// RANT
Oh, the absurdity of it all,
As many of you DVD Ripping has become rampant, mainly because of excessive DVD Prices and poor marketing on the part
of the certain retailers. But yesterday it became absurd as a major hardware review site did an article explaining
how "good" it is to rip movies.
This review at Tom's Hardware Guide
does just that. But frankly, the folks didn't even do it right. I'm not even talking about the concept of ripping, but
the fact that they got A LOT of their facts wrong. Lets just count what's wrong about that article:
- MPEG-4 doesn't give a 1:11 compression over MPEG-2, at best it gives 1:4 and at that ratio you get a lot more motion
artifacts. Tom bases this by saying that a DVD is 9gb while a compressed MPEG-4 stream can fit on a 700mb CD.
The thing is, he gives "The Matrix" as an example, and as you may know, The Matrix contains tons of additional
bonus material which isn't part of the actual movie. The actual movie itself is about 3-4gb.
- Tom further indicates that the MPEG-2 resolution limit might be 720x576, which is frankly false. MPEG-2 is used
in HD-TV transmissions with far higher resolutions .
- He goes on to say that the default NTSC resolution is 640x480 while it's in fact 720x480.
- In a funny move Tom tries to explain how FlaskMPEG works, getting it all wrong confusing Flask's MPEG-2 decoding
engine with an MPEG-4 encoder engine (which flask doesn't have, it just interfaces the window's AVIFile API
to encode using a previously installed MPEG-4 codec).
- In an even more amusing tid-bit, tom tells you to make sure you set filtering to nearest neighbor rather than
bicubic filtering. What this does is cause MASSIVE image artifacts when the image is downscaled (dimension shrink).
- I wouldn't even go into the unrelated MPEG-1 Layer III statement Tom gives, as it has nothing to do with the
flask decoding engine and only comes later in the AVIFile interface.
In conclusion, take everything you read in some site with a salt of grain, especially where new technology is involved,
certain reviews are written without real research or understanding of the material. With this in mind, it kind of makes
me afraid of what other BS is spread on topics I don't know as much about.
I usually try not to rant on other people's work, but when such a big site gives misleading and downright wrong information
it pains me to see this and at times I feel I must take a stand. It should also be frightening to the major studios that
such big sites have decided write these sort of articles.
// RANT
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