Not that this is a bad thing at all, but RealVideo 10 is actually an enhanced version--I imagine this might be an understatement--of RealVideo 9, also known as RV9 EHQ (as mentioned on the Doom9 forums). I'm glad to see that people generally aren't misinformedly bashing Real's codecs.
Since you can tell from the forum activity that people are actually testing this stuff out in the open, you know that the tweaking will actually improve things--I remember when WMAv8 came out a while ago, it sounded a lot worse to me than the previous versions because the psychoacoustics were so aggressive about cutting out frequencies.
I agree that hinting too little has been a problem with past versions of OS X, but whatever they added between Jaguar and Panther (I guess Apple prefers to call it "micro-pixel positioning") has done a lot to clean up the color problems that existed before. I noticed the difference the first time Panther booted, and the appearance of small fonts in particular is much more readable now.
While some/.ers seem to be invoking the phrase to refer to the music that's being broadcast, I can't help but wonder the same thing about how the music would be processed for HD radio. Currently, there are a bunch of filters applied to music before it's broadcast over FM radio (this was mentioned on Hydrogenaudio) to increase subjective audio quality. Of course, this tends to mean making it louder, adding more base, and otherwise destroying what little dynamics there might have been in the recording.
I can only hope that if HD radio gets widely adopted, stations begin to reexamine their filtering to see what sounds good on the other end.
Well, according to the product site, it's only 40% smaller by volume, and only about half an inch smaller on both height and width.
I was kind of hoping that they would find some ingenious way of cutting the size in addition to making things smaller (the click wheel is a good idea, though).
I guess this is a tiny thing compared to the magnitude of the iPod Mini release and GarageBand, but I do hope that Apple has improved the Enhance feature in iPhoto. Granted, I shouldn't really expect something on the caliber of Photoshop's Auto Color (which, while not perfect, has surprised me a few times), but it can't hurt to hope.
The article was actually submitted with a partner=GOOGLE parameter in the link, so all of that NY Times registration junk wouldn't have come up, anyway.
Well, based on reading the article, WhenU.com offers software that helps people fill out address forms and check weather forecast, while providing you with the aforementioned ads from competitors of the website your visiting. (IMO, neither of these example tasks seems like something that would require a separate program to do, let alone one that hijacks your browser with popups.)
...the spread of the bars on the graph represents the uncertainty of the results, so (even according to those who performed the test and discussed it on HydrogenAudio) it's only fair to declare that one codec is conclusively worse than another when its entire spread lies below another codec's spread. Therefore, the only thing that's for sure is that MP3 is worse than the others. I don't know which samples favor which codecs, but a different set of test samples could have yielded slightly different orderings of the non-MP3 codecs.
That being said, market share is far more of an issue than sound quality.
True, DVD is lossy, but at least get the facts straight: DVD uses MPEG-2, not MPEG-4, and its resolution does make sense in the overall scheme of things, since it matches that of its usual destination, a TV. Also, DVDs can encode movies using progressively-scanned frames and simply mark the video stream to be telecined into the interlaced output that most TVs need.
Here's their about page. Players are more specialized (there's a goalie, for example), and it doesn't use the standard UT2K3 weapon configuration, as the linked page says. I can see how would be a superficial resemblance, though.
All things being equal (source quality, etc.), which they probably aren't, AAC should beat out WMA handily at bitrates like what the iTMS and Wal-Mart are using. The only chance WMA would have of approaching AAC in quality at that bitrate would have been if Wal-Mart had used WMA Pro, but because of the lack of hardware player support for WMA Pro, that probably won't happen soon.
Also, Apple has actually spoken about the quality of the sources that they encode from (the original masters rather than CDs themselves), and Wal-Mart hasn't.
I do hope that whoever elects to actually directly compare the quality of Wal-Mart's music to Apple's doesn't just look at frequency analysis to do it. Apple's AAC lowpasses at 16 KHz, but to use this as some sort of indication of quality is ludicrous.
I downloaded the DivX version of Intel Extreme Edition Challenge to see how the quality compared to the WMV version. However, the conclusions that I've drawn come from the encoding process itself, and really don't concern the particular codec choices themselves. (I should note that Ben Waggoner voiced the same concerns when Modern Day Gamer 2 was released.)
The video could have been compressed a lot smaller (and quite possibly with an increase in quality, to boot), if it had been deinterlaced first--after all, PC monitors are progressive scan--and resized to something smaller and in the proper aspect ratio, like 640x480, instead of leaving it in native PAL resolution as it was here. Also, using non-square pixels requires user intervention to correct during viewing, unless the video was encoded with the pixel aspect ratio stored in the file, which is possible--but not used in this case--for WMV, but not AVI.
Just the small changes of not having to deal with all the little lines created by interlacing, and also having fewer pixels in general to encode would result in a lighter download and less artifacted video for all.
These films have all been great, content-wise, even for a non-team-oriented gamer such as myself, but once in a while, I can't help but wonder what would have been possible at the same download size with just a little bit of filtering and resizing.
Yes, the G5 does have two DP floating-point units, but the Altivec instructions are still single-precision. The Velocity Engine and the FP units are numbers 6 and 7 on the execution core section of Apple's G5 pages, so this is actually something totally different.
Well, that's what happens when you have per-polygon hit detection--it's not just a hitbox anymore. All of a sudden, you have the ability to shoot under people's arms, next to their heads, and between their legs.
I didn't get to play Doom III (didn't go to QuakeCon or anything), but that kind of precision sounds really cool.
The PS2 is capable of outputting DTS in real-time if whoever codes the game cares to devote one of the vector units toward audio encoding. EA has done this with a couple of games, like SSX Tricky, for example.
...was intended to do the exact opposite of what Greg was talking about. The people who created it thought that Q3 was too newbie oriented with the way it handled its armor and health (counting back down to 100 anytime it went over 100) and weapon switching delay. It's interesting that the creators of CPMA take pride in the fact that CPMA can heavily segregate people based on skill.
Just thought I'd mention that it goes the other way as well, and clearly some people want it that way.
The Max Payne guy (at least the one whose face was used in the first Max Payne) wasn't an actor at all. He was Sam Lake, one of the writers for Remedy, which is based in Finland. You can actually see Sam in the picture of Remedy's staff at the back of the Max Payne manual.
Slashdot, isn't it time to update icons?
on
Apple Chromes Its Logo
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· Score: 0, Redundant
The Apple logo has changed, and it looks like there ought to be large enough copies of the logo floating around for you to make a site icon. For that matter, shouldn't the picture for Desktops (Apple) be updated, too? The look of Apple's desktops has been revised twice (mirrored-front/wind-tunnel, and of course, the G5) since your icon was made...
Mentioned on the Blue's News link, but not here, since I imagine that not everyone will read all the articles. Seeing as they were all from Willits and Hollenshead's demonstrations at QuakeCon, I'm not surprised that most of the articles are similar, if not identical, in content.
I'm even more curious as to how people play Unreal Tournament without an alt-fire key on the mouse. It just wouldn't be a shock combo if you had to go to the keyboard to launch the ball.
What do people use the other buttons for in Quake, anyway? I feel like I could get by with one button. Now, touchpad Quake, that's a totally different thing...
Slashdot Mirror
Not that this is a bad thing at all, but RealVideo 10 is actually an enhanced version--I imagine this might be an understatement--of RealVideo 9, also known as RV9 EHQ (as mentioned on the Doom9 forums). I'm glad to see that people generally aren't misinformedly bashing Real's codecs.
Since you can tell from the forum activity that people are actually testing this stuff out in the open, you know that the tweaking will actually improve things--I remember when WMAv8 came out a while ago, it sounded a lot worse to me than the previous versions because the psychoacoustics were so aggressive about cutting out frequencies.
I agree that hinting too little has been a problem with past versions of OS X, but whatever they added between Jaguar and Panther (I guess Apple prefers to call it "micro-pixel positioning") has done a lot to clean up the color problems that existed before. I noticed the difference the first time Panther booted, and the appearance of small fonts in particular is much more readable now.
Didn't Doom and Quake have user-selectable difficulty levels? Not sure how that would be adaptive, really.
While some /.ers seem to be invoking the phrase to refer to the music that's being broadcast, I can't help but wonder the same thing about how the music would be processed for HD radio. Currently, there are a bunch of filters applied to music before it's broadcast over FM radio (this was mentioned on Hydrogenaudio) to increase subjective audio quality. Of course, this tends to mean making it louder, adding more base, and otherwise destroying what little dynamics there might have been in the recording.
I can only hope that if HD radio gets widely adopted, stations begin to reexamine their filtering to see what sounds good on the other end.
...according to the tech specs.
The 20GB iPod come with a wired remote, carrying case (with belt clip), and the iPod dock (as opposed to just the cable).
Buy a 15GB iPod, and you'll end up making up for most of the difference if, later on, you decide you want any of those accessories.
Of course, back when the 15GB was only 10GB, this was an even bigger reason to step up one level.
Well, according to the product site, it's only 40% smaller by volume, and only about half an inch smaller on both height and width.
I was kind of hoping that they would find some ingenious way of cutting the size in addition to making things smaller (the click wheel is a good idea, though).
I guess this is a tiny thing compared to the magnitude of the iPod Mini release and GarageBand, but I do hope that Apple has improved the Enhance feature in iPhoto. Granted, I shouldn't really expect something on the caliber of Photoshop's Auto Color (which, while not perfect, has surprised me a few times), but it can't hurt to hope.
The article was actually submitted with a partner=GOOGLE parameter in the link, so all of that NY Times registration junk wouldn't have come up, anyway.
Well, based on reading the article, WhenU.com offers software that helps people fill out address forms and check weather forecast, while providing you with the aforementioned ads from competitors of the website your visiting. (IMO, neither of these example tasks seems like something that would require a separate program to do, let alone one that hijacks your browser with popups.)
...the spread of the bars on the graph represents the uncertainty of the results, so (even according to those who performed the test and discussed it on HydrogenAudio) it's only fair to declare that one codec is conclusively worse than another when its entire spread lies below another codec's spread. Therefore, the only thing that's for sure is that MP3 is worse than the others. I don't know which samples favor which codecs, but a different set of test samples could have yielded slightly different orderings of the non-MP3 codecs.
That being said, market share is far more of an issue than sound quality.
True, DVD is lossy, but at least get the facts straight: DVD uses MPEG-2, not MPEG-4, and its resolution does make sense in the overall scheme of things, since it matches that of its usual destination, a TV. Also, DVDs can encode movies using progressively-scanned frames and simply mark the video stream to be telecined into the interlaced output that most TVs need.
Whoops...I meant for my post to be a reply to this post
Here's their about page. Players are more specialized (there's a goalie, for example), and it doesn't use the standard UT2K3 weapon configuration, as the linked page says. I can see how would be a superficial resemblance, though.
All things being equal (source quality, etc.), which they probably aren't, AAC should beat out WMA handily at bitrates like what the iTMS and Wal-Mart are using. The only chance WMA would have of approaching AAC in quality at that bitrate would have been if Wal-Mart had used WMA Pro, but because of the lack of hardware player support for WMA Pro, that probably won't happen soon.
I haven't seen tests directly comparing AAC to WMA (non-Pro), but Roberto Amorim's testing at 128kbps with AAC and WMA Pro and ff123's testing of a different AAC codec against WMA non-Pro probably say enough.
Also, Apple has actually spoken about the quality of the sources that they encode from (the original masters rather than CDs themselves), and Wal-Mart hasn't.
I do hope that whoever elects to actually directly compare the quality of Wal-Mart's music to Apple's doesn't just look at frequency analysis to do it. Apple's AAC lowpasses at 16 KHz, but to use this as some sort of indication of quality is ludicrous.
I downloaded the DivX version of Intel Extreme Edition Challenge to see how the quality compared to the WMV version. However, the conclusions that I've drawn come from the encoding process itself, and really don't concern the particular codec choices themselves. (I should note that Ben Waggoner voiced the same concerns when Modern Day Gamer 2 was released.)
The video could have been compressed a lot smaller (and quite possibly with an increase in quality, to boot), if it had been deinterlaced first--after all, PC monitors are progressive scan--and resized to something smaller and in the proper aspect ratio, like 640x480, instead of leaving it in native PAL resolution as it was here. Also, using non-square pixels requires user intervention to correct during viewing, unless the video was encoded with the pixel aspect ratio stored in the file, which is possible--but not used in this case--for WMV, but not AVI.
Just the small changes of not having to deal with all the little lines created by interlacing, and also having fewer pixels in general to encode would result in a lighter download and less artifacted video for all.
These films have all been great, content-wise, even for a non-team-oriented gamer such as myself, but once in a while, I can't help but wonder what would have been possible at the same download size with just a little bit of filtering and resizing.
Yes, the G5 does have two DP floating-point units, but the Altivec instructions are still single-precision. The Velocity Engine and the FP units are numbers 6 and 7 on the execution core section of Apple's G5 pages, so this is actually something totally different.
Well, that's what happens when you have per-polygon hit detection--it's not just a hitbox anymore. All of a sudden, you have the ability to shoot under people's arms, next to their heads, and between their legs.
I didn't get to play Doom III (didn't go to QuakeCon or anything), but that kind of precision sounds really cool.
The PS2 is capable of outputting DTS in real-time if whoever codes the game cares to devote one of the vector units toward audio encoding. EA has done this with a couple of games, like SSX Tricky, for example.
...was intended to do the exact opposite of what Greg was talking about. The people who created it thought that Q3 was too newbie oriented with the way it handled its armor and health (counting back down to 100 anytime it went over 100) and weapon switching delay. It's interesting that the creators of CPMA take pride in the fact that CPMA can heavily segregate people based on skill.
Just thought I'd mention that it goes the other way as well, and clearly some people want it that way.
The Max Payne guy (at least the one whose face was used in the first Max Payne) wasn't an actor at all. He was Sam Lake, one of the writers for Remedy, which is based in Finland. You can actually see Sam in the picture of Remedy's staff at the back of the Max Payne manual.
The Apple logo has changed, and it looks like there ought to be large enough copies of the logo floating around for you to make a site icon. For that matter, shouldn't the picture for Desktops (Apple) be updated, too? The look of Apple's desktops has been revised twice (mirrored-front/wind-tunnel, and of course, the G5) since your icon was made...
what's to stop Microsoft from cutting prices too, If they're already losing money with each XBox they sell?
...according to IGN.
Mentioned on the Blue's News link, but not here, since I imagine that not everyone will read all the articles. Seeing as they were all from Willits and Hollenshead's demonstrations at QuakeCon, I'm not surprised that most of the articles are similar, if not identical, in content.
I'm even more curious as to how people play Unreal Tournament without an alt-fire key on the mouse. It just wouldn't be a shock combo if you had to go to the keyboard to launch the ball.
What do people use the other buttons for in Quake, anyway? I feel like I could get by with one button. Now, touchpad Quake, that's a totally different thing...