Keep your eyes on XVid. This is also an OpenDivX-derived codec, but it’s open source. According to all reports and tests, this seems to be good competition for DivX4. As soon as it’s more accessible or I have more time, I can start playing with it.
Clan Of Xymox came to my attention recently on EMusic. This is rather interesting Alternative/Goth/Industrial that reminds one of vintage Sisters of Mercy with some Cure thrown in for kicks. I can highly recommend this.
I’ve just done a quick subjective comparison between the same film compressed with DivX Networks’ DivX 4.0 codec (as performed with my own im2avi linked with avifile) and Project Mayo’s OpenDivX (also mpeg4) codec, as implemented independently by ffmpeg.
Now, ffmpeg encodes the whole movie in a fraction of the time. This is no surprise, as ffmpeg has spent some time on optimising their code for real-time streaming. This is still impressive.
Keep in mind that, at least according to what I read, DivX 4.0 was developed starting from the open source OpenDivX by more or less the same group of people. Well, subjectively speaking, even when encoding OpenDivX at DOUBLE the bitrate, the DivX 4.0 movie still looks far better. I would have liked to make a version of im2avi for ffmpeg exclusively: ffmpeg has just about zero dependencies and a carrot could compile it. Building avifile correctly (with support for all the codecs) is somewhat more involved. However, the quality of divx4 is hard to beat with open source. If I get VERY bored, I’ll do some quantitative tests.
I get to work at home today. Yaaaay!
Read this Salon article about Mozilla; it’s reasonable and down to earth. Also remember to IGNORE any links to MozillaQuest that you ever come across: the guy behind it is an absolute moron. Don’t confuse MozillaQuest (urgh) with MozillaZine, which is good. I’m test driving Mozilla 0.9.9, and I must say that it’s impressive. One day, all this browser pain will be behind us. We just have to kick more “web-designers” into submission with regards to being compliant with HTML standards.
I just updated the script that generates our publications listings so that it doesn’t list the cross references separately anymore. It creates full citations for each and every publication instead. In this change, I ran into the old problem of @InBook and @Book not allowing author and editor, which is strange… think about when you’ve written a chapter in a book for instance. In anycase, my advice is to ditch these and use @Proceedings and @InProceedings instead. Doh.
It would have been terribly useful if emusic.com had some facility for discussing the available music. I’ve discovered some jewels there (My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult for example) but I’ve had to work through quite an amount of audio. Hey, maybe I should mail them!
I’m adding the final touches to the camera-ready version of my IEEE VisSym 2002 article. This has to be done by tomorrow, and then the fun can begin with some messy TF domain image processing.
This is not an unreasoned or unfounded hate. I can name a few thousand good reasons why you too should hate the company and their products. There is no arguing that as a business entity, they’re simply doing what they should do to remain the best. However, their products have a greater negative impact on quality of life than you would like to think.
Today’s little point to ponder is this: if Microsoft really gave a shit about its users, why does no Windows install come with PDF or Postscript support by default? Well, if they did this, more users would distribute documents in PDF format. PDF, or Portable Document Format, was designed as a platform-independent way to distribute typeset documents and this it does incredibly well. If more users distributed PDF documents and other users could read these documents with the free Acrobat Reader, these users would NOT be starting up MS Office to read these documents. In addition, the documents could be sent to people NOT using Windows, HEAVEN FORBID! So, from a commercial perspective this was a good decision to ignore PDF. Unfortunately, the user gets screwed.
Ooooh ooh ooh, I almost forgot. In this same US of A, I did buy the super-cool RioVolt SP250 CD MP3 player. Take care to read the reviews that are linked to. Yes, it does kick ass.