Posts by John Barrett

Free Software Foundation urges Google to open On2 codec

Plugin?

"We question whether yet another plug-in is the best of ideas"

Erm, where's this plugin? The idea is to replace all these terrible plugins (especially the egregious Flash) with built-in browser support.

If some variety of VP8 were to be released under a useful license then all browser vendors could link in nice, fast support using native, hardware renderers like GL or overlay. Fast loading, high performance, really cross-platform web video. Wouldn't that be nice?

Apple's patent FUD notwithstanding, the VP8 codec is only realy necessary if you find theora's btistream that inefficient - there are constant improvements in the encoder. Recent comparison here:

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html

Shatner is looking pretty these days... be nice if it had a low bitrate video comparison available, though.

When PCs went mobile

LED Screen?

Aye, remember that and it's 40x30 resolution... Great days when we finally got LCD screens.

Cowon D2+ DAB

Own non-DAB version

I have the non-DAB version of this player and I am very pleased with it.

Killer for me is the fantastic SDHC support. Previous player was the Creative ZEN 8GB with atrocious SD support - you had to browse the card separately and it would stop playing when you browsed elsewhere.

Also handy is the fact that the storage is available as a simple USB-storage device meaning it will work on any OS you fancy. You can even upgrade the firmware from the USB storage interface. Again, contrasting with the ZEN, you are free from nasty proprietary (slow, barely working) interfaces like MTP.

Can't speak for the video/radio support as I don't use them, but something to keep in mind is that (the version I have at least) has no support for mpeg4 b-frames so even if your video is a playable resolution/codec you may get choppy playback. I plan to release a FUSE file system soon for iPods, Creatives, Cowons etc which will take care of all this for all you *nix users. Keep an eye ;)