IP TV
After reading how FrontRow is a crap I ended up playing with Windows XP Media Center Edition only to learn that is crappy too. Namely, per official Microsoft Extender FAQ the whole MediaCenter - Extender architecture is as good as its extenders and extenders are closed source. So I do get decent experience on a PC, but in the living room Xbox extender is pretty much useless for anything but playing mp3. The reason for that is that Microsoft do not support any codecs but Microsoft's and there is no...
Looks like neither mplayer nor xine could play .smil playlist. Apple way of converting .smil to .mov by adding SMILtext and saving as .mov is a hack. And .qtl could be used to playout supported content in full screen despite Apples efforts to collect money for the priviledge...
So far Apple kept their Podcast Chapter Tool private and only available of OSX. Trying to hack it out have been unsuccessful so far. My guess is that is because editing .mp4 is supported in QT 7.x and QuickTime for Java is QT 6.x. Anyhow, the easiest way to edit .mov (and .mp4?) is using quicktime.std.movies of QuickTime for Java. Here are examples Part 1 and Part 2 or this. Still, not very clear how to create .mov refferencing external movies? Is it as simple as creating Movie and saving it without...
Amazon started selling Intel based Mac Mini. Mac Mini 1.5GHz Solo is at $599.99 and Mac Mini 1.66GHz Duo is at $799.99 or both are at MSRP. Amazon runs $25 mail in rebate on both until 03/21/06. Mac Mini review by arstechnica pointed out that MacMini CPU is socketed and thus MacMinis are upgradable, but at least for now it is quite expensive $300 to go to Core Duo 1.83GHz and $400+ for Core Duo 2GHz. Still, it makes MacMini very cheap Yonah entry-level box that could have longer life with CPU upgrades....
First, there was xbox in Rover running Linux and freevo. Then there was Jeepintosh. And now there is Mac Prius.... well, almost. On a Prius note... Prius is not only 50mpg car but also a portable electricity generator and UPS...
So Apple released Intel based MacMini with their stinky old remote. At $799 Core Duo version is competative with lower end Pentium D boxes starting at $700+, alas Gateways and such offer more raw power and disk space (2.8GHz, 2x1MB L2, 800 MHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB HD vs. 1.66GHz, 2x1MB L2, 667MHz, 512 MB RAM, 80GB HD), but lack extras like 1G ethernet, bluetooth and built in wireless. Oh did I forgot remote? Anyhow, looks like for the first time ever Apple appears if not cheap, but at least as a good...
Tests at the low end of the bandwidth revealed that AVC (x.264) does not offer significant advantage over ASP(XVID, DX50). It did looked better overall, but not good enough to justify 50% increase in speed required to both encode and decode. Once again the test were at the low end of the bandwidth where all codecs showed some but yet noticable artifacts. This low end of the bandwidth is as follows Size Bandwidth QT7 on 848Mhz CPU 384x288 300 kbps 80-85% 480x352 500 kbps 90% 640x480(480p) 800 kbps...
Standard Definition (SD) is 480p or in 4:3 format 640x480=307200pix. High Definition (HD) is 720p or in 4:3 format 960x720=691200pix or in wide screen (16:9) 1280x720 or 921600 pix. Encoding/decoding is proportional to number of pixel per frame and thus, “upgrade“ from 4:3 SD to to 4:3 HD is 225% more expensive and to 16:9 HD is 300% more expensive. On 448 Mhz test CPU most trivial case of CBR encoding gave the following result Size XviD x264 480x360 5fps 3fps 640x480 3fps 2fps thus AVS...
I didn't realize that mp4 container could host DiVX5 (DX50) and XviD (XVID) video streams. Moreover, since they are simple profile MPEG-4 streams (MP4V-ES), upon packaging mp4creator changes id to MP4V-ES and after that encoder becomes transparent. Quicktime could play those DX50 and XVID streams using MPEG-4 compliant decoder, alas there are some problems. 1. Since QuickTime is very picky it would play only AAC audio and will refuse MP3 that would be packaged into mp4 by default when repackaging...
So I installed Darwin Streaming Server to play with mp4 and H.264, but it didn't go further then audio - DSS refuse to RTSP stream mp3 apparently because it is not hinted. Neither does it stream mp3 wrapped into mp4 container even with hint track. DSS has no problem however streaming AAC with hint in mp4 container, but doom9.org way of creating AAC using AACMachine is cludgy as hell. Here there is a list of other posibilities when it comes to encoding mp4. And here is the list of audio encoders and...
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