I don't think the Simpsons S1 problems were completely fixed with S2. What bothers me is that the Simpsons DVDs are interlaced, and obviously captured from a composite source (you can see artifacts around color edges, especially text -- "dot crawl"). I think they just took the 1/2" video masters and digitized them.
Now this stuff is animation... it's like film, it's an inherently progressive source. I don't really know the details of how animation works but it would be nice if they could go back and redo the cartoons in progressive video.
I think you'd see a big difference if they went back and really remastered it.
The C-Media chip on my Abit board is hooked up to an optical SPDIF, which runs out to my surround system. All the DAC is done in on my receiver, which has better DACs than any SB or Turtle Beach and probably most cards except the M-Audio variety. Bonus: Dolby and DTS pass through mean the receiver also does the decoding, so I get full 5.1 sound for DVDs. Also, you don't have to use the cheap-o jack/plug/headphone style connectors; the analog signal is entirely inside the receiver until it leaves the amplifier stage.
I think the point of the article was that the DACs on onboard chips are getting pretty good, but I've been very happy just using the digital out to my reciever for a long time.
Clearly the more data put in, the better the results
Actually it's more important to have data that is representative of the whole, not merely as much data as you can get.
That's how the Gallup poll became famous. In 1935, the Literary Digest, then the most trusted poller, predicted Landon over Roosevelt 56/44. But LD came up with its results by polling a huge number of the upper class rather than a smaller number of everyone. Gallup polled a much smaller representative sample, and was correct in predicting Roosevelt's victory.
The existing DVD standard already has a virtual machine instruction set for describing the interaction of menus and video segments. Why not take this idea a whole lot further and implement a domain-specific bytecode language that handles complex graphical operations, and is sufficiently powerful to code decompression algorithms?
Almost sounds like programmable DSPs that have existed for many years....
I work in the video compression field. I've done a lot of work porting an advanced proprietary codec to embedded systems. All modern codecs do two things: motion comp and intra-block/atom pasting. You'd need to tailor an instruction set based on those two concepts, something that DSPs already do rather well.
Really though the reason your idea doesn't have much of a chance of happening is economic and not technical. DVD players are cheap because the MPEG-2 decoding is done by single-mindedly-specialized chips. If you add the option of upgradability (FPGA or programmable DSP) you add a LOT of cost.
There isn't much hope of allowing more than 1 generation of codec expandability on a STB player without it costing as much as a PC. So what's the point?
How long before THX becomes more like a brand name than a technical rating... ?
Similar project: view from a fish's perspective
on
Inside the Tuna Can
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
An engineering professor at UC Berkeley created a project that uses video cameras to track the position of fish in a tank, then a projector projects onto a nearby wall what the view looks like from one of the fish.
You know, it's pretty embarrassing when I can say that half of the people in my intro to EE class have never touched a resistor in their life, or even know what one looks like.
Uhhh... should it really be suprising that in an intro class you find yourself among inexperienced colleagues?
Meanwhile I'm surrounded by them and they're getting better grades in math than I am. For God's sake don't let them be designing the circuits in the space shuttle.
Yeah, they might actually design circuits that do calculations correctly because they actually understand the calculations...
First of all, it shouldn't take four years to learn most of how any kind of networking works.
It should if you want to start designing anything.
First you need a few semesters of math to understand E&M physics, then after physics you can learn about antennae, etc.
Again you build on a few semesters of math to learn the basics of signal processing, then DSP.
Again with some math you can begin to learn probability and random processes.
Then with signal processing and random processes you can finally learn how radio really works from a signals perspective. You can also now learn how to design digital communication systems that work under noisy conditions.
Well, For one thing nobody records at that resolution. As another reply stated, DV is 720x480.
Another problem with your simple calculation is that video is never stored as 32-bit color. That's totally unrealistic. The common way to store video is not RGB, but YUV. Because of the way the human visual system works, the color components (U,V) are typically stored at 1/4 the resolution of the luminance (Y), meaning that an 3*X pixel RGB image would be stored as a X+X/4+X/4=1.5X image in YUV, half the number of pixels.
More significant, though, is that fact that just about every digital image recording mechanism stores information compressed onto the storage media. This is true from consumer digital cameras to DV cameras to the Sony HDTV cameras Lucas used for Star Wars.
Consider what it means to take 12,000 frames per second. You're probably recording a single nearly-instantaneous event, or getting many images of a very fast event. In the former case, there will be a series of frames before the event in which nothing is going on, and the difference between the frames is close to zero, which compresses extremeley well with MPEG-style compression. Your data rate could be 1/100th of the uncompressed rate. When the event occurs, the instantaneous data rate goes up, but buffering can solve this, since it probably lasts a few frames.
In the latter case, recording a fast event at a fast framerate, is essentially the same as recording a normal-speed event at normal frame rates. In this domain as well MPEG-style compression is extremeley effective. At the maximum you would need 1/5th or 1/10th the uncompressed rate, but 1/100th is a pretty reasonable number given current technology.
The only challenge with realtime compression at this speed, of course, is sufficiently fast hardware. I think it could be done in parallel -- capture several GOPs worth of data (15-45 frames perhaps) and send it to a compressor, and then switch the buffer output to a new compressor, round-robin style.
In any case, video is usually stored at rates many factors smaller than the uncompressed rate. So if you change the variables of your equation to a more realistic resolution and color depth, then divide that number by 10 or 100, you'll have a more realistic data rate.
720(w)*480(h)*1.5(color)*12000(fps)= 6.2GB/s, divide by 100 for agressive compression but reasonable results = 600MB/s
Still too fast, but not completely unrealistic if you've got a healthy budget.;-)
The track is 300'. A typical NASCAR track is maybe 2miles ~= 10500', or 35 times as long.
So the litte robot cars going around the track at 6mph would be like real race car going 210mph.
Not so bad for a coupla undergrads, huh?
I had a class with Professor Fearing ...
on
Spy Fly
·
· Score: 1
... one of the profs who is designing this thing.
You people are so paranoid.
He spent a class session talking about his research, and when he discussed applications, the big thing on his mind was using the flies for search and rescue operations. Put CO2 sensors on 'em, let 1000 of them fly into, oh, I dunno, a collapsed building, and they'll fly towards living humans stuck in the building (by finding the CO2 from their breathing). Then rescue crews go in and look for concentrations of flies. Bingo, you've got your victim.
Nothing as insidious as you freaks are conjecturing.
Most people don't realize that saturation distribution (3,000+ screens) of a film costs more than $10 million dollars just to print and move the film.
Digital distribution, by optical disc, hard drive, or even better satellite would cost pennies on the dollar to distribute versus film prints.
It's going to be challenging for both theaters and studios to simultaneously adopt digital technology. The profit motive is there (and let's face it -- the movie business is a BUSINESS), but the movie busiess has ALWAYS been behind the times with technology. It may take decades if ever for digital projection to catch on.
HOPEFULLY it will start as a grassroots effort like independant theaters like this UC Davis thing. "NO CONTENT" is misleading -- most student and many independant productions these days are shot on DV cameras. Digitally projecting such projects would allow big exposure for students that wouldn't need to expensively transfer their videos to film.
If you can swing it, get both 35mm and digital. Get some private industry to write some grants for ya.
Of course, the source material on the DVD is not high-definition, but rather plain old 480i. The progressive players merely do some deinterlacing voodoo, which does make it look better.
I would think that the quality of music over a cell phone would be absolutely horrible.
Remember that the way digital cell phones work is that they analyze the sound input, and send it not as audio data, but as coefficients to a human-voice synthesis DSP to save bandwidth. Digital cell phones are really only good for transmitting and recieving human voices, and are really really bad at music.
So it is rather suprising to me that such as technology is feasible.
UC Berkeley offers classes called "DeCals" where students teach a class with a faculty advisor. Last Spring, and many earlier semesters, a Simpsons class has been available, called THE SIMPSONS: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SATIRE.
Also available is SOUTH PARK: A SATIRE OF SOCIETY and SEINFELD AND OTHER COMEDIC EXPRESSIONS.
The FPU in the P4 is there for x86 compatability. Intel is betting that software developers will use some of the P4's 144 new instructions to accomplish floating point operations. The new instructions, if used properly, could realize significant speed increases.
Further, as was mentioned earlier, Intel has always released new generations of CPUs that didn't exactly take the benchmark world by storm.
Wait 'till software emerges that takes advantage of what the P4 has to offer. Then you can try to complain.
Didn't anyone read what Paul DeMone had to say? Or Ace's review of the P4?
Yeah right no cross-platform support is going to slow it down much. Most college-age people, who would use this the most (like MP3), are either running windows systems or linux/windows dual boot.
Reminds me of the thing with movie standards where the whole industry is touting moving to expensive digital theaters when there is no real improvement
Uhm, I think you're missing the primary purpose of digital theaters: satellite distribution. Think about it, instead of printing hundres or thousands of VERY VERY expensive movie reels for every movie, then worry about people stealing/damaging them, and them all fading in five years, you just stream a movie up to the satellite and down to thousands of theatres simaltaneously....
I was an early adopter of DSS; in fact, the DSS reciever I still use is the original first-generation RCA unit. Having used DSS for years I can say that TCI (ie AT&T) digital cable is inferior.
Specifically, newer (anything in the past 3 years) DSS units do not have the slow-channel-switching problems. Also the channel guides are very sophisticated and morever very useful. The image quality is like S-VHS, and the sound quality is AWESOME. I only notice MPEG artifacts when there is a subtle gradient or a large dark area on the screen.
My DSS freaks out maybe three times a month. By freaks out I mean the MPEG signal goes crazy, the screen becomes corrupted (sound is fine) and it takes about 5 seconds to return to normal.
With digital cable, this is a MUCH more frequent occurance. And, like you mentioned, channel switching is painful. Not only does it take a second to tune, but then it seems like it starts building the image before it gets a keyframe; ie you will see a bunch of boxes on the screen that eventually resolve into a normal image.
Whats more is the cost -- "digital cable" here in Berkeley, CA means 40 channels of analog cable at $25/mo + $10/mo for TEN channels of digital (+PPV). Uhmm... no thanks, I'll stick with DSS, which is technically better, as well as the fact that not only do I get ALL the cable channels in digital, I also get the local networks digital for an extra $5. Thats ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.
Detachable In-Dash CD (MP-3) Receiver with Changer Controls
And since you don't see any CD slot, the slot is almost certainly behind the face. I've seen these -- the face will flip down to reveal a regular CD slot. I dunno if there is any particular (dis)advantage to this design, but it is not uncommon for aftermarket in-dash CD players.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the Simpsons S1 problems were completely fixed with S2. What bothers me is that the Simpsons DVDs are interlaced, and obviously captured from a composite source (you can see artifacts around color edges, especially text -- "dot crawl"). I think they just took the 1/2" video masters and digitized them.
... it's like film, it's an inherently progressive source. I don't really know the details of how animation works but it would be nice if they could go back and redo the cartoons in progressive video.
Now this stuff is animation
I think you'd see a big difference if they went back and really remastered it.
The C-Media chip on my Abit board is hooked up to an optical SPDIF, which runs out to my surround system. All the DAC is done in on my receiver, which has better DACs than any SB or Turtle Beach and probably most cards except the M-Audio variety. Bonus: Dolby and DTS pass through mean the receiver also does the decoding, so I get full 5.1 sound for DVDs. Also, you don't have to use the cheap-o jack/plug/headphone style connectors; the analog signal is entirely inside the receiver until it leaves the amplifier stage.
I think the point of the article was that the DACs on onboard chips are getting pretty good, but I've been very happy just using the digital out to my reciever for a long time.
Actually it's more important to have data that is representative of the whole, not merely as much data as you can get.
That's how the Gallup poll became famous. In 1935, the Literary Digest, then the most trusted poller, predicted Landon over Roosevelt 56/44. But LD came up with its results by polling a huge number of the upper class rather than a smaller number of everyone. Gallup polled a much smaller representative sample, and was correct in predicting Roosevelt's victory.
I work in the video compression field. I've done a lot of work porting an advanced proprietary codec to embedded systems. All modern codecs do two things: motion comp and intra-block/atom pasting. You'd need to tailor an instruction set based on those two concepts, something that DSPs already do rather well.
Really though the reason your idea doesn't have much of a chance of happening is economic and not technical. DVD players are cheap because the MPEG-2 decoding is done by single-mindedly-specialized chips. If you add the option of upgradability (FPGA or programmable DSP) you add a LOT of cost.
There isn't much hope of allowing more than 1 generation of codec expandability on a STB player without it costing as much as a PC. So what's the point?
Sure it's THX certified!
... ?
You didn't think creative was going to spend all that money investing in THX if it wasn't going to use it, do you?
How long before THX becomes more like a brand name than a technical rating
An engineering professor at UC Berkeley created a project that uses video cameras to track the position of fish in a tank, then a projector projects onto a nearby wall what the view looks like from one of the fish.
Pretty slick combination of engineering and art.
You know, it's pretty embarrassing when I can say that half of the people in my intro to EE class have never touched a resistor in their life, or even know what one looks like.
... should it really be suprising that in an intro class you find yourself among inexperienced colleagues?
...
Uhhh
Meanwhile I'm surrounded by them and they're getting better grades in math than I am. For God's sake don't let them be designing the circuits in the space shuttle.
Yeah, they might actually design circuits that do calculations correctly because they actually understand the calculations
First of all, it shouldn't take four years to learn most of how any kind of networking works.
It should if you want to start designing anything.
First you need a few semesters of math to understand E&M physics, then after physics you can learn about antennae, etc.
Again you build on a few semesters of math to learn the basics of signal processing, then DSP.
Again with some math you can begin to learn probability and random processes.
Then with signal processing and random processes you can finally learn how radio really works from a signals perspective. You can also now learn how to design digital communication systems that work under noisy conditions.
It takes a lot of classes.
Well, For one thing nobody records at that resolution. As another reply stated, DV is 720x480.
Another problem with your simple calculation is that video is never stored as 32-bit color. That's totally unrealistic. The common way to store video is not RGB, but YUV. Because of the way the human visual system works, the color components (U,V) are typically stored at 1/4 the resolution of the luminance (Y), meaning that an 3*X pixel RGB image would be stored as a X+X/4+X/4=1.5X image in YUV, half the number of pixels.
More significant, though, is that fact that just about every digital image recording mechanism stores information compressed onto the storage media. This is true from consumer digital cameras to DV cameras to the Sony HDTV cameras Lucas used for Star Wars.
Consider what it means to take 12,000 frames per second. You're probably recording a single nearly-instantaneous event, or getting many images of a very fast event. In the former case, there will be a series of frames before the event in which nothing is going on, and the difference between the frames is close to zero, which compresses extremeley well with MPEG-style compression. Your data rate could be 1/100th of the uncompressed rate. When the event occurs, the instantaneous data rate goes up, but buffering can solve this, since it probably lasts a few frames.
In the latter case, recording a fast event at a fast framerate, is essentially the same as recording a normal-speed event at normal frame rates. In this domain as well MPEG-style compression is extremeley effective. At the maximum you would need 1/5th or 1/10th the uncompressed rate, but 1/100th is a pretty reasonable number given current technology.
The only challenge with realtime compression at this speed, of course, is sufficiently fast hardware. I think it could be done in parallel -- capture several GOPs worth of data (15-45 frames perhaps) and send it to a compressor, and then switch the buffer output to a new compressor, round-robin style.
In any case, video is usually stored at rates many factors smaller than the uncompressed rate. So if you change the variables of your equation to a more realistic resolution and color depth, then divide that number by 10 or 100, you'll have a more realistic data rate.
720(w)*480(h)*1.5(color)*12000(fps)= 6.2GB/s, divide by 100 for agressive compression but reasonable results = 600MB/s
Still too fast, but not completely unrealistic if you've got a healthy budget. ;-)
So the litte robot cars going around the track at 6mph would be like real race car going 210mph.
Not so bad for a coupla undergrads, huh?
... one of the profs who is designing this thing.
You people are so paranoid.
He spent a class session talking about his research, and when he discussed applications, the big thing on his mind was using the flies for search and rescue operations. Put CO2 sensors on 'em, let 1000 of them fly into, oh, I dunno, a collapsed building, and they'll fly towards living humans stuck in the building (by finding the CO2 from their breathing). Then rescue crews go in and look for concentrations of flies. Bingo, you've got your victim.
Nothing as insidious as you freaks are conjecturing.
ILM is in San Rafael, CA (near San Francisco)
That might explain something, no?
Most people don't realize that saturation distribution (3,000+ screens) of a film costs more than $10 million dollars just to print and move the film.
Digital distribution, by optical disc, hard drive, or even better satellite would cost pennies on the dollar to distribute versus film prints.
It's going to be challenging for both theaters and studios to simultaneously adopt digital technology. The profit motive is there (and let's face it -- the movie business is a BUSINESS), but the movie busiess has ALWAYS been behind the times with technology. It may take decades if ever for digital projection to catch on.
HOPEFULLY it will start as a grassroots effort like independant theaters like this UC Davis thing. "NO CONTENT" is misleading -- most student and many independant productions these days are shot on DV cameras. Digitally projecting such projects would allow big exposure for students that wouldn't need to expensively transfer their videos to film.
If you can swing it, get both 35mm and digital. Get some private industry to write some grants for ya.
Of course, the source material on the DVD is not high-definition, but rather plain old 480i. The progressive players merely do some deinterlacing voodoo, which does make it look better.
No, I'm talking about CELP.
Check it out. Or do a google search.
Remember that the way digital cell phones work is that they analyze the sound input, and send it not as audio data, but as coefficients to a human-voice synthesis DSP to save bandwidth. Digital cell phones are really only good for transmitting and recieving human voices, and are really really bad at music.
So it is rather suprising to me that such as technology is feasible.
Also available is SOUTH PARK: A SATIRE OF SOCIETY and SEINFELD AND OTHER COMEDIC EXPRESSIONS.
The FPU in the P4 is there for x86 compatability. Intel is betting that software developers will use some of the P4's 144 new instructions to accomplish floating point operations. The new instructions, if used properly, could realize significant speed increases.
Further, as was mentioned earlier, Intel has always released new generations of CPUs that didn't exactly take the benchmark world by storm. Wait 'till software emerges that takes advantage of what the P4 has to offer. Then you can try to complain.
Didn't anyone read what Paul DeMone had to say? Or Ace's review of the P4?
WHAT profits?
Why not just use eXceed on win32? It's almost exactly like being at the console.
"'Nuff Said"
Yeah right no cross-platform support is going to slow it down much. Most college-age people, who would use this the most (like MP3), are either running windows systems or linux/windows dual boot.
Reminds me of the thing with movie standards where the whole industry is touting moving to expensive digital theaters when there is no real improvement
Uhm, I think you're missing the primary purpose of digital theaters: satellite distribution. Think about it, instead of printing hundres or thousands of VERY VERY expensive movie reels for every movie, then worry about people stealing/damaging them, and them all fading in five years, you just stream a movie up to the satellite and down to thousands of theatres simaltaneously....
I was an early adopter of DSS; in fact, the DSS reciever I still use is the original first-generation RCA unit. Having used DSS for years I can say that TCI (ie AT&T) digital cable is inferior.
Specifically, newer (anything in the past 3 years) DSS units do not have the slow-channel-switching problems. Also the channel guides are very sophisticated and morever very useful. The image quality is like S-VHS, and the sound quality is AWESOME. I only notice MPEG artifacts when there is a subtle gradient or a large dark area on the screen.
My DSS freaks out maybe three times a month. By freaks out I mean the MPEG signal goes crazy, the screen becomes corrupted (sound is fine) and it takes about 5 seconds to return to normal.
With digital cable, this is a MUCH more frequent occurance. And, like you mentioned, channel switching is painful. Not only does it take a second to tune, but then it seems like it starts building the image before it gets a keyframe; ie you will see a bunch of boxes on the screen that eventually resolve into a normal image.
Whats more is the cost -- "digital cable" here in Berkeley, CA means 40 channels of analog cable at $25/mo + $10/mo for TEN channels of digital (+PPV). Uhmm... no thanks, I'll stick with DSS, which is technically better, as well as the fact that not only do I get ALL the cable channels in digital, I also get the local networks digital for an extra $5. Thats ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.
It says:
Detachable In-Dash CD (MP-3) Receiver with Changer Controls
And since you don't see any CD slot, the slot is almost certainly behind the face. I've seen these -- the face will flip down to reveal a regular CD slot. I dunno if there is any particular (dis)advantage to this design, but it is not uncommon for aftermarket in-dash CD players.