You are kidding right? Its the same thing! The photo at the Portuguese site (Yeah portuguese!) Shows an almost identical photo to the "Capuccino G1"; so maybe your link is the right one instead.
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Re:I LIKE these updates, so there.
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XFree 4.1.0 Out
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"This is only for Linux users."
Ahem... Care to search which other OSes use Xfree?
Spam and Diablitos are not the same, nor taste the same. I managed to find "real" spam cans here, albeit expensive, as any imported stuff. Payed attention to it only after learning about the existence of such a food and Monthy Python sket. All of this thanks to the spam term being used to describe UBE.
This is very stupid. Right now there is a business in selling IP addresses due to scarcity, but once IPv6 is implemented, the market of selling IPs is over. Of course most providers actually "like" the current system; so they dont really care to implement IPv6 yet. While IPv6 address the issue of NATs even better than the old IPv4; it is actually supposed to be less used than it is today, or at least only used when desired; and not as an unfortunate need like it is right now with IPv4. Im really happy that Japan is so serious about implementing it; i hope more countries follow.
The Purple Book can succeed, if, only if, all drive manufacturers start manufacturing Purple book capable CD-ROM drive units and stop production of the old CD-ROM ones. They must appear 'en masse' on the market; all the 'cheap' CD players must support Purple Book; and go beyond the standard; just like those which now support Orange Book III (aka. CDRW). For this reason, the format *must* remain fully open; so any manufacturer can build the units.
The presence of Double Density CDs on the market could even lead to further revision of the VCD standard. By just allowing Variable Bit Rate and rising the 1374kbps limit of the current White Book; you can have very good quality simple Mpeg1 video storage format, that could make very cheap VCD Players with twice duration and crisp non blocky quality. Of course you can achieve even more if you also allow Mpeg 2/4 and mp3/aac audio in the stream; but this will make the device cost a bit higher; which still could cost a fraction of your average DVD player.
Uncrippled of any kind of restriction nonsense; an underground "supported by the people" alternative distribution format like this could easily succeed; at least in many, many countries that can not afford anything else anyway. In fact i believe it is a matter of when will they get more popular.
I ran a single line BBS from 1993 to 1998, i had Fidonet address 4:890/5 (for Venezuela). I probably still have a backup somewhere with the nodelist of the last years. My country had public BBSs at least since 1985, i joined the scene in 1989 with a 1200BPS modem.
The software i used for the system was Remote Access, originally written in Pascal if i remember correctly. The theme of my system was mostly multiplayer BBS door game inspired, including a famous play by email game called VGA Planets. I remember using Frontdoor for the Fidonet daily exchange, and The-Draw a lot, to build nice looking (and friendly) ANSI menus.
I only used DOS for the time it lasted (single line, anyway), with as low as a 2MB 12-Mhz 286 with an old 5 1/4" 40MB Seagate (ST-251N) MFM Hard Disk (the N was the 28MS version, not the 40MS:) with mono HGC like card for disply. It didnt change very much, at the last days it used an AMD 386SX-40 with 4Mb ram and a mighty (IDE/ATA:) 80MB seagate hard disk (uhm.. ST-3096A, still fully operational:) and those CPU upgrades were to minimize the downtime required per day for the turn process of the VGA Planets games. (which could easily take 1 to 2 hours on the 286!:) Hmm btw that AMD/Intel 12Mhz 286 (still functional!) was an old DTK *full size board* (i have the large desktop DTK case) with the memory on 256byte chips... (hence, the full size:).
Ah the old days, only thing needed was a decent terminal (with ANSI:) program and preferably a good protocol (zmodem). Who cared what OS/platform had the caller, as long as it were a modem, which, were all true (non soft) modems back then.
Sorry but Intellectual Property is now used as a tool of power for the corporations, it is no longer desirable to maintain such a system where the people has to submit to the industry. The abuse is out of control, only a radical move like banning all Intellectual Property could help. Patents, Copyrights, trade secrets, DMCA, ad nauseaum is more trouble than benefit. Speech is outlawed, research is outlawed; what else are you waiting? The current President of United States policy regarding pollution only reflect that the interests of the industry are above all elses lives; and the weather on the planet getting worse is only beginning. The people is no longer in control, they see their own governement as enemies; and thanks to the lobby system, laws are dictated according to corporate needs. So much for a `free` country where only deep pockets rule the justice. This of course, is only an opinion.
My only comment: They have got what they deserve. Relying in closed source propietary operating systems which their own scientists can not even audit? Is this for real? Are we talking about the public funded NASA? No doubt the public no longer believes in them anymore; i am not really surprised. No science in there anymore, only corporate sponsorship...
Windows? at NASA!? so stupid, i can not believe it!. I bet China will be more succesful, as the now poor russians were.
Agreed. In fact, i believe most current VCD friendly countries will just skip DVD and go ahead with a "VCD 4.0" spec, consisting of one of the mpeg4 implementations. Mpeg4 can easily achieve "near DVD quality" in standard CDs, and without all the annoyances and cost of the "copy control" mechanism of DVDs, i think the people will simply "adopt it" just like they are doing now with hardware mp3 players.
Oh my, not only do people start finding alternative artists, now they will even go as far as to buy from *non american* companies!? This is the tool of the devil!
Do you even know about singles in the United States? The small 8cm discs that are so popular in Japan, that usually hold 2 to 4 songs and sell very cheap? What? Is there a possibilty of buying the song you want instead of a full CD full of songs you dont want? I bet some *organization* will never allow this. Selling just what the poeple wants and not a lot else to have an excuse to ask them to pay full 14$ instead of 4$ or something? Of course not! Producing singles can cost about the same.5 cents to press per cd, yet they will profit a lot less than `full sized` (usually just half hour:) discs... Surely you do not think about reducing profits for the sake of consumers, even if this could mean selling a lot more, but, what? selling a lot more cheap than a few expensive? Going back to work for real, instead of relax behind lawly aquired cartel status? You are kidding right?
Well, i honestly use the system to get what is hard to obtain in my country. For example, i love Japanese music, but it is impossible fo buy here. To buy a Japanese CD, i need to import from a US based store who also imports from Japan, this adventure usually costs me 50$ per disc.
Even with all those prices, thanks to the Napster like networks, i have discovered many Jpop and Jrock artists, and i have even buyed some of those overpriced discs. But the preview of the artists is what determined my intention. One good reason i would like to buy the CD, aside from giving a little aid to the artist (i know they wont get very much per CD sale) is the opportunity for me to make my own good rip and mp3 encoding, so that people can enjoy a truly good preview of the song.
For this, i use Lame of course ^^
Anyway my opinion is that the Riaa has a lot more to lose by going against this, instead of embracing it. They will never win the war, anyway, so it is very sad they are so obfuscared they still even attempt to fight it. Well, if the Napster with subscription thing takes off, i think they will essentialy become a riaa on the net. Anyone wanting to have presence, will need to register with napster first, otherwise they wont recieve money from downloads of their songs.
Well, if there were not that many free alternatives, that is. So now that Napster could became Riaa friendly, with all the control and encryption they plan to add to the songs (aka yet another propietary format) and subscription scheme including paying Riaa periodically, it could be now of their best interest (for RIAA) to target all the others, non Napster networks who will still use the Riaa so hated MP3 format.
In fact, i am suprised that MPAA is not involved too, since OpenNap servers allow more than mp3 content to be traded, like Mpeg video. I am sure they will, with the United Corporations of America laws with them, no one inside the US will be able to even think outside the Corporation s best interests.
Yes, but this is unavoidable. A whole business model is a stake here, surely you do not expect them to die silently. Yes, they will die, or at least their business model will not be as good is it ever was (the US music and movie industry, that is). You can expect them to spend up to the last dollar to slow down this process, but it is only a matter of time, a whole new era has just began. So, whatever happens to Napster.com really does not matter. The concept of easy sharing of content is the one that will survive, even if outlawed, the people will still use it. Now imagine the millions of users Napster has now, what will all of them do when there is no more napster? Do you expect them to give up and sleep? Oh sure, some Asociation of America executives will want this... Once you create the need, so will they come. I can easily imagine the United corporationism States of America outlawing their citizens more and more, specially having the lobby (aka $$) system dictate laws, justice and politics; but will the whole world follow? Hopefully not.
In the meantime, get used to the OpenNap servers, like those listed in www.napigator.com. The last time napster went down, www.musiccity.com opennap servers had people in like never before, it seems they are the next napster replacement. Just wait until the clueless napster users learn that they could also exchange *video* the very same way they exchange music with napster now. And yet OpenNap is only one of the many alternatives... Besides, everyone knows napster.com is dead by July...
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Yes, original black Freshmeat theme was best.
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Freshmeat II
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· Score: 1
Yup i agree too. Now all the sites are starting to look the same, pretty boring same, some with different colors, but that is all. Even the old B&W Freshmeat logo was very nice. Now we see this radical F ][ letters all over the place, and the yellow ][ icons are very misleading. This thing is aiming to look like some kind of Enlightenment theme... Not that i really care, but if there were a poll asking which of the three layouts you liked the most, i d choose the first black one (old Freshmeat logo included:)
The real savings will come when the Transmeta (fanless?) like CPUs get used, *and* Magnetic RAM which does not need refresh at all.
In the meantime, the powering on/off of hard disks is bad, bad, bad. They will die too fast, and can also actually use *more* power, since such is needed to spin up a hard drive.
But take this into account, how much power is wasted on cooling? Fans, and everything? Now this may sound retro, but i strongly believe we are are better off using *low speed* 5400 RPM drives, in a RAID rather than those monstrous 15000RPM units. The faster the RPMs, the more power they will require to spin up, and more is the heat they will release. Just a thought.
So the bad times are coming, what should you do? Get as much as you can from Napster while you still can!. The community will split and divide, among the many free alternatives and networks; so what used to be abundant in the centralized Napster shall become scarce in the many mini-networks. No doubt, Napster will stop being popular the day they start asking charges. The majority will go. Face it. I bet the Napster.com won't be able to survive for long. People will migrate 'en masse', and some of the alternatives will become popular, think of the many IRC Networks of today, vs the single one of the past.
While this happens, a bit of scarcity and again "hard to find music online times" will come, until truly (free) alternatives start becoming adopted by the public from everywhere, but this will take time.
The bigger the collection we can get, the better the aid everyone will provide as individuals to any of their chosen alternative networks or distribution systems. This is very important, many are already complaining the lack of material on the many Opennap like servers. Having them chained together will surely help. Napster is not really that different from IRC, IRC is an interesting model for these servers to pass data among themselves so that searches can get better results, even if taking longer. Once found, the p2p model could still kick in with the good transfer speeds as usual. The official Napster servers are *not* all chained together. Maybe you have noticed, many times by connecting and disconnecting from the meta servers will give you different people online in your Hotlists, and the chat rooms.
Maybe a whole new protocol should be proposed, something like Internet Relay Transfer Protocol or similar, where a net of IRC like servers do exactly the function that the current Napster servers do, a kind of contact service. This should even be a standard Internet service, pretty much like Instant Messaging is now pushing to be a standard, and it began with just ICQ. Now look all the IM alternatives, but ICQ *still* allows free login, so it is still very popular. But Napster on the other hand... Well, they just introduced a very interesting concept, just like Mirabillis did a while back. Let's take the concept and push it ahead, i'd say.
In the meantime, before the fall of napster.com begins, while they still allow free access, it is better to take as much as possible, we may be the sole source in who knows which network or alternative the future will stump among us.
So yes, forget the easy to buy stuff, concentrate on rare, limited edition, whatever hard to get music you can find (eg in high bit rates). I only use Napster to download the kind of music i can never buy in my country, don't really care in the easy to find stuff. When the opportunity comes, i will sure buy just, CDs if just to provide a better encoding of my favorite music to share. No joke this whole Napster thing ended up being the most cheap never seen mass publicity the big Record Labels could never even dream of, now they can cut a little more on those expensive tours the had to give the artists to get listened at...
I can easily do that too, any wintv card will do. For software, on win98SE: virtualdub 1.4c, very flexible, open sourced GPLed, i use it for both capture and edition, it has many key features as well.
The capture & compression can be done in real time, my system is an AMD K7 Duron 650Mhz running on a MSI motherboard with 64Megs of ram. I usually leave the audio uncompressed, at full PCM 44.1khz stereo. I also set DivX;-) low motion codec at 1 sec keyframes, and 6000 (max) kbps. Average compression is 26:1, somewhere near 200 KB/sec. WIth 10Gigs free, it has more than 20 hours left for recording:) I think you could get even more if you also compress the audio, in.wma at 64kbps, but a little bit faster procesor could be needed. Ah yes, the harddisk is just a Maxtor 30G IDE drive, with UDMA enabled.
I also use a little free scheduler called "Windows Scheduler" to do the automated capture (it saves keystrokes), and virtualdub itself can stop the record after certain conditions are met (like, n minutes passed, or only n megs free on disk).
So yes, your VCR is obsolete already, get a decent CPU and TV Tuner, and have a lot of fun.
Oh, and hear this tip: do the capture at YUY2 (raw) so you can enable the "noise filter", anything from the default (17?) to below (left) should be okay. You will be amazed of the magic this does with old tapes or not good enough tv signal, then choose the compression at the "compression" menu option, so to be done in real time after the raw capture and filtering.
Of course install the DivX;-) lossy codec, and the very useful free opensource huffyuv lossless codec, use the lossy one when you need a long recording time, and the lossless when you need quality above anything else. Same with PCM (raw) audio vs mp3/wma (lossy).
BTW: Could somebody with the knowledge please take a look at VirtualDub's and huffyuv's source code? Maybe it could be ported to BeOS and Linux, now that we have the DivX;-) Deux source at hand it could be useful. I hope video4linux 2 is ready:)
Yes, me too!. I strongly believe in VCD and VCD improvement. Many Asian countries have VCD as a popular distribution format, originals (copyright royalty payed) and all, yet they still sell them very cheap (and bootlegs even cheaper). So OK, it's not DVD quality (in its current white book defined form), but its much more convenient. The VCD home players cost 50$ or less, and now many of these also take CD audio and CD mp3 music (check A-Max's NAPA DAV-310), and yet cost half the price of the cheapest DVD player. VCDs also don't have all that CSS/macrovision/zone/nopauseallowed problems as DVD do; nor they waste space on fancy menus and useless static ads, and marketing add-ons.
Well, we have the next generation SVCD, pretty much the same like VCD, but Mpeg2 instead of Mpeg1, with VBR allowed, yet taking twice the space as standard 352x240 VCD video in stereo.
Now what we really need, is a third generation VCD *standard*, maybe "XVCD" or "DVCD" (Meaning "DivX;-) Deux" VCD?:) which could use this DivX;-) Deus format in standard ISO9660 mode 2 CDs just like Mpeg 1 does in VCD, and allowing the use of MP3s audio just makes perfect sense (i suggest we skip all that.wma nonsense, VBR mp3 is enough). Now, a NAPA like VCD/MP3/CD player would only need, is the support for DivX;-) Deus video format, since everything else is in there already.
So, have you grow tired of MPAA iron grip on DVDs? Then let's start this powerful underground format! Who says it has to be sanctioned to be succesful? Have the RIAA sanctioned MP3s already?
The only remaining wall to develop a hardware DivX;-) Deux player, the lack of source code, has just been just demolished. Now with an underground format like this, independent producers not wanting to sell themselves out to the MPAA, could have a perfect cheap distribution media, and all the countries in this world not blessed with a perfect economy could have an alternate defined format to stand on, in case some hollywood megacorp decided no...
Just think that a standard VCD requires uses typically mpeg1 video at 1150Kbps CBR, + audio layer 2 at 224Kbps CBR too. Imagine what could you do with 1374Kbps with DivX;-) and audio layer 3 instead, both with VBR? So 1374Kbps CBR is all that is needed in mode 2 to have the same duration of a standard audio CD (74mins), but DivX;-) movies distributed on the net already average 300Megs, so it is realistic to assume at least 2 hours could easily fit a standard CD, rendering complex DVD media obsolete already! (I would not think how much DivX;-) video could fit a 2.6Gb DVD-R:)
About DivX;-) Deux legal grounds, i think they simply fall in the same category as the Lame, both source code that "could produce" *if compiled* a tool who may be illegal in "some countries". With the United Corporate State of America DMCAish laws and some few "policy follower contries" in todays world, maybe this kind of renegade open source will become the only way of development the world has anymore!
People is completely surrounded on everlasting Patents and "copyright" and just about everything, the kitchen's sink and their mother is covered, yet they still want everyone to shut down their minds and just play by the rules *they* imposed? How could non-profit efforts work anymore? How could people experiment with ideas? Of course everyone is getting angry, could you just believe all that stuff on the new ATA and ATAPI and even some of SCSI "copyright infrigment protection proposals" at the protocol level?
And yet they still expect that *everyone* will behave, and act like a nice little lamb? DeCSS? I'd say that was *nothing* compared to what we shall see. It is a corporate vs underground war out there, at least in countries were monopolic mega corporations rights matter where people's don't.
Denial of people's own content creation and backup ability for the sake of piracy prevention?
Then why they don't ban all weapons illegal for the sake of crime prevention?
Welcome to Corporate and World Police States of America... Face it, Democracy is not what USA has in place, Maybe Lobbycracy or Corpocracy but something very far from the people themselves...
This is pretty simple: DVD laser wavelength is not the same for CD laser, it will read DVD, and non CD-R media without modification. For a DVD unit to support CDR media, it has to be an "additional feature", for this reason you should always try a CDR disc on a DVD unit prior purchase, and most preferably, a VCD movie on CDR backup. If the player does not read it, skip it and try another model or manufacturer. Pretty simple, just like you should also hunt for the really important features like all region play, non-macrovision and pause never locked in the unit.
Now on CDs: kind of the opposite, CD players will by default support CD and non CDRW media, so the "additional feature" would be the CDRW support. Of course, with the price of a single blank CDRW disc i can easily buy 10 o to 20 CDR discs, so i actually don't care anything (and actually avoid) CDRW media. Some DVD players without CDR support, just "happen" to read some CDRW discs. CDRW is bad anyway, limited to 1000 writes, so you better stop deleting and writting small documents on them...
Now the real *real* DVD-R (burners still costing tens of thousands of dollars) can be played in all existing DVD units (yes, assuming decent non locked fully blank media). All the pseudo DVD-Rom/Ram stuff is not really compatible with existing players, avoid it, or consider Mini-DVD backups (which fit 1 to 3 normal CDs) with sligtly less quality (like SVHS/SP), but since you will do backups with CDR media, is better that your player supported them on the first place.
This has nothing to do with Sony, or any other manufacturer. The DVD incompatibility occured when they changed the invisible wider laser with the smaller reddish one, it is a side effect. If you keep shrinking the laser, you'll get to the famous blue one, but they didn't use it probably for the fear of total CD compatibility lost. A nonsense, since most DVD units ended supporting CDR media by having both a red and invisible laser (or a mechanism to change wavelengths on the fly).
Well, no. The truth is, that you need two cheap VHS (with braindead low speed auto gain adjust) decks for the Macrovision thingy to have any effect at all. Of course the video stabilizers can be useful to take out the macrovision from the copied tape...
Pass directly the video directly among tapes at a low bandwidth channel, and all macrovision protection is perfectly copied to the resulting copy. In fact, it would add innecesary complexity to scan for macrovision to prevent (actually deny) the copy on such level, just so that the unit is DMCA compliant and can be legally sold inside the USA. Sadly, Go-Video had to do this to their otherwise perfectly fine units sold before April of 2000...
But since macrovision does not come in DVD video, it is a nonsense to use the video stabilizer devices in these. Much better is to rip out the Macrovision encoder, or access the hidden menu or move the hidden jumper somewhere inside the unit, or plain simply buy a non compliant unit without the Macrovision chip (Hint: Check UK and Taiwan, forget USA:)
So in case you haven t figured it by now, let me put it clearly. DVD video does not contain macrovision, it is added on real time by request of the disc. Yes, the request can simply be ignored by the unit, just like the zone selection system and the fast forward forbbided section.
And lastly, yes, Macrovision *does* degrade picture quality, so its better to avoid it than just post fix it later.
I don't think so. The best portable MP3 players are the ones without moving parts, and the most promising technology to achieve this would be Magnetic RAM (MRAM). Now, i don't think a Quantum computer will be suitable for MP3 playback, but if it is possible, the energy savings will be astronomical. Anyway a conventional CPU (maybe Transmeta?) coupled with some Gigs of MRAM would make an excellent MP3 player, replacing all that exists now.
BTW: CDRs costs 90cents on average, and work in all standard CD players, Why bother with expensive 25$ to 50$ CDRW media which won't last many rewrites anyway?
Well, it would be a perfect time for a smart niche manufacturer to produce lots of cheap 5400rpm scsi harddisks and *lots* of cheap SCSI2 controllers so to encourage people so switch away from ATA once and for all, and what better excuse than the silly copy protection mess?
Well, the hardware manufacturers are yet to learn what the software industry has already learnt in the past two decades: No matter what, all copy protection mechanisms are doomed to failure. It is only a matter of time each time some new fancy protection scheme goes out, somebody somewhere reverse engineer within months its and its all wasted on extra components that are all going to be happilly bypassed. Take the CSS, Macrovision and zone selection chips on DVD units, for example, would not be much cheaper to build these without units without the extra protection hardware? If i am not mistaken, the DVD format was ready like two or three years before its official launch, but hollywood insisted in adding some kind of extra protection mechanisms before giving support. Well, we lost those years on extra hardware that was destined to be removed or bypassed which only increased the cost per unit, difficulting the mass adoption of the format.
Do the hard disk manufacturers want to take those risk themselves? Think for a minute, what would they loose if they ignore the uneeded complexity requested by those uninformed media executives? WHat would they loose if they *do* support it?
This reminds me of the early CDROM drives, there was a concern about copyright infrigment via the use of the "cdda" command, and some people decided it would be best to remove this capability, but only Mitsumi did it. The result? Everyone was avoiding Mitsumi CDROM units for years and models to come, so they finally restored back the CDDA capability some years later. Would you, harddisk manufacturer want to become the next Mitsumi of harddisks?
Leave the copyright enforcement to policeman and lawyers, leave the hardware and software out of this nonsense at once, you'll loose more money if you don't. Just think why most software stopped the sillyness, ten years ago...
Slashdot Mirror
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Ahem... Care to search which other OSes use Xfree?
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The presence of Double Density CDs on the market could even lead to further revision of the VCD standard. By just allowing Variable Bit Rate and rising the 1374kbps limit of the current White Book; you can have very good quality simple Mpeg1 video storage format, that could make very cheap VCD Players with twice duration and crisp non blocky quality. Of course you can achieve even more if you also allow Mpeg 2/4 and mp3/aac audio in the stream; but this will make the device cost a bit higher; which still could cost a fraction of your average DVD player.
Uncrippled of any kind of restriction nonsense; an underground "supported by the people" alternative distribution format like this could easily succeed; at least in many, many countries that can not afford anything else anyway. In fact i believe it is a matter of when will they get more popular.
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The software i used for the system was Remote Access, originally written in Pascal if i remember correctly. The theme of my system was mostly multiplayer BBS door game inspired, including a famous play by email game called VGA Planets. I remember using Frontdoor for the Fidonet daily exchange, and The-Draw a lot, to build nice looking (and friendly) ANSI menus.
I only used DOS for the time it lasted (single line, anyway), with as low as a 2MB 12-Mhz 286 with an old 5 1/4" 40MB Seagate (ST-251N) MFM Hard Disk (the N was the 28MS version, not the 40MS :) with mono HGC like card for disply. It didnt change very much, at the last days it used an AMD 386SX-40 with 4Mb ram and a mighty (IDE/ATA :) 80MB seagate hard disk (uhm.. ST-3096A, still fully operational :) and those CPU upgrades were to minimize the downtime required per day for the turn process of the VGA Planets games. (which could easily take 1 to 2 hours on the 286! :) Hmm btw that AMD/Intel 12Mhz 286 (still functional!) was an old DTK *full size board* (i have the large desktop DTK case) with the memory on 256byte chips... (hence, the full size :).
Ah the old days, only thing needed was a decent terminal (with ANSI :) program and preferably a good protocol (zmodem). Who cared what OS/platform had the caller, as long as it were a modem, which, were all true (non soft) modems back then.
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Windows? at NASA!? so stupid, i can not believe it!. I bet China will be more succesful, as the now poor russians were.
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Even with all those prices, thanks to the Napster like networks, i have discovered many Jpop and Jrock artists, and i have even buyed some of those overpriced discs. But the preview of the artists is what determined my intention. One good reason i would like to buy the CD, aside from giving a little aid to the artist (i know they wont get very much per CD sale) is the opportunity for me to make my own good rip and mp3 encoding, so that people can enjoy a truly good preview of the song.
For this, i use Lame of course ^^
Anyway my opinion is that the Riaa has a lot more to lose by going against this, instead of embracing it. They will never win the war, anyway, so it is very sad they are so obfuscared they still even attempt to fight it. Well, if the Napster with subscription thing takes off, i think they will essentialy become a riaa on the net. Anyone wanting to have presence, will need to register with napster first, otherwise they wont recieve money from downloads of their songs.
Well, if there were not that many free alternatives, that is. So now that Napster could became Riaa friendly, with all the control and encryption they plan to add to the songs (aka yet another propietary format) and subscription scheme including paying Riaa periodically, it could be now of their best interest (for RIAA) to target all the others, non Napster networks who will still use the Riaa so hated MP3 format.
In fact, i am suprised that MPAA is not involved too, since OpenNap servers allow more than mp3 content to be traded, like Mpeg video. I am sure they will, with the United Corporations of America laws with them, no one inside the US will be able to even think outside the Corporation s best interests.
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In the meantime, get used to the OpenNap servers, like those listed in www.napigator.com. The last time napster went down, www.musiccity.com opennap servers had people in like never before, it seems they are the next napster replacement. Just wait until the clueless napster users learn that they could also exchange *video* the very same way they exchange music with napster now. And yet OpenNap is only one of the many alternatives... Besides, everyone knows napster.com is dead by July...
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In the meantime, the powering on/off of hard disks is bad, bad, bad. They will die too fast, and can also actually use *more* power, since such is needed to spin up a hard drive.
But take this into account, how much power is wasted on cooling? Fans, and everything? Now this may sound retro, but i strongly believe we are are better off using *low speed* 5400 RPM drives, in a RAID rather than those monstrous 15000RPM units. The faster the RPMs, the more power they will require to spin up, and more is the heat they will release. Just a thought.
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While this happens, a bit of scarcity and again "hard to find music online times" will come, until truly (free) alternatives start becoming adopted by the public from everywhere, but this will take time.
The bigger the collection we can get, the better the aid everyone will provide as individuals to any of their chosen alternative networks or distribution systems. This is very important, many are already complaining the lack of material on the many Opennap like servers. Having them chained together will surely help. Napster is not really that different from IRC, IRC is an interesting model for these servers to pass data among themselves so that searches can get better results, even if taking longer. Once found, the p2p model could still kick in with the good transfer speeds as usual. The official Napster servers are *not* all chained together. Maybe you have noticed, many times by connecting and disconnecting from the meta servers will give you different people online in your Hotlists, and the chat rooms.
Maybe a whole new protocol should be proposed, something like Internet Relay Transfer Protocol or similar, where a net of IRC like servers do exactly the function that the current Napster servers do, a kind of contact service. This should even be a standard Internet service, pretty much like Instant Messaging is now pushing to be a standard, and it began with just ICQ. Now look all the IM alternatives, but ICQ *still* allows free login, so it is still very popular. But Napster on the other hand... Well, they just introduced a very interesting concept, just like Mirabillis did a while back. Let's take the concept and push it ahead, i'd say.
In the meantime, before the fall of napster.com begins, while they still allow free access, it is better to take as much as possible, we may be the sole source in who knows which network or alternative the future will stump among us.
So yes, forget the easy to buy stuff, concentrate on rare, limited edition, whatever hard to get music you can find (eg in high bit rates). I only use Napster to download the kind of music i can never buy in my country, don't really care in the easy to find stuff. When the opportunity comes, i will sure buy just, CDs if just to provide a better encoding of my favorite music to share. No joke this whole Napster thing ended up being the most cheap never seen mass publicity the big Record Labels could never even dream of, now they can cut a little more on those expensive tours the had to give the artists to get listened at...
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The capture & compression can be done in real time, my system is an AMD K7 Duron 650Mhz running on a MSI motherboard with 64Megs of ram. I usually leave the audio uncompressed, at full PCM 44.1khz stereo. I also set DivX ;-) low motion codec at 1 sec keyframes, and 6000 (max) kbps. Average compression is 26:1, somewhere near 200 KB/sec. WIth 10Gigs free, it has more than 20 hours left for recording :) I think you could get even more if you also compress the audio, in .wma at 64kbps, but a little bit faster procesor could be needed. Ah yes, the harddisk is just a Maxtor 30G IDE drive, with UDMA enabled.
I also use a little free scheduler called "Windows Scheduler" to do the automated capture (it saves keystrokes), and virtualdub itself can stop the record after certain conditions are met (like, n minutes passed, or only n megs free on disk).
So yes, your VCR is obsolete already, get a decent CPU and TV Tuner, and have a lot of fun.
Oh, and hear this tip: do the capture at YUY2 (raw) so you can enable the "noise filter", anything from the default (17?) to below (left) should be okay. You will be amazed of the magic this does with old tapes or not good enough tv signal, then choose the compression at the "compression" menu option, so to be done in real time after the raw capture and filtering.
Of course install the DivX ;-) lossy codec, and the very useful free opensource huffyuv lossless codec, use the lossy one when you need a long recording time, and the lossless when you need quality above anything else. Same with PCM (raw) audio vs mp3/wma (lossy).
BTW: Could somebody with the knowledge please take a look at VirtualDub's and huffyuv's source code? Maybe it could be ported to BeOS and Linux, now that we have the DivX ;-) Deux source at hand it could be useful. I hope video4linux 2 is ready :)
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Well, we have the next generation SVCD, pretty much the same like VCD, but Mpeg2 instead of Mpeg1, with VBR allowed, yet taking twice the space as standard 352x240 VCD video in stereo.
Now what we really need, is a third generation VCD *standard*, maybe "XVCD" or "DVCD" (Meaning "DivX
So, have you grow tired of MPAA iron grip on DVDs? Then let's start this powerful underground format! Who says it has to be sanctioned to be succesful? Have the RIAA sanctioned MP3s already?
The only remaining wall to develop a hardware DivX
Just think that a standard VCD requires uses typically mpeg1 video at 1150Kbps CBR, + audio layer 2 at 224Kbps CBR too. Imagine what could you do with 1374Kbps with DivX
About DivX
People is completely surrounded on everlasting Patents and "copyright" and just about everything, the kitchen's sink and their mother is covered, yet they still want everyone to shut down their minds and just play by the rules *they* imposed? How could non-profit efforts work anymore? How could people experiment with ideas? Of course everyone is getting angry, could you just believe all that stuff on the new ATA and ATAPI and even some of SCSI "copyright infrigment protection proposals" at the protocol level?
And yet they still expect that *everyone* will behave, and act like a nice little lamb? DeCSS? I'd say that was *nothing* compared to what we shall see. It is a corporate vs underground war out there, at least in countries were monopolic mega corporations rights matter where people's don't.
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Then why they don't ban all weapons illegal for the sake of crime prevention?
Welcome to Corporate and World Police States of America... Face it, Democracy is not what USA has in place, Maybe Lobbycracy or Corpocracy but something very far from the people themselves...
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Now on CDs: kind of the opposite, CD players will by default support CD and non CDRW media, so the "additional feature" would be the CDRW support. Of course, with the price of a single blank CDRW disc i can easily buy 10 o to 20 CDR discs, so i actually don't care anything (and actually avoid) CDRW media. Some DVD players without CDR support, just "happen" to read some CDRW discs. CDRW is bad anyway, limited to 1000 writes, so you better stop deleting and writting small documents on them...
Now the real *real* DVD-R (burners still costing tens of thousands of dollars) can be played in all existing DVD units (yes, assuming decent non locked fully blank media). All the pseudo DVD-Rom/Ram stuff is not really compatible with existing players, avoid it, or consider Mini-DVD backups (which fit 1 to 3 normal CDs) with sligtly less quality (like SVHS/SP), but since you will do backups with CDR media, is better that your player supported them on the first place.
This has nothing to do with Sony, or any other manufacturer. The DVD incompatibility occured when they changed the invisible wider laser with the smaller reddish one, it is a side effect. If you keep shrinking the laser, you'll get to the famous blue one, but they didn't use it probably for the fear of total CD compatibility lost. A nonsense, since most DVD units ended supporting CDR media by having both a red and invisible laser (or a mechanism to change wavelengths on the fly).
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Pass directly the video directly among tapes at a low bandwidth channel, and all macrovision protection is perfectly copied to the resulting copy. In fact, it would add innecesary complexity to scan for macrovision to prevent (actually deny) the copy on such level, just so that the unit is DMCA compliant and can be legally sold inside the USA. Sadly, Go-Video had to do this to their otherwise perfectly fine units sold before April of 2000...
But since macrovision does not come in DVD video, it is a nonsense to use the video stabilizer devices in these. Much better is to rip out the Macrovision encoder, or access the hidden menu or move the hidden jumper somewhere inside the unit, or plain simply buy a non compliant unit without the Macrovision chip (Hint: Check UK and Taiwan, forget USA
So in case you haven t figured it by now, let me put it clearly. DVD video does not contain macrovision, it is added on real time by request of the disc. Yes, the request can simply be ignored by the unit, just like the zone selection system and the fast forward forbbided section.
And lastly, yes, Macrovision *does* degrade picture quality, so its better to avoid it than just post fix it later.
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BTW: CDRs costs 90cents on average, and work in all standard CD players, Why bother with expensive 25$ to 50$ CDRW media which won't last many rewrites anyway?
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Do the hard disk manufacturers want to take those risk themselves? Think for a minute, what would they loose if they ignore the uneeded complexity requested by those uninformed media executives? WHat would they loose if they *do* support it?
This reminds me of the early CDROM drives, there was a concern about copyright infrigment via the use of the "cdda" command, and some people decided it would be best to remove this capability, but only Mitsumi did it. The result? Everyone was avoiding Mitsumi CDROM units for years and models to come, so they finally restored back the CDDA capability some years later. Would you, harddisk manufacturer want to become the next Mitsumi of harddisks?
Leave the copyright enforcement to policeman and lawyers, leave the hardware and software out of this nonsense at once, you'll loose more money if you don't. Just think why most software stopped the sillyness, ten years ago...
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