>> 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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Invisible wrote:
> But how on earth do you get an answer 
> to something like "what's the most popular Z?" 

http://google.com/search?q=what+is+the+most+popular+codec

> 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).

That's the sort of thing where you need to know what the answer looks 
like in order to find it, methinks. If you don't know the term used for 
spec sheets, you're going to get too many odd hits on relative speeds of 
CPUs.

> 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.

That searches answers, not questions. Keep that in mind. :-)

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

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Invisible wrote:
> 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.

Google searches the WWW. Finding things *people* put there.

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On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:07:17 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> 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.

Try putting "popular video encoders" in the Google search box.  The links 
that come up (just on a quick overview) don't say "this is the most 
popular", but they do give some useful pointers.

> 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.

Yes, and if you learn how to speak the language the search engine knows, 
it is a very powerful tool for learning stuff.

With the search terms suggested above (without the quotes), the fifth hit 
is a Wikipedia article on Video Codecs; item 3 in the TOC on that page is 
"Common used standards and codecs" and gives a good overview of each of 
the most popular codecs out there.

For example:

"MPEG-1 Part 2: Used for Video CDs, and also sometimes for online video. 
If the source video quality is good and the bitrate is high enough, VCD 
can look slightly better than VHS. To exceed VHS quality, a higher 
resolution would be necessary. However, to get a fully compliant VCD 
file, bitrates higher than 1150 kbit/s and resolutions higher than 352 x 
288 should not be used. When it comes to compatibility, VCD has the 
highest compatibility of any digital video/audio system. Very few DVD 
players do not support VCD, but they all inherently support the MPEG-1 
codec. Almost every computer in the world can also play videos using this 
codec. In terms of technical design, the most significant enhancements in 
MPEG-1 relative to H.261 were half-pel and bi-predictive motion 
compensation support. MPEG-1 supports only progressive scan video."

Now, knowing what VHS video looks like, that gives a good idea as to what 
sort of quality to expect out of it.

Jim

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On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 12:07:17 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> 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).

Search with "cpu speed arithmetic" - hit numbers 4&6 seem like they might 
be relevant.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> Now, knowing what VHS video looks like, that gives a good idea as to what 
> sort of quality to expect out of it.

Yeah. Just so folks understand, MPEG1 was designed to be delivered over 
a T1 speed link, which is the same speed as a 1x CD drive. You can't 
really expect too much out of 24 voice channels or one high-quality 
uncompressed audio stream if you're trying to deliver video. :)

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

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On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:19:40 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Now, knowing what VHS video looks like, that gives a good idea as to
>> what sort of quality to expect out of it.
> 
> Yeah. Just so folks understand, MPEG1 was designed to be delivered over
> a T1 speed link, which is the same speed as a 1x CD drive. You can't
> really expect too much out of 24 voice channels or one high-quality
> uncompressed audio stream if you're trying to deliver video. :)

Yup. :-)

Jim

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Darren New wrote:

> Yeah. Just so folks understand, MPEG1 was designed to be delivered over 
> a T1 speed link, which is the same speed as a 1x CD drive. You can't 
> really expect too much out of 24 voice channels or one high-quality 
> uncompressed audio stream if you're trying to deliver video. :)

Really? That's interesting; I was under the impression that you can use 
MPEG1 at any arbitrary bitrate.

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

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