Chris Seberino wrote:
On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 12:40 -0800, Stewart Stremler wrote:
begin quoting Chris Seberino as of Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 12:10:12PM -0800:
It is very odd that *video* is not more widely used like
text and sounds are over the Internet.
Bandwidth isn't infinite.
Doesn't BitTorrent (a Python app!) save all?
BitTorrent addresses the problem of servers which are overloaded, not a
shortage of bandwidth. If you are part of the BitTorrent you are
allowing others to download bits off of your computer while your
computer is downloading bits off of other computers. It works along the
line of [EMAIL PROTECTED] or any of the other distributed computing projects
except instead of using your processor power it is using your storage
medium and your ethernet connection to become a small server in a
cluster of servers (the Torrent) . I don't know of anyone with the
patience to run BitTorrent on dial up. Even so, running BitTorrent on
xdsl or cable modem limits you to available bandwidth. I don't think I
have ever seen more than 3 or 4 other people connect to me while I was
running my xdsl connection and each one ate up resources which made my
downloads crawl. I have known people who have blocked others while they
downloaded their file(s) and then left their computer on and unblocked
overnight or over a weekend for others to download off of their computer
to pay back the favor of letting them download.
There is no ubiquitous easy format for video the same way
that text has ASCII/HTML and sound has MP3/Ogg.
Sure there is. It's called MPEG.
Then how come everyone doesn't use MPEG? For example,
I wanted to watch a 20 min tutorial video of a great Python web
framework at turbogears.com. They did it in QuickTime!?!?
Why would an open source project do a QuickTime video if MPEG
is so great?
Perhaps because they already owned the wherewithal to prepare it in
Quicktime and the Quicktime viewer is free like the Acrobat Reader? Have
you seen any Flash or Macromedia videos? They are pretty impressive and
programmers who can make those sorts of videos can command significant
salaries. But the software to make the videos is very expensive. To get
people to watch the Flash and Macromedia videos they give away free
viewers as plug-ins for popular web browsers.
A couple of years ago DVD players were very expensive as was the
software to watch the DVD.
How popular would the web be today if instead of HTML the world
had 4 or 5 competing incompatible markup languages in 1993?
You are putting the cart before the horse. The Internet used to be a
whole bunch of things besides the web. Because of Berners-Lee inventing
HyperTextMarkupLanguage the WorldWideWeb became the newest hot app on
the Internet . These days there are large numbers of people who don't
even know that the WorldWideWeb isn't the Internet, but just one aspect
of it. Go back and bone up on Unix and Linux and you will find that the
universal language used to be ASCII. Back before HTML people used some
really archaic (yes, I know the term archaic also applies to me) text
formatting schemes. Go look at some of the packages that you can load in
most distributions of Linux to see how text got formatted before HTML
came along. And even then that was to format books and manuals which you
downloaded as ASCII text and then ran through the formatter for
printing, not viewing as formatted text in a browser.
I'm guessing video usage and innovation would explode when
people rallied around 1 format for video like MPEG.
It is not just the format. It is the format, the power of the machines,
the price of the peripherals which allow you to store and assemble the
videos, and the medium to disseminate the product. And then, of course,
there is the software to make all that hardware work easily enough for
someone without an advanced engineering degree to produce usable video
in a timely manner. Sometime for light reading go check out Connections
by James Burke. He has a pretty good way of presenting a perspective on
how things have to come together at the right time and the right place
for new inventions to be created to fill a need that people did not know
they had until someone figured out how to meet it.
Perhaps it really all just boils down to bandwidth. Maybe we all just
have to wait for broadband and BitTorrent to penetrate 90 of US
households.
That depends again on whether you are speaking of streaming video where
the bandwidth must be sufficient to accommodate the stream or about
video which is assembled on a computer or, as in making the movie
Titanic, a cluster of Linux boxes. If you are speaking of the power of a
single computer or a cluster of computers then bandwidth is not the
issue. The issue is power of the CPU, the supporting chipsets, the speed
of the bus or busses, the speed of the storage medium and controller
interfaces, the speed of the graphics rendering chips and their ability
to render in 3D or 2D, the amount of RAM memory, etc. And then the end
users computer must be powerful enough to play the resulting video.
Rick
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
