp the meanings of simple phrases, then obviously the problem lies with you yourself.
In other words, jackass, if you don't understand what the verbal shorthand "war on terror" means, then you need to stop complaining and crack a fucking newspaper once in a while. Join us here in the 21st century before opening your goddamn pie-hole.
There is no war in Iraq unless congress formally declares war, which hasn't happened.
Wrong. War, by definition, is a state of armed conflict. Therefore whenever and wherever a state of armed conflict exists, there is war. There is war in Iraq. There is war in Afghanistan. There is war in Madrid, in Gaza, in Damascus, in London.
Next, even if it had been a war, it's now over.
Also wrong, for obvious reasons. As of 9:40 EDT, the body-count in today's murder-bombings in Basrah is up to 68.
The absolute worst thing that can happen right now is for the world to slip into a state of complacency about this. This level of violent conflict is not acceptable. It's not tolerable. It's war, all-out war between those who want peace, liberty, and prosperity and those who want medieval theocracy.
The sooner we get ourselves onto a proper war footing, the sooner we'll be able to bring this conflict to an end and go back to living in a time when detonating a bomb in front of a police station is a tragedy of epic proportions, not just another fucking day at the office.
If by "better looks" you mean "could have come out of a cereal box in the mid-1980's when the 'Transformers' were the absolute pinnacle of industrial design for the under-12 set," then yes, better looks indeed.
Speaking solely for myself, I prefer something that doesn't look like it came out of the "open box" bin at the Fry's in Lomo Alto.
Much too low; 12-bit RGB, meaning a total of 36 bits per frame, or more often 10-bit logarithmic, meaning 30 bits per frame.
lossless (optimistic) 4:1 compression
No compression.
and 24fps
You got that part right.:-)
a 2 hour movie takes up over 1.8TiB
A 4K frame is about 45 MB. (Which is one reason you almost always work at 2K in post-production; a 2K frame is only 12 MB.)
If you figure that there are 86,400 frames in 60 minutes of film, that comes to about 3.8 TB per hour.
Is it just a box of 300GB tapes, or do they have something even cooler?
Something even cooler. Disk arrays are quite cheap now, in dollars per terabyte.
To move such stuff around, you use DLT, though. A reel of 35 mm film is limited to about 20 minutes, so the most you'd ever need to feed your film recorder at one time is about 1.2 TB.
Jesus Christ, this post and the ones following it are stunning in the sheer amount of misinformation contained in them.
When you scan a 35 mm frame at 4K resolution, you end up with a Cineon file that's 4,096 pixels by 3,112 pixels, using 48 bits per pixel to describe the red, green, and blue channels (12 bits each).
It's NOT dots-per-inch. It's not lines-per-inch. It's not anything per inch; there are no inches involved.
4K means 4096x3112 out of a 35 mm film frame, just as 2K means 2048x1556 out of the same 35 mm frame. That's it.
Could any (well, all) of those features not be compensated for with some of the $1,000+ one saves buying the PC?
Sure. But in that case, you're not saving all of that money, are you? You're having to spend it to get what you want.
As for the FSB, the PC has a faster CPU anyway, so the FSB isn't going to catch the Mac up.
Uh...;-)
If things like 8X AGP are really worth $1,000 then buy the Mac. But I think it's a disservice to say Macs are a better value than PCs.
When you buy a Mac, you generally get more stuff--more features, more software, the whole package--for the money. Therefore, by any objective measurement, the Mac is a better value, where value refers to amount of stuff obtained per dollar spent.
Also lacking in the Dell: ports for 802.11g and Bluetooth, FireWire 400 or 800, optical audio I/O ports, AGP 8X, and a capacity of 4 GB of RAM.
You proved the poster's point: yes, you can build a PC that has fewer features and costs less than a Mac. But you can't find a PC that is feature-comparable to a Mac and yet costs significantly less.
(The 1.6 GHz G5 is kind of a waste of money, anyway. It only has room for 4 GB of RAM as opposed to 8 GB in the other G5's, and it doesn't have PCI-X. The 1.8 GHz is a better value.)
Your response here, based on the normal Slashdot way of doing things, should be something along the lines of, "Nobody needs FireWire anyway, 'cause USB is faster." Or something like that.
HDV 720p is 19Mbps and the other formats are 25Mbps.
Ce n'est pas correct, mon petit frere. Regular DV/DVC/DVCAM/DVCPRO is approximately 25 Mbps. There's a 50 Mbps variant called DVCPRO50. (The 25 Mbps variant is 4:1:1; the 50 Mbps variant is 4:2:2. If this means nothing to you, don't worry about it.)
There is no 720p variant of DVCPRO-HD. The DVCPRO-HD format anamorphically encodes either 1280x720 or 1920x1080 into 1280x1080 with 8-bit samples (4:2:2) at 100 Mbps.
I suppose you work with 1.5 gigabit digital video streams, then? I doubt it.
Sure. HD-SDI, i.e., SMPTE-292. Look around on the back of your HDCAM or D-5 deck. See that coaxial port? That's what it is. That's the transport for uncompressed HD. That's the video signal we use to get HD into our Smoke and our Fire.
If you've got enough disk bandwidth, it's trivial to export uncompressed HD from Smoke as a QuickTime and bring it into Final Cut. I've done it several times, when circumstances demanded it; I did not have enough disk bandwidth, but I wasn't working in real-time, so it didn't matter.
Sorry, I do know what I'm talking about.
Not from where I'm sitting, bud. No offense, but nope. Not from here.
Products like Shake that are meant for using massive render farms
Interestingly, Shake has including ad-hoc grid computing for some time now. Any two Shake machines on the network can use each other for distributed rendering, all automatically and with zero configuration.
Apple factored out this aspect of Shake and is now distributing it as a general-purpose grid computing toolkit under the name Xgrid.
They make it sound like realtime HD over firewire is some big deal until you realize it's just 19Mbps HDV video
Wrong. HD over FireWire is 100 Mbps. It's only after the program content has been sent to the transmitter that HD gets squeezed all the way down to 19 Mbps. In production, the bit rates are 50-100 times higher than that.
(Real men deal with uncompressed SMPTE-292, of course. Gigabit and a half per second, thank you very much.)
I'm completely off-topic, but I'm gonna get this out there in this thread anyway: the notion of a presidential vacation is a fucking joke. The president is on vacation right now; he's was at his ranch yesterday. What did he do? He got up before sunrise for about half a dozen of his regular daily briefings. He met with senior staff over breakfast. He made about a hundred phone calls. And, oh yeah, he spent half the day with the president of Egypt.
And that's a day off.
I think it's about time we put the whole "presidential vacation" meme to bed.
This has nothing to do with apple, itunes, or ipod. This is all fair use vs. DMCA.
No. Wrong. Totally wrong.
It's not about engaging a fight, or even a debate, on fair use vs. the DMCA. If that were the case, the person or persons responsible for this would have stood their ground and made an argument.
We have a system for dealing with bad laws. These laws are challenged in court, and a judge or panel of judges decides whether the law should continue to apply, be narrowed in scope, or be stricken entirely from the books. Did the Playfair... what do you call it? Organization? Whatever. Did the Playfair Dude engage that system? Did they raise the level of debate, or seek restitution in a court?
No.
They ran and hid. They slipped through a loophole into the dank, seamy underbelly of the Internet. (No offense to the Indians who are hosting the project. I don't mean the site; I mean the behavior.)
The Playfair Dude did precisely what you'd expect an trafficker in illegal goods to do.
What about the facility to burn MP3 CD's from protected AAC tracks? Right now we can burn audio CD's, but to folks with car stereos with MP3-CD support, plain old audio CD's aren't as cool.
Yes, you could pop the MP3-CD in any computer and pull the MP3's off, but the same is true of an audio CD: it can be re-ripped to any format.
The point is, the Playfair person or persons never sat down and said, "Here's what I want to be able to do. I do not want to enable people to pirate iTunes music, nor do I want to break the law. What's the solution?"
Come on, man. You'd imagine that anybody who could create something like Playfair must be at least fairly bright. A person like that should jump at the chance to solve that kind of tricky, complex problem.
Brute-forcing an illegal solution is neither elegant, nor impressive. It's just lame. Taking it off-shore to avoid legal entanglements is both lame and cowardly.
But can you decompile iTunes and use it for your own purposes? I don't think so.
Don't need to. Apple provides you with a complete and stunningly rich API for accessing all sorts of encoding and playback functions. It's called QuickTime.
But I'm also not foolish enough to spend $300 on something that's just going to be a piece of rubbish in a few years.
Some people value their time and their satisfaction more than others.
But don't try and dissuade others from choosing an alternative that is substantially better for their own needs.
Never did. I'm simply pointing out that marketing Ogg on the premise that it's free is pointless, because programs like iTunes, which support superior codecs than Ogg, are also free. It's not a winning strategy, you see, to claim to be good and free when your competitor can claim to be better and free.
Everyone else can have their end-use,r prepackaged middling quality products. You are more than welcome to buy into that.
Love the smug sense of superiority you ooze. Keep that up; it really works for you.
Rather than working with Apple to try to resolve their differences, whomever is responsible for this little hack (the person or persons responsible refuse to attach their name to their work or their collateral) decided to just slip through what many perceive as a loophole in the law.
This does nothing to legitimize the hack or the idea behind it. Rather, it does just the opposite: it makes it clear to all interested parties that the person or persons behind this are more interested in finding ways to subvert the system than working within it to improve it.
Apple's support for "fair use" is obvious. They specifically added features to iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto that allow you to use purchased or ripped music in your own media projects, even if the tracks you want to use are protected by FairPlay.
Doing this kind of end-run around Apple, instead of working with them to come to a resolution, completely de-legitimizes the whole effort for me, and I'm sure for many others.
If you want to assume the moral high ground--"I don't believe the majority of the people who use my program will use it so that they can share their files on Kazaa."--then you'd damn well better stick to it, instead of cutting and running for the sewer at the first sign of trouble.
In 1850, if a slaveowner wanted to give one of his slaves as a gift to his son at no charge, would the slave have automatically become a free man?
Hey, neat. That was really cool, the way you deliberately chose to misunderstand the meaning of a word in a given context to try to advance your little agenda. That's really awesome. I've never seen anything like that before. You're so cool. When I grow up I wanna be just like you.
True, anybody can download the iTunes software, but what's the point of downloading a program available only for Mac OS or Microsoft Windows OS if you don't have a Macintosh computer or a Windows license?
The point is that you don't have to pay for it. It's free.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course there's barely 4 channels worth of HD I'd want to record at once
The system only supports recording two streams at once. That's two OTA digital TV streams, two satellite streams, or one of each. Any combination of HD and SD.
The average consumer cares little about sound quality.
Nonsense. The average consumer cares very much about sound quality. It's just that for the average consumer, sound quality is a binary value. Either it sounds good or it doesn't. It's boolean.
Some people think sound quality needs to be described using a 64-bit long long, so they can talk with great precision about just exactly how good something sounds. These people are whackos and are best ignored.
An MP3 at 128 kbps does not sound good. It gets a zero in the sound quality column. An MP3 at 192 kbps, or an AAC at 128 kbps, sounds good. It gets a one.
The average consumer cares very much about sound quality. They just don't bother describing it with a great deal of precision.
...in the US political sense a war is formally declared against a country
The War of 1812; the Mexican-American War, 1846; the Spanish-American War, 1898; the First World War, 1917; the Second World War, 1941.
Those are the five formal declarations of war that have passed the Congress of the United States. There are some interesting omissions from that list, don't you think? The Civil War, for example, is not on that list. At no time was a declaration of war issued from the Congress regarding the little unpleasantness between 1861 and 1865. That nastiness on the Korean peninsula that started in 1950? Also conspicuously absent.
Between the non-wars of, for example, 1861-1865 and 1950-present and the formally declared wars cited above we have events that can best be described as "Congressionally authorized uses of military force." These include all instances in which the Congress of the United States has authorized the waging of war without a formal declaration of war. There are 11 such instances in our history: the undeclared war with France, 1798; the first Barbary War, 1801; the second Barbary War, 1815; the African slave war, 1820; the war with Paraguay, 1859; the first Lebanese civil war, 1958; the war in Vietnam, 1964; the second Lebanese civil war, 1982; the liberation of Kuwait, 1991; the Afghanistan war, 2001; and the liberation of Iraq, 2003.
Please define the differences, practical, ethical, or moral, between, for example, the Spanish-American War and the Civil War.
However, that doesn't stop all our politicians and the talking heads on the news from saying we are at war with several different things, such as drugs (inanimate objects), terrorism (acts of killing), or the one that grates on my nerve the most: "The War on Terror(tm)" Terror is a feeling, a state of mind...are they actually suggesting that they are going to fight a war against people being deathly afraid?
Your failure to understand the intricacies of the English language is not the problem here. If you lack the capacity to grasp the meanings of simple phrases, then obviously the problem lies with you yourself.
In other words, jackass, if you don't understand what the verbal shorthand "war on terror" means, then you need to stop complaining and crack a fucking newspaper once in a while. Join us here in the 21st century before opening your goddamn pie-hole.
There is no war in Iraq unless congress formally declares war, which hasn't happened.
Wrong. War, by definition, is a state of armed conflict. Therefore whenever and wherever a state of armed conflict exists, there is war. There is war in Iraq. There is war in Afghanistan. There is war in Madrid, in Gaza, in Damascus, in London.
Next, even if it had been a war, it's now over.
Also wrong, for obvious reasons. As of 9:40 EDT, the body-count in today's murder-bombings in Basrah is up to 68.
The absolute worst thing that can happen right now is for the world to slip into a state of complacency about this. This level of violent conflict is not acceptable. It's not tolerable. It's war, all-out war between those who want peace, liberty, and prosperity and those who want medieval theocracy.
The sooner we get ourselves onto a proper war footing, the sooner we'll be able to bring this conflict to an end and go back to living in a time when detonating a bomb in front of a police station is a tragedy of epic proportions, not just another fucking day at the office.
If by "better looks" you mean "could have come out of a cereal box in the mid-1980's when the 'Transformers' were the absolute pinnacle of industrial design for the under-12 set," then yes, better looks indeed.
Speaking solely for myself, I prefer something that doesn't look like it came out of the "open box" bin at the Fry's in Lomo Alto.
there's nothing wrong with expressing the scan resolution in terms of pixels per inch
There is when the number "4K DPI" or "4K PPI" or "4K LPI" is involved.
Anyway, your math must be off in a way that I don't feel like tracking down, as 4K scans use square pixels.
Uh, you do know that P4 had 800 FSB long before the G5 was even announced, much less actually shipped?
Then it should be no problem to find a competitively priced Dell with a comparable system bus.
You can also build a PC that has MORE features and STILL costs less than a Mac.
Find one, please.
A good P4 whitebox built by any local shop
Er, no thanks. I'm looking for something with a parts-and-labor warranty.
4000x4000 image
:-)
4096x3112, in Cineon format
24 bit color (too low?)
Much too low; 12-bit RGB, meaning a total of 36 bits per frame, or more often 10-bit logarithmic, meaning 30 bits per frame.
lossless (optimistic) 4:1 compression
No compression.
and 24fps
You got that part right.
a 2 hour movie takes up over 1.8TiB
A 4K frame is about 45 MB. (Which is one reason you almost always work at 2K in post-production; a 2K frame is only 12 MB.)
If you figure that there are 86,400 frames in 60 minutes of film, that comes to about 3.8 TB per hour.
Is it just a box of 300GB tapes, or do they have something even cooler?
Something even cooler. Disk arrays are quite cheap now, in dollars per terabyte.
To move such stuff around, you use DLT, though. A reel of 35 mm film is limited to about 20 minutes, so the most you'd ever need to feed your film recorder at one time is about 1.2 TB.
Jesus Christ, this post and the ones following it are stunning in the sheer amount of misinformation contained in them.
When you scan a 35 mm frame at 4K resolution, you end up with a Cineon file that's 4,096 pixels by 3,112 pixels, using 48 bits per pixel to describe the red, green, and blue channels (12 bits each).
It's NOT dots-per-inch. It's not lines-per-inch. It's not anything per inch; there are no inches involved.
4K means 4096x3112 out of a 35 mm film frame, just as 2K means 2048x1556 out of the same 35 mm frame. That's it.
Could any (well, all) of those features not be compensated for with some of the $1,000+ one saves buying the PC?
;-)
Sure. But in that case, you're not saving all of that money, are you? You're having to spend it to get what you want.
As for the FSB, the PC has a faster CPU anyway, so the FSB isn't going to catch the Mac up.
Uh...
If things like 8X AGP are really worth $1,000 then buy the Mac. But I think it's a disservice to say Macs are a better value than PCs.
When you buy a Mac, you generally get more stuff--more features, more software, the whole package--for the money. Therefore, by any objective measurement, the Mac is a better value, where value refers to amount of stuff obtained per dollar spent.
Dell: 533 MHz FSB
Mac: 800 MHz FSB
Dell: ATA/100
Mac: SATA
Dell: 100 Mbps Ethernet
Mac: Gigabit Ethernet
Also lacking in the Dell: ports for 802.11g and Bluetooth, FireWire 400 or 800, optical audio I/O ports, AGP 8X, and a capacity of 4 GB of RAM.
You proved the poster's point: yes, you can build a PC that has fewer features and costs less than a Mac. But you can't find a PC that is feature-comparable to a Mac and yet costs significantly less.
(The 1.6 GHz G5 is kind of a waste of money, anyway. It only has room for 4 GB of RAM as opposed to 8 GB in the other G5's, and it doesn't have PCI-X. The 1.8 GHz is a better value.)
Your response here, based on the normal Slashdot way of doing things, should be something along the lines of, "Nobody needs FireWire anyway, 'cause USB is faster." Or something like that.
HDV 720p is 19Mbps and the other formats are 25Mbps.
Ce n'est pas correct, mon petit frere. Regular DV/DVC/DVCAM/DVCPRO is approximately 25 Mbps. There's a 50 Mbps variant called DVCPRO50. (The 25 Mbps variant is 4:1:1; the 50 Mbps variant is 4:2:2. If this means nothing to you, don't worry about it.)
There is no 720p variant of DVCPRO-HD. The DVCPRO-HD format anamorphically encodes either 1280x720 or 1920x1080 into 1280x1080 with 8-bit samples (4:2:2) at 100 Mbps.
I suppose you work with 1.5 gigabit digital video streams, then? I doubt it.
Sure. HD-SDI, i.e., SMPTE-292. Look around on the back of your HDCAM or D-5 deck. See that coaxial port? That's what it is. That's the transport for uncompressed HD. That's the video signal we use to get HD into our Smoke and our Fire.
If you've got enough disk bandwidth, it's trivial to export uncompressed HD from Smoke as a QuickTime and bring it into Final Cut. I've done it several times, when circumstances demanded it; I did not have enough disk bandwidth, but I wasn't working in real-time, so it didn't matter.
Sorry, I do know what I'm talking about.
Not from where I'm sitting, bud. No offense, but nope. Not from here.
Yes, and it's important that we all remember just how much a couple of rich, white guys from Massachusetts have in common with Rosa Parks.
Xsan is Apple's branded port of CVFS.
Products like Shake that are meant for using massive render farms
Interestingly, Shake has including ad-hoc grid computing for some time now. Any two Shake machines on the network can use each other for distributed rendering, all automatically and with zero configuration.
Apple factored out this aspect of Shake and is now distributing it as a general-purpose grid computing toolkit under the name Xgrid.
They make it sound like realtime HD over firewire is some big deal until you realize it's just 19Mbps HDV video
Wrong. HD over FireWire is 100 Mbps. It's only after the program content has been sent to the transmitter that HD gets squeezed all the way down to 19 Mbps. In production, the bit rates are 50-100 times higher than that.
(Real men deal with uncompressed SMPTE-292, of course. Gigabit and a half per second, thank you very much.)
You shouldn't comment on what you don't know.
Right back atcha.
Xsan is Apple's port of ADIC's CVFS (or "StorNext" as they took to calling it a while back) to Mac OS X, with new administration tools.
A CVFS client on Window, Solaris, whatever, will plug right into an Xsan network.
Is it still called "reverse engineering" when the protocol specification has been public for nearly a year?
It's called DAAP, and it was hardly a secret.
Except for the part about being true.
I'm completely off-topic, but I'm gonna get this out there in this thread anyway: the notion of a presidential vacation is a fucking joke. The president is on vacation right now; he's was at his ranch yesterday. What did he do? He got up before sunrise for about half a dozen of his regular daily briefings. He met with senior staff over breakfast. He made about a hundred phone calls. And, oh yeah, he spent half the day with the president of Egypt.
And that's a day off.
I think it's about time we put the whole "presidential vacation" meme to bed.
This has nothing to do with apple, itunes, or ipod. This is all fair use vs. DMCA.
No. Wrong. Totally wrong.
It's not about engaging a fight, or even a debate, on fair use vs. the DMCA. If that were the case, the person or persons responsible for this would have stood their ground and made an argument.
We have a system for dealing with bad laws. These laws are challenged in court, and a judge or panel of judges decides whether the law should continue to apply, be narrowed in scope, or be stricken entirely from the books. Did the Playfair... what do you call it? Organization? Whatever. Did the Playfair Dude engage that system? Did they raise the level of debate, or seek restitution in a court?
No.
They ran and hid. They slipped through a loophole into the dank, seamy underbelly of the Internet. (No offense to the Indians who are hosting the project. I don't mean the site; I mean the behavior.)
The Playfair Dude did precisely what you'd expect an trafficker in illegal goods to do.
And that was a dumb-ass mistake.
Use your imagination.
What about the facility to burn MP3 CD's from protected AAC tracks? Right now we can burn audio CD's, but to folks with car stereos with MP3-CD support, plain old audio CD's aren't as cool.
Yes, you could pop the MP3-CD in any computer and pull the MP3's off, but the same is true of an audio CD: it can be re-ripped to any format.
The point is, the Playfair person or persons never sat down and said, "Here's what I want to be able to do. I do not want to enable people to pirate iTunes music, nor do I want to break the law. What's the solution?"
Come on, man. You'd imagine that anybody who could create something like Playfair must be at least fairly bright. A person like that should jump at the chance to solve that kind of tricky, complex problem.
Brute-forcing an illegal solution is neither elegant, nor impressive. It's just lame. Taking it off-shore to avoid legal entanglements is both lame and cowardly.
Who needs the infinite compassion of Ganesha when you have Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman staring back at you with their dead eyes?
But can you decompile iTunes and use it for your own purposes? I don't think so.
Don't need to. Apple provides you with a complete and stunningly rich API for accessing all sorts of encoding and playback functions. It's called QuickTime.
But I'm also not foolish enough to spend $300 on something that's just going to be a piece of rubbish in a few years.
Some people value their time and their satisfaction more than others.
But don't try and dissuade others from choosing an alternative that is substantially better for their own needs.
Never did. I'm simply pointing out that marketing Ogg on the premise that it's free is pointless, because programs like iTunes, which support superior codecs than Ogg, are also free. It's not a winning strategy, you see, to claim to be good and free when your competitor can claim to be better and free.
Everyone else can have their end-use,r prepackaged middling quality products. You are more than welcome to buy into that.
Love the smug sense of superiority you ooze. Keep that up; it really works for you.
This was exactly the wrong thing to do.
Rather than working with Apple to try to resolve their differences, whomever is responsible for this little hack (the person or persons responsible refuse to attach their name to their work or their collateral) decided to just slip through what many perceive as a loophole in the law.
This does nothing to legitimize the hack or the idea behind it. Rather, it does just the opposite: it makes it clear to all interested parties that the person or persons behind this are more interested in finding ways to subvert the system than working within it to improve it.
Apple's support for "fair use" is obvious. They specifically added features to iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto that allow you to use purchased or ripped music in your own media projects, even if the tracks you want to use are protected by FairPlay.
Doing this kind of end-run around Apple, instead of working with them to come to a resolution, completely de-legitimizes the whole effort for me, and I'm sure for many others.
If you want to assume the moral high ground--"I don't believe the majority of the people who use my program will use it so that they can share their files on Kazaa."--then you'd damn well better stick to it, instead of cutting and running for the sewer at the first sign of trouble.
Dumb, dumb.
In 1850, if a slaveowner wanted to give one of his slaves as a gift to his son at no charge, would the slave have automatically become a free man?
Hey, neat. That was really cool, the way you deliberately chose to misunderstand the meaning of a word in a given context to try to advance your little agenda. That's really awesome. I've never seen anything like that before. You're so cool. When I grow up I wanna be just like you.
True, anybody can download the iTunes software, but what's the point of downloading a program available only for Mac OS or Microsoft Windows OS if you don't have a Macintosh computer or a Windows license?
The point is that you don't have to pay for it. It's free.
Does AAC beat Ogg Vorbis at 128 kbps?
Handily.