Finally, HD DVD users now have the empirical evidence they’ve been looking for to prove that the universe really is conspiring against them. We figured we’d make ourselves useful over here and give you a list of things you can do with your poor, obsolete HD DVD player — starting with taking it out to dinner, excusing yourself to the bathroom before the check comes… then getting the hell out of there.
Gimmes
The HD Specification
So what is HD? Hi-definition video is more than just a name to indicate an image has higher resolution than previous video forms, rather HD is a specific technical specification that all major hardware manufacturers and software developers have agreed upon for the future of film, TV, video and broadcasting.
As I’ve been working on Windows XP x64, I am always interested to know how much difference of performance will VMWare and VirtualBox have on a 64-bit host system. VirtualBox has a native x64 version, but I haven’t yet found a native x64 version of VMWare. I guess this factor is likely to help VirtualBox to catch up with VMWare on x64 platform. Today I performed a benchmark for the two virtual machine applications by running MediaCoder in the guest system to transcode an DVD MPEG-2 PS clip of 720×480@29.97fps to an H.264 MP4 file of 320×240@29.97fps with MP3 audio. As there is no multi-processor support for VirtualBox and there is no sense to compare the video transcoding speed of a dual-core guest machine with a single-core one, I just chose Windows 2000 as the OS for guest machine.
Finally a new version number in the new year. You may easily find out some changes from the screenshot if you have used MediaCoder for some time.
MediaCoder (build 3999) can now encode with the Enhanced 3GPP AAC+ encoder again. The encoder is updated (with the latest 3GPP AAC+ encoder reference code) and patched with some minor optimizations and AAC/ADTS container support by me. The Enhanced 3GPP AAC+ encoder is able to produce low-bitrate (16kbps to 48kbps) AAC+ with Parametric Stereo optionally.
The 0.6.0.3999 update contains the encoder. The x64 update contains the 64-bit version of the encoder which has an approximate 30% speedup than the 32-bit version.
TAGS:AAC+ 3GPP
Right I am spending day and night on the implementation of the transcoding farm (multiple computer transcoding). As the initial goal is to improve HDTV transcoding speed effectively, I started from implementing the farm for x264. The MiniWeb project which I registered on SF.net in 2004 became active again this time as it will act a quite important role in the new transcoding system.
The idea is straight-forward. Assuming there are 3 computers in the LAN. PC1 acts like a controller and PC2 and PC3 work as agents. Both controller and agent have MiniWeb built in. For controller, MiniWeb is for collecting encoded data from agents as well as serving original file for agents. For agent, MiniWeb is for receiving and responding to controller commands. Now a huge 1080i HDTV file is to be transcoded. PC1 connects to PC2 and PC3 telling them they need to transcode part of a file. It will serve the file with MiniWeb through HTTP protcol. On getting the command, PC2 and PC3 start to process the file via HTTP from different given positions. During the procedure, their output will be posted back via HTTP to PC1. PC1 is also processing part of the whole file. After the 3 parts are transcoded, they are joined on PC1. PC2 and PC3 don’t need to have any temporary storage and all they need to have is a fast CPU.
Up to now I have finished following tasks:
A usable prototype will come out by the end of this year. Please stay tuned.