It's true, vvx runs windows on one of his machines pretty exclusively. Not only that, it's his best machine. ASUS a7n8x, XP 2000, 125 gigs of hard drive and so forth.. WHY?!
I know Linux strengths, I've been using it forever. I would never use Windows to share an internet connection if I could help it (which is why my router has a Debian install dating back to 2000 (it's been updated regulariliy). There is a lot of free software for Linux, but then again, there's also a lot of free software for Windows. I use Phoenix, have for months. I use Xchat, have for even longer.
Linux is more stable. It is, but I don't mind too much that my XP machine has to go down for a reboot about once a month. If they were equal in every other way, I probably would, but I'll get to that. This isn't like Windows 98 where I would end up crashing it 3 times a day.
Windows just has a few advantages, some small, some big. Neverwinter Nights for instance, was released what -- nearly a year for Windows before the Linux _BETA_ was available for download? Windows client still has more features.
But, the largest reason I use Windows is something so small.. This one thing would cause me to switch tomorrow if it were to be fixed. I don't watch DVDs anymore. I watch divx. Yes, I own somewhere around 70 DVDs, and never watch them. I have the Matrix on DVD, but if I'm going to watch it, I'm going to watch the divx I made. My DVD will be in pristine condition for many years to come, and if I scratch up my divx cd so what, I can just make it again. Linux has plenty of divx players, so that's not an issue. Linux also has a few divx encoders, but that is still an issue.
You see, I watch a lot of anime. Never pokemon or sailor moon, but lots of other stuff. Made for TV movies and anime are two types of NTSC material that tends to be telecined. Telewhat? Well, you see, the tv displays 60 half frames per second. So, you have 30 frames a second. But, what if it's recorded at 24, like almost everything is? Well, if it was a made for theaters movie no big deal, the DVD player will do it on the fly (telecine that is) and playback the 24 fps stream at 30 fps. You see, for every 4 frames you add a frame. Of course, if that's all you did you'd see a noticeable pause every 4 frames, so it's a little more advanced than that. They interlace the duplicate frame into two others to make it a bit more smooth. So, you'll have non-interlaced, non-interlaced, interlaced, interlaced, interlaced, non-interlaced, ... and so on.
When the material is "made-for-tv" though, there isn't a dvd player plyaing it (when they play it for dvd) and whereat the theater they can display it at 24 fps, on tv it has to be 30. So, they'll telecine it .. and when you buy a dvd, it's the same telecined material as it was on TV. Linux has lots of deinterlacing options, but this isn't "normal" deinterlacing. One interlaced frame here contains "half-frames" from two seperate frames and you'll just blend them togethor and it'll look not as good as it could. Because the frames aren't interlaced in the traditional method, but rather just 4 frames with ad uplicate frame interlaced togethor, you can pick them apart and put them back togethor in the proper order and drop the extra frame. It comes out very nice looking if you do. We call this IVTC or inverse telecine.
Now, here's where Windows has the strength. There are _multiple_ excellent methods to do this on Windows (mostly with free as in free beer & speech software.) Last August, someone partially ported one of the best Windows methods to transcode. Problem is they didn't get it quite as well as the windows counterpart. When video is put togethor, the pattern changes.. the non-interaled, non-interlaced, interlaced, ... pattern. Say you cut 3 seconds of video here, and change scenes there, and so on. The linux IVTC plugin couldn't handle pattern changes very well, and in material such as anime there are a lot of pattern changes. It's effectively useless unless you're dealing with some very clean telecine (pretty rare.)
And that my friends is why I use Windows.
EDIT: I mispelled sailor moon!
EDIT: I misspelled misspelled! (I should fix "oen" while I'm here too.)
*shrug* it's all about the best too for the job. I wouldn't run Linux to do studio quality sound processing, nor would I run Windows for a root DNS server. I've always been a "best tool for the job" kind of guy, and I'm glad to see that there are others out there, that look past the surface "oh, it's windows, it must be bad" or "oh, it's Linux, it's the absolute best in everything". These kind of people make me sick, and make me laugh.
Anywho, good post VVX.
Can you tell me what FREE software in Windows does Divx encoding better than transcode? Transcode does everything (short of actual movie editing, I mean how many people want to actually edit frames via CLI) but for encoding, what in Win beats it? Not challenging you, but Id like to know myself.....Only things Ive seen in Win that are better are Shake (which has a linux version, its just nearly impossible to find bootleg, and Im not spending $10,000 or whatever to buy it) and Adobe-type things (premiere, etc)
EDIT: Re-read your post, got your point, the ITVC.... Asked my encoding master friend, he said yep, youre right =)
Virtualdub is probably the best in windows for encoding. No, it isn't as full featured as transcode in some things (doesn't do vcd for instance, it's purely an avi thing.) but has some serious advantages -- such as IVTC and more plugins than you can shake a stick at (If you read through the docs on transcode plugins, you'd be shocked how many are just ports of vdub plugins.) Virtualdub is GPL.
I should also plug doom9 about now, seeing as I'm talking about windows divx encoding. If you can do it in Windows, (divx, vcd, svcd, and so on) the place to read _how_ is http://www.doom9.org.
[quote author=vvx link=board=25;threadid=6790;start=0#63600 date=1049845777]
Virtualdub is probably the best in windows for encoding. No, it isn't as full featured as transcode in some things (doesn't do vcd for instance, it's purely an avi thing.) but has some serious advantages -- such as IVTC and more plugins than you can shake a stick at (If you read through the docs on transcode plugins, you'd be shocked how many are just ports of vdub plugins.) Virtualdub is GPL.
[/quote]
vdub is cool, but like you said = no VCD/ no SVCD = NO NO for meIm a VCD/SVCD kinda guy
[quote author=rick420 link=board=25;threadid=6790;start=0#63602 date=1049846341]
[quote author=vvx link=board=25;threadid=6790;start=0#63600 date=1049845777]
Virtualdub is probably the best in windows for encoding. No, it isn't as full featured as transcode in some things (doesn't do vcd for instance, it's purely an avi thing.) but has some serious advantages -- such as IVTC and more plugins than you can shake a stick at (If you read through the docs on transcode plugins, you'd be shocked how many are just ports of vdub plugins.) Virtualdub is GPL.
[/quote]
vdub is cool, but like you said = no VCD/ no SVCD = NO NO for me
[/quote]
Then why'd you ask about divx? You aren't one of those people who think divx = svcd?
But, if you wanna do vcd/svcd in windows..
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mpg/svcd-guides.htm
LOL. Not at all. Reread my first post, it was a mistake on my part. I about half read your post and thought you were just complaining in general about Linux encoding. Had to plug transcode in there. Then after I re-read your post, I realized what you were talking about and went back and edited my first post
No hard feelings, it was a long one (post.)
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