It's completely different. A 4K HDR Netflix stream might be efficiently encoded at 10-15Mbps, but a realtime low latency gaming stream would need 50-100Mbps to get similar quality.
Efficiently compressing VOD is done by making multiple passes through the file, using information from earlier and later frames (up to +/- 30 seconds) to find redundancies that can be coded, using the results of prior passes to find segments of video that can be encoded with fewer bits without noticeable quality loss or which need more bits to look good, and using CPU/GPU intensive compression algorithms which can operate slower than real time. It makes sense to make every effort to save every bit when the video only needs to be encoded once but the output will need to be uploaded millions of times.
Live streaming video is tougher - You can't make multiple passes through the file but usually you can tolerate some delay, often anywhere from 5 - 30 seconds, so you can still use later frames to find redundancies. You have 1 producer streaming to an audience, so there's only one stream that needs to be compressed to serve many end users, and it makes sense to throw a lot of power into that compression since multiple viewers can benefit from the results.
Real time gaming, on the other hand, means you need an encoder for every user. That practically requires using less intensive and less efficient encoders, and thus more bits are needed to encode the same quality. Games tend to have a lot of small details such as text labels, so you can't drop the quality too much. And the stream has to be encoded with extremely low latency, which means you can't look at any later frames to find redundancies, you can only look at a few past frames.
Think of it like herd immunity for vaccines. As much as I love the internet, it broke through all of the barriers that used to protect us from the spread fake news, and society hasn't yet figured out how to fix it.
There have always been lots of crazy people spread throughout society, but before the internet, your social interactions were limited to your local community groups. If you didn't want to be ostracized, you had to at least pretend to blend in with local norms. Your choice of media were limited to things like TV, radio, and newspapers which had to appeal to a geographic market rather than a particular bias or viewpoint. These factors acted like herd immunity, protecting these vulnerable crazy people and helping to contain fake news before it could spread.
Enter the internet. Every crazy and/or dishonest person can now make a direct connection with millions of vulnerable people without geographic, political, or financial barriers. Media outlets can now specialize in highly tailored viewpoints without any consideration for geographic appeal, and have to constantly out-extreme each other to maintain a shrinking slice of viewers. Instead of local social groups helping to contain the spread of misinformation, we now have a positive re-enforcement cycle: the bolder and crazier your fake news, the bigger your audience of gullible people eager to consume more and more outlandish ideas, and the faster it spreads. It's like a virus spreading rapidly through a population that lacks natural immunity.
Had the iPhone 7 switched from Lightning to USB-C, this would kind of make sense. Put USB-C ports on the laptops and now all accessories (chargers, headphones, displays, Thunderbolt, USB devices, etc.) could use the same port across all devices. But with the iP7 using Lightning, losing the Macbook headphone jack would really suck. You couldn't use Lightning headphones on the Macbook without an additional USB-C to Lightning female dongle (on top of your USB-C to Lightning male for charging your phone, USB-C to USB-A dongle(s) for regular USB devices like flash drives, USB-C to HDMI dongle for displays, etc.), and to use regular stereo jack headphones on both devices would require carrying 2 dongles. Most wireless headphones only pair to one device at a time so it would be super inconvenient to use the same wireless headphones on two devices.
I'm a big scifi nerd and I'd love for FTL travel/communication to be proven possible, but if it ever is, it likely won't be via quantum entanglement.
Here's an analogy: We have a red ball and a black ball. We randomly put each one into a sealed box so that it's impossible to tell which ball is in which. I take one on my spaceship and fly away from you at top speed, you do the same in the opposite direction. When we're a light year apart, we both open our boxes. Mine is red, so I immediately know that yours must be black, and vice versa. We were able to determine the color of a ball 1ly away instantaneously, even though it would take at least a year for any message like "mine is the red one" to reach the other.
However, this doesn't mean we can send information FTL. Even with an unlimited supply of balls, the best I can do for any particular ball is know that yours is the opposite color. I can't manipulate the color or choose the order in order to send information FTL, at least not without some side channel of communication which must necessarily happen at c or slower. (If the side channel communication was FTL then we'd just use that to communicate and skip the entanglement part.)
Even jerks need freedom of speech, but trademark protection goes far beyond just freedom of speech. Trademark protection means the full force of government -- the courts, the criminal justice system, the police (to enforce the court's decisions), the military (to enforce economic sanctions), customs & border control, etc. -- can be wielded by the trademark holder to enforce their sole ownership of a term. Do you think it's right that the government should be forced to spend millions of tax payer dollars to enforce someone's exclusive use of an offensive term?
I'm sure he could find half a dozen people with the gear who would be prepared to do it for the experience.
If that were true, there would have been half a dozen other people documenting the conference for "experience", but there weren't, so you're proven wrong.
Creators/artists of any skill level should not be expected to work for free for the "experience" or "exposure" as a cost cutting measure. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/e...
As a liberal from Maryland, I'd like to add that O'Malley was such a terrible governor that a solid blue state elected a virtually unknown Republican to succeed him.
In my experience it's not just a head tracking issue. Just the feeling of seeing your avatar walking around in the virtual world, while your real body is stationary, was enough to cause nausea in a lot of people.
Games where your avatar remains seated in a cockpit, like a fighter sim, were no problem. You can crane your neck to look around the cockpit from different positions and angles without any nausea (provided the head tracking works well enough), because both your avatar and your real body are seated and not moving. The lack of G forces from the motion of the craft were apparently not a problem.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced that even a perfect head tracking VR helmet will ever work for FPS-type games where your avatar is walking around while your real body sits still.
One branch of government profits from hospitals unintentionally misusing your private information, then another branch of government takes those profits to fund the intentional and illegal misuse of your private information.
Figuring out liability for human drivers is insanely complicated. You just don't notice it because drivers are generally removed from the issue; there is a whole industry (car insurance) whose existence depends on profiting from driver liability and thus deals with all of the complications for you. They even figure out things like risks of being hit by an uninsured driver and factor that into the cost. The only cases they don't handle are when 2 uninsured motorists get into an accident, and then the courts can get involved.
Insurance companies will figure out the risks of various types of autonomous car failures and to what extent their liability costs can be recouped from the manufacturers (due to negligence), from the passengers, from the other parties involved, etc. Then they will set their insurance rates for autonomous cars so that they can cover liabilities and still make a profit. If they underestimate their liabilities then they raise their rates or go out of business. The autonomous cars could even require proof of insurance to be installed or downloaded in order to operate, making them very difficult or impossible to operate without proof of coverage. That will pretty much eliminate the problem of uninsured drivers.
The only thing that would hold back autonomous cars is if the risks are estimated to be too high, making the insurance rates so expensive that it outweighs the convenience. Given how unsafe most human drivers are, I think the autonomous car manufacturers would have to do a really terrible job for that to become an issue.
There's no perfect solution, but something that works for 60% might already be better than nothing.
I work in the closed captioning industry, and I'd say anything less than 95% accuracy is actually WORSE than nothing. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has no concept of context or situational awareness. The mistakes they make tend to be not in the simple common words and phrases, but concentrated in the nouns, especially proper nouns: names of people, places, companies, products, etc. Even at 80% accuracy, which is quite good for the current best speaker independent ASR systems, you're looking at 2 words out of every 10 being substituted with the wrong word, completely changing the meaning of the phrases. Imagine the chaos if (major news network)'s closed captioning reported some celebrity or politician as saying "I'm not a fan of Jews." when they actually said "I'm not a fan of juice." (Which would be 83% accurate!) Wars have been started for one misheard word out of a thousand; imagine how bad 200 out of 1000 would be.
People who lost hearing later in life tend to do better with high error rate ASR because they know what words sound like and can figure out easy substitutions, e.g. Juice vs. Jews, Election vs. Erection, etc., but people who were born deaf or lost hearing before language acquisition cannot easily make these substitutions in their head because they don't "hear" the word sounds when they read them.
I had terrible experiences with their drives and tech support. In one instance, to solve a Windows blue screen problem, their support told us to update the firmware on the drive, which bricked it. They then refused to return/repair the drive because "firmware updates void your warranty." In another case, we needed a quick replacement on a failed drive so we requested advance replacement. They immediately charged our card MSRP (double the actual retail price), but then it took them over 30 days to actually ship the replacement.
Zombies are the ideal fantasy opponent for a doomsday scenario. They have most of the strengths of humans, thus (supposedly) requiring heavy firepower and good tactics to defend against them, but being sub-human (lacking a soul, whatever) and extremely dangerous, there is little to no aversion to the use of violence against them.
Put it another way, if a prepper told anyone that they were loading up on weapons to be able to attack fellow humans during a crisis, they would be labeled psycho and probably have their weapons taken away.
But... if they're gearing up to fight "zombies", they can stockpile all the weapons they want and only appear to be a little paranoid.
Car registration/licensing/insurance are only required if you want to drive on other people's property, like public roads (property of the People). It's perfectly legal to drive on your own private property without doing any of those things.
So to fully extend your analogy, public or private firearm ranges may require shooters to be licensed & insured if they want to shoot on their property... (but I think most of them would stick with the safety courses they currently use.)
Furthermore, unlike the right to bear arms, driving is a privilege, not a right guaranteed by the constitution. Would you be ok with mandatory registration, licensing, and proof of insurance before you can exercise your first, third, fourth, or fifth amendment rights?
"'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no."
So what does "not engaged in combat" mean, and who gets to decide? Would you be surprised if a future executive order defines political opponents or whistle blowers as "engaged in combat"?
While this law sounds reasonable on the surface and seems well enough intentioned, looking at the past history of government regulations, I can't help but assume that even if this were to pass, the law will be twisted and manipulated to the point that it actually hurts the end users or stifles competition. Perhaps the requirements for compliance with the law will be so onerous that small ISPs cannot compete, leaving only the big players and a high barrier to entry, or it will prevent new innovative business models and force us to stick with the status quo even if a better alternative is found.
For example, the regulations for bidding for government contracts were intended to level the playing field, reduce corruption, and lower costs. But as the regulations became more and more complicated (trying to plug the loopholes), only the biggest contractors with government bidding officers and on-staff lawyers can actually get through all the red tape. The result is that small players cannot compete and costs go up. The regulations ended up doing exactly the opposite of what was intended.
I have a individual (not group, not employer offered) HSA plan with a very low premium and a high deductible. Every month I put some money (about the difference between this plan's premium and a average premium plan) into my HSA account. Although the deductible is high, I save enough on the premium to basically put away twice the yearly deductible every year. The plan gives 100% coverage after deductible on everything covered (no coinsurance), and many things (annual checkups) are totally free even before the deductible.
In other words, in years when I have high medical expenses, my total costs work out about the same as a high premium, low deductible plan. However, in years when my medical expenses are low, I get to KEEP the money that I would have spent on premiums. The insurance company loves it because any expenses I incur come partially out of my savings, so there is a definite motivation for me to keep my costs as low as possible (which keeps their costs low as well, unlike other plans where there is no incentive for the insured to keep costs low).
And the best part is that everything I deposit in the HSA account is TAX DEDUCTIBLE and earns interest TAX FREE. When I retire I can withdraw from it TAX FREE as well. It is like the best parts of a Traditional IRA plus a Roth IRA, but I can use it to cover any health expenses I have at any time and with no penalties.
Bottom line is that I'm paying about 1/2 of what the equivalent coverage would cost from a regular plan, and in the best case I get to save a lot of money that would have been wasted on premiums and earn interest on it tax free, and in the worst case if I use up the whole deductible, I still get good coverage, lower my taxes, and earn some interest on the money. The only time I wouldn't recommend the HSA is if you get really sick a lot and have high expenses all the time, especially prescription drugs which aren't discounted as much in this plan.
The problem has to do with the intricacies of variable bit rate (VBR) codecs and the way that audio and video are interleaved.
AVI and MOV only support very limited types of VBR and limited ways of interleaving audio with video. The result is that trying to put both H.264 video and AC3 or DTS audio in an AVI/MOV just doesn't work.
Most professional, standardized formats like DVD/Bluray/broadcast/etc. use MPEG-2 transport streams to tie together multiple streams like this. M2T works great when it works, but it is a really difficult format to work with, with a lot of conflicting specs you have to pay to get access to and various patents you have to worry about. M2T have really poor cross-compatibility even if you follow the specs precisely, and there are a number of $1000+ software packages which are made just for the purpose of twiddling a few bits in your M2T file to be just right for your intended hardware/software player.
MKV was invented as an open source solution to these kinds of problems. It is a kind of transport stream, but with loose specs and an open format which is much easier to use. That's why you see a lot of H.264/AC3 video files using the MKV container rather than M2T or AVI/MOV.
Slashdot Mirror
It's completely different. A 4K HDR Netflix stream might be efficiently encoded at 10-15Mbps, but a realtime low latency gaming stream would need 50-100Mbps to get similar quality.
Efficiently compressing VOD is done by making multiple passes through the file, using information from earlier and later frames (up to +/- 30 seconds) to find redundancies that can be coded, using the results of prior passes to find segments of video that can be encoded with fewer bits without noticeable quality loss or which need more bits to look good, and using CPU/GPU intensive compression algorithms which can operate slower than real time. It makes sense to make every effort to save every bit when the video only needs to be encoded once but the output will need to be uploaded millions of times.
Live streaming video is tougher - You can't make multiple passes through the file but usually you can tolerate some delay, often anywhere from 5 - 30 seconds, so you can still use later frames to find redundancies. You have 1 producer streaming to an audience, so there's only one stream that needs to be compressed to serve many end users, and it makes sense to throw a lot of power into that compression since multiple viewers can benefit from the results.
Real time gaming, on the other hand, means you need an encoder for every user. That practically requires using less intensive and less efficient encoders, and thus more bits are needed to encode the same quality. Games tend to have a lot of small details such as text labels, so you can't drop the quality too much. And the stream has to be encoded with extremely low latency, which means you can't look at any later frames to find redundancies, you can only look at a few past frames.
Think of it like herd immunity for vaccines. As much as I love the internet, it broke through all of the barriers that used to protect us from the spread fake news, and society hasn't yet figured out how to fix it.
There have always been lots of crazy people spread throughout society, but before the internet, your social interactions were limited to your local community groups. If you didn't want to be ostracized, you had to at least pretend to blend in with local norms. Your choice of media were limited to things like TV, radio, and newspapers which had to appeal to a geographic market rather than a particular bias or viewpoint. These factors acted like herd immunity, protecting these vulnerable crazy people and helping to contain fake news before it could spread.
Enter the internet. Every crazy and/or dishonest person can now make a direct connection with millions of vulnerable people without geographic, political, or financial barriers. Media outlets can now specialize in highly tailored viewpoints without any consideration for geographic appeal, and have to constantly out-extreme each other to maintain a shrinking slice of viewers. Instead of local social groups helping to contain the spread of misinformation, we now have a positive re-enforcement cycle: the bolder and crazier your fake news, the bigger your audience of gullible people eager to consume more and more outlandish ideas, and the faster it spreads. It's like a virus spreading rapidly through a population that lacks natural immunity.
Apparently Han did come in that thing, after all.
Unless you happen to use Spotify... http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Had the iPhone 7 switched from Lightning to USB-C, this would kind of make sense. Put USB-C ports on the laptops and now all accessories (chargers, headphones, displays, Thunderbolt, USB devices, etc.) could use the same port across all devices. But with the iP7 using Lightning, losing the Macbook headphone jack would really suck. You couldn't use Lightning headphones on the Macbook without an additional USB-C to Lightning female dongle (on top of your USB-C to Lightning male for charging your phone, USB-C to USB-A dongle(s) for regular USB devices like flash drives, USB-C to HDMI dongle for displays, etc.), and to use regular stereo jack headphones on both devices would require carrying 2 dongles. Most wireless headphones only pair to one device at a time so it would be super inconvenient to use the same wireless headphones on two devices.
I'm a big scifi nerd and I'd love for FTL travel/communication to be proven possible, but if it ever is, it likely won't be via quantum entanglement.
Here's an analogy: We have a red ball and a black ball. We randomly put each one into a sealed box so that it's impossible to tell which ball is in which. I take one on my spaceship and fly away from you at top speed, you do the same in the opposite direction. When we're a light year apart, we both open our boxes. Mine is red, so I immediately know that yours must be black, and vice versa. We were able to determine the color of a ball 1ly away instantaneously, even though it would take at least a year for any message like "mine is the red one" to reach the other.
However, this doesn't mean we can send information FTL. Even with an unlimited supply of balls, the best I can do for any particular ball is know that yours is the opposite color. I can't manipulate the color or choose the order in order to send information FTL, at least not without some side channel of communication which must necessarily happen at c or slower. (If the side channel communication was FTL then we'd just use that to communicate and skip the entanglement part.)
Even jerks need freedom of speech, but trademark protection goes far beyond just freedom of speech. Trademark protection means the full force of government -- the courts, the criminal justice system, the police (to enforce the court's decisions), the military (to enforce economic sanctions), customs & border control, etc. -- can be wielded by the trademark holder to enforce their sole ownership of a term. Do you think it's right that the government should be forced to spend millions of tax payer dollars to enforce someone's exclusive use of an offensive term?
I'm sure he could find half a dozen people with the gear who would be prepared to do it for the experience.
If that were true, there would have been half a dozen other people documenting the conference for "experience", but there weren't, so you're proven wrong.
Creators/artists of any skill level should not be expected to work for free for the "experience" or "exposure" as a cost cutting measure. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/e...
As a liberal from Maryland, I'd like to add that O'Malley was such a terrible governor that a solid blue state elected a virtually unknown Republican to succeed him.
You mean, stop verbing nouns?
In my experience it's not just a head tracking issue. Just the feeling of seeing your avatar walking around in the virtual world, while your real body is stationary, was enough to cause nausea in a lot of people.
Games where your avatar remains seated in a cockpit, like a fighter sim, were no problem. You can crane your neck to look around the cockpit from different positions and angles without any nausea (provided the head tracking works well enough), because both your avatar and your real body are seated and not moving. The lack of G forces from the motion of the craft were apparently not a problem.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced that even a perfect head tracking VR helmet will ever work for FPS-type games where your avatar is walking around while your real body sits still.
This is supposed to be news for nerds. Not news for delusional paranoiacs.
It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
One branch of government profits from hospitals unintentionally misusing your private information, then another branch of government takes those profits to fund the intentional and illegal misuse of your private information.
Figuring out liability for human drivers is insanely complicated. You just don't notice it because drivers are generally removed from the issue; there is a whole industry (car insurance) whose existence depends on profiting from driver liability and thus deals with all of the complications for you. They even figure out things like risks of being hit by an uninsured driver and factor that into the cost. The only cases they don't handle are when 2 uninsured motorists get into an accident, and then the courts can get involved.
Insurance companies will figure out the risks of various types of autonomous car failures and to what extent their liability costs can be recouped from the manufacturers (due to negligence), from the passengers, from the other parties involved, etc. Then they will set their insurance rates for autonomous cars so that they can cover liabilities and still make a profit. If they underestimate their liabilities then they raise their rates or go out of business. The autonomous cars could even require proof of insurance to be installed or downloaded in order to operate, making them very difficult or impossible to operate without proof of coverage. That will pretty much eliminate the problem of uninsured drivers.
The only thing that would hold back autonomous cars is if the risks are estimated to be too high, making the insurance rates so expensive that it outweighs the convenience. Given how unsafe most human drivers are, I think the autonomous car manufacturers would have to do a really terrible job for that to become an issue.
There's no perfect solution, but something that works for 60% might already be better than nothing.
I work in the closed captioning industry, and I'd say anything less than 95% accuracy is actually WORSE than nothing. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has no concept of context or situational awareness. The mistakes they make tend to be not in the simple common words and phrases, but concentrated in the nouns, especially proper nouns: names of people, places, companies, products, etc. Even at 80% accuracy, which is quite good for the current best speaker independent ASR systems, you're looking at 2 words out of every 10 being substituted with the wrong word, completely changing the meaning of the phrases. Imagine the chaos if (major news network)'s closed captioning reported some celebrity or politician as saying "I'm not a fan of Jews." when they actually said "I'm not a fan of juice." (Which would be 83% accurate!) Wars have been started for one misheard word out of a thousand; imagine how bad 200 out of 1000 would be.
Here's an article about a HUMAN transcription error that caused a pretty major ruckus. Now imagine this kind of problem being an order of magnitude worse:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20693447,00.html
People who lost hearing later in life tend to do better with high error rate ASR because they know what words sound like and can figure out easy substitutions, e.g. Juice vs. Jews, Election vs. Erection, etc., but people who were born deaf or lost hearing before language acquisition cannot easily make these substitutions in their head because they don't "hear" the word sounds when they read them.
I had terrible experiences with their drives and tech support. In one instance, to solve a Windows blue screen problem, their support told us to update the firmware on the drive, which bricked it. They then refused to return/repair the drive because "firmware updates void your warranty." In another case, we needed a quick replacement on a failed drive so we requested advance replacement. They immediately charged our card MSRP (double the actual retail price), but then it took them over 30 days to actually ship the replacement.
Zombies are the ideal fantasy opponent for a doomsday scenario. They have most of the strengths of humans, thus (supposedly) requiring heavy firepower and good tactics to defend against them, but being sub-human (lacking a soul, whatever) and extremely dangerous, there is little to no aversion to the use of violence against them.
Put it another way, if a prepper told anyone that they were loading up on weapons to be able to attack fellow humans during a crisis, they would be labeled psycho and probably have their weapons taken away.
But... if they're gearing up to fight "zombies", they can stockpile all the weapons they want and only appear to be a little paranoid.
Cooty Rats Semen
(If you don't get it, you need to see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ )
Car registration/licensing/insurance are only required if you want to drive on other people's property, like public roads (property of the People). It's perfectly legal to drive on your own private property without doing any of those things.
So to fully extend your analogy, public or private firearm ranges may require shooters to be licensed & insured if they want to shoot on their property... (but I think most of them would stick with the safety courses they currently use.)
Furthermore, unlike the right to bear arms, driving is a privilege, not a right guaranteed by the constitution. Would you be ok with mandatory registration, licensing, and proof of insurance before you can exercise your first, third, fourth, or fifth amendment rights?
"'Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no."
So what does "not engaged in combat" mean, and who gets to decide? Would you be surprised if a future executive order defines political opponents or whistle blowers as "engaged in combat"?
Just curious, where did you find AR15 lowers and magazines for those prices? :)
While this law sounds reasonable on the surface and seems well enough intentioned, looking at the past history of government regulations, I can't help but assume that even if this were to pass, the law will be twisted and manipulated to the point that it actually hurts the end users or stifles competition. Perhaps the requirements for compliance with the law will be so onerous that small ISPs cannot compete, leaving only the big players and a high barrier to entry, or it will prevent new innovative business models and force us to stick with the status quo even if a better alternative is found.
For example, the regulations for bidding for government contracts were intended to level the playing field, reduce corruption, and lower costs. But as the regulations became more and more complicated (trying to plug the loopholes), only the biggest contractors with government bidding officers and on-staff lawyers can actually get through all the red tape. The result is that small players cannot compete and costs go up. The regulations ended up doing exactly the opposite of what was intended.
I have a individual (not group, not employer offered) HSA plan with a very low premium and a high deductible. Every month I put some money (about the difference between this plan's premium and a average premium plan) into my HSA account. Although the deductible is high, I save enough on the premium to basically put away twice the yearly deductible every year. The plan gives 100% coverage after deductible on everything covered (no coinsurance), and many things (annual checkups) are totally free even before the deductible.
In other words, in years when I have high medical expenses, my total costs work out about the same as a high premium, low deductible plan. However, in years when my medical expenses are low, I get to KEEP the money that I would have spent on premiums. The insurance company loves it because any expenses I incur come partially out of my savings, so there is a definite motivation for me to keep my costs as low as possible (which keeps their costs low as well, unlike other plans where there is no incentive for the insured to keep costs low).
And the best part is that everything I deposit in the HSA account is TAX DEDUCTIBLE and earns interest TAX FREE. When I retire I can withdraw from it TAX FREE as well. It is like the best parts of a Traditional IRA plus a Roth IRA, but I can use it to cover any health expenses I have at any time and with no penalties.
Bottom line is that I'm paying about 1/2 of what the equivalent coverage would cost from a regular plan, and in the best case I get to save a lot of money that would have been wasted on premiums and earn interest on it tax free, and in the worst case if I use up the whole deductible, I still get good coverage, lower my taxes, and earn some interest on the money. The only time I wouldn't recommend the HSA is if you get really sick a lot and have high expenses all the time, especially prescription drugs which aren't discounted as much in this plan.
I don't get what you're all rattling on about.
The problem has to do with the intricacies of variable bit rate (VBR) codecs and the way that audio and video are interleaved.
AVI and MOV only support very limited types of VBR and limited ways of interleaving audio with video. The result is that trying to put both H.264 video and AC3 or DTS audio in an AVI/MOV just doesn't work.
Most professional, standardized formats like DVD/Bluray/broadcast/etc. use MPEG-2 transport streams to tie together multiple streams like this. M2T works great when it works, but it is a really difficult format to work with, with a lot of conflicting specs you have to pay to get access to and various patents you have to worry about. M2T have really poor cross-compatibility even if you follow the specs precisely, and there are a number of $1000+ software packages which are made just for the purpose of twiddling a few bits in your M2T file to be just right for your intended hardware/software player.
MKV was invented as an open source solution to these kinds of problems. It is a kind of transport stream, but with loose specs and an open format which is much easier to use. That's why you see a lot of H.264/AC3 video files using the MKV container rather than M2T or AVI/MOV.