Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Limited Real AC3 Passthrough

Well, I got to fiddling around with the existing passthrough on the AppleTV. I found where it works, and where it doesn’t. AC3 passthrough does work in .mov files with 48KHz files, of any bit rate. I did this with importing a .ac3 file into .mov, and adding a video track (ATV doesn’t like playing audio only files). I still need to test 44.1KHz, and 32KHz, but they are a bit harder to find. I have still to come across one of them.


Expensive Hotels internet access

Well, Infocom is over and I am back home. While I was there, I often used my iPod Touch to do quick things on the net when pulling out the laptop would have taken too much time. The only issue is the wireless AP there required a web based login where one would have to enter in the email address they used to register for the conference. This can be annoying at best on the iPod when all I really wanted to do was look up something really quick and this stage takes 50-80% of the time.


The Hall of Shame

So, the good folk over at FFmpeg have stared a Hall of Shame. Basically, it is a page of projects which are using FFmpeg in direct violation of its license. The developers have asked that people link to that page, thereby increasing its ranking in Google. Well, here’s my part. Why should I care about this? Simple, if you look at the list of projects using FFmpeg, you will see Perian listed. Some parts of Perian rely so heavily on FFmpeg that it has an entire section in the code base. Going further, some of the Perian developers are contributing back to FFmpeg, so our copyright is being infringed along with many others.


Start of Infocom

Well, I am currently at Infocom. Getting here was a lot of fun because I had to wake up at 5am to drive to Houston and catch my flight here. In theory, I could have flown out of College Station, but all too often it is faster to drive to Houston than it is to fly. Then, when I got the rental car, I noticed it was made by Hyundai. I immediately remembered the old episode of Top Gear I watched the previous night where they “accidentally” called the Hyundai Accent the “Hyundai Accident.” I thought to myself, “did I get an accident?” I guess I should feel better that it was a Sonata instead, but the car still sucks. It has no acceleration, and if I hit the gas, I can count the seconds it takes for the idiotic automatic transmission to realize that it needs to downshift to actually go anywhere. Oh, and the engine has to be on to shift from drive to park. What engineer thought that would be a good idea?


New iPod Touch

Well, after quite a while of looking at them, I finally decided to buy an iPod Touch. In fact, I wrote this blog post using it. The hardest part is to force yourself to stop correcting your mistakes, and trust that it can correctly figure out what you meant and correct it for you. The auto correction is definitely a necessity, but it isn’t as effective for those who can’t spell, like me. Regardless, it is time to close since typing on this keyboard is getting quite tedious. I’ll follow up later with pictures and the like when I am back on a more powerful computer.