>> Again, that's all very nice. But unless you have insane levels of
>> bandwidth available, it's not going to work.
>>
>> There's nothing theoretically difficult about sending video data over
>> the Internet. The problem is the bandwidth.
> 
> 
> Meh, I had a 1Mbit DSL connection for a long time, and my wife could be 
> watching Youtube videos of kids playing with cats, and I could watch a 
> netflix film at very decent quality w/o interruption for buffering. Of 
> course now, with my cable internet bandwidth is no longer an issue... ;)

It is utterly baffling to me that this is possible. In my experience, 
YouTube on its own is very unreliable. At certain times of day it's just 
unusuable, while at other times it's just about stable. (I guess this is 
probably due more to server load than end-user bandwidth though.)

Even when it works properly, the quality is nowhere near TV quality. 
Same for BBC iPlayer, 4 on demand and all those others. As soon as you 
make it go fullscreen, it looks horrifyingly blurry and covered in 
compression artifacts. You certainly wouldn't bother paying money to 
watch a *movie* at such low quality...

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> My dad wired it himself. ;-)
>
> (As in, he literally chiselled out chunks of wall and then plastered it 
> over again.)

Before they came up with cavity wall insulation you could just drop your 
cables down between the inner and outer brickwork, drill a hole through the 
wall where you want the socket, use the old bent-tape-measure trick to grab 
the cable and wire it up to a socket.  Job done.

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> Even when it works properly, the quality is nowhere near TV quality. Same 
> for BBC iPlayer, 4 on demand and all those others. As soon as you make it 
> go fullscreen, it looks horrifyingly blurry and covered in compression 
> artifacts.

Are you comparing the two signals the same way?  Note that if you feed 
normal SDTV into a 22" monitor and sit 30 cm away then it looks *really* bad 
too.

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scott wrote:
>> Even when it works properly, the quality is nowhere near TV quality. 
>> Same for BBC iPlayer, 4 on demand and all those others. As soon as you 
>> make it go fullscreen, it looks horrifyingly blurry and covered in 
>> compression artifacts.
> 
> Are you comparing the two signals the same way?  Note that if you feed 
> normal SDTV into a 22" monitor and sit 30 cm away then it looks *really* 
> bad too.

Well, DVDs are SD aren't they? I quite often watch DVDs on my PC...

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> Well, DVDs are SD aren't they? I quite often watch DVDs on my PC...

DVDs use about 5x the bitrate of SDTV.

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And lo On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:08:55 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did  
spake thusly:

>>> Hard to believe but apparently true. Something fishy in our brain. Jan  
>>> Koenderink, who was giving the talk, is trying to figure out why.
>>  Perhaps something similar to line perception where we overestimate  
>> acute angles and underestimate obtuse ones.
>
> My mother believes she can sing. Even though she's actually about a  
> fifth to a third flat. The result sounds truly *horrible*! You'd think  
> she could hear the difference, but no...
>
> She also claims to be unable to tell the difference between major and  
> minor chords, which is impressive given the vast, world-alering  
> difference between the two.

My father will happily sing and tap along half-a-beat out to music that he  
likes. Drives me mad.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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And lo On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:53:51 +0200, scott <sco### [at] scottcom> did  
spake thusly:

>> My dad wired it himself. ;-)
>>
>> (As in, he literally chiselled out chunks of wall and then plastered it  
>> over again.)
>
> Before they came up with cavity wall insulation you could just drop your  
> cables down between the inner and outer brickwork, drill a hole through  
> the wall where you want the socket, use the old bent-tape-measure trick  
> to grab the cable and wire it up to a socket.  Job done.

Pah bent-tape-measure, professionals use ferrets :-)

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> On 4/27/2010 4:12 PM, John VanSickle wrote:
> 
>> Government regulators, for whom being safe is generally more important
>> than being right, had a major role in the determination of the standard.
>> The standard had to allow for broadcast within a strictly-defined
>> frequency band, and this limit was chosen based on technology that is
>> now ready for deployment to your local museum, because these decisions
>> were made years ago.
>>
>> If I am remembering things correctly, there was even some insistence
>> that the signal be displayable by sets designed for the old broadcast
>> standard. If that sounds thinking-impaired, well, that's the FCC for you.
> 
> kind of like how NTSC color was kludged on top of the existing black and
> white broadcast signal in the name of backwards compatibility?

Isn't "NTSC color" like "ATM machine"?

Oh wait, "Never Twice Same Color" is not the official acronym meaning? :)

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Phil Cook v2 <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> wrote:
> My father will happily sing and tap along half-a-beat out to music that he  
> likes. Drives me mad.

  Accenting the off-beat is a completely valid form of rythm. Ever heard
eg. reggae music?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Phil Cook v2 <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> wrote:
>> My father will happily sing and tap along half-a-beat out to music that he  
>> likes. Drives me mad.
> 
>   Accenting the off-beat is a completely valid form of rythm.

Sure. If you are consistently accenting the same beat.

Tapping midway between beats with variable accuracy is NOT valid. ;-)

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