Browsers (Was: A very basic blog about D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 16:23:39 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:
> (Especially since cable is $70 / month. Really, at that 
> obscene price, do they even need commercials anymore to turn a 
> profit? 

They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's about being
under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract *as much* money as
possible. ('Course I think their current practices are *still* failing
at that by running themselves into the ground.)

The worst thing wasn't paying a huge bill to get commercial breaks. The
worst thing was paying a huge bill to get commercials *overlaid* on top
of the actual shows. That was the tipping point for me. Plus the fact
that there's no longer anything on cable that *isn't* a reality show.
Even Food Network is pretty much 100% reality shows these days.

> canceled it in christmas 2011 and set up an antenna. I 
> still get most the shows I watch over the air

Yea, we got rid of cable about a year ago and haven't regretted it
(Well, except I do genuinely miss that two-month free trial of NHK they
once gave us. I didn't understand most of the talking, I'm not fluent,
but it still became my favorite channel. I watched it far too much.)

Honestly, I don't even watch over-the-air anymore anyway. If my digital
converter box stopped working, I probably wouldn't notice. All I ever
use my TV for is videogames and DVDs (usually anime) from the library.
And sometimes netflix, but they keep making their PS3 UI worse and
worse, and they're crap for anime anyway (netflix never does dual-audio
tracks for anime).

> (higher quality too*)
> * The new digital tv over the air signal looks great, even on my 
> old tvs, compared to digital cable. Which kinda amazes me, but it 
> does. I guess it has to do with cable compression. The problem is 
> if you don't get a good signal, it is unwatchable. And when it 
> gets hot and/or windy, my signal gets crappy.

Yea, I absolutely couldn't believe how horrible cable's video quality
suddenly became a couple years ago. I genuinely suspect that it may
actually be MPEG 1, it really is that bad. And the A/V sync is almost
always botched. And even after a replacement, the settop box's
interface will would go completely unresponsive for up to a full minute
at a time. Completely worthless service at any price.

> 
> With the old analog tv, it was almost always watchable. Maybe 
> fuzzy or ghosting picture, but watchable, even in imperfect 
> weather.
> 

Yea. Over-the-air digital is a bad deal. With OTA, there's *always*
going to be periods of significant interference. And analog signals
degrade *far* better with decreasing signal quality than digital
signals do. And digital signals require a much stronger signal in the
first place (Both my dad and grandmother went from plenty of channels
to nearly no channels after the digital switch until they shelled out
for ultra fancy new antennas). It was a questionable tradeoff at best.

> I think digital tv, maybe the PS3 too now that I'm thinking about 
> it, are examples of where we're going toward more more more at 
> the peak, more pixels, more channels, etc., while ignoring 
> graceful degradation for an acceptable average.
> 

Yea.

> Yes, with a strong signal, 1080p might be great. But getting a 
> black screen when the signal weakens sucks.

Or that awful digital "stutter". Analog interference is perfectly
watchable and listenable. Digital interference (ie, the stuttering)
just simply isn't.

>I betcha if they 
> broadcast a highly error resistant 480i (or whatever standard tv 
> resolution used to be)

Yea, for NTSC it's basically 480i. Slightly more for PAL (520i?) at the
cost of a few less frames per second.

> on that same data stream, they could have 
> gotten a much more reliable stream, giving a very consistent 
> quality even in poor weather.
> 

Yea, I'm sure there's a lot they could have done. NTSC/PAL were
invented how long ago? And look at what they've been able to do with
cellular signals since then. Obviously the different operating
frequencies make a HUGE difference in how much can be done, but if they
were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done
something far better than the non-degradable new system we ended up
with.

> But then how would they sell people new high def equipment every 
> other year?
> 

Same way cell phone industry does it. Make the quality of the design
and manufacturing bad enough that they break down in around a year. ;)

> 
> Wow I'm getting off topic even for an off topic thread! Oh well.
> 

I'm probably becoming famous for that ;)

> > Actually, I think that's preferable as long as the UI matches 
> > (or rather, *is*) that of the user's associated video player 
> > program.
> 
> Yes, I like to use mplayer for things so I can skip and speed up 
> easily. I don't like watching videos at normal speed (most the 
> time), it just takes too long. With text, I can skim it for 
> interesting parts. With video, I'd like to do the same but can't. 
> Best I can do is play it at like 1.5x speed.... mplayer can do 
> that.

So does PS3 I was surprised to discover. That may come in handy.

For PC, I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema. I only wish it
supported Linux :(

> And mplayer takes like 1% cpu to play it. Flash takes like 110% 
> cpu to do the same job. What trash.

Yea, Flash makes JS seem fast. Adobe never should have ventured outside
of media production tools and into developer tools. It's clearly not
within their area of expertise.