R420 Shows up at IDF

ah another reason why I don't buy cds or pay for cable / sat tv . Waste of money . I buy my dvds which i can watch over and over and over and over again and no one can tell me when i have to stop

 

Not everything is available on DVD. Also, DVD isn't HDTV, so when I watch HDTV on Fox, HBO, or Showtime, it is far higher quality than your DVDs.

In one week, I can pull down like 100 movies, convert them to Divx, and burn my own DVD. I still buy DVDs for the extra content, but I enjoy shows on TV that I don't get on DVD for years. (some TV series)

 

Yes i know the quality of dvd which for me is fine . But i get my dvds for 10 each . Get all the extra content and I don't have to spend the time to burn the movies .

I also have hdtv (I don't pay for it ) My father does so he can watch his italian station and see all the games .

Not only that but I make my own movies . I have a ton of fun doing it to.

Lately though they have been all crappy love storys . My younger sister is going to ithaca for video editing and directing and my youngest sister is just getting into it . So i spend a ton of time editing movies with them .

My father built a dual xeon 2.6 ghz pc for my younger sister to edit and I drove it up to her school this weekend. Very nice system .

 

Actually, when you watch HDTV on Fox, it is about DVD quality. (They broadcast 480 widescreen, if I'm not mistaken).

 

Wow. I work with one of these things, you guys must not. Id never want one at home. =)
Oh and dont forget to ebay from FC cards for your PC's to Hook up to your san switch (Also from ebay).

 

I am just going to assuming you are exaggerating here...cause there is no way you can do 100 1 hour TV shows in DivX or XviD in high quality in one week...trust me.

 

Er, as long as your rig is capable of re-encoding at 4/7 realtime .. once you automate the setup, it should be very possible.

 

In that case it could be possible...but when you factor in all the time needed to make a quality rip (and that includes denoising and cutting commercials) the time needed increases dramatically. When I used to capture TV shows it took on the order of 8+ hours to come out with something halfway decent (this is on a 2.53 GHZ P4 btw). I have since given up and just download SVCDs to encode and archive till I can purchase the show on DVD. You can easily do an SVCD to XviD encode in under an hour on a fast machine...but coming from a raw SDTV source there is absolutely no way you can do 100 a week unless you don't care about cutting commercials...have made some script that encodes it automatically and have a pristine source with no noise.

 

I don't cut commercials. It's all automated. My TiVo can only hold about 250hours of stuff I think (might be 300, don't know exact). I have an uber-wishlist and season pass. I get every episode of Seinfeld, Friends, Nova, Frontpage, The Office, Yes, Prime Minister, Enterprise, Babylon5, Sliders, (e.g. most scifi channel), Sex in the City, Queer Eye, Curb your Enthusiasm, 24, (many more) plus most movies that show up. I watch maybe 4 shows per week, so the rest has to be archived, or my TiVO would fill up, even with 250hrs.

I have a P4 3ghz linux box with a nightly cron job that pulls videos from Tivo, MPEG-4 compresses them, then deletes them from the TiVo. Obviously, recompression lowers quality, the resolution is also 480x480 BTW. But that's fine, since the shows and movies I really care about, I watch real-time on my HDTV receiver (I don't capture/record HDTV yet)

I don't know about your system, but the p4 gig on my linux box can encode in real time. (1hour of video can be crunched in 1 hour, in fact, I think it's faster than realtime). The size gain is something like 1gb for an hour of MPEG-2 Tivo into 600-700mb of MPEG-4.

 

Oops, yes Russ, that's true, Fox is the damn straggler at 480p. *Some* fox shows are carried at 720p (football) on some special circumstances. Very irritating.

 

Maybe you should add that this only applies to the US. I'm not exactly sure if it's still legal after the recent copyright law changes in several european countries (it definitely was before), but a dbox with linux on it streaming the incoming mpeg2 directly over ethernet to a pc is quite nice. (Apart from most linux@dbox projects being far superior to the crappy default software) Especially to record stuff like the Star Wars Trilogy in full DVD quality (prog-scan of course and 5.1 AC3 - Yummy! Sadly I only have analogue sat connection in my apartment (with a central dish on the roof for all apartments) and I'm not allowed to mount my own...

Oh, I know it's not HDTV. But I just couldn't resist...

 

Yeah, I mentioned you can get a DVB card for a PC, but it won't work with DirectTV, and even though Dish Network uses DVB, I don't think it will work there either. Alas, you cannot really build a PC based satellite receiver box in the US yet unless you want to watch German or Korean broadcasts.

(or if you want to hack/pirate satellite, which could land you in jail for years)

 

Yeah, another 'big achievement' from the mouth of the GOP...

PS: (D)evolution by GOP, sorry FOx... (couldn't resist )

 

#1 - HD-Tivos are preorder status, some people are testing them right now
#2 - true, give it time though


My SDTivo took about 2 hours to mount and get the configs setup and install a 120GB HDD and Turbonet.

I used a windows app to pull and encode the stream. wasn't that hard at all, just followed directions off of a website.
I could then burn the streams to DVD format for playback on my TVs.

but, I later sold the Tivo, was rather bored with TV.

Also, most (99%) of Fox stations dont broadcast in anything higher than 480p. A lot of the stations are 720p ready, just waiting on the stream from Fox HQ for it.

 

Yes, *now* it is alot easier. But there was a time when it wasn't so easy, before 2.5 xtreme and 3.0 tivolater. When you had to fetch various source code packages yourself, compile them with a cross compiler, and install everything manually. There was a time when no lib/noscramble.o existed. Before 9thtee when you had to use an RS232 serial connection. There was a time when no windows apps like TyStudio or the hacked MPlayer/MEncoder existed.

I expect the HD Tivos will be much more difficult to crack. Clearly, they will be designed to prevent ripping, that's the whole point of HDCP. SD Tivos were pretty much wide open, so much easier than the X-Box to hack.

 

Codemasters have just released the single player demo of CMR04 , if anyone wants to run it on their current system and see how it stacks up against the figure of "upto 100 fps" mentioned in the original article.

I've tried it on my 9800 Pro + >3Ghz P4 at the sort of settings I'd run the game at - 1280x960 , no AA/AF all the other options cranked up to the max the demo allows - and using FRAPS I'd say the average for me was around 25-35 fps .

Mark

 

U sure you are only getting 35-45 fps because I also have a 9800 pro and p4 3ghz and im getting a solid 75-100 fps at the same settings.

 

Strange I'm getting above 60 at the same settings (Athlon Xp2600+,9700 pro), and with 2AA I'm still not dipping below 57 (using fraps as well).

 

Find also the same things with a Athlon 3200 + 9800 = 90 FPS :?

 

25fps avg with a P3-866 384MB and 9100 64MB at 12x9 high.