OT: You OS/X Users...question for ya...

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Jay Ashworth) say:
> 
> Though if you have one window full size for editing code, and another
> at 80x25 because (obRant) filePro doesn't know how to use larger screen
> sizes (/obRant), then you can't put them both in the same emulator
> comfortably...

Good point, although I personally gave up anything but 80x25 for terminals
years ago.  Used to use 80x70 and 80x50 years ago, notably on NeXTs, even
on linux a bit.  Gave that up, though...just didn't like it.

> I assume you're asking about your video demo, Mark.

That one and future ones, yeah.

> I'd aim for 352x240 MPEG1, myself, about 15fps, or lower if you can
> live without it; about 1 meg/s bitrate; I believe that should be
> playable on anything relatively modern, though I might be wrong.
> 
> Anyone who *can't* play it back really ought to figure out how, anyway.  :-)

Oh, I know how to play it, and I've encoded more VCD quality MPEGs than you
can shake a stick at.  I know how.

I'm a bit surprised at you though.  You should know better than to think
that would be remotely legible.  I did a 2:1 Lanczos3 method shrink-down
of the 1024x768.  Divide by two in both aspects and you know what I had.
That's about the best filter you can use for the quantization on the
resize.  It was pushing the limits of a cleanly legible Anzio, and that was
with a fairly lossless codec on the final mixdown.  

The MPEG1 video codec itself is horribly, horribly lossy, with quality
at or just around VCR quality, and a tendency to block up and pixelise
around higher intensity light sources, to boot (read, bright characters on
a black or dark blue screen would be subject to it).  At that resolution,
well...it wouldn't be anything usable.  That's like bringing a JPEG codec
to a cartoon convention, man.  Wrong tool for the wrong job.

The object is to let people see something, not go blind trying.

Got the demo version of the MOV plugin I wanted.  So far, haven't found
the compression method within it that lets me keep high quality but
that doesn't bloat a lot.  It seems that no matter what the actual
internal video compression inside the container is, the conversion
takes like 4-5x longer than converting to WM9, too, which I find a bit
disenchanting--although not a huge deal if I can find one with decent
compression -and- quality.  I liked PNG, but holy bloat.  I'm looking
for something equivalent to WM9 in size and quality, but within the
MOV architecture.  Whole list of 'em to try.  Some are just obviously
meant for full motion video like movies.  Those that aren't are horribly
bloated--actually worse than the lossless codec I got for capture/editing.

Never thought I'd say it, but I -do- like the WM9 codec.  It's a thing of
beauty.  I have yet to find anything that comes close in -both- quality and
compression.  Sure, you can set XViD or DiVX to a bitrate of 3014 to keep
artifacts away but the file sizes jump like mad.  Nothing you want to be
uploading at 256kbit.

Speaking of which, and even further OT, Firefox got a new plugin:  FireFTP.
Pretty sweet from the quick look I've gotten so far.  It's like having
CuteFTP in a browser.  And anyone that does any amount of web development
should grab Firebug...OMG, that thing is so useful it's not even funny.
Combined with livehttpheaders, there's pretty much nothing you can't see.

Anyway...  Thanks for the suggestion, but I think I'll pass on VCD style
MPEG1's.  :)

mark->
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