> For playback on PCs (and on the PS3 connected to my TV) I usually 
> convert to h264 which is really good for high resolution.  I found a 
> program called xvid4psp which is free and has a nice GUI to do all the 
> conversion, without needing some huge command line only to find that 
> your player doesn't support "adaptive b-frames" or some pyramid thingy.

I usually just use MPEG-1. It works everywhere, and it's easy to create. 
(Doesn't look quite as nice as a DVD though.)

I used to use Huffyuv, but it only gives you a few percent compression, 
and then one day it spectacularly stopped working on my PC and I nearly 
lost a whole load of renders that had taken months to produce. o_O

>> You do realise that I was *in* Curries looking at new TVs only a few 
>> days ago, right?
> 
> That's funny, on their website they have plenty of HDTVs under 400 pounds.

Well, unless they only put the expensive ones out on display or something...

>> Really? That's a rather sudden price drop, don't you think? I mean, 
>> the format is still brand-spanking-new.
> 
> Hmm I don't think so, once the PS3 came out, basically nobody could sell 
> a blu-ray player for above 400 pounds.  Since then the prices have 
> gradually come down from 350 or so to the 200 you see today.

Oh. So it's Sony's fault? ;-)

>> Are there even any BluRay titles to play yet?
> 
> Amazon only have 1507 titles listed.

OK, there is no way anybody could have shot over 1,000 movies in less 
than 4 months. That's impossible. They must just be rereleasing SD 
content printed on BluRay disks...

>> Now that's just puzzling. I tried to use Windows Movie Maker once, and 
>> it wouldn't do *anything* I wanted it to do. Sure, I could take a 
>> bunch of videos and join them together to make one video. But that 
>> seemed to be the sum total of its abilities.
> 
> You didn't notice the fades and text and all the effects you could add 
> then?

I noticed the faced, and the fact that these are limited to a maximum 
duration of 2 seconds - the exact limitation I was hoping to get round 
by using Windows Movie Maker instead of the other thingy.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Amazon only have 1507 titles listed.
>
> OK, there is no way anybody could have shot over 1,000 movies in less than 
> 4 months. That's impossible. They must just be rereleasing SD content 
> printed on BluRay disks...

What makes you think that older films only exist in SD format?  Do you think 
they always used to show SD format at the cinema?!?! :-O

> I noticed the faced, and the fact that these are limited to a maximum 
> duration of 2 seconds - the exact limitation I was hoping to get round by 
> using Windows Movie Maker instead of the other thingy.

Don't have that limitation here, just go to timeline view and drag the video 
clips around after you've applied the transition.

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487365a2$1@news.povray.org...

> Other than audio and video data (which is inherantly large), I can't think 
> of anything you can do with a computer that actually uses much memory.

At least, having a lot of memory lets you open many RAM-hungry apps at the 
same time. I can have FinalRender gobbling memory to render a huge scene and 
still be able to edit images with Photoshop while having Firefox opened with 
lots of tabs etc. Also, there are many professional applications where more 
RAM = bigger whatever is the goal of the application. I'm working with 
linear programming for instance, and more RAM = larger models.

G.

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>> OK, there is no way anybody could have shot over 1,000 movies in less 
>> than 4 months. That's impossible. They must just be rereleasing SD 
>> content printed on BluRay disks...
> 
> What makes you think that older films only exist in SD format?  Do you 
> think they always used to show SD format at the cinema?!?! :-O

Er... yes. (Let's face it, at the cinema the pictures are usually more 
blurry than on TV! For some reason, they never bother to get the 
projector sharply in focus...)

>> I noticed the faced, and the fact that these are limited to a maximum 
>> duration of 2 seconds - the exact limitation I was hoping to get round 
>> by using Windows Movie Maker instead of the other thingy.
> 
> Don't have that limitation here, just go to timeline view and drag the 
> video clips around after you've applied the transition.

I'll try it when I get home.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Other than audio and video data (which is inherantly large), I can't think 
>> of anything you can do with a computer that actually uses much memory.
> 
> At least, having a lot of memory lets you open many RAM-hungry apps at the 
> same time. I can have FinalRender gobbling memory to render a huge scene and 
> still be able to edit images with Photoshop while having Firefox opened with 
> lots of tabs etc. Also, there are many professional applications where more 
> RAM = bigger whatever is the goal of the application. I'm working with 
> linear programming for instance, and more RAM = larger models.

OK, but all of what you've described is pretty unusual for home use.

Sure, I run flam3, which eats RAM like candy. But that's because I'm a 
nerd. Normal humans don't do things like that.

At any rate, none of this explains why *Vista*, by itself, requires 
multiple gigabytes of RAM. (And therefore, presumably, if you want to 
run *real applications* that require gigs of RAM, you have to add even 
more RAM to your system to accomodate them!)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Er... yes. (Let's face it, at the cinema the pictures are usually more 
> blurry than on TV! For some reason, they never bother to get the projector 
> sharply in focus...)

Never noticed that before at the cinemas I've been at.  What I do notice is 
that even when you walk right up to the screen at the end, the text of the 
credits still looks good, even when you've got 1% of the screen taking up 1 
foot right infront of your face.  Now try going up close to your TV during 
the end credits of a film and seeing how detailed the text looks...  There's 
an order of magnitude difference.

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Invisible wrote:
> I'm just loving the concept of "only 1 GB of RAM" - as if that's a 
> "small" amount or something...

Yeah, I was looking at machines in Fryes yesterday (just because I was 
there) and noticing all of them had either 2 or 5 gig, for fairly 
reasonably-priced machines. (Not cheap, mind, but below mid-range even 
had 2G of RAM.)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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scott wrote:
> Because when everyone had only 256 MB of RAM, there weren't cameras that 
> could generate 10 mega-pixel images, video cameras capable of creating 
> 1920x1080x30fps resolution video, DVDs that could store 8GB worth of 
> game data, graphics cards that were capable of rendering billions of 
> multiply-textured triangles per second etc etc.

I remember when Myst first came out on a CD. Wow, over 600 meg on one 
read-only disk. "Well," I thought, "there goes the end of game pirating. 
You'd never be able to copy such a thing onto a hard drive."

And yeah, it's nice to have a 10G text file, wonder how you're going to 
trim lines off the top and bottom conveniently, and then realize you are 
on a 64-bit machine with 16G of RAM, so you just fire up VI.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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Darren New wrote:

> And yeah, it's nice to have a 10G text file, wonder how you're going to 
> trim lines off the top and bottom conveniently, and then realize you are 
> on a 64-bit machine with 16G of RAM, so you just fire up VI.

Wouldn't scrolling the file take more than the linetime of the universe?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> BTW, any ideas about *good* DVD authoring software? My drive came with 
> some freebie that works, but it doesn't work fantastically well...

When I looked around for DVD authoring software for turning camcorder 
stuff into DVDs, I found ULead to be the only version that actually 
didn't compress everything so poorly it was unwatchable. ULead "fair" 
quality was better than anyone else's "best" quality. I suspect ULead is 
the only one that actually implemented b-frames at the time.

If that's what you're doing, I'd suggest getting a clip with lots of 
motion and another with lots of flat area, then trying out all the free 
trial versions of stuff to see what the quality is like. I used a video 
of sun sparkling off an open tank of water, and then looking into the 
tank of water to see the turtles and such swimming. Gave a good pair of 
images, with lots of random motion and lots of subtle contrast 
differences, both of which are hard for mpeg to compress.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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