SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012
http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2012_SDTVx264r.nfo> - - - - The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012- L??TT??TT??- -??++??T??T??++ - L??[ INTRO ]??- - - - - x264 has become the most advanced video codec over the past few years. - - Compared to XviD, it is able to provide higher quality and compression at - - greater SD resolutions. It also allows better control and transparency over - - encoding settings. With CRF in the mix, we can also ensure that a diverse - - array of material will get the most appropriate bitrate for them and not- - arbitrary and fixed sizes. This standard aims to bring quality control back - - to SD releases. There are many standalone players/streamers such as TviX, - - Popcorn Hour, WDTV HD Media Player, Boxee, Xtreamer, PS3, XBOX 360, iPad, & - - HDTVs that can playback H264 and AAC encapsulated in MP4. - - - - The SD x264 TV section was formed to separate releases from the ruleless- - world of TV-XviD. This document will cover the rules and guidelines for - - only SD resolution x264 television rips.- - - L??TT??TT??- -??++??T??T??++ - L??[ RELEASE RULES ]??- - - - - Compliance with this document is optional as of its pre date, and - - mandatory as of 2012-02-22 16:00 UTC. - - - - Video: - - - Sources requiring resize are to be cropped and resized using sharp - - resizers such as Lanczos/Lanczos4, Spline36, or Blackman. Bicubic is - - banned. - - - HD video taken from the decoded HD output of a set-top box (e.g.- - component, DVI, HDMI) may be used as a source; source must be tagged- - in dirname as AHDTV. Decoded output of PDTV or DSR sources is banned. - - Releases taken from a natively recorded transport stream shall be tagged- - as HDTV, PDTV, or DSR. Dupes are as follows: HDTV > AHDTV > PDTV > DSR. - - AHDTV captures must be done at the native format of the channel, e.g. - - 720p or 1080i. - - - Sources that sideconvert 1080i to 720p (such as BellTV) are allowed but - - must be tagged as PDTV or DSR. - - - If there is a question as to the validity of a source, the release - - may be nuked source.sample.requested_ (e.g.- - source.sample.requested_suspicion.of.analog.source) within 24 hours of - - pre. The group has 24 hours from the nuke to pre a RARed SOURCE.SAMPLE - - that is at least 10 seconds in length in order to document that the - - source is valid. Failure to provide source proof or providing bad - - source proof shall result in the release remaining nuked, and it may- - then be propered. - - - Improper IVTC methods that result in jerky playback, such as Force - - Film, are banned- - - Interlaced video sources must be deinterlaced with a smart deinterlacer - - such as Yadif. FieldDeinterlace is banned. - - - Group watermarks of any kind on the video are banned- - - Intros, outros, betweenos, or any other form of defacement of the - - episode are banned - - - "Native" refers to the standard in which the video was produced (e.g. - - NTSC or PAL)
Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Are we getting into the right issues here? The debate seems to have moved to the ethics of sites like Facebook and whether they are exploitative, whereas this thread started with the question of whether capitalism will survive a world of "value abundance". To begin with this, my sense is that it will. See Kevin Kelly's essay "Better Than Free" at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php While I do not agree with all that Kelly says, I concur with the thrust of the argument which is that in a world of value abundance a different set of activities will get monetized. So it is not likely that scarcity will disappear, it is just a question of what are the new activities that will be scarce. Moving on to the issue of where the thread has moved: I am not sure whether it is productive to see the problem in terms of labor. Lets imagine a couple of pre-internet physical-world instances to explore this further: INSTANCE 1: A well-known anthropologist, tenured at a famous university, publishes a study on the cultural life of a tribe on a little-known island in the Pacific Ocean. The study becomes widely known both in academic and general circles. The anthropologist earns substantial royalties from the book rights. The resultant fame creates highly paid opportunities on the lecture circuit, and also increases the wages that the anthropologist could demand at any reputed university. So you can clearly say that the anthropologist has profited very well out of this activity. Where does the life and labor of the Pacific island tribe fit into this? Have they been exploited? INSTANCE 2: There is a well-known coffee house in a large metropolitan city. A company realizing that many people frequent this place decides there is value in putting up a billboard advertising their wares on one of the walls of the coffee house, and offers the owner of the coffee house a substantive sum of money to do so. The advertisement is so successful that the advertiser offers the coffee house owner even more money for the right to place the billboard. Eventually the coffee house owner senses that advertising gains him more money, and begins to offer the coffee and other menu items for free so that more people will visit the place, and he can earn more from the advertisements. The basic activity in the room remains the same: people still enjoy the coffee and conversation here, which is why they visit; except now they no longer have to pay for the coffee. However the business model of the coffee house owner has completely changed. Now imagine this going one step further. The advertiser realizes that if he has more information about the kind of people who frequent the coffee house, then he can produce better advertisements and earn a greater profit. So he offers the coffee house owner some more money in order to construct and rent a high platform within the coffee house. He posts one of his employees to sit on this platform to watch the behavior of all the patrons of the coffee house, and draw patterns of information from his observations, which can be utilized to design better advertisements. How do the patrons of the coffee shop react when they see this man on the platform observing them? Each of these instances highlights some problematic issues. The instance of the anthropologist raises the question of opportunity symmetry. In any intersection of people within a space, do all the players involved operate with the same set of possibilities being offered to them? In this case the answer is no - and I would cite here Edward Said's argument of Orientalism where modernist scholars began to devote a fair level of attention to the Orient, and this might be seen as an ethical impulse to recognize the Orient. However this attention is found to be based on the portrayal of the Oriental as an exotic other who does not have a voice and therefore requires the Occidental scholar to speak on their behalf. The scholar enjoys all the freedom, mobility and possibilities that modernity offers. These benefits can be preserved only if the Oriental is retained as an exotic other, for the scholar's intellectual production depends on this. For this two operations are necessary. Firstly, the discourse is constructed in terms that only permit intellectual rationality, and any other mode of thought is dismissed as myth or folklore and therefore not worthy of entering the discourse; so an Oriental presence in the discourse requires another voice to speak on the Oriental's behalf. And secondly, the exoticism of the Orient is romanticized and portrayed as desirable, and therefore the Oriental should seek to preserve and remain within that world, and should not desire the options available to the modern Occidental scholar. The point of whether the Oriental finds his/her cultural world desirable is not the key point - what matters is whether he/she is given the option of remaining within this world or choosing oth
Re: Political-Economy and Desire
Brian: > Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go. Thanks. Here's some more . . . The key question, I believe, is what happened to VIRTUE in these socio-economic transitions. As you know, the *four* "cardinal" virtues and, thus, the foundation of Western culture -- from Plato to Aquinas (i.e. 2000 years) -- are fortitude, temperance, justice and prudence. Industrialism(Capitalism) gets rid of THREE of these, since humans are not expected to be just, prudent or temperate -- if their economic lives are "ruled" by desire. The *only* virtue that remains "consistent" with political-economy is FORTITUDE (i.e. power) -- so, very early, we wind up with the necessity for LEVIATHAN. Thus, "social" violence becomes mandatory for industrial economics. Accordingly, this becomes the basis of "sociology" and, if you will, the invention of "society" as the *regulator* by Comte/Durkheim and Weber/Simmel et al, building on Kant et al. Btw, this "narrowing" of the "moral options" is paralleled in "philosophy" with the discarding of formal, material and final causality -- also foundational from Aristotle to Aquinas -- to the exclusive benefit of *efficient* causality, which is the "moral" equivalent to FORCE. And, rarely discussed, this is also the reason for the strong attraction to MAGIC among key economic "personalities" (i.e. why those like John D. Rockefeller J. Pierpont Morgan were *occultists*, as was Nietzsche!) -- since summoning the "devil" is the ultimate expression of POWER. > Maybe the cybernetics guys, with their interest in rationality, > were also interested in power over entire populations: predictive > power, the power to control. Yes, that's correct. I'm particularly familiar with the "cybernetics" people, since my father was in the room when that term was coined (as a protege of Norbert Wiener.) What "systems science" is all about (including today's "complexity" approach, as at Santa Fe Institute, Kevin Kelly et al) is power over people -- even when it is titled "Out of Control." Btw, ironically, that is also why we know about Noam Chomsky. He was selected, funded and made "famous" by the systems/cybernetics guys at MIT because they hoped that his ur-grammar could be used to "program" people. It isn't -- as Chomsky himself "revealed" in some very important debates (after he got tenure). Yes, I believe that *digital* technology is stimulating a *moral* RENAISSANCE globally -- which is the reason for my re-reading the early political-economists. What the US is going through today is a "re-discovery" of the multiplicity of *virtue* as expressed in BOTH the Tea Party and OWS (i.e. where the "virtue" being emphasized for each is consistent with the ideologies of each of their "wings" -- "justice" for OWS and "prudence/temperance" for the Tea Party). However, as the ancients understood, there is no VIRTUE in separating these qualities and excessive emphasis on any of them leads in the direction of VICE. Furthermore, none of this makes any sense without "grace," which, in turn, informs "natural law." This DIGITAL *renaissance* of virtue also implies a revival of concerns about *vice* -- which is what is happening with the "flesh hunt" for corruption on the Chinese Internet, for instance. As it turns out, this is also why the Chinese Premier cited both Marcus Aurelius and Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" to Fared Zarcaria on his TV show last year -- as these are key documents in the "capitalist" assertion/rationalization of the "solitary" virtue of *fortitude*! The reason for my post was to take advantage of the wide-scope of reading by those on the nettime list to see if there are contemporary political-economists who are questioning the "calculus of desire" under *digital* economic conditions. Has anyone started to question the assumptions behind "politcal-economy"? Guess not, based on your own research? Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Mute article on Bitcoin
hi Josie, On Wed, 22 Feb 2012, Josephine Berry Slater wrote: > This feature on Mute argues that in the most substantial ways, > Bitcoin is a continuation of, not alternative to, money and the > systemic violence and inequality it guarantees. > M | U | T | E | __ rread it! > 22 February 2012_ > Bitcoin - Finally Fair Money? > > Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency deploying peer-to-peer > networking to enable secure and anonymous transactions without a central > bank. Unlike many economic commentators, The Wine and Cheese > Appreciation Society and Scott Len take the currency seriously but > ask, how exactly does it differ from 'real' money? > > http://linkme2.net/ra A rather quick conclusion, comprehensible since it takes some knowledge of cryptography to understand that Bitcoin is less than what you are talking about, while what might come next is the most interesting part. Since the next Bitcoin conference will be in London, I hope to see you there, but please leave some prejudices at home: these are very open grounds, not a public funded get-together of old lefties :^) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67199.0 ciao -- jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value ab...
Jon: > I'm just attempting to put the other side and the paradox > and ambiguity back in the equation. Alas, the *equation* does NOT allow paradox! When Larry Kraus (well known popularizer of quantum/particle/string physics) opines that "mathematics is the only language of nature," he is just continuing the very old tradition that got us into this mess. Needless to say, he's wrong. We are using language right now. And, it's not "mathematics." It is equivocal and not univocal and rich with paradox. Whether this urge to "know the answers" began with the primordial *desire* to definitively know GOOD from EVIL, or Pythagoras and his "beans" or Plato's denunciation of the "sophists" or, for our own Western "culture," with Ockham's RAZOR (with its own roots in Catharism), the "choice" has been between trying to set up equations (i.e. "gnosticism") and/or trying to live with the necessity of paradox. This is what McLuhan called the "Ancient Quarrel." I would recommend his 1943 Cambridge PhD thesis, "The Classical Trivium" (not published until 2006) for those interested in the highlights of its history. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
On the "e-i-ization" of everything (including cows)
http://www.sautiyawakulima.net/research/2012/02/the-e-i-ization-of-everything/?? Eugenio Tisselli. The ???e-i-ization??? of everything (including cows) Posted on 29/02/2012 Excerpt: e-agriculture, e-learning, e-banking (sometimes also m-banking) on one hand??? and on the other, iPhones, iPads, iCows. We are living in times where adding the e- or i prefix to anything turns it into something new and exciting. In the first case, e- stands for electronic, implying that the service in question has grown out of its analog phase, and entered a digital one. The i prefix may seem a bit less obvious, but it???s really what it seems: i as in I, myself. I searched the Internet for the meaning of the i in iPhones, and this is what I found: As announced for the very first iMac that came out in 98???, the ???i??? stood for ???Internet, Individual, Instruct, Inform, and Inspire. And also: The original imac, released in 1998, was marketed around the concept that it was the easiest computer to connect to the internet. in ???98, the internet was still something that most people didn???t use regularly, and so the idea of a computer that was ???internet ready??? was hip and new. The i stood for internet, but it also stood for ???I??? as in ???me???. The imac was designed to make the personal computer feel more personal, and make the user feel like the computer was working for them, not against them. So, if there was ever any doubt about how the cult of the individual goes hand in hand with digital gadgets, especially those designed and marketed by Apple, let it be forever vanquished. And while urban citizens throughout the world will hardly find this problematic, we might begin to find some dissonance when the i-products are applied to the improvement of rural livelihoods, as in e-agriculture. Countless studies show that small-scale, subsistence and rural farmers rely on their communities as key elements to their practices: the social sphere is inseparable from what they do in the field. Just to provide an example: in his book, Zapotec Science, Roberto J Gonz??lez studies the traditional idea of "mantenimiento" among the Mixe people in Oaxaca, southern Mexico: literally translated as maintenance, it is a broad concept that deals with farming, the preparation and consumption of food, and the family???s sustenance. It implies a particular vision of time: to farm the land, but without exploiting it, so that it can feed us today and tomorrow as well. But, quite significantly, Zapotec people also understand the relationships within their communities as something to be maintained through a practice of reciprocity in which farming and food has a central role to play, and thus apply the same concept to their social sphere. There is also an appization of everything, leading many to think that everything can be resolved, or at least improved, using a mobile application. This can be seen as a reductio ad "appsurdum" of the "e-i paradigm", and in fact reveals the worryingly reductionist worldview held by techno-determinists.?? Read the rest here: http://www.sautiyawakulima.net/research/2012/02/the-e-i-ization-of-everything/ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Invisible Airs Documentary
Alistair Oldham an old film maker friend of mine has just just uploaded the "Invisible Airs" documentary. This is Alistair’s particular take on databases and the events that surrounded our work in Bristol. As database's become active mediator's in their own right, actors constructing, organising and modifying social relations and I'm often in a position of addressing new public’s, outside of specialist knowledge and trying to explain the complex machinery that's behind the lived logics of databases. Alistair’s film will be a key tool with which we will try to generate discussion. http://yoha.co.uk/ia_documentary Invisible Airs – Documentary by Alistair Oldham "The computerized database is fundamentally changing society. From communication, to government, transport, shopping, friendship, health, education, narrative and even the way we watch film, the database is radically transforming our lives. And yet we are only barely aware of its existence, we don't really know what a database is : like electricity, it's pervasive and all around us , but we cannot actually see it. Digital media artists YOHA set about making the database visible. Working with Bristol City Council in England, they use local government expenditure to explore the relationship between the database, power and expenditure. Turning the pounds sterling of expenditure into the pounds per square inch of pneumatic pressure, they make a suite of engineered mechanical contraptions: an expenditure filled potato cannon, an Older People Pneumatic Floor Polisher, an Expenditure Riding Machine and a Open Data Book Stabber. But as they tour these contraptions around Bristol, they become embroiled in the more fleshy realities of the city, in the form of the Royal Wedding, local anti-Tesco riots and the censorship of a local outdoor cinema. Invisible Airs is very much a story of our time, of our obsessions with data, ordering and sorting and its uneasy relationship to the visceral bodies bound in cities." Alistair Oldham http://vimeo.com/36567631 http://vimeo.com/acaciafilms # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
