Apr 29 2005
I’m not sure why it happened or - worse still - who forced things, but Australia (to wit: the federal government) has really screwed up digital TV. This is free-to-air, not pay TV. Don’t get me started on pay TV…
First some basic technical stuff about TV. It’s not hard, trust me.
In Australia, a normal good old fashioned TV has 625 lines of information broadcast. Your TV ‘paints’ these lines very quickly, over the screen.
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Apr 24 2005
I’ve just got a book on Video compression. The DVD format (mpeg2 compression) has been around for about a decade (mpeg2 I mean, not DVD per se). It’s also mpeg2 used for digital TV around the world. Yet you would have thought that in nearly 10 years the Next Generation would have come out…and been twice as good etc. Moores law.
Turns out it did and was called mpeg4 (name mpeg3 skipped for historical reasons), BUT they - the creators - put such restrictive licensing terms that The Industry rejected it. Only recently - after ‘hacked’ versions appeared - did they relent and change the conditions.
Too late, it would initially seem. The mpeg4 format really only appears as pirate Internet movie files in the XviD and DivX flavours. A tiny handful of “DVD” players support them. Pity; a 90 min (mpeg2) DVD movie could be 2 or 3 GB. XviD can squash this down to 700 MB and look pretty much the same.
But all may not be lost. At least one of the new “DVD” follow ons (Blu-Ray) will support mpeg4. A current single-sided, single layer DVD is 4.7 GB. The equivalent Blu-Ray - or BD - will be 25 GB. But we’ll need it. Even at that size a 25 GB disk recording of Hi Definition digital TV will only be about 2 hours! Already Sony are talking up dual layer 50GB BDs.
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Apr 16 2005
Firstly, I am not a hard core Star Wars fan. I like the films, but am not one of those who can tell you how many teats a female Bantha has.
I’m on the record - along with others - as saying that Return of The King has really set a high water mark for quality. And that George Lucas will be measured against it.
To that end here’s how I would end Episode III aka Revenge of the Sith.
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Apr 12 2005
Another pause, ponder and reflect moment as I read back a forum entry I’ve just written:
“Also I currently use VirtualdubMPEG2, resized via inbuilt filter to 576×324 Lanc, 2 pass, AS @ L5, ( B-VOPS 2 / 1.5 / 1.00) with [ Adap Q, Interlaced Enc, QPEL, GMC] all off, if that helps”
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If that helps? I sure hope the target speaks in abbrev’s and acro’s 
I’m seeking advice and ‘tuning tips’ for some video conversion.
A VOP is a Video Object Plane, sort of like a frame. B means Bidirectional; this frame’s compression is influence by the frames before and after it.
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