>> ^gwiz665:
Who uses CD's nowadays?


I do! I like getting a physical object and I like admiring the cover art. I also like being sure that the artist gets his royalty, but that may just be the techno-fearing old geezer in me talking. Last but not least, the sound quality is usually better on CD, as the bitrate is usually too low on the mp3s I've seen for sale.

What, did the Dag eat your harddrive?

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Jesus, you're killing me, teach. Can I get an extension on my paper?

In reply to this comment by srd:
Hmm, ok. No stutter with other apps means that the sound subsystem is basically ok, so it isn't a driver or a hardware issue.

Flash under Linux has always been treated a bit as a lead paint chip eating "special" relative by adobe, so things flash tend to run less smoothly anyway. Thing's I've observed:
Flash is a lot more CPU intensive under linux than under windows; they seem to have implemented especially the flash movie decoding and rendering rather inefficiently. But basic CPU speed shouldn't be a problem in your case, since you have a brand new dual core machine. My EEEBox croaks on HD videos

Flash movies aren't streamed from memory, they're first saved in /tmp, then played back from there once enough is buffered there. This means you have several things going on simultaneously: the flash stream coming in from the network, the flash stream being written to disk, the flash stream being read from disk and finally the decoding and rendering. The last part should be ok. Getting the flash via the network should be OK too, since I'm guessing you can tell the difference between stutter and repeated buffering pauses

So, what we have left is (barring other CPU tasks running that you didn't tell me about): the harddisk. This meshes somewhat with your observations that the problems get worse if lots of movement takes place: the bitrate of the video goes up and more data needs to be read from the disk and processed by the CPUs.

So things you could check (Homework Paintchipboy!): is there another harddisk intensive programm running (to verify my diagnosis: start up a big program like staroffice or the gimp when you're playing a video. Does stutter get worse?)? Is the partition your /tmp directory is on full? Is the harddisk being addressed in UDMA mode (sudo apt-get install hdparm; sudo hdparm /dev/sda - sorry this is keyboard work Fire up 'top' in a console. In the third row from the top you'll see a line of CPU stats. The %wa entry would be interesting while you're experiencing stutter. That's the time the CPU waits for requested data from a storage medium aka Wait Time. You can quit top by pressing 'q'.

I'm guessing your harddisk is basically ok and not damaged because you'd have tons of other problems then.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Jesus, you're killing me, teach. Can I get an extension on my paper?

In reply to this comment by srd:
Hmm, ok. No stutter with other apps means that the sound subsystem is basically ok, so it isn't a driver or a hardware issue.

Flash under Linux has always been treated a bit as a lead paint chip eating "special" relative by adobe, so things flash tend to run less smoothly anyway. Thing's I've observed:
Flash is a lot more CPU intensive under linux than under windows; they seem to have implemented especially the flash movie decoding and rendering rather inefficiently. But basic CPU speed shouldn't be a problem in your case, since you have a brand new dual core machine. My EEEBox croaks on HD videos

Flash movies aren't streamed from memory, they're first saved in /tmp, then played back from there once enough is buffered there. This means you have several things going on simultaneously: the flash stream coming in from the network, the flash stream being written to disk, the flash stream being read from disk and finally the decoding and rendering. The last part should be ok. Getting the flash via the network should be OK too, since I'm guessing you can tell the difference between stutter and repeated buffering pauses

So, what we have left is (barring other CPU tasks running that you didn't tell me about): the harddisk. This meshes somewhat with your observations that the problems get worse if lots of movement takes place: the bitrate of the video goes up and more data needs to be read from the disk and processed by the CPUs.

So things you could check (Homework Paintchipboy!): is there another harddisk intensive programm running (to verify my diagnosis: start up a big program like staroffice or the gimp when you're playing a video. Does stutter get worse?)? Is the partition your /tmp directory is on full? Is the harddisk being addressed in UDMA mode (sudo apt-get install hdparm; sudo hdparm /dev/sda - sorry this is keyboard work Fire up 'top' in a console. In the third row from the top you'll see a line of CPU stats. The %wa entry would be interesting while you're experiencing stutter. That's the time the CPU waits for requested data from a storage medium aka Wait Time. You can quit top by pressing 'q'.

I'm guessing your harddisk is basically ok and not damaged because you'd have tons of other problems then.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Hmm, ok. No stutter with other apps means that the sound subsystem is basically ok, so it isn't a driver or a hardware issue.

Flash under Linux has always been treated a bit as a lead paint chip eating "special" relative by adobe, so things flash tend to run less smoothly anyway. Thing's I've observed:
Flash is a lot more CPU intensive under linux than under windows; they seem to have implemented especially the flash movie decoding and rendering rather inefficiently. But basic CPU speed shouldn't be a problem in your case, since you have a brand new dual core machine. My EEEBox croaks on HD videos

Flash movies aren't streamed from memory, they're first saved in /tmp, then played back from there once enough is buffered there. This means you have several things going on simultaneously: the flash stream coming in from the network, the flash stream being written to disk, the flash stream being read from disk and finally the decoding and rendering. The last part should be ok. Getting the flash via the network should be OK too, since I'm guessing you can tell the difference between stutter and repeated buffering pauses

So, what we have left is (barring other CPU tasks running that you didn't tell me about): the harddisk. This meshes somewhat with your observations that the problems get worse if lots of movement takes place: the bitrate of the video goes up and more data needs to be read from the disk and processed by the CPUs.

So things you could check (Homework Paintchipboy!): is there another harddisk intensive programm running (to verify my diagnosis: start up a big program like staroffice or the gimp when you're playing a video. Does stutter get worse?)? Is the partition your /tmp directory is on full? Is the harddisk being addressed in UDMA mode (sudo apt-get install hdparm; sudo hdparm /dev/sda - sorry this is keyboard work Fire up 'top' in a console. In the third row from the top you'll see a line of CPU stats. The %wa entry would be interesting while you're experiencing stutter. That's the time the CPU waits for requested data from a storage medium aka Wait Time. You can quit top by pressing 'q'.

I'm guessing your harddisk is basically ok and not damaged because you'd have tons of other problems then.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Sorry it took so long to get back to you - been kind of busy. Anyway I haven't noticed the problem with other apps. I've played other audio and video files, and they all seem to wotk fine. It's just Flash video that's the problem. It gets worse with with HD flash. If the images are relatively static there's no problem, but if there's a lot of motion then stuttering occurs.

In reply to this comment by srd:
Are you experiencing stutter with other apps? Playing mp3s for e.g.

Well it's good to hear from you, and I'm glad that you'll be back to sifting on a regular basis soon.

See you real soon, amigo.

John

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
I've been too goddamn busy working at a moving company for 40+ hours a week to get my internet video fix during the week and it's made me cranky, I constantly crack jokes there about how I'm going to have to go home and beat my dog to relieve the stress that job instills in me.

Nah, I kinda like it, it's a job where I can talk and laugh with my coworkers or listen to my iPod as I work, which beats the hell out of standing silently at a cash register anytime you're not putting on your biggest fake smile and spouting out a cheesy-ass one cent greeting to a customer.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm definitely a people person, but it's so much more fun and satisfying when you can have real, relaxed conversation as opposed to just a quick 30 second blurb of talking.

I'll be done with it and headed back to school in another week and a half though, so even if the work sucked it wouldn't be a big deal, haha.

Anyway, sweet sift there. It reminds me that I am not listening to enough Foo Fighters, because the stuff I had on my computer had unreasonably low bitrate (96 kbps or whatever, wtf) so I deleted it, only to realize that I won't get a chance to re-download until the semester starts up again. Awesome song, I'm still a little disappointed that my girlfriend didn't want to go see Foo Fighters live when we had the chance this Spring.

Ah well, I'll get a chance sometime.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
That could very well be the funniest promote I've ever seen here. Thanks. bro!

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
*promote

How did this not sift? Now I've got to go kick my dog once for every single view on this video that wasn't an upvote. YOU MAKE ME DO THIS, VIDEOSIFT.

I've been too goddamn busy working at a moving company for 40+ hours a week to get my internet video fix during the week and it's made me cranky, I constantly crack jokes there about how I'm going to have to go home and beat my dog to relieve the stress that job instills in me.

Nah, I kinda like it, it's a job where I can talk and laugh with my coworkers or listen to my iPod as I work, which beats the hell out of standing silently at a cash register anytime you're not putting on your biggest fake smile and spouting out a cheesy-ass one cent greeting to a customer.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm definitely a people person, but it's so much more fun and satisfying when you can have real, relaxed conversation as opposed to just a quick 30 second blurb of talking.

I'll be done with it and headed back to school in another week and a half though, so even if the work sucked it wouldn't be a big deal, haha.

Anyway, sweet sift there. It reminds me that I am not listening to enough Foo Fighters, because the stuff I had on my computer had unreasonably low bitrate (96 kbps or whatever, wtf) so I deleted it, only to realize that I won't get a chance to re-download until the semester starts up again. Awesome song, I'm still a little disappointed that my girlfriend didn't want to go see Foo Fighters live when we had the chance this Spring.

Ah well, I'll get a chance sometime.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
That could very well be the funniest promote I've ever seen here. Thanks. bro!

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
*promote

How did this not sift? Now I've got to go kick my dog once for every single view on this video that wasn't an upvote. YOU MAKE ME DO THIS, VIDEOSIFT.

Meh, I had an explanation of everything but it was way to long. In short, this isn't fake, but it IS most likely a demo produced with the intent of selling his idea to a bigger company.

Aside from the massive amounts of memory needed to keep most of the world "on demand" for thousands of users, rendering 320x240 windows (think youtube people. Before youtube, people thought free movie streaming sites people could upload movies to would be impossible to support. It is, you just gotta customize your method of streaming to suit low bitrates) isn't to hard. I mean take a look at your video card, the only reason we want monster cards is for higher resolutions, higher AA (Which is achieved by rendering at larger resolutions then what your monitor displays), and more memory for the textures. You reduce your window to 320x240 and your only issue left is memory.

The camera's movements are exatly that of a mouse, flying through a virtual world, and the world produced many of the common flaws of LOD rendering that we encounter today in virtual worlds,

a) when zooming in on sky scrapers quickly, you can see a reflection texture that isn't rendered at a distance gets applied, this shouldn't happen in pre-renders were LOD is not applied nor needed,

b) many out door scenes get caught with low resolution shadow maps, especially the mall floor. This is an optimization for real time rendering and would not show up in pre rendering.

c) When high up in the air looking down, roadways appear sparse and buildings featureless, much like that of GTA4 when you do the same. Realtime LOD rendering removes alot of it to keep frame rates sane, pre-rendering would not need this.

It's done by changing the bitrate and duration in the FLV via a hex editor.
See: http://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882.html

I don't believe it works anymore, though.

I'm sure we'll see official support for HQ videos very soon. Especially now that Stage6 is dead.

well i can tell you're tired coz you aren't reading what i write.

you don't need to change the front page. you want the front page to show everything with more than 10 votes? fine. flow gets bigger and you have to raise that to 15? fine. Want to change the starpoint limit to 3.141592654? fine.

but why "discard" other less mainstream stuff, rejecting it from the sift archives, simply because it wasn't "front page material" ?

i keep saying i don't expect the site to reflect me personally. i am totally not saying that the sift should reflect my personal tastes. you keep throwing that charge at me, i don't know why. i am just more interested in the long tail and i don't know why you cut it off so abruptly at 10 votes in 24 hours. that's harsh, and we are losing a lot. then i have to go find it on youtube, not here, and then i can't comment on it because that's a waste of time on youtube, and i can't playlist it, and there's no point in submitting it to the sift because it won't get out of the queue. i know discards are still in the database here, but "failed in the queue" is mixed up with dupes and porn, and not found in the main search.


at the moment we are making an archive of "stuff that's popular on the internet". fine. if that was your stated aim, i would have absolutely no argument. but you don't state your aim, except for the slogan "quality control"... and as you keep pointing out, quality and popularity are not the same thing, and are open to many interpretations, resulting in a grey goo of lolcats. whatever, it's fun, i am not trying to take that away, i also watch and laugh at lolcats. i appreciate keeping up to date on the latest hilarious memes. we need both pissing contest AND library.

so i will spell it out again:

i don't expect there to be more obscure videos in the upper echelons of golden siftworthiness, but it would be nice if we could stop rejecting so many good videos flat out. let playlists and channels and tags do their job to aid navigation of the fringes, while the community policing keeps the spammers and bad bitrate rubbish off the books, and the front page and top 15 do their job of showing "what's popular on average, the must-sees of our epoch, primetime 2.0".

if you still can't grasp this fundamental point about having both the "library" and the "top 15" sides active and efficient on here, instead of just designing around the top 15, then, well, i can't really help you much as the flow increases.

no dag, that's a cheap shot, of COURSE i don't think that my personal tastes should match exactly the things that escape the queue. But the slogan here is * quality control, not * upvote competition.

i don't expect the top 15 to be full of my favourite vids, but i also don't expect a newbie to come along with a perfectly good quality vid, within the rules, and get discarded after 48 hours because not enough people even saw the thing, let alone voted.

IMO the only things that should die in the queue should be porn, snuff, boring vlog shit, spam, low bitrate recompressed inaudible phonecam rubbish, etc etc.

Then, once the bad quality is sifted out, we can all have a pissing contest about trying to get into the top 15.

but at the moment, the pissing contest is in the queue already. hence the title jockeying and favouritism. that's the problem. the queue shouldn't be about choosing what is a "good" video, it should be a chance for the crap to be sifted out before the pissing contest. basically if you are going to have a 2 day queue then the escape limit should be 5. then queue escape simply becomes more objective... "five people think this is siftworthy, but it might not be top 15 material, we'll see". if you're worried about starpoint dilution, just leave the starpoint threshold at 10 upvotes.

a step too far towards what? variety?

the way i see it there are 3 levels a video can achieve, unsifted, sifted, and loadsavotes.

bad videos (dupes, selflinks, crap bitrate) should remain unsifted.
good but niche videos should be sifted but not get many votes.
good and broadly popular videos should get loadsavotes.

surely the aim is to have as many as possible of the good quality videos on the internet out of the queue? regardless of hive mind or lolcatfactor?

anyway i might not have the solution, but dag, are you just totally against distortion? because that means lolcats get an advantage, and the sift converges on certain kinds of clips (you know, the ones we all posted just to get a gold star)

Just downloaded it, cost me £3.

It is the most beautiful and powerful music they have ever written.

Radiohead have also had their fair amount of cash out of me over the years, both with albums and ticket purchases. I paid what I thought was fair!

I was initially a bit put off by the relatively low bitrate of 160kbps, but it has been encoded extremely well and sounds a hell of a lot better than something you'd rip/encode yourself on your own PC at 160kbps.

Farhad that was so awesome i think i should blog it for being pornography. If the bitrate was a bit higher i would probably not be able to blog it for being pornography, on account of the mysterious liquid all over my keyboard.

did i say too much?