Apple Quicktime vs. Theora vs. Xvid

For all you super geeks I need pre-face this with “No this isn’t a benchmark shoot out!”. Sorry. Basically it’s just me expounding on a subject that I have some knowledge of and born of a conversation with a buddy who can’t give me a good reason why he thinks Quicktime sucks. He has his opinion and he is entitled to it. I’ve simply decided to lay my thinking on the subject out on the table.

I like Quicktime. It has a very sharp, even at low res and high compression, image quality. It streams nicely and the associate player/software is very well done. Simple to use and mostly non-invasive(ok some windows startup stuff). It’s free to use for playback and you gotta pay for encoding etc. Most of the non-free stuff is enforced just through the player and not via the codec so there is a free version called Quicktime Alternative that has stripped the codec out and paired it with Media Player Classic for windows as a player and the codec can be used by other players. I also own a Mac personally which comes with Quicktime kind of integrated and it works flawlessly. Quicktime Pro is not all that expensive at like $30 so if you just can’t deal on the free end it isn’t exactly going to break the bank to go Pro. For me this is the way to go. Multi-Platform, sharp, high quality, and free options if need be.

Xvid is the next most popular codec but only because it is free and has been picked up and fostered by the pirate community. It makes video look darn good and compress down small which is ideal for shuttleing around those free’d hollywood films. It doesn’t have a specific player packaged with it and is a stand alone codec. One thing that I’m sure some have managed to make it do but that is not done widely is to make it stream. There is no easy straight forward process to do that. This seems to be it’s biggest downfall. Well, that and it’s user base. Don’t get me wrong I love to catch a flick before it comes out but that isn’t going to make this the first place I go when I need to put some legal media on the internet. I guess the main up side to this is that there are open source implimentations which makes this better for the Linux community to impliment but that doesn’t help the rest of us a whole lot if some one doesnt figure out how to move it in to a more professional easier to use framework.

Last but not least Theora. Theora is the Ogg implimentation for video. To be honest I’m not sure why this doesn’t see more wide spread use. Ogg offers higher quality audio at lower bit rate/compressions and I’ve seen Theora make some small files come out looking great. So what’s the deal? The website has cross platform binaries available and the project is open source. So why is this stuck in a similar situation as Xvid? It suffers from the same short comings as Xvid in that it is not widely used despite being free. It came about shortly after Xvid and I think that has detracted a lot of attention from it. I think it comes down to marketing. They have to drop this in to a single drop and go player package for all platforms and then advertise the crap out of it by making version submission posts to slashdot etc.

So there it is. Lack of streaming along with a lack of a ‘just works’ sort of package from Xvid and Theora are the things that really make those two fall short for me. Xvid is good but I’m sure that Theora can best Xvid in quality. Now if only it were in more wide spread use.

Flipsyde, Abortion and the facts…stupid huh?

Ok so I was poking around on allofmp3.com after having downloaded the new Norah Jones album and I ran across Flipsyde. Flipsyde is something of a rap/pop version of Lincoln Parks rock/pop style. The thing that strikes me about Flipsyde is the amount of genuine feeling in the music. So much so that Happy Birthday caught me off guard and started me thinking on the subject of abortion. So, in true tekchipian style I decided to consult some facts and logic. But first I wanted to share the video with every one who reads.

Ok so its sad and everything when abortion happens. It’s also biblically negative. I can find you a million links and a crap ton of scripture references and expound on those. That’s not what I’m looking to do here. I’m just going to expound on some thoughts I had and who knows may be it’ll change some minds or at least set some minds in motion.

In true geek fashion I decided I needed some cold hard numbers. A benchmark if you will. Not so much of abortion rates and all that politically skewed crap. I’m looking to make a decision for my self. So I tried to find info from non-biased sources. I found some info on Webmd.com.

According to webmd’s time line of fetal development by week 4 there are more than 250 cells and a visible structure to the cells that defines all the parts of a human being. Thats pretty darn early. By week 6 there is a heart beat and there is a human shape to the cells. Webmd mentions “legs” as not being well defined. I little note between week 4 and 6 is the whole heart beat thing. We define a person as being dead when they fail to have a heart beat. We know that people can not have a heart beat for a period of time and that we can still revive them. So needless to say there is a little period of time between no heart beat and actually dead and gone. Doesn’t it stand to reason then that we should give the beginning of life as much credit as the end of life? Week 12 sees organs as well defined along with limbs and the afore mentioned parts. I’m not going to go on because the real concern/debate with abortion is when does life start. I think beyond week 12 it’s pretty obvious that it has all ready started.

I’m not really looking to start a huge debate here just trying to look at the facts. Looking at the numbers it seems anything beyond 3 or 4 weeks is killing a living human being. People get their panties in a wad over stem cells and the ethics of that and yet with babies and abortion we’re talking a lot more cells and structure than just stem cells. May be more people should be getting their panties in a wad over abortion too? Regardless I was touched by the message of the Flipsyde video and I’m digging the rest of the racks on this album. Lil something for your mind and your stereo.