BunkBlog

The following is somewhat reformatted from a recent discussion on Cnet about DVD camcorders.

I know many people are considering a digital camcorder for the first time, as their old 8mm and VHS-C cameras start to die. Many people think that a DVD camcorder is a great idea, because it’s so simple: just record to the disk, hit the “finished” button, and play it on a DVD player (although you’ll be recording about 20 minutes on that disk, not the two hours you expect from a full-sized DVD). That works great if you want the exact same capability you had with a simple analog video camera. If you want to produce nicer video, though, the story is quite different.
There are some people who don’t edit their videos, who don’t mind that their home videos look amateurish and contain fingers over lenses and heads blocking shots and poor audio. For those people, a DVD camcorder is a great fit. They neither want nor need the editing quality they are denied by recording in a lossy format; they need and want, however, the ease of taking their videos and dropping them in nearly any DVD player and watching them.

Recording to a DVD in DVD-standard formats means lossy compression and the joys of MPEG formats that anyone who has tried to edit an MPEG can understand. The MiniDV camcorders can dump uncompressed video to your computer, where you can delete the scenes that look bad, you can punch up the color balance and contrast, you can add a music soundtrack if you like. All these things are wonderful, and I do them with all my home videos, producing slick DVDs with titles and transitions and menus for my relatives. That niche is where I want to be.

DVD is a great medium to VIEW video with. It’s even a great medium to shoot video if you understand its limits.

DVDs and MiniDV and hard drives and flash memory all record digitally. So, talk of capacity should include RAW storage in bytes, not just in minutes. Any talk of minutes gets you embroiled in compression issues.

A MiniDV tape holds 13 gigabytes of data. An 8cm DVD (the smaller ones used in camcorders) holds 1.4 gigabytes. An expensive SD card holds 4 gigabytes. A hard-drive based camcorder holds (as of today) around 30 gigabytes. That’s the actual storage capacity, folks. Now, how much do each cost? Well, the best price per gigabyte is the tape, as it has been throughout digital media history.

The cheap nature of tapes convinced the DV forum to make DV standard very close to uncompressed. This makes it easy to edit without losing quality.

The low capacity of 8cm DVDs, and the need to make them compatible with DVD players, means that DVDs have the worst video quality (among hard drives, DV tape, and DVDs at least – some of the flash recorders are toys). The compatibility of DVDs is their greatest asset. Hit “done” on that camcorder, and two minutes later you can be watching your home movie on a big screen. Not so with tapes.

DVD format does have an inherent flaw – lossy compression.

Tapes still exist for every high-capacity recording system in use today. High-end video recorders use tape. High-end data backup systems use tape. The reason is simple: high density at low cost.

If the video was recorded to the DVD as an uncompressed video file (like the DV standard used on tapes), you’d swap disks every six minutes. Also, the DVDs would be DVD-ROM format, and wouldn’t play on your DVD player – which is the selling point for most DVD recording camcorder users.

When you export a DVD format video to edit it, you are taking an MPEG (with I, B, and P frames) and editing it into a different compression scheme for whatever your target system is. If it’s DVD again, you compress an MPEG to MPEG, each generation producing another set of MPEG compression artifacts.

So, you can get high capacity and high quality on tape. You can get easy compatibility with DVD. You can’t get both. If you want DVD-player compatibility, then the DVD camcorder format has an inherent flaw – MPEG.

The hard drive recorders, at least those that you see marketed for typical consumers, use compressed video because they don’t generally have removable hard drives. With a fixed disk, you want more capacity than a single tape, obviously. So, the JVC Everio and others have MPEG-compressed video and the same issues with editability as the DVDs.

To me, the DVD camcorder is to video what the point-and-shoot camera is to photography. Just because we geeks want the best quality and ease of editing, doesn’t mean that “good enough” matched with “really easy” is a bad thing. So, if you know what you want to do with your video, that makes all the difference in the world for what type of camcorder to buy.

The Army is mandating Trusted Computing for their new machine purchases. Of course, Trusted Computing only works with Microsoft Vista, which is vapor at this time. And, doesn’t having to trust Microsoft instead of you users imply that you believe the soldiers you have trained are less responsible than a large faceless blameless corporation?

I watch the military system administrators and their contract counterparts struggle with Windows 2000 and XP on a daily basis. Our unclassified computers currently have at least two errors popping up every time we log into them. They also reset the internet homepage and proxy settings seemingly at random. The standard response to almost any error on Windows is, “we don’t know why it’s doing that.  Reboot it.” I can just imagine when the SysAds are no longer even capable of doing anything on the machines that Microsoft hasn’t previously approved…We’re doomed.

As I was clearing out old documents and files from my email attachment directory, I came across a receipt for a Micron computer, purchased in December of 2000. Understand, I never buy the top of the line, but usually something more reasonable.  This is what passed for reasonable in 2000:

AMD Athlon 1 Ghz CPU
128 MB of RAM
20 GB hard drive
8x CDRW drive
12-40x DVD-ROM drive
GeForce2 AGP card
Soundblaster Live Value edition
56k Modem
100 Mbps network card
MS Office Small Business edition
Oh, and I got a free Zip drive.  That was useful.

And all of that was a mere…1800 dollars and change. After shipping and tax, it was just over two grand.  And now that machine would make a dandy footrest. I was looking through the Sunday paper today and came across several laptops that have 2 Ghz procressors and a gig of memory and 100 gig hard drive and dual-layer DVD burners, for 800 bucks.  What a difference five years makes, eh?

After seeing the teaser trailer twice now, I figured I’d make an LJ userpic from the Transformers movie. Yes, it doesn’t come out until next July.

Dear people who change the resolution at work:

LCD monitors have one resolution.  That is all.  It is not debatable.  There is no judgement call, no opinion, no possibility of misunderstanding.  LCD panels have one fixed resolution.  Yes, they will sync up at lower resolutions (and sometimes higher, which must be seen to be believed).  But they will look like crap at anything but their native resolution or an even divisor thereof.  So, a panel of 1600×1200 resolution could look decent at 800×600.  But, a panel with resolution of 1280×1024 will not look good at 1152×864, no matter how much you may wish it to be so.

Thank you for not being a tool.

Yes, I do have too much time on my hands. Why do you ask?

So, anyone else see the slightest bit of similarity between the new ABC Family show Kyle XY and the dearly-missed Fox show John Doe? They both have no memory of themselves, fantastic abilities, woke up in the forest, set in Seattle but probably shot in Vancouver… Of course, in keeping with the usual way of doing things lately, ABC had to slap together a viral marketing campaign too. Like the Hanso Foundation from Lost, we have the Mada Corp, a shadowy group that claims to be all about doing good and yet has a secret blog hidden in the job search link where someone writes that “they” are coming to get him. With the implication of freaky experimentation, maybe there’s a dash of Dark Angel in there too.

My point? I don’t have one, just thought that Kyle XY was strangely reminiscent of other shows.

Anyone else watching the BBC Series Two Doctor Who episodes?  Yeah, Usenet is a wonderful thing.

Could the foreshadowing have been any heavier at the end of “Fear Her” yesterday?  Dayum.

Because Perich and Visgoth did it and I’m a geeky sheep.

Every Hugo-winning novel since the dawn of the Hugo Award. The ones I’ve read are bolded.

More »

Ah, the most surprising news from Microsoft since removing PC Sync or removing EFI support came today. WinFS is dead. Really, this time. Previously, they removed WinFS from the Vista release, but promised it would be available separately soon after Vista was released in 2005.  Since the 2005 date for Vista has slipped to 2007, you’d think they’d have enough time to get WinFS working, but apparently not.

Windows Vista had three major innovations as of its original release announcement: WinFS, Avalon graphics engine, and a technology for communication between devices and applications. Since everyone realizes that the prettier graphics are just eye candy, we can throw that one out and say there were two innovations announced. One was thrown out years ago, so then we have the Indigo system as the sole remaining innovation in Vista, and it still is three years later than originally announced. At least we’ll have integrated DRM and Trusted Computing so that Hollywood can control our computers. yay

Yet another attempt to get broadcast flags enshrined in law is coming up this week. Take action to stop them, please.

What is the problem with the broadcast flag and audio flag, you ask?  Simple – they don’t do anything worthwhile and are an obstruction to technological progress. If you’re a Republican, do you believe in more governmental regulation or do you believe in letting the market decide?  Well, broadcast flag legislation protects one business model to the exlusion of letting the market decide.  If you’re a Democrat, do you believe in the government bowing to the orders of large corporations?  Well, the broadcast flag legislation exists only because of the efforts of the entertainment industry, not due to any grassroots campaign from actual individual citizens.

All these flags and the PERFORM Act do is stop innovation. They make it so that the United States will remain the technology ghetto of the world.  We keep our recording devices at the same technological level as analog cassette tape in the 21st Century.  What the hell?  Read Engadget sometime – every day there is some new piece of audio or video gadgetry that will never arrive in the United States, because the Asians don’t have retarded laws protecting the RIAA and MPAA from competition.  It’s like we went back in time and killed the Ford automobile because buggy whip makers were pissed off.  Absurd now, isn’t it? Yet you know that the buggy whip makers were campaigning for just such a thing at the time. Why let the RIAA and MPAA tell you that you can’t record what you want on your stereo or television? Why let the recording industry control your electronics? Do your elected representatives represent you or Hollywood?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new approach to consumer activism: The Corruptibles. The cartoon is pretty cool, and gives a reasonably simple overview of what the entertainment industry would like to have Congress give them. So far, the congresscritters have given them pretty much everything the industry has paid for wanted, so there’s a great deal of confidence that they’ll get everything else they’ve bought asked for as well.

I’m sure some people don’t care that their iPod only works with music they buy from Apple, and that Sony enjoys building virus-like rootkit hacking tools into music CDs, and the industry wanting to halt all technology at the level of analog cassette tapes, but maybe some of you realize that giving one business model special protection is a bad thing.

Only we can stop…The Corruptibles!

It’s been a couple months since Microsoft announced it was removing EFI boot capability from Windows Vista. Now, they’ve announced they’re removing a feature called PC Sync, which was meant to keep documents consistent between two or more computers. Yet another feature (dubious though it may be) that has been sacrificed to the almighty “Ship It By January” gods. At this rate, they’ll release Vista as XP Service Pack 3.

The local Circuit City, like all other “big box” stores in this town, is more of a “not so big box” store. They’ve been here for about a year now, but seem to be in a constant state of stocking the shelves as if for the first time. Today, I went to the store to try to touch a Sansa e200, which I will probably end up buying as a replacement for my broken Karma. I went to the part of the store marked “Portable Audio” – that was where I’d seen MP3 players in the past, and the name seems to be apropos. The aisles were filled with telephones and CD cases. OK, so where might the portable audio be? After several attempts, I finally found a salesperson who pointed out the sign hanging above the computer section, “iPods and MP3.” A new sign, it is literally a section carved out of the middle of the computer section. There are hard drives on the left and laptops on the right. What the hell?

And that Sansa e200? Not on display. Best Buy has one on display, but it’s broken. I hate this town some days.

The fact that this article is not accessible on-base is probably just a remarkable coincidence regarding AETC-mandated proxy-server updates or something.  Right.

Built one of Yamaha’s papercraft animals this weekend: a macaw. Now to let my hand uncramp from the knife-clenching. Of course, Alex now wants me to build a motorcycle. The macaw took three pieces of card stock; the motorcycles are over a dozen sheets each. Ouch.

 

 

For you LJ users, a pack of new userpics.  Go for it, Mike!

Taking a cue from Bob Cringely, I have tweaked my site’s CSS pages so they now are automagically “printable” when used with any sort of modern browser. I rock.

It’s important to avoid licensing problems with potential illegal copies of Microsoft products. Billy Gates has acquired a company named AssetMetrix, which keeps track of your installed programs and snitches on you to the home office (Redmond?). The new version of Microsoft Office (2007, 2008, Vista, whatever) has a completely different interface than has ever been used before, and a new file format. Well, shoot – if you’re going to learn a new piece of software, why not the one that costs you bupkis?
There is no need to risk getting audited by the Business Software Alliance – just say NO to Microsoft.

I can quit any time I want. It’s a good thing most of the programs on my MythTV box are set for “autoexpire when the drive gets full.” Here’s the latest status line.

297 programs, using 242 GB (246 hrs 31 mins) out of 345 GB.

Now, to be fair, I have a truly stupendous number of cartoons for the Boy, as well as a significant number of DVDs ripped to the hard drive (no need to mess with the disks, which is good if you’re six years old).