I started to refute each point that you made about what you supposedly couldn't do with old Dells, but it's not even worth it. Every single point you made was bogus.
And of course, there's the fallacious point of "Apple's computers starting at $1000". Apparently you haven't heard of the Mac Mini, coming in at $599, just $199 more than Dell's "Bottom Line" and offering a ton more features.
"Just $199 more" = 50% more than $400. In other words, "just" is not an appropriate term for it. As the other poster said, you still need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Also, from your original post that got modded higher than its parent for some strange reason:
Apparently, you missed it. Apple's new Mac Pro is cheaper than a comparatively configured Dell workstation machine.
It truly doesn't matter whether Apple wins the high end. Most of Dell's market is low end. Apple could dominate the $2000+ market, and they still wouldn't make a dent in Dell. We can talk about Dell Precisions all day, but the fact is, most consumers don't even know what a Dell Precision is.
Womble's encoder seems to work fine for me. Even when adding logos and transitions, and only reencoding those parts, you can't tell the difference between the stream copied and reencoded sections.
Nero Recode's MPEG-4 AVC encoder is actually really good. It's got most of the profiles and options to turn everything off so crappy Quicktime can even play it.
I don't use it so much for MPEG-2, just when DVD Shrink doesn't work. And that's really to just remove previews and shrink menus, so I guess I don't know how good it's quality is.
But Nero Digital is pretty serious about being a full-featured encoding suite, compatible with Nero Digital standalone players. They have a free AAC encoder that is quite popular. They're good for much more than just burning now. And Nero Recode is also quite popular on doom9, so I don't think it can be too bad.
It imports AVI, uses a timeline editor with a really fast seek, and my favorite: it can do stream copy for portions you don't want edited. Then there's transitions and other bells and whistles. I use it for anything I can't do in VirtualDub/AviSynth or Nero Recode. It's also recommended in the doom9 forums, for what it's worth.
And getting rid of a slender cable from my mouse or keyboard to my monitor is not worth it.
Yeah, lying down on my couch reading slashdot at +3 pt font after increasing it with one of 12 buttons on my wireless mouse that I'm using on my leg really sucks.
Ha! I didn't see your post when I posted mine right below yours. That was a great game for its time. It was weird around that time. I switched from owning several Macs to Windows 95 on a Compaq (P75 4x CD-ROM, 4 MB base RAM woohoo!) and was annoyed that I had all these Mac games that weren't compatible with Windows. It was the exact opposite of how it would be now. I ended up rebuying Myst for Windows much later but it just wasn't as exciting as it was at the time. Myst is the definition of the word immersion. About the only series that has come close in that aspect is Morrowind/Oblivion.
Using Vorbis wouldn't be the smartest, as it isn't going to be supported on many (if any) standalones or portables. I don't see why anyone would use MKV over the MPEG-4 container, I don't see why anyone would use FLAC when the audio is arguably the least important part of the file (and most compressible), and I see absolutely no reason to use Ogg.
Apple didn't ruin anyone's experience by popularizing AAC. They didn't even invent AAC. They weren't even part of the MPEG group that did create it: wikipedia:AAC.
So far, you have Quicktime, faac, ffmpeg, and Nero for AAC encoders, available on every platform. It's part of the MPEG-4 AVC standard. It will be supported by every standalone MPEG-4 player, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. You have no reason not to use it for video.
That game was highbrow...or a slideshow...depending on your POV. No killing. No dying. Just puzzles. And scenery.
It was the reason many people, myself included, first got a CD-ROM. It was also created on Macs (in HyperCard and Quicktime), and first released for Mac.
I don't think they'll miss the party either. I bet they make more money selling you Windows and Office for Windows than they do on VPC or Office for Mac, taking into account development expenses for both and quantity sold. They might as well let some other company make the virtualization products and still sell you both Windows products.
Everything from the 6200 TC 256MB on up has MPEG-2 and H.264/MPEG-4 decoding hardware acceleration. The 7xxx Series adds deinterlacing, scaling, and WMV9 acceleration.
Actually, it'd be great if I could just use my TV and stereo as alternate display and sound devices for the laptop... wirelessly. Plug a little box into my entertainment center, then just use some control panel on the laptop to turn the TV into a secondary desktop, and drag a media player over to it.
Well, with those small requirements, you can already do that with an S-Video cable from your video out on your video card...with wires. Or get MediaMVP and hook it up to an external wireless device of some sort for wireless.
Have you tried WIndow MCE? Well, it leaves a lot to be desired. I can just picture myself on the phone with my mom; "You need to decrypt and rip the movie to your hard drive. Now you have to encode it to MPG4. How big do you want that file?" Yeah, that's not going to happen.
That's not a problem with MCE. That's a problem with the movie industry.
I looked into MythTV before going with SageTV, but I couldn't find documentation on how to get EPG listings. Is there a way for North American users to get listings? Or is it just that XMLTV stuff that only appeared to have listings in other countries?
You mention using Explorer to organize files and wanting an iTunes interface, so I assume you didn't use Windows 2005MCE to organize recordings, or SageTV, or BeyondTV, or MythTV, or any number of other interfaces that are actually designed for PVRs with remotes?
Which Hauppauge card did you use? Raw AVI? CPU? All their cards use hardware MPEG-2 encoding now (read: No CPU cycles).
Hauppage WinTV software sucks, so you can get SageTV or BeyondTV to record with EPG listings. You can get the Hauppauge card in a SageTV bundle. Those programs and Windows MCE 2005 are designed for PVRs, much more than WinTV or Nero.
You can cut out commercials with a SageTV plugin, or manually with an app like Womble (takes about 5-10 mins). The files produced by the Hauppage are 100% valid MPEG-2 Program Streams. You may need to tweak the bitrate and other things to comply with DVD standard.
But they should burn to DVD-Video if you have Nero, but I wouldn't know. I burn everything to DVD-ROM ISO so I can use multisession (about 5 DVD-5s per week).
Slashdot Mirror
"Retarded version of Windows"?
MCE 2005 = XP Pro + remote + Media Center + it's newer - Active Directory.
So I guess it's retarded because you really wanted AD for your house, right?
I started to refute each point that you made about what you supposedly couldn't do with old Dells, but it's not even worth it. Every single point you made was bogus.
"Just $199 more" = 50% more than $400. In other words, "just" is not an appropriate term for it. As the other poster said, you still need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Also, from your original post that got modded higher than its parent for some strange reason:
It truly doesn't matter whether Apple wins the high end. Most of Dell's market is low end. Apple could dominate the $2000+ market, and they still wouldn't make a dent in Dell. We can talk about Dell Precisions all day, but the fact is, most consumers don't even know what a Dell Precision is.
Womble's encoder seems to work fine for me. Even when adding logos and transitions, and only reencoding those parts, you can't tell the difference between the stream copied and reencoded sections.
Nero Recode's MPEG-4 AVC encoder is actually really good. It's got most of the profiles and options to turn everything off so crappy Quicktime can even play it.
I don't use it so much for MPEG-2, just when DVD Shrink doesn't work. And that's really to just remove previews and shrink menus, so I guess I don't know how good it's quality is.
But Nero Digital is pretty serious about being a full-featured encoding suite, compatible with Nero Digital standalone players. They have a free AAC encoder that is quite popular. They're good for much more than just burning now. And Nero Recode is also quite popular on doom9, so I don't think it can be too bad.
I like Womble MPEG for editing MPEG-2.
It imports AVI, uses a timeline editor with a really fast seek, and my favorite: it can do stream copy for portions you don't want edited. Then there's transitions and other bells and whistles. I use it for anything I can't do in VirtualDub/AviSynth or Nero Recode. It's also recommended in the doom9 forums, for what it's worth.
Most apps use Ctrl-W for close. Alt-F4 works too, but whatever.
I think as far as Alt-Tab/Ctrl-Tab, Windows leaves it up to the app to know how best to manage its Windows/Tabs/Whatever-else-is-most-appropriate.
I think the only time I use Alt-Tab is when I'm playing a game full-screen though.
Him knowing that it was a developer-heavy crowd and stating so makes it obvious he's well aware what type of conference it is.
Parent should be modded redundant.
Yeah, lying down on my couch reading slashdot at +3 pt font after increasing it with one of 12 buttons on my wireless mouse that I'm using on my leg really sucks.
Definitely no reason to get a wireless mouse.
Ha! I didn't see your post when I posted mine right below yours. That was a great game for its time. It was weird around that time. I switched from owning several Macs to Windows 95 on a Compaq (P75 4x CD-ROM, 4 MB base RAM woohoo!) and was annoyed that I had all these Mac games that weren't compatible with Windows. It was the exact opposite of how it would be now. I ended up rebuying Myst for Windows much later but it just wasn't as exciting as it was at the time. Myst is the definition of the word immersion. About the only series that has come close in that aspect is Morrowind/Oblivion.
Using Vorbis wouldn't be the smartest, as it isn't going to be supported on many (if any) standalones or portables. I don't see why anyone would use MKV over the MPEG-4 container, I don't see why anyone would use FLAC when the audio is arguably the least important part of the file (and most compressible), and I see absolutely no reason to use Ogg.
Apple didn't ruin anyone's experience by popularizing AAC. They didn't even invent AAC. They weren't even part of the MPEG group that did create it: wikipedia:AAC.
So far, you have Quicktime, faac, ffmpeg, and Nero for AAC encoders, available on every platform. It's part of the MPEG-4 AVC standard. It will be supported by every standalone MPEG-4 player, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. You have no reason not to use it for video.
Remember Myst?
That game was highbrow...or a slideshow...depending on your POV. No killing. No dying. Just puzzles. And scenery.
It was the reason many people, myself included, first got a CD-ROM. It was also created on Macs (in HyperCard and Quicktime), and first released for Mac.
He equated Apple fanboism to Spice Girl worship.
Knowing MS is all about the bottom line, I'd have to say:
It's not as profitable to develop it themselves when you'll still buy a Windows license anyway.
And all this right after the x86 days. If that isn't a conspiracy, I don't know what is.
I don't think they'll miss the party either. I bet they make more money selling you Windows and Office for Windows than they do on VPC or Office for Mac, taking into account development expenses for both and quantity sold. They might as well let some other company make the virtualization products and still sell you both Windows products.
For all the system builders, I found the chart where I got information about hardware acceleration for nVidia cards: http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html
Everything from the 6200 TC 256MB on up has MPEG-2 and H.264/MPEG-4 decoding hardware acceleration. The 7xxx Series adds deinterlacing, scaling, and WMV9 acceleration.
Sweet! Thanks, I must have missed that when I was reading docs.
Ahh crap, you're right. Just checked my Newegg order history and I paid $65 for the PVR150MCE. That's what I get for posting before my coffee.
2 E16814127204
The silent 6200 was right though. Here's a decent one for $35:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
Replying to self: ahh, I just read your subject. That's what you said too! sorry. :(
Well, with those small requirements, you can already do that with an S-Video cable from your video out on your video card...with wires. Or get MediaMVP and hook it up to an external wireless device of some sort for wireless.
That's not a problem with MCE. That's a problem with the movie industry.
I looked into MythTV before going with SageTV, but I couldn't find documentation on how to get EPG listings. Is there a way for North American users to get listings? Or is it just that XMLTV stuff that only appeared to have listings in other countries?
You mention using Explorer to organize files and wanting an iTunes interface, so I assume you didn't use Windows 2005MCE to organize recordings, or SageTV, or BeyondTV, or MythTV, or any number of other interfaces that are actually designed for PVRs with remotes?
Which Hauppauge card did you use? Raw AVI? CPU? All their cards use hardware MPEG-2 encoding now (read: No CPU cycles).
Hauppage WinTV software sucks, so you can get SageTV or BeyondTV to record with EPG listings. You can get the Hauppauge card in a SageTV bundle. Those programs and Windows MCE 2005 are designed for PVRs, much more than WinTV or Nero.
You can cut out commercials with a SageTV plugin, or manually with an app like Womble (takes about 5-10 mins). The files produced by the Hauppage are 100% valid MPEG-2 Program Streams. You may need to tweak the bitrate and other things to comply with DVD standard.
But they should burn to DVD-Video if you have Nero, but I wouldn't know. I burn everything to DVD-ROM ISO so I can use multisession (about 5 DVD-5s per week).
Just what I need: the audio to take up 1-3 GB for my 4-7 GB movies.
BTW, both faac and ffmpeg encode AAC on linux.