29 Oct 2005
I managed to get my finger stuck in a car boot last night (n.b. the rest of me was outside the car), so posting will be a little light for the next few days due to mobility restrictions and the difficulty of typing. This should be the case anyway, as I have an Extension English exam Monday and a Modern History exam Thursday, but the increased strain is, inevitably, the deciding factor.
It was my right hand, so I’m planning on using a scribe for at least the Extension exam (which could be kinda fun, because I can talk about that stuff quite easily, at length. Just like delivering a seminar, only slower and with more pauses to tell some kid in year 11 how to spell various big words that are fun to throw in essays.)
Somehow my left hand has managed to pretty much escape damage all my life, whereas my right has scars on my thumb, middle finger (courtesy of an ice skate), and now a mashed-up nail on what I am reliably informed is known as the “ring finger” — apparently a technical term, because it appeared on my medical certificate!
So there’s my excuse for not writing lots. Meanwhile, have a picture of a helicopter.
p.s. whilst I can type–this post is testament to that–, it takes an inordinate amount of effort not to appear as though drunk at the keyboard, if you will. So, it’s altogether safer just to stay away.
28 Oct 2005
In an exchange between Phil Tripp, a music media commentator, and Telstra Corporate Affairs manager Craig Middleton, it’s revealed that the record companies/distributors are just like the rest of us.
Craig Middleton said this:
No I am not saying iPod users can download directly into iTunes. But they can download and burn CDs. With a CD there is no need to ‘engineer’ anything with iTunes – although it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod. As the Sydney Morning Herald once pointed out there is no legal way to use an iPod – but that makes a lot of us criminals
:-)
Then Phil Tripp (albeit under a pseudonym) fired this back:
And I’m one of the biggest criminals around with a succession of three generations of pods with 11,000 songs on one now and a hard drive with 26,000 songs–but all legal from my own record collection.
SO what you suggest I do is use a PC to download songs legally from BP, then burn to CD and then I can transfer these over to an iPod. KEWL! You got me. Any chance that BP is going to do the 99 cent downloads again for November if iTunes launches?
Telstra pulled out the lawyers.
Phil suggested that Telstra encourages customers to circumvent its digital rights management protections. In fact, Telstra in no way advocates or condones this type of action by customers. Transferring BigPond Music downloads from a CD to an iPod or other device is an infringement of copyright. It is also a breach of the terms and conditions that customers agree to when they sign-up to use BigPond Music. Craig made this clear in his email to Phil by saying “it is illegal to rip from CD onto iPod.”
Telstra is extremely disappointed that Phil chose to misrepresent his exchange with Craig on the themusic.com.au website.
That is, of course, assuming smiley faces have absolutely nil semantic value. Bull crap. (I try to keep this site clean, and that’s probably one of the stronger expletives I’ve used here. This debacle irks me, lots.)
Telstra, just like the rest of us, fully recognises what consumers will do with DRM’d media. Namely, whatever the hell they can and want to. No-one reads “terms of service” for B2C services, unless they’re security paranoid (I’ve been known to, but only when I really don’t trust a source–certainly not because I’m afraid of prosecution!), and distributors know it.
Record companies are a bunch of ostriches, it’s true, so maybe they’re the only ones who haven’t cottoned on to this fact yet. This whole DRM thing is a massive façade to convince the record industry they do, in fact, have some control over the distribution of their music. Here’s some news: they don’t. You probably didn’t hear it here first.
27 Oct 2005
I’ve cut a one-act (Bec and Nick’s take on the English Advanced course) bit of The Revue and compressed it into a digestible chunk, and have published it on OurMedia.
Get the dialup-happy version here (it’s 5MB or something), or [25MB decent quality version coming, if it ever uploads. Their site sucks. Watch this space.] See this update for more.
OurMedia is terrible to use aside from the whole free bandwidth and storage thing. I honestly don’t mind supplying ridiculous amounts of metadata, but its interface is absolutely painful — and, to make things worse, if I do as they recommend and use their crappy “OurMedia Publisher Tool” (it sucks, don’t use it unless someone has a gun to your head, and think twice even then… the gun to your head may have nothing to do with OurMedia!), I can enter all the metadata I want in its “helpful” wizards, and none of it will make it through to the actual site. Thanks guys. I’m now uploading a higher resolution version again via HTTP, because… yeah, you guessed it, the Publisher tool crashed.
There must be something about that name and crappy software. Microsoft’s product was (I haven’t used it for years) far more stable, but equally pathetic.
I’m thinking about switching across to Google Video instead, but am reluctant to because it locks data in a little bit more… so, we’ll see.
Okay, I got sick of trying to publish it for free… so it’s going up on the same server hosting the year12.joahua.com site (appropriate, niet?). Audio is a little cleaner in the WMV version… but if you want near-source quality instead, get the DVD. Here’s the broadband version. If someone feels like contributing captions, be my guest.
27 Oct 2005
Jon Johansen posted a month or two ago about some HD trailers a guy called Ben Waggoner put together of The Island (with permission from Warner Bros, it’s all good :)).
I grabbed the more recent, 8Mbps VBR followup test. This is 1920×1080 stuff, no interlaced crap. To put things in perspective, this 1 minute 42 second trailer is roughly 100MB.
Quick summary, it works like this: gstreamer crapped out, mplayer wouldn’t start a lot, VLC kept crashing, xine puts in a great performance. mplayer was pretty good, too, when I tried enough times to get it to startup properly and play stuff… so long as I didn’t ‘jog’ the track or anything (I love the OSD that it and xine do, though… very nice.)
Running with xine, X.org and xine sat at 97% usage (split roughly 55/45… yeah, everything else was pretty much idle) on my Athlon 2200+ (1.8GHz) — and that was with the MPEG2 version. The WMV version worked well on a 3GHzish Pentium 4 built for playing back video… but it looked like crap coz it was hooked up to a display at not-quite-native resolution (the display is a very expensive piece of crap. Not my fault.) On my desktop, however, the WMV version would only start to load.
Actually, that’s not quite true. mplayer would play vision (with lots of dropped frames) all the way through, but ignore audio, xine would play jerky audio and no video (well, it’d grab the first frame and stick with that on display), and gstreamer wasn’t even game to try.
The Real Video 4/Cook Audio version was an interesting one. mplayer would play audio smoothly for a few seconds, then cut out, then play video smoothly to catch up, then audio would catch up, etc. Never both at once! And, strangely, it decided to try and display this version in 4:3 (the trailer is 16:9, and it detects that fine with all other versions). xine played video smoothly at about half speed (as in, consistently half, no obviously dropped frames), but had no audio. Possibly a codec thing, but I thought mplayer and xine were using the same w32codecs package here. Could be wrong. VLC took a look at the file and gave up (it didn’t crash, it just sat there expecting attention as it normally does. I’m no fan, can you tell?), whilst gstreamer was typically competent. (Typically for it, of course, meaning “did nothing.”)
Everything could play the MPEG2 version fine… except for the usual suspects, though performance wasn’t quite so bad this time. gstreamer was pretty poor, cutting out regularly, but VLC managed an almost-acceptable performance — its only fault was occasional slowness between high-motion frames, and loss of A/V sync. (Heh, I’m glad it managed to play this one. I don’t think I’d ever seen VLC successfully play video before. Well, aside from boring 320×240 stuff, anyway.)
The MOV was the worst in terms of all-round support. VLC played the AAC audio track fine, and only the first frame of video. Everything else choked, because the Linux drivers aren’t ready for Apple’s H.264 implementation (which, rumour has it, is crap anyway. Not that this makes a difference, seeing as they publish most of the world’s trailers — we’re all going to clamour to see them, just coz they’re in sexy HD), and neither mplayer nor xine separate streams like VLC does (at least, that’s what it looks like. I don’t really know :P). gstreamer I have no great idea about.
The quality was… very impressive. As in, I couldn’t fault it :P This is what I imagined DVD to be like before I actually encountered it, though, because they marketed the crap out of it even when the product itself was thoroughly mediocre. Aside from the digital/multi-channel audio and extra features thing, DVD really doesn’t do it for me in terms of quality… because it’s (often fairly heavily) compressed, medium-resolution MPEG2 (maxing out at 720×480, IIRC).
Incidentally, that’s one reason why I’m glad this whole HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray thing seems to be going Blu-Ray’s way: hopefully, the extra space will mean that content producers are less likely to compress things too badly anymore, and we’ll actually enjoy the benefits of the format. With Blu-Ray’s highest test and theoretical limits more than double what HD DVD has achieved, I’m looking forward to some absolutely awesome quality video in the not-too-distant future. (Sure, it’ll be another five years til I can afford it, but meh!) Here’s a good comparison of the two from Engadget.
I’m currently torrenting the 18Mbps version… if I don’t post about it, it’s possibly because my computer exploded in a fireball large enough to engulf me when trying to process massive amounts of video information.
Whoa, no, it works fine. Admittedly, my computer can do absolutely nothing else at the same time, including resize the window, but it’s still not a bad thing. Quality is pretty much imperceptibly different (or, I think it might be better, but can’t really say for certain — placebo effect and all that –, so I’m not going to).
27 Oct 2005
Cameron Adams just wrote a piece on form focus with Javascript, because “your index finger has a finite number of clicks in it”
. His solution works, but comment #1 was a more concise and pragmatic solution.
Good stuff, though I’m uncertain as to whether I should use it here on the search field or on comment forms.