Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> ...they have tutorials now? ._.
> > 
> > <sigh> Do you think that everyone else just somehow managed to intuit 
> > the proper settings?

> Well yeah, presumably.

> I mean, TMPGEnc doesn't come with a manual or any tutorials either, and 
> most people manage to figure that out. Ditto for Virtual Dub...

  You know, there's this thing called "Google". Ever tried that?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Gail wrote:

> It may not come with it, but that doesn't stop people who have wored 
> things out to write tutorials for all the people who can't or who don't 
> want to fiddle for days to get a good result.
> If you're wondering how to do something, ask google. Chances are, 
> someone has done it before and will have written up something explainig 
> how.

I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need them.

At the time, I was only really trying out various codecs. The general 
conclusion I reached is that every codec known to man produces some 
degree of visible distortion, so it's best to store everything fully 
uncompressed, only encoding it when writing to DVD. Basically I only 
ever play video on my PC or on a DVD; I've never tried to put video onto 
the Internet before.

I decided that for lossy encoding, MPEG1 is good enough. (And has the 
advantage that absolutely everything can play it, and there's a nice, 
free, fairly usable encoder available.)

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ad8c2$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail wrote:
>
>> It may not come with it, but that doesn't stop people who have wored 
>> things out to write tutorials for all the people who can't or who don't 
>> want to fiddle for days to get a good result.
>> If you're wondering how to do something, ask google. Chances are, someone 
>> has done it before and will have written up something explainig how.
>
> I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
> instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need 
> them.

No. You assume that it should be obvious.
Most other people I know (myself included) would go looking for some 
assistance (whether it be asking someone or searching online)

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Gail wrote:

>> I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
>> instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need 
>> them.
> 
> No. You assume that it should be obvious.
> Most other people I know (myself included) would go looking for some 
> assistance (whether it be asking someone or searching online)

Well, the encoder _did_ work. It just produced very bad quality 
pictures. I assumed it was just a naff codec, and continued my 
explorations elsewhere. (At the time I'd never heard of it before, so I 
figured that was because it's not very good.)

I do recall spending 4 days trying to get a codec called "cinepak" to 
work well - and when I mentioned it online, somebody said "OMG, do you 
have *any idea* how ancient that thing is? Get rid of it!" I guess I 
assumed that DivX must be similar, so I didn't spent too many hours 
trying to fix it.

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490adb53@news.povray.org...

> I do recall spending 4 days trying to get a codec called "cinepak" to work 
> well - and when I mentioned it online, somebody said "OMG, do you have 
> *any idea* how ancient that thing is? Get rid of it!" I guess I assumed 
> that DivX must be similar, so I didn't spent too many hours trying to fix 
> it.

You seem to often make assumptions based on insufficient information. Don't. 
Investigate, verify, confirm for yourself. The tools needed are there, it's 
not hard.
You do your reputation no good if you make an assumption that 2 min or less 
with google will show to be completely false.

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Gail wrote:
> 
> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
> news:490adb53@news.povray.org...
> 
>> I do recall spending 4 days trying to get a codec called "cinepak" to 
>> work well - and when I mentioned it online, somebody said "OMG, do you 
>> have *any idea* how ancient that thing is? Get rid of it!" I guess I 
>> assumed that DivX must be similar, so I didn't spent too many hours 
>> trying to fix it.
> 
> You seem to often make assumptions based on insufficient information. 
> Don't. Investigate, verify, confirm for yourself. The tools needed are 
> there, it's not hard.
> You do your reputation no good if you make an assumption that 2 min or 
> less with google will show to be completely false.

You look at your PC. You have half a dozen codecs available. Which ones 
are you going to spend most time investigating? The ones you've never 
heard of? Or the ones you've heard about that are supposed to be good? 
Where are you going to spend the most effort?

Also... You make it sound like Google is some magical Oracle that will 
instantly answer any possible question. This is not actually the case. 
Google works very well for certain questions, and drastically less well 
for certain other questions. Sometimes it can take hours of hunting to 
get a useful answer out of Google. (Though probably not for the specific 
case in question.)

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:490ae0c2$1@news.povray.org...

> You look at your PC. You have half a dozen codecs available. Which ones 
> are you going to spend most time investigating? The ones you've never 
> heard of? Or the ones you've heard about that are supposed to be good? 
> Where are you going to spend the most effort?

First I'd spend some time investigating what are considered to be good 
codecs, which ones are popular and which are seldom used, rather than 
relying on my own knowledge. If I have some I've never heard of (and if so, 
why would I have them at all), I'd do a little bit of investigating until I 
had a basic understanding of them

> Also... You make it sound like Google is some magical Oracle that will 
> instantly answer any possible question.

I never said that. I said that you should investigate, verify and confirm 
for yourself. If you search and can't find an answer, that's one thing, when 
you state something as a categorical truth and half a minute with google 
proves that it's completely false, that's quite another.

Searching's a skill that needs practice, it's not obvious first time what 
keywords are going to produce an answer. Sometimes it takes several 
searches, refining the terms each time based on what's returned and what's 
not.

fyi, I've had very few questions where I couldn't get an answer out from 
either google or a forum/newsgroup/mailing list on the particular subject. 
That's for work stuff, for stuff that I'm casually interested in, for 
game-related stuff and for information for my Masters thesis.

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>> You look at your PC. You have half a dozen codecs available. Which 
>> ones are you going to spend most time investigating? The ones you've 
>> never heard of? Or the ones you've heard about that are supposed to be 
>> good? Where are you going to spend the most effort?
> 
> First I'd spend some time investigating what are considered to be good 
> codecs, which ones are popular and which are seldom used, rather than 
> relying on my own knowledge. If I have some I've never heard of (and if 
> so, why would I have them at all), I'd do a little bit of investigating 
> until I had a basic understanding of them

Now here's the thing. Google is very good at answering "what is X?" and 
to some extent "how do I do Y?". But how on earth do you get an answer 
to something like "what's the most popular Z?" Google can't tell you 
that. Only *people* can tell you that.

>> Also... You make it sound like Google is some magical Oracle that will 
>> instantly answer any possible question.
> 
> I never said that. I said that you should investigate, verify and 
> confirm for yourself. If you search and can't find an answer, that's one 
> thing, when you state something as a categorical truth and half a minute 
> with google proves that it's completely false, that's quite another.

Well this thread started by my stating that *I* couldn't get a decent 
picture out of DivX - which *is* a categorical truth. I know. I was there.

I have never claimed that DivX isn't good; I just said that it didn't 
work for me.

Also, I can't really do a Google search every single time I utter any 
sentence in case something in that sentence is not factually accurate. 
I'd never say anything! There has to be some sane limits here.

> Searching's a skill that needs practice, it's not obvious first time 
> what keywords are going to produce an answer. Sometimes it takes several 
> searches, refining the terms each time based on what's returned and 
> what's not.
> 
> fyi, I've had very few questions where I couldn't get an answer out from 
> either google or a forum/newsgroup/mailing list on the particular 
> subject. That's for work stuff, for stuff that I'm casually interested 
> in, for game-related stuff and for information for my Masters thesis.

Clearly you are radically better at this stuff than I am.

Just the other day I was trying to figure out the relative speed of 
various CPU arithmetic operations, and I couldn't find anything useful 
with Google (as evidenced by my asking here).

It was only a few weeks back that I wanted to know how to configure an 
Exchange public folder so it can receive email. Various websites tell 
you how to do this, but they all assume you have access to the Exchange 
admin console. Is there a way of doing it without that access? I guess 
I'll never know - cos Google sure can't tell me.

There is an endless list of obscure computer problems I've had that 
Google couldn't solve for me. (Clearly nobody else had ever had the 
exact problem I had.)

So yeah, there's a pretty huge sea of questions that I couldn't get 
Google to answer. It's not an Oracle, it's just a search engine.

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Invisible wrote:
> I guess I just assumed that if something doesn't come with any 
> instructions, it's supposed to be "obvious" enough that you don't need 
> them.

I think that only applies to commercial products. Sadly, I've bought a 
few commercial products, hoping they'd have better instructions than the 
free equivalents, only to find that the author didn't even feel it was 
worth updating the printed manual to cover the last couple of versions 
of the software.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Invisible wrote:
> Google works very well for certain questions, and drastically less well 
> for certain other questions. 

No. Google works well if you are looking for an answer. It works poorly 
if you're asking a question.

The difference is that google searches answers. If you don't have any 
idea what the answer looks like, you're unlikely to find it no matter 
how precisely you state the question.

Fortunately, *most* questions have the seeds of their answer already 
planted in the question.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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