it is ugly. Your original statement was stronger: That it wasn't music.
what if someone makes those sounds and calls it "music"?
It would depend on the context in which it is done. I heard music made with the intent of shocking the listener, and I didn't like it. Since the music was made in an attempt to make something ugly, it's a safe bet that most people would find it ugly. There was a burglar alarm in an office building I used to work in that had a very objectionable sound - it was probably engineered to be objectionable, and it worked. If someone made a record of nothing but that sound, it'll be quite bad. If, however, somebody found a way to quote this sound in a musical context, it might be interesting, but i'll wait for proof before I declare it worthy of the word music.
I suspect that most music you object to (and I'll have to continue groping in the dark until you start naming artists whose music or sound you think is ugly) was made with the intent of creating something beautiful. People play electric guitars through Marshall stacks not because they want to disgust you with their ugly sound, but because electric guitars make a beautiful sound when amplified and distorted. The distortion creates and emphasizes harmonics in the signal that people find deeply satisfying, the same way they find a string section better sounding than a single violin, and the human voice more beautiful than a whistle.
I hear an ugly, distorted, maimed version of what it ought to be.
Ought to be according to you. It's not your call, and if this is what you think music is about, you're just wrong.
I keep getting the feeling that you're arguing with straw-men you don't even bother erecting. I'm not politically correct, I don't think that everything is relative (or I wouldn't tell you that you're wrong, truth being relative and all that).
In fact, you don't even bother arguing. Maybe you can argue from authority with your children (and even that won't last long), but I don't have to take it.
I could bring any number of counter examples to your thesis. I did before, and you've ignored them.
There is big difference between music that is incomprehensible and music that is ugly.
You think it's ugly because you do not comprehend it. You don't like it, and you've made up a neat little story as an excuse to make you feel justified in not liking it, but your story is wrong, and you keep dancing around it instead of seeing it for the bullshit it is.
Perhaps the real question is, do you believe that anything is truly ugly?
I think there are things that people will always find ugly, because of the way our brains work, and the way they evolved. Your example of a physically deformed person is a good one. I think vivid imagery of pain is universally disturbing, at the very least. An overwhelming majority of people find depictions of people being tortured hard to watch, and very unpleasant.
None of this applies to music, though. Music doesn't have to be about anything, it doesn't need to have a message, and it's as abstract as any art form can hope to be. If you think a piece of music is ugly, chances are that you just don't get it, and didn't try very hard. If you say it isn't music, you're just wrong. I don't have a problem with you being wrong, but trying to impose your opinion on your children, and pretending you're taking some sort of a moral stand by doing so, is dumb, condescending, and likely to backfire.
Sorry, I don't buy the "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
Good, 'cause I'm not selling it. The music I mentioned is beautiful, period. You'd recognize it if you bothered listening to it, and working your way into seeing the beauty in it (for the more challenging works - some of it is quite approachable).
If you are truly saying that beauty is relative
Don't put words in my mouth.
We find music beautiful when it's sufficiently similar to music that we already know. If I played an Um Kalthoum record for you, chances are you'd be clawing your eardrums out of your skull after half a song (about 20 minutes). Still, she was a singer with a rare gift, who's admired and loved to this day, and her records are considered classics.
So, what's going on here? Most western listeners aren't accustomed to arab music. Everything, from the tone of the presentation to the quarter notes used in some melodies seem alien, and make the music hard to listen to. It is possible to grow to love music that's different from what you're used to, but you have to listen to it, and make an effort to understand it. Maybe work your way into it from music that's more familiar to you, that's influenced by the music you're trying to understand.
The orcs in Tolkien aren't beautiful.
The orcs in Tolkien aren't REAL.
There are creatures that most people find ugly, and yet they breed successfully. Do boy cockroaches find girl cockroaches beautiful because of their corrupted nature?
[...] the perceiving of [beauty] becomes easier with practice.
Oh, so we agree on something.
Yet, you won't practice finding the beauty in music you don't get, and won't let your daughter do it, either.
The choice is yours - stay ignorant, or step out of your cave and see the beauty. It only hurts because your eyes aren't used to the light yet. Music is possibly the most beautiful creation of humanity - to enjoy music is to enjoy people. Open up to it.
Says who? I always maintained that the western violin is not a musical instrument, but an instrument of torture, inflicting injury on players and mental anguish on listeners. Still, it would be idiotic for me to dictate that violin music will not enter our home.
On your rule of "no distortion": So Shakti would be kosher, but Mahavishnu Orchestra wouldn't be? Shankar would be OK, as long as it isn't that "screaming" album he did with Frank Zappa? The Roches would be forbidden because Robert Fripp used a distorted guitar on the second track of their self titled debut album?
Death Metal singers don't scream - they growl. Would that be ok? No? So I guess Tom Waits is verboten. Too bad.
Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come: Fine - an acoustic, instrumental work. No screaming there. What about Free Jazz? They don't actually scream, but they might as well have. The screaming attitude is there. There goes a seminal 20th century recording. Plonk.
Listen to anything by Devin Townsend. Is he singing or screaming? Whatever it is, it's musical, except that your daughter won't even get the chance to argue that with you, because this screaming ain't getting in your home, no siree.
Krzysztof Penderecki made a symphonic orchestra scream in Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, but I guess that's not music. Damn - I rather liked it, and I was deeply moved by it.
I suppose you'd approve of Pat Metheny's work. No screaming or distortion there... Oops, I forgot about Zero Tolerance For Silence. It's a work of great beauty, if you dig into it, and see past the, well, distortion.
Give me a break. This isn't philosophy, or moral structure. This is an arbitrary, boneheaded and ignorant rule of aesthetics. If you give your children a philosophy of life (as you should, and you seem to strive to do), it must be consistent. It must have structure, and things must follow logically from the ground rules. Setting arbitrary rules to satisfy your preferences in music is neither consistent nor fair.
But in most cases, the exploits comes some weeks after the bug has been published in the public, so there is some time to patch.
In other cases, exploits are available before the bugs are discovered. Wasn't the SSH discussion mentioned here yesterday started when people suspected some root level intrusions into systems running SSH?
Linux vendors don't seem to take security too seriously. Why isn't anyone packaging LIDS or grsecurity as part of the default install? Is it because running a for-pay update service is more lucrative than making systems harder to break into, or is it because vendors care about performance first, and security second or third?
I'm really curious about this - the technology to stop some classes of exploits of common software bugs exists, and people don't seem to take notice. Why? What am I missing?
Sure, if you define "community" as what the open source "community" is, you can prove anything you want. It's a cyclical argument, and as such it's no argument at all.
I may share the scientific community's interests, but I'm not a scientist, and not a member of that community.
From m-w.com:
Main Entry: community Pronunciation: k&-'myu-n&-tE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -ties Usage: often attributive Etymology: Middle English comunete, from Middle French comunete, from Latin communitat-, communitas, from communis Date: 14th century 1 : a unified body of individuals: as a : STATE, COMMONWEALTH b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society e : a group linked by a common policy f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society
2 : society at large
3 a : joint ownership or participation b : common character : LIKENESS c : social activity : FELLOWSHIP d : a social state or condition
I'm not part of YOUR community. Learn to live without me, however hard you may find this.
The open source community is just that, a community.
No, it isn't. Your wishing it doesn't make it true, and endlessly talking as if it's true doesn't make it true, either.
I contributed to open source projects, I use open source, and I have my own open source project, but I don't consider myself part of the community, and I refuse to be dragged into a community I don't want to be in.
People release code under permissive licenses for various reasons, but the reasons are their own, and they are no more a community than people who wear blue T shirts are a community.
It's quite useful. You can turn it into a VPN server, have it serve DHCP, put your network's access control mechanism on it, and have a one box solution to a whole range of wireless networking problems.
It's just the CueCat all over again. Someone has a dumb idea (give away the scanner, sell the links), and then the entire world is just expected to sit there nodding and saying how smart this is.
Figuring out how stuff works isn't malicious. Neither is finding new uses for your property.
I doubt that the target audience for this is going to go wild burning their video collection on this thing. If Hasbro's content is unique enough and cheap enough, it'll sell. If it isn't, and people don't want it, it won't sell, reverse engineering or no reverse engineering.
Well, it confuses me, too. That's why I used the word "might" in the post you replied to.
Someone posted VIA's copyright notice and terms somewhere around here. It wasn't clear to me whether slapping the GPL on derived works was permitted under those terms. The explicitly permit redistribution, modification, and "sub-licensing", whatever that means. I understand that to mean that they permit you to make changes to the licensing terms when distributing copies, modified or otherwise.
The GPL might not actually be broader than the original license, by the way. It poses restrictions on distribution that VIA's license doesn't.
At this point, I don't know what it all means, other than that if I were doing this work and intending to distribute the results, I'd consult a lawyer, and possibly try to get VIA to explicitly allow me to distribute the code.
It's good to have one's butt covered. Keeps out the chill and the lawyers.
It seems like the license for VIA's binary allows redistribution and sub-licensing of derivative works. In that case, even though this is definitely a derivative work, it might actually be legal to redistribute.
The work described here started with VIA's source code. VIA's engineers compiled the source into a library. This young fellow used IDA Pro to disassemble the library into assembly language. He then went on to modify the assembly language to pseudo C functions with an assembly body, and then fleshed out the C code based on the assembly. When that was done, he compiled the code, tested it, fixed the places that were wrong, and repeated the process until he had a working library. At that point he stuck his copyright notice and GPL header on the source file.
I strongly suspect that the compiled binary resulting from this process would be almost identical to the binary Ivor started out with, at the instruction level. (Mind you, I haven't tested this myself). This can't be attributed solely to the fact that both libraries implement the same protocols to control the same hardware. In this case, Ivor's code was actually derived from VIA's.
I honestly don't see how you could argue the code in question is not derived from VIA's library in this case, unless you're assuming that a different process was used to write it. This is a hard argument to use, given the author's explicit description of the process he used.
MPlayer was my first choice on those machines, and it just couldn't handle the task.
MPlayer is a really nice research platform for accelration techniques, but a media player it isn't. What killed it for me was its lack of support for DVD menus. Even if it did support them, it just didn't perform well, and I couldn't use it.
I've worked with the MPlayer source on several occasions, around version 0.50. It was an abomination - a monolithic design that couldn't be modified in any meaningful way without a rewrite. It had obvious bugs (like using the wrong xlib API to read X events, resulting in a massive memory leak of every single X event ever sent to the application because they weren't being removed from the queue), and just seemed very fragile.
Considering the sorry state of the code, I can't but admire the MPlayer authors for their dedication and focus, and for taking it as far as they have.
On the Windows side I tried PowerDVD, which almost worked, but it had visual glitches when using MMX and it couldn't keep audio sync without causing the audio to skip every once in a while.
I use XINE on that machine right now, (Totem, actually, which my 4 year old son is perfectly happy with), and it just works - no digging into man pages, no unpleasant interaction with a snotty maintainer. I like that.
The machine I'm running this on predates the Rage Pro by quite a bit, I think. There definitely weren't any Radeons around when this machine was made. It accelerates the RGB->YUV conversion, which is great, but that's it.
After using MPlayer for a while, you know what your hardware can do, because you have to tell it all to MPlayer. It's painful, but educational.
I believe that distribution of this code would be illegal, since it is a derivative work based on VIA's library. I haven't seen VIA's license, by typically those licenses prohibit redistribution, reverse engineering, and disclosure of any trade secrets.
The reverse engineering itself is probably still legal, arguably, if it is done to enable someone to write software that interoperates with the decoder. To be safe, I would assume that it's probably better to write such software for an operating system that VIA doesn't support - QNX, for example. (One could argue that the BSDs' ability to run Linux binaries voids the interoperability argument if one were to write a BSD driver, but what do I know?).
You should also make sure that the person writing the final open source code hasn't seen VIA's decompiled source. Typically this is done by having one person or team reverse engineer the code, document the hardware, and toss the hardware documentation over the wall to the driver team.
My DVD player is a PII-300. My laptop is a Celeron (P-II era) 366MHz, and it plays DVDs just fine.
The secret? Stay away from Windows and MPlayer. And use a sufficiently accelerated ATI card with the open-source drivers. The XV extension makes a huge difference.
But other than that, you're right. Hardware MPEG decoding is dirt cheap (MPEG was designed to be decoded in dirt cheap hardware) and always nice to have.
Are you asking me whether it's a true story? I don't know. Lance's eventual shotgun wedding to a European princess of loose moral fiber sounds a bit far fetched to me, but who knows? Stranger things happened.
The author is a regular contributor to the site, and is supposedly an audio engineer by trade. I don't know enough to tell whether that part is true (I'm sure someone more knowledgeable can read his other posts and determine whether at least that part of his online persona seems genuine, but I didn't bother).
I found the story entertaining, and parts of it at least ring true. I have been in a recording studio where an audio engineer was trying to lay down basic tracks with a drummer who couldn't keep time, and it was an ugly situation - the drummer was the customer, he was paying for the session, so bringing somebody else in was not an option. There was no producer to make painful decisions, so everyone tried to work around the problem while pretending that it wasn't there, and I got uncomfortable enough just watching the situation that I couldn't stay there anymore.
Who talks like that? I don't think we'll be seeing much of the main writer for this band for a while. WTF?
Maybe the author took liberties with the text, not quoting it verbatim. Maybe this is all a fabrication. I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
it is ugly.
Your original statement was stronger: That it wasn't music.
what if someone makes those sounds and calls it "music"?
It would depend on the context in which it is done. I heard music made with the intent of shocking the listener, and I didn't like it. Since the music was made in an attempt to make something ugly, it's a safe bet that most people would find it ugly. There was a burglar alarm in an office building I used to work in that had a very objectionable sound - it was probably engineered to be objectionable, and it worked. If someone made a record of nothing but that sound, it'll be quite bad. If, however, somebody found a way to quote this sound in a musical context, it might be interesting, but i'll wait for proof before I declare it worthy of the word music.
I suspect that most music you object to (and I'll have to continue groping in the dark until you start naming artists whose music or sound you think is ugly) was made with the intent of creating something beautiful. People play electric guitars through Marshall stacks not because they want to disgust you with their ugly sound, but because electric guitars make a beautiful sound when amplified and distorted. The distortion creates and emphasizes harmonics in the signal that people find deeply satisfying, the same way they find a string section better sounding than a single violin, and the human voice more beautiful than a whistle.
I hear an ugly, distorted, maimed version of what it ought to be.
Ought to be according to you. It's not your call, and if this is what you think music is about, you're just wrong.
I keep getting the feeling that you're arguing with straw-men you don't even bother erecting. I'm not politically correct, I don't think that everything is relative (or I wouldn't tell you that you're wrong, truth being relative and all that).
In fact, you don't even bother arguing. Maybe you can argue from authority with your children (and even that won't last long), but I don't have to take it.
I could bring any number of counter examples to your thesis. I did before, and you've ignored them.
There is big difference between music that is incomprehensible and music that is ugly.
You think it's ugly because you do not comprehend it. You don't like it, and you've made up a neat little story as an excuse to make you feel justified in not liking it, but your story is wrong, and you keep dancing around it instead of seeing it for the bullshit it is.
Perhaps the real question is, do you believe that anything is truly ugly?
I think there are things that people will always find ugly, because of the way our brains work, and the way they evolved. Your example of a physically deformed person is a good one. I think vivid imagery of pain is universally disturbing, at the very least. An overwhelming majority of people find depictions of people being tortured hard to watch, and very unpleasant.
None of this applies to music, though. Music doesn't have to be about anything, it doesn't need to have a message, and it's as abstract as any art form can hope to be. If you think a piece of music is ugly, chances are that you just don't get it, and didn't try very hard. If you say it isn't music, you're just wrong. I don't have a problem with you being wrong, but trying to impose your opinion on your children, and pretending you're taking some sort of a moral stand by doing so, is dumb, condescending, and likely to backfire.
Sorry, I don't buy the "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
Good, 'cause I'm not selling it. The music I mentioned is beautiful, period. You'd recognize it if you bothered listening to it, and working your way into seeing the beauty in it (for the more challenging works - some of it is quite approachable).
If you are truly saying that beauty is relative
Don't put words in my mouth.
We find music beautiful when it's sufficiently similar to music that we already know. If I played an Um Kalthoum record for you, chances are you'd be clawing your eardrums out of your skull after half a song (about 20 minutes). Still, she was a singer with a rare gift, who's admired and loved to this day, and her records are considered classics.
So, what's going on here? Most western listeners aren't accustomed to arab music. Everything, from the tone of the presentation to the quarter notes used in some melodies seem alien, and make the music hard to listen to. It is possible to grow to love music that's different from what you're used to, but you have to listen to it, and make an effort to understand it. Maybe work your way into it from music that's more familiar to you, that's influenced by the music you're trying to understand.
The orcs in Tolkien aren't beautiful.
The orcs in Tolkien aren't REAL.
There are creatures that most people find ugly, and yet they breed successfully. Do boy cockroaches find girl cockroaches beautiful because of their corrupted nature?
[...] the perceiving of [beauty] becomes easier with practice.
Oh, so we agree on something.
Yet, you won't practice finding the beauty in music you don't get, and won't let your daughter do it, either.
The choice is yours - stay ignorant, or step out of your cave and see the beauty. It only hurts because your eyes aren't used to the light yet. Music is possibly the most beautiful creation of humanity - to enjoy music is to enjoy people. Open up to it.
However, screaming is not music.
Says who? I always maintained that the western violin is not a musical instrument, but an instrument of torture, inflicting injury on players and mental anguish on listeners. Still, it would be idiotic for me to dictate that violin music will not enter our home.
On your rule of "no distortion": So Shakti would be kosher, but Mahavishnu Orchestra wouldn't be? Shankar would be OK, as long as it isn't that "screaming" album he did with Frank Zappa? The Roches would be forbidden because Robert Fripp used a distorted guitar on the second track of their self titled debut album?
Death Metal singers don't scream - they growl. Would that be ok? No? So I guess Tom Waits is verboten. Too bad.
Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come: Fine - an acoustic, instrumental work. No screaming there. What about Free Jazz? They don't actually scream, but they might as well have. The screaming attitude is there. There goes a seminal 20th century recording. Plonk.
Listen to anything by Devin Townsend. Is he singing or screaming? Whatever it is, it's musical, except that your daughter won't even get the chance to argue that with you, because this screaming ain't getting in your home, no siree.
Krzysztof Penderecki made a symphonic orchestra scream in Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, but I guess that's not music. Damn - I rather liked it, and I was deeply moved by it.
I suppose you'd approve of Pat Metheny's work. No screaming or distortion there... Oops, I forgot about Zero Tolerance For Silence. It's a work of great beauty, if you dig into it, and see past the, well, distortion.
Give me a break. This isn't philosophy, or moral structure. This is an arbitrary, boneheaded and ignorant rule of aesthetics. If you give your children a philosophy of life (as you should, and you seem to strive to do), it must be consistent. It must have structure, and things must follow logically from the ground rules. Setting arbitrary rules to satisfy your preferences in music is neither consistent nor fair.
Man, I hope she finds out about Apocalyptica, Ornette Coleman and John Zorn, and tears your narrow minded little world apart.
cipe has been on my shitlist for a long time for instance.
Why? Surely not because its source is not available?
But in most cases, the exploits comes some weeks after the bug has been published in the public, so there is some time to patch.
In other cases, exploits are available before the bugs are discovered. Wasn't the SSH discussion mentioned here yesterday started when people suspected some root level intrusions into systems running SSH?
Linux vendors don't seem to take security too seriously. Why isn't anyone packaging LIDS or grsecurity as part of the default install? Is it because running a for-pay update service is more lucrative than making systems harder to break into, or is it because vendors care about performance first, and security second or third?
I'm really curious about this - the technology to stop some classes of exploits of common software bugs exists, and people don't seem to take notice. Why? What am I missing?
You know what? That works for me.
Let's apply a powerful legal tool: The silly analogy.
Take a copyrighted work (Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, for example).
Now, rearrange all the letters randomly, and pick (say) every 10th letter. Apply rot13 to the result, and print it.
Is this derivative work? If you think it is, then, yes, copyright holders should be able to control MD5 hashes produced from their work.
Sure, if you define "community" as what the open source "community" is, you can prove anything you want. It's a cyclical argument, and as such it's no argument at all.
I may share the scientific community's interests, but I'm not a scientist, and not a member of that community.
From m-w.com:
Main Entry: community
Pronunciation: k&-'myu-n&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English comunete, from Middle French comunete, from Latin communitat-, communitas, from communis
Date: 14th century
1 : a unified body of individuals: as
a : STATE, COMMONWEALTH
b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself
c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location
d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society
e : a group linked by a common policy
f : a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests
g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society
2 : society at large
3
a : joint ownership or participation
b : common character : LIKENESS
c : social activity : FELLOWSHIP
d : a social state or condition
I'm not part of YOUR community. Learn to live without me, however hard you may find this.
The open source community is just that, a community.
No, it isn't. Your wishing it doesn't make it true, and endlessly talking as if it's true doesn't make it true, either.
I contributed to open source projects, I use open source, and I have my own open source project, but I don't consider myself part of the community, and I refuse to be dragged into a community I don't want to be in.
People release code under permissive licenses for various reasons, but the reasons are their own, and they are no more a community than people who wear blue T shirts are a community.
It's quite useful. You can turn it into a VPN server, have it serve DHCP, put your network's access control mechanism on it, and have a one box solution to a whole range of wireless networking problems.
I actually have spent many a drunken night courting these folks at bars in town
Dude,
You're never gonna get laid this way.
It's just the CueCat all over again. Someone has a dumb idea (give away the scanner, sell the links), and then the entire world is just expected to sit there nodding and saying how smart this is.
Figuring out how stuff works isn't malicious. Neither is finding new uses for your property.
I doubt that the target audience for this is going to go wild burning their video collection on this thing. If Hasbro's content is unique enough and cheap enough, it'll sell. If it isn't, and people don't want it, it won't sell, reverse engineering or no reverse engineering.
One word: Putty.
Well, it confuses me, too. That's why I used the word "might" in the post you replied to.
Someone posted VIA's copyright notice and terms somewhere around here. It wasn't clear to me whether slapping the GPL on derived works was permitted under those terms. The explicitly permit redistribution, modification, and "sub-licensing", whatever that means. I understand that to mean that they permit you to make changes to the licensing terms when distributing copies, modified or otherwise.
The GPL might not actually be broader than the original license, by the way. It poses restrictions on distribution that VIA's license doesn't.
At this point, I don't know what it all means, other than that if I were doing this work and intending to distribute the results, I'd consult a lawyer, and possibly try to get VIA to explicitly allow me to distribute the code.
It's good to have one's butt covered. Keeps out the chill and the lawyers.
It seems like the license for VIA's binary allows redistribution and sub-licensing of derivative works. In that case, even though this is definitely a derivative work, it might actually be legal to redistribute.
The work described here started with VIA's source code. VIA's engineers compiled the source into a library. This young fellow used IDA Pro to disassemble the library into assembly language. He then went on to modify the assembly language to pseudo C functions with an assembly body, and then fleshed out the C code based on the assembly. When that was done, he compiled the code, tested it, fixed the places that were wrong, and repeated the process until he had a working library. At that point he stuck his copyright notice and GPL header on the source file.
I strongly suspect that the compiled binary resulting from this process would be almost identical to the binary Ivor started out with, at the instruction level. (Mind you, I haven't tested this myself). This can't be attributed solely to the fact that both libraries implement the same protocols to control the same hardware. In this case, Ivor's code was actually derived from VIA's.
I honestly don't see how you could argue the code in question is not derived from VIA's library in this case, unless you're assuming that a different process was used to write it. This is a hard argument to use, given the author's explicit description of the process he used.
Why? If what the article describes is true, the code was developed based on a disassembled binary. How is that not derivative work?
MPlayer was my first choice on those machines, and it just couldn't handle the task.
MPlayer is a really nice research platform for accelration techniques, but a media player it isn't. What killed it for me was its lack of support for DVD menus. Even if it did support them, it just didn't perform well, and I couldn't use it.
I've worked with the MPlayer source on several occasions, around version 0.50. It was an abomination - a monolithic design that couldn't be modified in any meaningful way without a rewrite. It had obvious bugs (like using the wrong xlib API to read X events, resulting in a massive memory leak of every single X event ever sent to the application because they weren't being removed from the queue), and just seemed very fragile.
Considering the sorry state of the code, I can't but admire the MPlayer authors for their dedication and focus, and for taking it as far as they have.
On the Windows side I tried PowerDVD, which almost worked, but it had visual glitches when using MMX and it couldn't keep audio sync without causing the audio to skip every once in a while.
I use XINE on that machine right now, (Totem, actually, which my 4 year old son is perfectly happy with), and it just works - no digging into man pages, no unpleasant interaction with a snotty maintainer. I like that.
The machine I'm running this on predates the Rage Pro by quite a bit, I think. There definitely weren't any Radeons around when this machine was made. It accelerates the RGB->YUV conversion, which is great, but that's it.
After using MPlayer for a while, you know what your hardware can do, because you have to tell it all to MPlayer. It's painful, but educational.
I believe that distribution of this code would be illegal, since it is a derivative work based on VIA's library. I haven't seen VIA's license, by typically those licenses prohibit redistribution, reverse engineering, and disclosure of any trade secrets.
The reverse engineering itself is probably still legal, arguably, if it is done to enable someone to write software that interoperates with the decoder. To be safe, I would assume that it's probably better to write such software for an operating system that VIA doesn't support - QNX, for example. (One could argue that the BSDs' ability to run Linux binaries voids the interoperability argument if one were to write a BSD driver, but what do I know?).
You should also make sure that the person writing the final open source code hasn't seen VIA's decompiled source. Typically this is done by having one person or team reverse engineer the code, document the hardware, and toss the hardware documentation over the wall to the driver team.
My DVD player is a PII-300. My laptop is a Celeron (P-II era) 366MHz, and it plays DVDs just fine.
The secret? Stay away from Windows and MPlayer. And use a sufficiently accelerated ATI card with the open-source drivers. The XV extension makes a huge difference.
But other than that, you're right. Hardware MPEG decoding is dirt cheap (MPEG was designed to be decoded in dirt cheap hardware) and always nice to have.
Are you asking me whether it's a true story? I don't know. Lance's eventual shotgun wedding to a European princess of loose moral fiber sounds a bit far fetched to me, but who knows? Stranger things happened.
The author is a regular contributor to the site, and is supposedly an audio engineer by trade. I don't know enough to tell whether that part is true (I'm sure someone more knowledgeable can read his other posts and determine whether at least that part of his online persona seems genuine, but I didn't bother).
I found the story entertaining, and parts of it at least ring true. I have been in a recording studio where an audio engineer was trying to lay down basic tracks with a drummer who couldn't keep time, and it was an ugly situation - the drummer was the customer, he was paying for the session, so bringing somebody else in was not an option. There was no producer to make painful decisions, so everyone tried to work around the problem while pretending that it wasn't there, and I got uncomfortable enough just watching the situation that I couldn't stay there anymore.
Who talks like that? I don't think we'll be seeing much of the main writer for this band for a while. WTF?
Maybe the author took liberties with the text, not quoting it verbatim. Maybe this is all a fabrication. I don't know.