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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (110819)	5/14/2000 9:21:00 PM
From: Steve Porter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572953

Joe, <OT> Yeah Variable Bit Rate MP3s are nice, don't get me wrong. And most player properly support it now too (which may be another reason it wasn't popular earlier). However, only 1 or 2 encoders support the creation of them and until that gets fixed not many will use it. Have you played with the Divx video codec for dvd->avi files. I have a great Sony Vaio laptop, which unfortunately doesn't have a DVD ROM drive. By turning my DVDs into Divx encoded AVIs I can watch them on the Vaio. It's a very cool experience to watch Hackers outside on the patio under a tree with a beer on a nice warm day. (I love technology). Using modest compression for the video and 160kbps mp3 for the audio, I can get most movies down to under 1GB with VERY VERY good quality. If I sent a 1.2GB filesize limit you have to look really hard (i.e. sit RIGHT in front of the monitor) to tell the difference between the .avi and the DVD. I'm not sure what the MPAA is getting so bent about. I personally use DeCSS for legal purposes. I only deCSS->encode movies I own, and I only do it for my convenience. I think it's my right by purchasing the movie to make as many copies for myself as I want, as long as only one is in use at a time. In fact it's not worth my time (6 hours to encode a movie on a lightly loaded 800mhz athlon + rip time (another 1 hour)). For the 7 hours of my time, I'm not going to pirate a movie, I'll just go pay $20-$30 and buy the damn thing. I think most people are that way. The only ones that will 'really' pirate movies are those that can't afford to buy them, or would have copied the video tape anyway. MP3 is actually more dangerous to the RIAA than deCSS to the MPAA. Regards, Steve