Thanks for the input... I did sell my Mini already so there's no turning back there, but 1080i would have been good enough for me. I take it the EyeTV reduces the load on the CPU quite a bit (especially the 500 part). Were you doing the whole DVR thing, pausing, rewinding, etc.?
I will admit that Quicktime was (understandably) good - although 720p QT7 files (H264) was a little skippy. But granted, although the HDTV spec, that's an awfully high resolution, and AVCs like H264 are more processor intensive than any codec to come prior. They were shaky also in the QT7 for Windows (running on an Athlon 64 w/ 1GB PC3200 RAM).
I experimented with x264, the open source implementation of AVC, for a couple encodes, and was largely satisfied. The resolution was a lot less than 720p - more along the lines of DVD resolution (480p I guess, give or take), but I didn't play around with it that much. I did one full backup with the codec and was astonished on color and detail accuracy at lower bitrates (higher bitrates and the distinctions aren't as significant next to MPEG-4 ASP). But encode times are a bit too much to ask compared to XviD. With time, it'll definitely be my codec of choice. Although post-processing filters in many of the popular open source players can alleviate issues with lesser codecs like XviD.
One thing I'd be greatly interested in is the Intel factor. G4, as you said, is a major achilles heel of the whole setup; maybe moving to Intel will help encoding/decoding a lot (after all, P4s have held the content-creation benchmark record in Windows over AMD's parts for a long time), and it could prompt a healthy price drop (I don't know how well Apple's premium pricing will hold over when the Intel Mini is compared to similarly-spec'ed $300-400 Dell boxes).
In the meantime, I'll look into turning our G5 into an HDTV PVR. Never really paid attention to EyeTV, but you piqued my curiosity.:)
Camino is nice, but it's development has stagnated next to Firefox. Now, Firefox has at least equalled Camino in performance - and many extensions work just fine in it.
My main issue is the lack of middle-clicking support. And performance improvements regardless, it's still slower than Safari - as is Camino.
24-bit transparent PNGs work pretty good in IE7 beta 1.
It's CSS where a lot of the work has to be done (and where it seems pretty much indistinguishable from the horrid IE6).
Yep, it's in the Firefox Beta 1.5. It was in the "Deer Park" alphas, as well, but deactivated at default - you had turn it on in a configuration page.
I agree that SVG is an enormously important standard, and having it built into browsers is a must. Hopefully, the next version of my site will have a vector logo instead of a bitmap PNG.:)
Is it sufficient for HDTV? I had a Mac Mini before, and was so upset by its speed (for the price) that I sold it. I had used it for graphics for a while, before that frustrated me so much that I put it in the living room to play my XviD DVD backups on my TV (via Apple's DVI->s-video adapter). I was using MPlayerOSX, and got skipped frames rather often - not to mention that I could never quite get the refresh just right with the Mini on my TV, so I'd get visible tearing.
I know it's probably the operating system colliding with drive bandwidth limitations more than anything else. It could also be a software issue - maybe MPlayerOSX isn't the best player to use. But whatever the case, its low ceiling for the $600 I paid for it was not satisfactory. Now I use a similarly priced PC with twice the hard drive (7200 RPM one at that) and RAM in a Shuttle case running an Athlon XP 2000+, a Hauppage PVR-250, and Ubuntu+MythTV. Not as pretty on the outside (though SFFs certainly ain't no beige boxes), but it flies in comparison, and plays my XviD and Vorbis collections just fine. Worth noting that I wasn't doing TV on my Mini, as EyeTV is another $300+; so I can't speak to the performance of TV on Mini (much less, HDTV). But I'd assume that if I had problems playing MPEG-4, pausing/recording live TV can't be much better.
On the other end of the spectrum, my girlfriend has a dual 2GHz G5 tower (enormously discounted as a bonus from work, for working so much damn overtime) which sits in our bedroom, and runs OS X as it was meant to be run.:) Probably down the road, I'll gift her (me) with an EyeTV and give it a good head-to-head with my Myth setup (ignoring price for a while).
I don't think Scribus supports that kind of output (certainly not the podcast, for sure). Its main output is PDF/X-3, which is appropriate since layouts in Scribus, similar to Adobe Indesign, are capable of containing vector images (as well as raster images), and PDF can contain either. The magazine surely could be formatted as RSS or some other XML, but then you'd be downloading the XML and the images separately.
I'm sorry if I misunterstood. I had inferred that your statement "but they're compressed" was a complaint against compression in general. I was just trying to point out that everything is relative, and that there's different levels of compression. Obviously, your new reply above shows you realize that already; I just didn't get that sense from the way you phrased your first comment.
And I agree that an option for CD quality, even in non-CD distribution, should always be provided. It's nice of Barenaked Ladies to show that music can be distributed on physical media other than CDs (however redundant in this age of iPods, U2 or not, the idea may be), and especially nice to do it without DRM, but artists who distribute outside of CDs should still provide comparable quality files.
FYI, nitpicking here, but CD audio, like any other digital format, is compressed. 16-bit PCM. When sampling analog recordings, there'll always be some loss of data.
It's true MP3, even at the 320kbps high end of commonly used resolutions, seems puny next to the 1400kbps of typical CD audio. But if the source for these MP3s was higher quality than CD - say, maybe it went straight from recording studio to MP3 encoding - then the differences probably won't too significant - certainly not for a majority of folks who play their files through cheap speakers and an underpowered source (e.g.: computer sound card).
And it's pretty obvious they're not targeting audiophiles with this product. If you want FLAC, Monkey Audio, Apple/WMA Lossless, what-have-you, you will, like you said, need more storage space. And at the cost of Flash or hard drives, you might as well use recordable CD/DVD to store your lossless audio. Or get a pressed CD.
Though since PR is the whole point of this idea, it'd be neat for an artist/label to take it a step further and use a multi GB portable USB HDD to hold a box-set (or two or three) worth of compressed audio.
Good point to make, Tchaika; although, I'd want to question the actual infrastructure - whether it takes advantage of the most efficient technologies. One can assume that many don't - but I concede that I don't know exact numbers.
Some interesting numbers, though - at least in the US - for CO2 emissions put the total for coal firing and natural gas plants a good 32% ahead of petroleum (as of 2003), with a small upward trend.
You are right that many states offer green options - New York included (we're signing up for hydro/wind power for my Brooklyn apartment), but not everybody knows this, sadly - especially in New York City. Hopefully awareness of the whole infrastructure, from power plant to car, will increase. But, of course, I welcome any change, big or small, away from CO2 emissions, and BEVs are certainly a step in that direction.
And personally, as much as I like fusion, I'm big on fuel cell power plants for electric and heat energy. Though admittedly I haven't been paying attention to recent developments with it.
I'm all for non-gasoline, all-electric cars, but the power has to come from somewhere. When you plug in to recharge, where does that line ultimately lead? Hopefully not one of the world's largest sources of artificially generated CO2. The more electrics on the road, the more cars plugging in to refuel, the more these dirty power sources have to burn, the more greenhouse gases in our air.
Moving to PCI E is definitely a pain... Lacking in an option in motherboard that had both AGP and PCI E, I bought a dead-end stop-gap, which is a 6600GT AGP card. I love it so far, but I knew I'd have to take the big gulp of getting a new mobo and a new card at once down the line.:(
But finally, at least nowadays we have options like this one with both kinds of interfaces on them, so I can buy the mobo now and the graphics card later.
I'm not certain about the numbers behind the format being used, but I get the feeling that the main purpose is to store the imagery for viewing on bigger screens - probably at full resolution and with the least amount of compression - while viewing it on the iPod's screen is just secondary (probably for verification purposes to make sure that the right images were transferred). So down-sampling need not apply - unless the iPod Photo/Video is incapable of doing the process itself in realtime and needs separate thumbnails made (in which case you still need the storage capacity to handle the full quality images).
I concede that this is a more bloated solution, and likely more unstable than the streamlined iPod. But I'd expect the interface could be fine-tuned even more conveniently than the iPod's click wheel.
This particular case isn't even about admission policies, it's about kicking students out whilst they are already there.
I think this is the most important point to make. Were applicants told this condition of "no blogs" in the first place? It's one thing for students to be booted when consciously breaking rules to which they knowingly bound themselves upon application - it's another to get kicked out because the school invented new rules without discussing it with the students after they were already accepted.
Dell PDA's are notoriously picky with OS's... meaning, Windows Mobile, or nothing. I currently have WM 2003 SE, with the A05 ROM update installed. It's decent, though it's been unstable lately - I've noticed especially if I shut down leaving the wifi on.
Although when it doesn't crash, things work pretty well. The wifi works pretty well - I've war-walked with it in some parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, although I use it most of all at work and at home (a Linksys WRT54GS router resides at each place). Better than my old X30h.
Non-networking stuff, such as video using the aforementioned Beta Player, audio using a program called Mort Player (GS Player is also great), and reading ebooks (I love Mobipocket Reader), and the basic included office apps are pretty much problem free.
If yours is a clunker, maybe you should try getting it replaced if it's under warranty still (maybe they'll send you the new x51v, with MS's latest WM 5.0 OS installed).
Actually, I put 1-1.5GB XviD-compressed full DVDs on my Microdrive. I usually compress to a resolution of 704 pixels wide, and the Axim is able to downscale it to 640 just fine using Beta Player. It was a daily habit of mine a while back to take a DVD backup to keep me occupied on the subway (now ebooks do that job).
Microdrive was the best thing I bought for it. I also have a 512MB SD card in there, but I use it for applications (documents and files go on the MD).
To blur the iPod functionality lines a bit further, I could try this - although Windows Media Player is hardly my most used app.
Re:Technology Changes, and so do preferences..
on
Video iPod Screen Test
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Speaking of, my Dell Axim x50 PocketPC can play all flavors of audio (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Flac, WAV, what-have-you), video (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 in the form of DivX and XviD - and in a bigger screen and 4 times the resolution of the iPod at that), has a built-in calendar, can browse the web, receive e-mails, chat over multiple IM protocols, and can make VOIP calls using Skype's PocketPC client and the built in wifi. It's just missing a camera...although, I could buy this one.
It doesn't have a HDD in the 10s of GB (just a 2.5GB microdrive I bought for it), but that wasn't in your list. It's "all-in-one" enough for me! =D
It's a headache, but I got wifi working in Ubuntu 5.10 running the Linux kernel 2.6.12-8-386 on my Acer Aspire 3002 using Ndiswrapper. It works pretty well
The major problem is that newer kernels don't seem to do so hot with it; when I upgraded to 2.6.12-9-386, the power management module stopped working, and I had to revert to the older kernel to get it back.
A couple of others have reported success. See here for a thread about it, and here for my wiki documenting my efforts to get it to work.
Windows Mobile (and I'm presuming Palm OS) based phones support a myriad of audio playback programs, and most (if not all) have at least an SD slot with no artificial limitations on number or size of files.
It's just the sync'ing with iTunes that they lack.
Slashdot Mirror
Or Gaim for the Linux/Windows users, the core library of which Adium uses.
Thanks for the input... I did sell my Mini already so there's no turning back there, but 1080i would have been good enough for me. I take it the EyeTV reduces the load on the CPU quite a bit (especially the 500 part). Were you doing the whole DVR thing, pausing, rewinding, etc.?
I will admit that Quicktime was (understandably) good - although 720p QT7 files (H264) was a little skippy. But granted, although the HDTV spec, that's an awfully high resolution, and AVCs like H264 are more processor intensive than any codec to come prior. They were shaky also in the QT7 for Windows (running on an Athlon 64 w/ 1GB PC3200 RAM).
I experimented with x264, the open source implementation of AVC, for a couple encodes, and was largely satisfied. The resolution was a lot less than 720p - more along the lines of DVD resolution (480p I guess, give or take), but I didn't play around with it that much. I did one full backup with the codec and was astonished on color and detail accuracy at lower bitrates (higher bitrates and the distinctions aren't as significant next to MPEG-4 ASP). But encode times are a bit too much to ask compared to XviD. With time, it'll definitely be my codec of choice. Although post-processing filters in many of the popular open source players can alleviate issues with lesser codecs like XviD.
One thing I'd be greatly interested in is the Intel factor. G4, as you said, is a major achilles heel of the whole setup; maybe moving to Intel will help encoding/decoding a lot (after all, P4s have held the content-creation benchmark record in Windows over AMD's parts for a long time), and it could prompt a healthy price drop (I don't know how well Apple's premium pricing will hold over when the Intel Mini is compared to similarly-spec'ed $300-400 Dell boxes).
In the meantime, I'll look into turning our G5 into an HDTV PVR. Never really paid attention to EyeTV, but you piqued my curiosity. :)
Camino is nice, but it's development has stagnated next to Firefox. Now, Firefox has at least equalled Camino in performance - and many extensions work just fine in it. My main issue is the lack of middle-clicking support. And performance improvements regardless, it's still slower than Safari - as is Camino.
Nope, Safari 2 on our Tiger machine here at work passes flawlessly.
I must be running the wrong versions of both browsers, then, because Mozilla gleans no more than relatively decent Acid2 results (which have stayed pretty much the same for a year more or less), while Opera comes considerably closer to passing.
Also, I think you can credit KDE and KHTML for a large part of why Safari now passes Acid2.
24-bit transparent PNGs work pretty good in IE7 beta 1. It's CSS where a lot of the work has to be done (and where it seems pretty much indistinguishable from the horrid IE6).
Yep, it's in the Firefox Beta 1.5. It was in the "Deer Park" alphas, as well, but deactivated at default - you had turn it on in a configuration page. I agree that SVG is an enormously important standard, and having it built into browsers is a must. Hopefully, the next version of my site will have a vector logo instead of a bitmap PNG. :)
Is it sufficient for HDTV? I had a Mac Mini before, and was so upset by its speed (for the price) that I sold it. I had used it for graphics for a while, before that frustrated me so much that I put it in the living room to play my XviD DVD backups on my TV (via Apple's DVI->s-video adapter). I was using MPlayerOSX, and got skipped frames rather often - not to mention that I could never quite get the refresh just right with the Mini on my TV, so I'd get visible tearing.
I know it's probably the operating system colliding with drive bandwidth limitations more than anything else. It could also be a software issue - maybe MPlayerOSX isn't the best player to use. But whatever the case, its low ceiling for the $600 I paid for it was not satisfactory. Now I use a similarly priced PC with twice the hard drive (7200 RPM one at that) and RAM in a Shuttle case running an Athlon XP 2000+, a Hauppage PVR-250, and Ubuntu+MythTV. Not as pretty on the outside (though SFFs certainly ain't no beige boxes), but it flies in comparison, and plays my XviD and Vorbis collections just fine. Worth noting that I wasn't doing TV on my Mini, as EyeTV is another $300+; so I can't speak to the performance of TV on Mini (much less, HDTV). But I'd assume that if I had problems playing MPEG-4, pausing/recording live TV can't be much better.
On the other end of the spectrum, my girlfriend has a dual 2GHz G5 tower (enormously discounted as a bonus from work, for working so much damn overtime) which sits in our bedroom, and runs OS X as it was meant to be run. :) Probably down the road, I'll gift her (me) with an EyeTV and give it a good head-to-head with my Myth setup (ignoring price for a while).
Don't fret, just switch to a different port, like I did. I'm using port 50000, to great success - for my GPL and CC content, of course.
I don't think Scribus supports that kind of output (certainly not the podcast, for sure). Its main output is PDF/X-3, which is appropriate since layouts in Scribus, similar to Adobe Indesign, are capable of containing vector images (as well as raster images), and PDF can contain either. The magazine surely could be formatted as RSS or some other XML, but then you'd be downloading the XML and the images separately.
I'm sorry if I misunterstood. I had inferred that your statement "but they're compressed" was a complaint against compression in general. I was just trying to point out that everything is relative, and that there's different levels of compression. Obviously, your new reply above shows you realize that already; I just didn't get that sense from the way you phrased your first comment.
And I agree that an option for CD quality, even in non-CD distribution, should always be provided. It's nice of Barenaked Ladies to show that music can be distributed on physical media other than CDs (however redundant in this age of iPods, U2 or not, the idea may be), and especially nice to do it without DRM, but artists who distribute outside of CDs should still provide comparable quality files.
FYI, nitpicking here, but CD audio, like any other digital format, is compressed. 16-bit PCM. When sampling analog recordings, there'll always be some loss of data.
It's true MP3, even at the 320kbps high end of commonly used resolutions, seems puny next to the 1400kbps of typical CD audio. But if the source for these MP3s was higher quality than CD - say, maybe it went straight from recording studio to MP3 encoding - then the differences probably won't too significant - certainly not for a majority of folks who play their files through cheap speakers and an underpowered source (e.g.: computer sound card).
And it's pretty obvious they're not targeting audiophiles with this product. If you want FLAC, Monkey Audio, Apple/WMA Lossless, what-have-you, you will, like you said, need more storage space. And at the cost of Flash or hard drives, you might as well use recordable CD/DVD to store your lossless audio. Or get a pressed CD.
Though since PR is the whole point of this idea, it'd be neat for an artist/label to take it a step further and use a multi GB portable USB HDD to hold a box-set (or two or three) worth of compressed audio.
You mean "as you increase the number of disks, the expected time before first failure plummets," not skyrockets.
Or it's a quick fix on getting your teeth really gleaming white for a little while.
Good point to make, Tchaika; although, I'd want to question the actual infrastructure - whether it takes advantage of the most efficient technologies. One can assume that many don't - but I concede that I don't know exact numbers.
Some interesting numbers, though - at least in the US - for CO2 emissions put the total for coal firing and natural gas plants a good 32% ahead of petroleum (as of 2003), with a small upward trend.
You are right that many states offer green options - New York included (we're signing up for hydro/wind power for my Brooklyn apartment), but not everybody knows this, sadly - especially in New York City. Hopefully awareness of the whole infrastructure, from power plant to car, will increase. But, of course, I welcome any change, big or small, away from CO2 emissions, and BEVs are certainly a step in that direction.
And personally, as much as I like fusion, I'm big on fuel cell power plants for electric and heat energy. Though admittedly I haven't been paying attention to recent developments with it.
I'm all for non-gasoline, all-electric cars, but the power has to come from somewhere. When you plug in to recharge, where does that line ultimately lead? Hopefully not one of the world's largest sources of artificially generated CO2. The more electrics on the road, the more cars plugging in to refuel, the more these dirty power sources have to burn, the more greenhouse gases in our air.
Moving to PCI E is definitely a pain... Lacking in an option in motherboard that had both AGP and PCI E, I bought a dead-end stop-gap, which is a 6600GT AGP card. I love it so far, but I knew I'd have to take the big gulp of getting a new mobo and a new card at once down the line. :(
But finally, at least nowadays we have options like this one with both kinds of interfaces on them, so I can buy the mobo now and the graphics card later.
I'm not certain about the numbers behind the format being used, but I get the feeling that the main purpose is to store the imagery for viewing on bigger screens - probably at full resolution and with the least amount of compression - while viewing it on the iPod's screen is just secondary (probably for verification purposes to make sure that the right images were transferred). So down-sampling need not apply - unless the iPod Photo/Video is incapable of doing the process itself in realtime and needs separate thumbnails made (in which case you still need the storage capacity to handle the full quality images).
You could provide a PDA with an iPod-like interface.
I concede that this is a more bloated solution, and likely more unstable than the streamlined iPod. But I'd expect the interface could be fine-tuned even more conveniently than the iPod's click wheel.
This particular case isn't even about admission policies, it's about kicking students out whilst they are already there.
I think this is the most important point to make. Were applicants told this condition of "no blogs" in the first place? It's one thing for students to be booted when consciously breaking rules to which they knowingly bound themselves upon application - it's another to get kicked out because the school invented new rules without discussing it with the students after they were already accepted.
Dell PDA's are notoriously picky with OS's... meaning, Windows Mobile, or nothing. I currently have WM 2003 SE, with the A05 ROM update installed. It's decent, though it's been unstable lately - I've noticed especially if I shut down leaving the wifi on. Although when it doesn't crash, things work pretty well. The wifi works pretty well - I've war-walked with it in some parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, although I use it most of all at work and at home (a Linksys WRT54GS router resides at each place). Better than my old X30h. Non-networking stuff, such as video using the aforementioned Beta Player, audio using a program called Mort Player (GS Player is also great), and reading ebooks (I love Mobipocket Reader), and the basic included office apps are pretty much problem free. If yours is a clunker, maybe you should try getting it replaced if it's under warranty still (maybe they'll send you the new x51v, with MS's latest WM 5.0 OS installed).
Actually, I put 1-1.5GB XviD-compressed full DVDs on my Microdrive. I usually compress to a resolution of 704 pixels wide, and the Axim is able to downscale it to 640 just fine using Beta Player. It was a daily habit of mine a while back to take a DVD backup to keep me occupied on the subway (now ebooks do that job).
Microdrive was the best thing I bought for it. I also have a 512MB SD card in there, but I use it for applications (documents and files go on the MD).
To blur the iPod functionality lines a bit further, I could try this - although Windows Media Player is hardly my most used app.
Speaking of, my Dell Axim x50 PocketPC can play all flavors of audio (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Flac, WAV, what-have-you), video (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 in the form of DivX and XviD - and in a bigger screen and 4 times the resolution of the iPod at that), has a built-in calendar, can browse the web, receive e-mails, chat over multiple IM protocols, and can make VOIP calls using Skype's PocketPC client and the built in wifi. It's just missing a camera...although, I could buy this one.
It doesn't have a HDD in the 10s of GB (just a 2.5GB microdrive I bought for it), but that wasn't in your list. It's "all-in-one" enough for me! =D
It's a headache, but I got wifi working in Ubuntu 5.10 running the Linux kernel 2.6.12-8-386 on my Acer Aspire 3002 using Ndiswrapper. It works pretty well The major problem is that newer kernels don't seem to do so hot with it; when I upgraded to 2.6.12-9-386, the power management module stopped working, and I had to revert to the older kernel to get it back. A couple of others have reported success. See here for a thread about it, and here for my wiki documenting my efforts to get it to work.
Windows Mobile (and I'm presuming Palm OS) based phones support a myriad of audio playback programs, and most (if not all) have at least an SD slot with no artificial limitations on number or size of files.
It's just the sync'ing with iTunes that they lack.