Whats a good image management app?

[Ken Springer]

Well Ken, you might try that small app too just for kicks! (Ear Test)

Oh, He double hockey sticks, it would just tell me something I already
know! LOL Too much time in the Navy around Curtis Wright R3350's
without proper ear protection.

I've always been different when hearing sounds. When shopping for my
main speakers, the salesman said "Listen, you can hear the guitar picks
on the strings." I'd listen and listen, and try as I might, couldn't
hear them. Bought the speakers anyway, and got a copy of the music.
Sitting at home, relaxed and "zoned" out, I noticed the picks
immediately!!!!

Nothing has changed, if I've got a piece of music that's relatively new,
and I'm just completely relaxed and immersed in the music, I'll
sometimes hear something new now and again I hadn't heard before.


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 14.0.1
Thunderbird 14.0
LibreOffice 3.5.2.2

 

[Ken Springer]

On 7/27/12 1:32 PM, Bill in Co wrote:

Yes, that good ole, vacuum tube amp vs solid state amp debate (along with
the golden ear, gold plated, Monster Cable debate) is ... interesting.

From a technical standpoint, the Monster Cable debate is valid. The
bigger the wire, the smaller the degradation of an electrical current
over a given distance. But, that doesn't mean the average human ear can
hear it. Note the operative word, "average".

That same idea of the bigger wire is why most fire departments now use
large diameter fire hoses.

I wouldn't bet my life on the idea that one can't hear some differences or
different nuances between these, BUT again, that doesn't necessarily, and I
might add, LIKELY, mean that the vaccuum tube amp is more faithful to the
source material than the solid state one! THAT point is what is lost, in
all these debates.

Add in the fact that much of that "source" material is already run
through electronic equipment before you have something to play back, and
you've already colored that question.

Different loudspeakers can, and often, will sound different. But that does
not directly equate to the sound's fidelity, and some people will prefer one
sound over another (depending on its equalization, or even the small
remaining distortion terms (harmonic or IM) that might still be heard)

True. And most people go about shopping for a sound system in the wrong
way. They start by reading specs, looking at the equipment and price,
then listening to the music available at the store. Most never ask the
salesman about what the settings are on the equipment, or ask if the
volume for each pair of speakers can be individually adjusted.

So, they do the in store testing completely wrong, and probably end up
with something for X dollars that if proper procedures had been
followed, they would have ended up with a system they would have liked
much more for the dollars spent.


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 14.0.1
Thunderbird 14.0
LibreOffice 3.5.2.2

 

[Industrial One]

In message <[email protected]>,


[]

For the subthread:

1. I'm aware 1080p is just a resolution. You're juggling semantics and

No, 1080 is a resolution, if we're talking still images. The p (or i)
determines the order (and possibly frequency) of pixel display when
talking video.

We started talking about video because it's an even better example of toxicmarketing and shitty products. When you take a picture at the max advertised resolution on the camera and it looks like shit, they'll say its your fault for not being an engineer, just like you guys accused me.

But when you're watching a movie that has been extracted, converted, processed and marketed by professionals and it doesn't even look 1080p despite the resolution, it proves my point. I'm talking about movies in the 21st century btw, although it doesn't really matter. 35mm resolution is roughly 4000p and they've been shooting movies on 35mm film since the 1940s.

That's actually only true of digital media with error correction (which
most has). But the difference is that you can copy a digital recording
perfectly, given error correction, and such copying can be done
indefinitely.

That's the real beauty of digital media and the only reason it survived in this moronic capitalist system, it forced you to buy replacements on a regular basis.

However, the other disadvantage is that analog has infinite resolution while digital is fixed, so this necessitates exaggerating the filesizes of video and audio to preserve it properly.

You would think HDDs are just like vinyl records, both are spinning disks. You think because of the density that they would be more efficient but think about uncompressed video, even if not in high-definition. A few hours already fills up a 2TB HDD which probably won't spin fast enough to playback in real-time anyway.

Nothing has really changed IMO, a movie still requires one whole disc if ithopes to match analog quality. Again, the sum is zero.

See above. (The main problem with digital is marketing - just because
something is digital, it doesn't necessarily mean high quality, only
consistent quality; when the CD format first came out some decades ago,
digital _did_ mean - for most people - high quality. Once low bit rates
[even with compression] became common, marketers [or those who genuinely
didn't understand] kept the "digital means high quality" which was no
longer [necessarily] the case.)

Yes, very few people seem to be aware of this but super-HD film has been out for over 70 years. These "drastic" increases in quality people have been following since the 240p VHS days to the now "high-definition" 1080p are ****ing pathetic compared to the 4000p 35mm film that has been out since forever. I have no idea how the hell they were able to get people to switch from watching the original theater-quality 4000p films to garbage 240p videotapes and then slowly start releasing "better quality" mediums. Pretty awesome scam.

... of the two little boxes in the corner of your room, the one without the
pictures is the one that opens the mind. - Stuart Maconie in Radio Times,
2008/10/11-17

I have no posters on my walls. My room is as white as a psyche ward. I guess I'm pretty damn open-minded.

Who are you quoting as "your friend"? No attrbutions were given.
-.-

The bottom line is that MP4 *is* a composite format that normally contains
both video and audio streams. Period. The audio only component is m4a,
the video m4v. Together, they make MP4.

You mean like how M3A and M3V made MP3? Please... let's voluntarily use some consistency if those stupid ****s at ISO can't.

 

[Ken Springer]

"Degradation of electrical current"?

Bad choice of words on my part, apologies. How about degradation of the
signal? LOL

(Now if
you were using really thin wire to connect your loudspeakers to your amp,
well, maybe.

Which was quite common when I bought my speakers. Still have them too.

And just as an add-on note for any potential audiophiles out there, the
single most important link in the audio chain, and the one that should get a
LARGE chunk of the budget, is the loudspeakers. (which is often left as an
afterthought, by many people) But unlike some other components in the
audio chain, this one needs a listening test - specs aren't enough. And
what's worse is that the way it sounds in the showroom likely won't be the
way it sounds in your home, due to all the sound reflections off the walls,
carpet, etc.

Speakers are *THE* most important part of the system. Good equipment
matched with poor speakers will show the limits of the speakers. Good
speakers with poor equipment will show the limitations of the speakers.

Never, never, ever, ever look at the speakers when listening to them.
Tell the salesman which pairs you would like to hear, then turn your
back while he plays *your* choice in music. Make sure the volume is
always the same between speakers, the salesman should *never* have to
adjust the equipment, just switch speakers. All controls on the
equipment should be set to neutral. Pick the speakers you like based on
what you hear, don't get in a hurry. Once picked, start selecting
equipment of equivalent quality. You should be home free.

Personally, I like (and am still using), some good old, Acoustic Research,
AR3s. (But I'm not spending $2000+ on a pair of loudspeakers, either.

Old ESS AMT 4's here, with the Heil Air Motion Transformers. Had to
have the woofers repaired, the foam surrounds finally deteriorated.
Back in the day, I almost spent $1200 on a pair of Tandberg speakers.
Damn, were they good!


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 14.0.1
Thunderbird 14.0
LibreOffice 3.5.2.2

 

[Industrial One]

In message <[email protected]>,

Strange, I'd wanted the both option for use with speakers. A proper
hearing test (which, granted, this stresses that it isn't) _does_ test
your ears individually, through headphones; ears deteriorate
differently, or at least can.

You shouldn't be using speakers to test your hearing. Headphones are way better. Hearing something at full volume on one ear and nothing on the other is really annoying. Idiots do it on Youtube all the time. To date I've never watched one of those longer than 3 seconds.

Yes, I noticed that. It's almost inevitable with most such software,
unfortunately; you'd need a raised-cosine type envelope to get round it,
which is certainly doable, but rarely done.

Shows how serious they really were about their program.

If it were me, I'd produce random pips (with enveloping to avoid the
click problem), at random amplitudes, to random ears, and with random
spacing (to avoid prediction), still with the press-if-you-can-hear
button - from what I remember, that's what a professional hearing test
involves (well, that was about 40 years ago and had the audiologist
doing it, though still with the button). The simple test prog. we're
discussing also doesn't seem to have any "save" option. But hey, it's
free, and serves the purpose for trivial testing, so what are we
complaining about - do we want blood (-:?

Unnecessary, but you can easily do that with an audio ABXer. You will have to produce your own samples though. Make the original sample silent and ABXit with high-freq sines.

Swearing doesn't make you look clever. I presume you're in your teens or
twenties?

Oh but a genius doesn't need to look clever, mang. It's only the useless and incapable who have something to prove.

(You sent this as an email as well; please say so if you're doing that.)

Mistake. I'm not too fond of this new GG interface.

No, it might be roughly 4000 resolution; not 4000p, the p is an order
not a resolution matter.

Film is inherently progressive is it not? Interlacing is only added to makeit look like its going twice the framerate for TVs.

No. You can copy a digital file from one copy to another, and then after
some years if you're afraid it's about to deteriorate beyond where
error-correction can restore it, copy it again, where the copy _will_ be
pristine again. No purchasing involved, other than the cost of the blank
medium (negligible compared to the original purchase price, especially

Bingo, the cost of the new medium, again again and again. I have probably 110 GB of irreplaceable stuff and 500GB if you include the stuff technicallyreplaceable but a real time-consuming bitch to do so shall I ever lose it in a crash.

500GB is not trivial to store, it would cost over $100 for an HDD to fit iton, and it takes hours to do regular backups since HDDs transfer speed hasnot increased at the same rate as its storage. An SDD or flash drive of that size (if it even exists) would cost even more, and transfering to an online backup site would take months on most affordable connection speeds.

You call this practical?

If, of course, you're complaining about the same thing being released on
different _types_ of medium as technology develops, then you're not

That's one of the factors. All the stuff you backed up on old CDs and floppies would not be compatible with modern PCs, so you would have to re-transfer to more modern media. But this is an asinine observation as the media would decay in time anyway so transfering to more modern media or identical media is inevitable.

do buy a bluray and it _isn't_ any better than the SD version, then get
your money back, as it's not been done properly.)

Not as good as it could be. Blu-ray copies lack the prominent quilting/banding artifacts common with MPEG-2 on DVDs, and many are better quality for that reason alone. BPP of 0.500 was really pushing the limits of the encoderat the time DVDs were out, they originally meant DVDs to have capacities of 5 GB not 4.37.

Not infinite - film grain (or dye molecule) size for images, and ambient
noise and (master) tape hiss or surface noise for audio, do provide a
limit. Modern digitising equipment exceeds this for _most_ audio
material, though has some way yo go yet for much video. (HD video
exceeds what's achievable with much 16mm, I've read, though not yet
35mm.)

They don't exceed it with better efficiency. A 35mm film roll would be a lot smaller than a digital transfer of the same resolution and quality. The only immediate advantage as you put it is flexibility and no gradual degradation.

Not quite sure what you mean by "exaggerating".

Video codecs quality does not scale linearly with bitrate, especially with the most advanced ones. With x264, 720p at 2Mb/s is really good quality, at1Mb/s it sucks, at 4Mb/s its only a little better quality than 2Mb/s and most people encode at this bitrate for good insurance, at 10Mb/s the qualityappears perfect but close-inspection can still uncover some degradation onsome of the scenes, so it's necessary to encode a couple times higher thanthat rate to have a 99.99% perfect, long-term archive-quality.

Let's not forget this is for YV12 colorspace and archive-quality would require the full RGB quality which would mean another doubling of the bitrate.

Not quite sure what point you're trying to make: the original movie
isn't on a disc.

It's on a film roll, close enough.

Different situations. The added convenience (and lower cost, given
repeatability!) of being able to watch at home is what people paid for;
I don't think the majority of even non-technically-minded people thought
picture quality from a video tape was anything like what they'd get in
the cinema (theater).

Did we not have those portable home movie projectors in the past that usually used 16mm and smaller prints? It had to better quality than VHS.

Re-releasing back catalogue on progressively higher-quality mediums is
certainly keeping a lot of the movie industry in business, but it hasn't
been entirely a scam: the better quality mediums just weren't available
(to them or us) initially. If by putting "better quality" in quotes
means you're buying (say) bluray copies and finding they're genuinely no
better than DVD copies, then more fool you (-:! I don't have a bluray
player (nor a 1080 TV, for that matter - I have a small 720 one, but
that's not connected to my disc player), but if I did, I'd expect
anything I bought in that format to be better than the same thing bought
in plain DVD format, and would return it if not: I'd not expect it to be
up to the quality of the original film, however, assuming the movie in
question was actually made on film.

Not all of them suck that bad, and not all are worse in terms of resolutionbut other things like brightness not being properly adjusted, false colorsand saturations and sometimes artifacts from automated software algorithmsto remove dirt/noise which I might even accept if it wasn't being done to movies produced digitally and never should have been sourced from a film master in the first place (South Park the Movie being one.)

Incompetence at those studios is amazing. I could do twice the better job with my freeware equipment.

There's that mouth again.

....which speaks the truth.

 

[Industrial One]

For goodness' sake, it's a free prog.!

I spend hours post-processing, encoding and uploading rips for free, but I do it because I know I do it right unlike 95% of the basement-dwelling degenerates that make the BitTorrent network always what it never ceased to be:a cesspool of elephant shit.

Do it right or dont bother is the point.

ABX?

A program that plays back clip A and B randomly and you hit A or B, whichever you think it is. A is the original recording, B is processed. If you canhear a difference, you'll have no problem guessing it right 20x in a row for a good confidence rating. If you can't tell them apart, the processed clip is transparent. This is how audiophiles do double-blind tests and judge the quality of codecs and what bitrate to use.

Its not designed for our purpose but it'll work just as objectively, and this way you do it fast without needing to be a coder.

Who mentioned film?

Look up...

Film is instantaneous, neither i nor p.

Anything that doesn't have every other line chopped out is progressive.

And that wasn't the reason for interlacing.

Yes it was. Video wasnt smooth enough at 30 fps, but TV cable didnt have bandwidth for 60p so they invented 60i.

What, a few pennies for a blank CD?

No shop sells a single CD, and most packs of CDs cost $10+. Either way, whothe hell still uses CDs?

I think your original point was that analog recordings last better than
digital ones. I questioned that. But now you've wandered off: I
seriously doubt you have the equivalent of 110 GB on LPs or tapes, so
the point is now moot.

My point was that nothing changed. The sum is zero. Digital media at least provided the choice to copy without degradation and I'll give it that much credit.

Hmm? granted floppies are a bit old hat, though you can still get USB
floppy drives (which AFAIK work on 7), but as for CDs, I don't see why
they wouldn't be "compatible".

Who thinks about those old photos they put on a floppy/CD 20 years ago foolishly thinking it would be preserved because it was 1s and 0s? 20 years later you find those irreplacable memories worth a hell of a lot more now thanit did the day you recorded them, in a dusty drawer realizing no computer has floppy drives anymore.

Hm? Even assuming 30 to 50 megabytes per frame (a discussion I was part
of in another 'group decided about 14 megapixels is about the same
resolution as a 35mm slide/negative using about 40 ASA film), that's 10
to 15 images on a CD, a lot more on a DVD, yet more on a bluray or hard
disc. If you're talking of a movie film, a 35mm print of that needs a
huge can to keep it in.

50 MB per frame is 1.2 GB/s at 24fps, no HDD can read that fast and that's not even enough to store half an hour.

I had 8mm ones (still better than VHS mind!); a 16mm projector is still
quite a beast, though obviously smaller than a 35mm one. Yes, some real
(reel!) enthusiasts with their own cinemas (movie theaters) had them,
but pretty rare. (I used to operate the 16mm projector at [boarding]
school, and they did indeed hire prints of feature films.)

Being not a spawn of the dark ages, I dont recall if those were significantly more costly than VHS setups, but I'm not convinced there is cost-effectiveness when quality is taken into account.

8mm projectors had to be cheap (people used them before VHS was available) so I'm puzzled how people were duped into accepting such pathetic quality. Maybe I suffer from false consensus effect.

But people will pay a lot (in terms of accepting poor quality) for
convenience. There's no way I'd describe any size of film projector as
convenient to use (fast wind, variable speed playback, ability to record
[without having to wait for the film to be processed!] and re-use).

Film cant be re-used? Videotape doesnt deteriorate quality when making copies?

But seems unable to do so without profanity that doesn't actually
contribute anything.

Buddy you ain't no videophile, you didn't deal with retard codec fanboys who type while dipping their dongs in toasters. You'd know where i'm coming from if you did.