You left out the biggest reason to rip DVD’s in my book: getting rid of those annoying delays and forced viewing of FBI warnings, corporate logos, and ads. I will personally never buy a DVD again, they are just too obnoxious. And I REFUSE to buy a product that threatens to put me in jail if I step out of line every time I watch it.
One Clifford DVD for my daughter has 45 seconds of mandatory viewing, 4 (F-O-U-R) corporate logo animations, followed by 5 previews. Each preview had to be skipped manually, which due to DVD slowness took about 5 seconds each. So to start this damn thing required basically 2 minutes of my time. Ripped to AVI and problem solved.
While I respect, admire, and even like Knuth he doesn’t write real software. His opinion isn’t relevant outside his domain of expertise.
I have serious doubts he has a clue about how real OSs work and how they are used. But then again that isn’t a failing on his part, it just means the scope of the universe where his opinions matter is as limited as anyone’s.
For a client machine (i.e. desktop) multicore machines solve a real problem with real software. While Knuth is correct that we got them for other reasons entirely, their true purpose is badly behaving software that would consume a single CPU and render machines unresponsive. A lot of this crapware involves gratuitous polling because it comes from the Unix tradition of software where async programming is seen as a black art.
Please DON’T write multithreaded software just to soak up my multicore resources. Back off! They’re MINE damnit, not yours to squander.
Though SUPER’s site may look downright-suspicious, I can’t find any evidence of adware or spyware either on the site or bundled with the program. Personally, I use it quite a bit for conversions of videos to iPod.
The big bonus i see of duel-core is that a run-away process can only use one so it is much rarer that one bad process will crash the whole system, or leave it completely unresponsive, or too sluggish to fix. The wierd side-effect of this is that you can have a semi-frozen in windows xp where it much be core internals crashing where TM and window management is totally gone much flash applets continue to run fine–even though you cannot interact with them.
Also-even with only one core you rarely see it fully optimized (except when your computer has bad processes, and then its optimized doing gibberish) so this is really only a change that ligitimate processor-intensive tasks must accomadate
What do you think of the Parallel Extensions to the .Net framework Microsoft is working on?
I think the minute you touch the database or do any kind of
significant I/O, the performance benefits will be miniscule. It is
a small step in the right direction, of course.
What a peculiar reply.
“What do you think of my new carburettors?”
“Well, the moment you touch the brakes or do any kind of significant maneuvering, the effects will be miniscule”.
Why didn’t you just say “I won’t need them”.
Those of us who crunch numbers and whose IO is mostly (say) DirectX are drooling over these extensions. We’re hoping they’ll do for threaded development what Java/.NET did for memory management. (I’m a happy ex-C++ developer who’d be happy if he never saw new/delete/malloc ever again). I hope they make mutex obsolete.
The single most important reason why we are going to benefit from multiple cores is increase in responsiveness that increases usability. That is, if operating systems start to use those cores for that. Then there would be on excuse for program to respond slower that human who uses it.
Another benefit would be the ability to create some freaking sweet features that have barely been thought of because doing them in real time has been impossible. How about 3D graphics creating program that shows scenes as rendered and can include chances as fast as you can make them, just like 2D programs can now. Or how about vector art program that allows more natural editing by more intelligently matching user input to vector graphics primitives.
The problem with these features is how intelligent developers are needed and the amount of research and development is needed to come up with those features (so that Clippy is not accidentally reinvented).
I understood that this kind of activity was illegal in the land of the free, and e.g. automated “media centers” that does this kind of thing have had problems or have bought licenses for their stuff.
No answer from Jeff yet, maybe he’s afraid to give legal advice on this…
While storage cost has dropped considerably, there is still a strong argument for re-encoding DVDs that is more than just about file-size.
There are many DVDs out there that have been poorly encoded, suffer interlacing effects when play on the PC, or are badly letterboxed with huge gaps on the sides.
Also, coming from a PAL country (Australia), films suffer the 24-25 fps speedup.
Of course the DMCA is stupid but that’s the way it is. And nobody much cares to change things there. Handbrake is probably illegal and linking to it and talking about it also.
But I thought it only mentioned breaking encryptions, and as you well know ASCII isn’t meant to be encryption (even if it might be comparable to CSS in complexity…). Encoding/decoding is not encrypting.
• H.264 typically achieves half the bitrate of MPEG-2 (DVD) for same quality, not 1/4 or 1/8.
But there are catches to know:
-H.264 achieves much better on high bitrates and high resolutions.
-H.264 (as most video formats) aims for perceived moving image quality. Still images may show defects not relevant during playback, it is a bad way to compare encodes (even with the same codec).
-Audio is also a significant part of total bitrate.
-The usual encode wiseness: Source material, codec, encoding settings and playback platform can make a lot of difference. Choose what suits you.
• DVD is not original material !
-It uses itself lossy compression wich induce artifacts.
-Source material may have been digitally filtered to better accommodate those artifacts.
Both of which can seriously impede re-encode efficiency.
More on the intent of the article, I totally understand the commodity of re-encoding DVDs.
Not only do you skip search-open box-insert-load-eject-frown at scratches-put back, but you can ablate abusive mandatory viewings and bad menus. These are major nuisances.
I really think your characterization of the new content as having “almost no quality loss” or “99% of DVD video quality” is quite exaggerated. The big red text in the second image looks like crap, the colors have changed, the wall is a blocky mess; the general appearance of the image has shifted (in my eyes) from “DVD” to “streamed video.” And I suspect it is even worse when there is a lot of motion on the screen.
It’s fine if you’re willing to accept significant quality loss in exchange for more significant hard disk savings. But, please, don’t call those changes “tiny.”
I read Knuth’s Art of Programming years ago and completed many exercises. It was a great learning tool. Then I started reading his blog and realized that his interests are not in the machines themselves but in the mathematical arcana. He also seemed to procrastrinate a lot; it has been 20 years since he announced additional volumes in the “Art” series. Seriously, 20 years is a lot of time to get anything done, especially for a retired professor who refuses to read email, has a secretary, has a cushy spot at Stanford and has time to play an organ in his spare time. It seems to me he is not writing most of the time. Just pointing the bleeding obvious here. And oh yes. It is so great that he spelled his name in Chinese in his blog. That’s totally awesome and impressive.
As of multicore PCs, main problem is that nobody really knows how to program them effectively. That does not mean we do not need them. It would be awesome to have software (and an OS) that never freezes (or twitches) when switching between 4-5 applications, however CPU intensive they are.
I am going to list my “Art” somewhere for sale, even though I do not generally sell my books for any reason. These, however, are so obsolete and irrelevant that I can no longer justify the bookshelf space for them.
If I buy a dvd and I want to encode it for use on MY PC then since I bought the dbd in the first place I should be allowed to copy it to my computer so long as I don’t distribute it.
I’m kinda unclear on the law but should it not be applied the same way software is?
I didn’t go to law school so someone help me out here please.
Wow, this article touches on two things that have really disappointed me recently: my Mac Pro running Handbrake and H264 encoding quality!
When re-encoding my DVDs, the 8-core (!) Mac takes about 20 minutes to do the job. That’s pretty long. CPU usage averages at around 40% during this time which to me could mean that either the DVD drive’s speed sucks badly and/or there is so much data contention in the system that the encoder can’t even keep the cores busy.
Anyway, is there substancial quality loss due to re-encoding? Hell, yes! It’s not enough to make me care on an aesthetic level, but my inner geek was kinda appalled when I saw ugly blocks and dithering effects (especially in near-unicolored image areas). The DVD was 4.7GB, the encoded H264 was 1.1GB - but that wasn’t enough to prevent serious degradation. So… how good is H264, really?
Well breaking the CSS encryption on the DVD is illegal, and besides you probably just have a license to the content on the dvd in the first place… Sad but true, but what are you going to do about it?
I want to rip my DVDs, but not for the standard reason; I personally have no problem popping in the disc and waiting through the advertisements and warnings. It’s of little inconvenience to me.
I want to rip my DVDs so I can use video editing software (like Adobe Premiere) to make compilations for fun. Something like a compilation of Jackie Chan fight scenes. That sort of idea.
The problem I’m running into is when I use Handbrake and try to encode to the AVI format it freezes partway through the second phase, regardless of the settings I choose or the source. I’m running a quad core and 8GB of RAM on Vista x64. When I encode to something else like MP4 it goes through fine and the end result is wicked, but problem is Adobe Premiere (and to a lesser extent, Windows Movie Maker) doesn’t support MP4 files. Nor do they support MKV files.
My question is has anyone been successful in encoding (using Handbrake) to the AVI format. I use DVD Decrypter to decrypt the VOB files then use those as the source.
When I bought my Kaypro-II (in a dodgy-looking shipping office in Miami - the secrraty was lovely but certainly wasn’t Devin Devasques) in 1984? it came with a bundle of compilers and interpreters. I don’t think they were all Basic; I sent it all to to rubbish heap a dozen years ago. I guess that was my first contribution to the bilg money pile.
Does anyone remember CP/M compilers/interpreters other than Basic?