Lucky For My Siblings That Homicide Is Illegal
This will be a short post, as I don’t trust myself to write anything that properly conveys my rage without murdering a member of my family. I like to download my TV shows. My sister likes to watch TV shows. Occasionalyl stuff I download and stuff she likes to watch overlap. This is what I refer to as the “Oh Shit” zone. Problems that arise in the Oh Shit zone usually happen when someone, in this case my sister, wants to use one of my machines, and has no idea how to. I guess she experimented and figured out I had a dropdown documents folder, and somehow got into my videos, and subsequently my TV. This is where Windows Syndrome kicked in.
Windows Syndrome is what I call the computer using habits of Windows users. They like everything to be all GUI friendly and clicky. My machine is not like that. At all. I play all my movies and whatnot from CLI. I barely use a GUI file browser. It stands to reason that I was unaware that the standard action for clicking a media file was that it would open in SMPlayer, a decent GUI for mplayer, and a SHIT GUI for mplayer-uau. I use mplayer-uau. I happened to go out last night with some friends before the new semester starts, and when I returned home, I remembered that I had left my SD keyring in my machine, and that it was completely unlocked and in KDE. This is where I got a bad feeling.
On reaching my computer, I prepared for the worst. I didn’t prepare enough. What greeted me was KDE, with no window borders, dmesg shitting bricks, conky going crazy, and a completely unresponsive desktop. Ctrl+Alt+fn+F2′ing to VT1 (sorry, apple keyboard) revealed something I did not expect. A shitload of smplayer cache processes, AND A BURNT OUT CORE. How in the hell did my sister manage to burn out a core by just watching a video in a player that breaks my system minorly on good days?
This is where I got a bit scared. I looked at the hostname, and that was when shit hit the fan. This was not my desktop, this was my main rendering box. An octocore Xeon setup. A very expensive octocore Xeon setup. I didn’t pay anywhere near full price as I got it second-hand but it still cost me rather a lot. I’ve since disabled the core in /sys/devices/system/cpu/online but I’m still running some tests on my beautiful ECC registered RAM and my Quadro but I am hoping extremely hard that it was just the CPU. Needless to say she won’t pay for it.
On the side, and this is just icing on the cake, she got pasta sauce or something on my insanely sexy scope node mouse. I laughed at that. Then I remote wiped her laptop. Petty vengeance is so satisfying. That concludes this episode of Emess Hates People Who Touch His Stuff.
The Only People Dumber Than The Scene Are The Industry
Long time since I’ve last posted as there is so much fail around I couldn’t think of anything special, but today I came across some comedy gold relating to video processing and encoding. I was speaking to a friend in The Video Industry this afternoon about why the hardware encoders we use suck. Now ‘Steve’ likes to think he knows a fair bit about things, as do most other video authoring type people. Unfortunately for them, they only really know the TOOLS they use, and not all that much about the content they work with.
Steve was telling me that his new IVTC machine is super awesome and capable of matching with the current, previous, and next frames unlike his old one that only did c/n matches. It’s all cutting edge in the industry apparently. He has declared that he can now compete with my own IVTC stuff now, except on a few really tricky clips we get from DVD imports. He still has no idea how I do it he says, but eventually he’ll beat me. I didn’t comment on tritical’s excellent TIVTC filters for avisynth doing what his expensive machine does for the past 6 years, or my own usage of YATTA, an extreme manual IVTC application.
Steve then gave me another GEM of wisdom. Apparently the latest AVC encoding hardware boxes have some really cool shit called FMO that my beloved x264 doesn’t have. I recalled speaking to Jason Garret-Glaser from the x264 project a while ago about the feature, where it was pointed out that FMO is only used in the extended AVC profile, which barely anything plays and nothing encodes fully anyway. What all the hardware DOES have though is pretty much everything that is stupid about AVC, and nothing that is good. x264 has CRF. I don’t even care about other features. CRF makes me happy every day. 2-pass encoding is stupid. The hardware boxes I have used all just pick a bitrate somewhat arbitrarily and then encode with it on a 2-pass program. They don’t have any fancy RDO or magic-block trees like x264, and they certainly don’t have the speed. If x264 had full BD standards support I don’t see the industry using shitty hardware and proprietary applications when they don’t have to, certainly not in small studios.
I think the point I am trying to make is that the industry relies too much on what it is TOLD is better as opposed to actually going out and evaluating different things. Quite a lot of free applications for various things insanely better than their professional adversaries. Sometimes, I hate working with these people, and at others I love the confused looks I get for using some obscure free software to do a job faster and better than their beloved machinery.
On the Topic of Stupid
“If I master a movie with Windows Movie Maker and I burn it to a DVD-R as a DVD, how can I get it back onto the computer?”
…was the question that I was just asked. Besides the stupidity of using WMM, what really got to me here was the way he tried to sound so knowledgeable about the topic. I would imagine that if he was able to encode the thing, he would have a copy already on his computer, but apparently not. Short post that isn’t really important but is just a minor vent about encoders being retarded.
In that regard, a Certain Man in Sydney that I will not name has gone and shown himself to be just as stupid as I suspected by going on about how great encoding on servers is. Sure it’s faster on the upload and possibly on the processing depending on the gear, but that doesn’t make it better. For one thing, CLI encoding is almost impossible to watch over and ensure quality on. YATTA isn’t exactly made for server use either. Fuck you, CommieSubs, for bothering to put out shit when all you do is kill the scene.
This One’s on Kovensky
Kovensky linked me a VERY interesting article, particularly for Sonictail I believe: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/05/will-linux-ever-be-mainstream.html
I like how he goes on about Qt being awesome because frankly it is. Then Nokia pumped this out at the end of last year and it looks to finally be going somewhere interesting: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/12/02/widgets-enter-the-third-dimension-wolfenqt/
The stuff in the first article is quite a good read for any tech people, especially the part at the end about how fixing the way X and *nix sound servers work coupled with Qt/OpenGL/Phonon would revolutionise gaming. I for one would love to see a natively built game using Qt like that. With a bit of simple hax it could even be rigged to work on Sony’s Phyre Engine, given it already uses OpenGL. Phonon support would not be hard to add, and if Phonon got support in the PS3 firmware Qt itself wouldn’t be far behind.
I can only see coding the PS3 interface from Sony’s part becoming easier with such a toolkit, if they are not already using it secretly internally, CyberLink seem to be.
Which actually gets me a bit annoyed. Has anyone else attempted to run CyberLink PowerDVD HD in WINE? It came with my BDROM. The first thing I noticed after it failing to do anything useful was that it used Qt, which really makes me wonder why they haven’t put out a *nix version of the software. Sure it uses custom UI blobs, but they’re all included in the binary and it should run perfectly well natively. The only problem I can see is that external software CyberLink provide, such as ArcSoft’s Home Theatre software, won’t run natively.
If a company has gone to the trouble of using a toolkit that runs in *nix, why haven’t they spoken to affiliate companies about a 3rd party native DTS-MA/True-HD decoder? Plenty of soundcards support *nix, and with it the decoding of these formats, so why are we not seeing anything? I think that article above really explains this quite well. Linux already has excelletn MPEG4-AVC decoding support, with VDPAU which even outperforms DXVA as far as GPU assisted decoding goes, why don’t we have the same thing for audio?
I seem to have answered my own question, the “audio situation” in linux specifically is terrible. FreeBSD has no problem. Solaris has no problem. OSX has no problem. Linux has OSS, ALSA, aRTS, PulseAudio, ESD… I could go on. They are all slow, they are all a pain to configure. Phonon is excellent but still acts as a server of sorts. All the factioning is destroying linux.
NB: I could be incorrect about CyberLink using Qt but I don’t believe so. Point still exists that we have the option of having an excellent OS yet factioning keeps destroying that possibility.
I Strongly Dislike Open-Source Developers And So Should You
Open source projects are awesome, right? They provide usually excellent programs, with source that allows any random developer to hack it apart and improve and bugfix. They allow people like Michael Niedermeyer to yell at people and be tyranical about media players and what code is allowed (fuck you I want matroska editions, uau plz2provide) and they allow people like the great folks at the Chakra Project to make what I like to refer to as KDE on crack.
Yesterday, I went about the usual task of adding another disk to my LVM grid. I had also upgraded from KDE 4.2 to 4.3, and because KDEmod is awesome, I assumed there would be no conflict with the absolute retardation that stock KDE in Arch had introduced with its crazy package splitting (fuck you Debian for encouraging people to split shit) My LVM went fine. I had 950GB of space floating there for the ComSSA LAN this weekend. Excellent. Reboot. FUCK.
Somebody had FORGOTTEN TO TELL ME AND THEN PROCEED TO MAKE NO NOTE OF IT ANYWHERE AT ALL that due to Arch’s dumb splitting, KDEmod had been forced to rename the ~/.kde4 dir to ~/.kdemod4. I rebooted into a system that appeared to lack ALL my settings in their entirety. A simple symlink fixed this but the time it took me to find out about it was crazy. This is by no means the biggest cockup Arch has done recently, I recommend reading http://archlinux.me/brain0/2009/08/16/shit-happens-when-you-party-naked-or-use-crappy-shell-scripts/ for a good read on how to fuck up a repo, admitedly I have done this to Ophion twice, but not quite as spectacularly.
I guess I can complain about Arch but it is still my favourite distro, at least until FreeBSD implements Pacman, and then I am getting the fuck away from Linux. Arch is quirky, and it has some really random bugs that no other distro seems to have, expecially involving wine and ffmpeg, and the 64bit version is a load of shit for the most part. Curse their insanely good package manager for keeping me in Linux-land.
Now to finish all that Gulden Draak in my fridge and worry about finding a good window border style and wallpaper, because I am finally changing my desktop for the first time in 3 years. I might even ditch KDE, who knows~
Today I Learnt That Pirated Software Runs Better Than The Legitimate Version I Almost Blew Ninety Dollars On
This post is about piracy. If you do not condone piracy, stop here. If you don’t care, are from the GNU legal team, or otherwise find this shit hilariously entertaining, then carry on.
So, this morning, I made a PERSONAL BACKUP of the first bluray volume of Xam’d of the Lost Memories. TO my horror, I came across gods damned DTS-MA audio, and adversary I had encountered on the Eureka seveN movie as well, but previously ignored.
Ofc, there is no open source decoder for DTS-MA, and, for some reason unbeknown to me, my Sonic decoder was broken in wine. So I turned to the next alternative: ArcSoft’s massive lump of shit that includes an HD audio decoder. I almost spent $90 before I realised I had a copy of it somewhere that came with my sister’s laptop. So LEGITIMATE SOFTWARE ON MY PC.
Needless to say, it didn’t work very well. Or at all. I messed around with it for a few hours before giving up and downloading a torrent, but it’s ok because I have a VALID LEGITIMATE SERIAL CODE. Suddenly, it worked. So basically the moral of this story is pirating shit works better than using the proper software, although for legal purposes I’d suggest “paying for it properly and then pirating it and using your legit serial,” lol ensuring I don’t get sued by the GPL people.
In the end I got annoyed with shit fucking up and ended up just installing Sonic on a client’s Server 2003 box and encoding the audio on there. Additionally, this entire exercise was useless because what leechers are going to care about 24bit FLAC anyway? It’s 1.33GB for two episodes. ONOES TALKING ABOUT FANSUBBING.
Ohi AAPT, Why Won’t You Let Me Give You Money?
The other day, I came across this GLORIOUS offer from AAPT, an ISP in Austfailia. This afternoon, I gave them a call to enquire as to how good a deal it really was. Connection stability and speed aside, I went straight to the important bits: QUOTA. Australia has this awesome idea that all ISP’s should offer a quota, as in, if you download more than a certain amount during a certain time of the day, say hello to symmetrical 64kbit speeds. Obviously this AAPT offer for TRULY UNLIMITED off-peak downloads was awesome.
I download a lot, and I mean, a LOT. So when I called AAPT, I was much less than pleased to find out that their peak quota maxes out at 60GB. Nonetheless, I persevered, only to be completely and utterly shocked that an ISP is unable to handle multiple connections to the same physical location over different lines. I have two phone lines (disconnected from actual phones, because I live with a bunch of antisocial misfits) and I also have a dual line modem. It allows me to plug two lines into the modem and effectively split traffic between them.
I guess you can see where I cam going with this: $200 a month for 120GB peak, unmetered offpeak, 48MBit, although at my distance from the DSLAM it would be more like 12MBit, still a vast improvement on my current speed, at a slightly cheaper price. However, it seems AAPT is unable to have two COMPLTELY SEPARATE LINES going to the same client. How is that even a problem AAPT, please, just tell me.
My current quota is roughly 750GB including WAIX. I use almost all of this. How long till an ISP in Australia can offer me a useable plan I wonder? I pay an absolute fortune so clearly funding isn’t an issue, but why is it that no matter how much I pay I cannot get a non-commercial line with reasonable speeds and tranfer? The only thing I need say further is the following:
Dear Each and Every ISP in Australia,
Fuck you all.
Love,
Emess
The Internet is a Series of Failures, at Least in Australia
After a post I made on a forum belonging to the guys that coordinate .wa.au’s largest anime convention, Siren actually replied, and have ammended their blogpost. While I still think this is something that needs to get out in the open, I do think Siren is definitely going down the right path and eventually we will have quality anime in Australia. I shall now proceed to make another post about the quality of Madman webcasting, and what Siren said in response to my comments:
I liked what you guys wrote about standards converting, and how to get Supreme Quality. It was really insightful into how the industry fails. I also liked how your post on this changed after someone decided to look up telecine on wikipedia, that was really cool.
Re: Article: After publishing the article I wrote, our authoring technician pointed out a mistake I had made regarding the the explanation of different options we have at our disposal when converting from NTSC to PAL. The change was minor and made the explanation more concise, and so I did not think to make a public mention of the change but I have now.
So, just a few things I was wondering about. Are you guys considering webcasting like Madman is doing (and perhaps doing it with a sane codec/bitrate/subtitle method?) Also, can we expect FILM framerates on any blu-ray releases you guys may or may not release, or will those be raped with PAL and thus destroy the Supreme Quality we all came to expect from Siren a few years ago? Please answer truthfully Siren, and if you don’t know what I am talking about, say so.
Re: webcasting: we are exploring the options, albeit at present more from a viability standpoint than a technical one. Currently we’re analyzing the required capital investment, ongoing overhead costs and various revenue models involved to recover those costs, then weight them all up. While I don’t have a launch date I’d say it’s simply a matter of time. You’re clearly well-versed on the subject, PM me and indeed, perhaps we can work together in some capacity.
I’ve left out everything they mentioned about blu-ray as it’s not really necessary. I do find it interesting that a publisher is interested in working with fansubbers, given that it’s an encoder we’re talking about while traditionally it’s been the translators that have joined the industry. It seems possible that Australia may have a decent webcast on it’s hands.
While speaking about webcasts, I think it’s time to bring up Madman Entertainment once again. When they first started their Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood cast, I was quite impressed. After episode two, not so much at all. Yesterday I went and capped Madman’s episode six. I won’t say much for their security as it’s non-existant, and the region blocking takes about 3 seconds to overcome, but the stream itself that I got was terrible. It was 576p VP6 video, although the framerate was correct which is a change for Madman, the bitrate was so low I couldn’t bare to watch it on my monitor fullscreen, or even windowed. The audio on the otherhand was very nice, 192kbps VFR mp3, which while it was nice in my ATH900’s, it also wasted about 15MB of bitrate that was desperately needed by the video.
One odd thing about the Madman stream was that it was 576p. While this is practically a standard on Australian DTV, I don’t understand why Madman used it at all. Especially when the player window was 640×480 with 640×360 actually going to the video, which is less than a fansubbers SD, yet it was about the same size as “400p” and looked so much worse. Colours were bad, blocking was abundant, and general bitrate starvation was VERY apparent. So if it’s displayed at 640×360, why bother encoding to 576p at all? Apparently that was for fullscreen, on which it looked even worse.
Australia has a long way to go with webcasting and Madman is really just showcasing what’s wrong. My comparison with Madman’s webcast and my own encode can be found here.
Goddamnit, Siren, Madman, AUSTRALIA IN GENERAL: FUCK
I have grown sick and tired of shoddy products in the Australian DVD market. I have been a long time advocate of supporting Madman for the most part (the anime club at my university frequently works with Madman) however I always suggested people stay the fuck away from their DVD’s. I am of course talking about PAL conversions. OH NOES PEOPLE STILL USE PAL BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE FANCY LCD’S OR PLASMA’S? YES, INORITE? I LOL’D TOO.
Recently, Siren have licensed two series over here, The Tower of Druaga, and Genius Party. When Jon first approached me about Siren being interested in doing their PAL conversion right, I was pretty happy, “Finally,” I thought, “someone is doing it right!” Turns out I was dead wrong. About a week ago, I got an email from Jon, with a link to this. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the page as it was last week, however since I replied to the email, it’s been changed drastically. I was informed last night that I have now royally pissed off Siren’s authoring house, to which I just lol’d. Here are some of the gold statements that the page had up, as quoted in my email.
We could use clever software and hardware to merge the frames, keeping the overall fps speed. This method, technically called field interpolation, is best used when the original source is a ‘true’ NTSC original and the picture motion is present in ALL the frames (relatively rare in anime). This can give very good results when handled carefully.
Well, I guess if the original source is 24fps and you like ghosting, it’s not too bad. I don’t see how this works at NTSC though, as you’d be DROPPING frames, not interpolating, what?
Another, more preferable way would be to re-create the 24 fps version and then play this, sped up, to PAL frame rates. Although speeding up might sound like a horrific thing to do to your film it is actually the best looking method, an industry standard procedure for motion pictures and can often end up being better than the original! It’s worth noting you have to handle the audio very carefully to correct the pitch (our authoring house uses high quality DIRAC processing).
Speeding up is better than ghosting fo’ sure, but it’d change the runtime. I guess if you fix the sound it’s not too bad an idea.
Finally we could use last method, called ‘Inverse Telecine’, but only in the event we are working with true true 24 fps originals.
Wait wait wait wait wait WHAT? So, telecine involves taking a video, and interlacing it with successive frames in a pattern to artifically simulate a higher framerate. So, for example, with 24->30 fps conversion (2:3 pulldown) one would be duplicating 1 frame in every 4 to make it 5. There is an excellent graphic on Wikipedia of it that I can’t be bothered linking here. So, if I understood Siren’s authoring house here, they are planning to INVERSE telecine, the process of matching the fields and decimating the duplicate frames, in a way to UP the framerate? Does that sound retarded to anyone else? I thought so.
Apparently, I am a noob that needs to read wikipedia more, which is awesome as my email QUOTED wikipedia for like 1/3 of it. So, for anyone in Australia that wants quality anime, or any international films really, I urge you, BOYCOTT SIREN AND MADMAN. Demand Blu-Ray 1080p24, demand no upscales, DEMAND PROGRESSIVE RELEASES AT THE FRAMERATE OF THE ORIGINAL ANIMATION. It’s NOT hard to do, and these companies are fucking you over with inferior products. Anyone with a TV capable of playing anime/film at this resolution will have an LCD or Plasma, which are all capable of multiple framerates, so there is nothing to stop releases at FILM rather than PAL or NTSC. With DVD’s, it’s a bit harder, but I see no reason to not release at 24FPS, unless people have ancient TV’s, in which case some sort of soft telecine could be set up or some shit.
So, how do other people think we should be getting PAL from FILM/NTSC? Keep in mind the material these companies get sourced from Japan is telecined NTSC, so it’s 30FPS after pulldown, and 24FPS natively. Speedup is one way, 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 pulldown is another. One could interpolate as well I guess. There are a few ways, what do the 4 people that might actually read this think?
DISCLAIMER: almost all 24/30FPS mentions in this post are referring to these rates with 1% slowdown, that is, 23.976FPS and 29.970FPS. I also would have pasted my entire email but didn’t feel it necessary, given it was sent to Siren.
y u do dis firefox?
I have been a long time hater of Firefox since about 1.0 came out. I remember loving it back in the 0.8 days, before it turned into a bloatmare (bloated nightmare, I am a master of the English language obviously) So last week, when I had so many tabs open in Opera, Arora, and Konqueror and decided I would nuke them and reopen later to see what I had up and kill the irrelevant tabs. I was then faced with a choice: Midori, Galeon, or Firefox. Now all three are GTK so should be as bad as each other, but I figured Midori was just an Arora clone (or vice versa really) and Galeon is old, so I went with Firefox. Wrong Fucking Choice.
I am wondering if anyone else has had this issue with Firefox, I believe it only effects *nix users, as an OSX G5 user I know has said it happens to her. One certain pages, but not all, and it seems to be somewhat random except GMail ALWAYS does it, cause my HDD to start grinding. It makes a terrible noise like the arm and head are ramming into the platter like a 15 year old virgin and his birthday whore in this terrible cacophany of OH GOD MY HARD DISKS FFFFFFFFFFFFF. Has this happened to anyone else?
That’s about all I have to say on the matter besides for Firefox 3 still rapes memory but isn’t too bad without any extensions, and it’s still an ugly as fuck GTK application.
