On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 10:00 AM, stuart wrote:
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, Tyler came up with this...
Nobody wrote...
"There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage. Real and wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by a reconversion phase. These are the people who are already swallowing the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear."
characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.
But you don't need to go to analog at all. I mean, aren't we using computers here?
Using VSound for Linux (which I have used) and Virtual Audio Cable for Windows (which I haven't used) you can tap the signal before it even hits the sound card. I use VSound to make usable sound files from realaudio files. Both sites even say a sound card isn't even necessary. I don't know, I haven't tried that.
Agreed, many options for directly grabbing the data. However, most people don't care about minor analog stages. Audiophiles and videophiles are not the primary consumers of this stuff, as evidenced by the mountains of MP3s not even sampled as well as they could be (64 kbps being the norm) and by the DIVX files shipped around the Web. And videos 10x-compressed to fit on CD-Rs. The people bootlegging CDs and DVDs are not usually the people with the 40-inch plasma screens. Video pirates in Asia routinely use covert camcorders to grab weird-ass angles of first-run movies. And their DVD stall customers cheerfully pay them the equivalent of two dollars for their DVDs. Compared to this, sampling from an analog signal is heaven. I have my own collection of about 30 DVD+Rs, each containing 1-2 full-length videos. By the end of this year, I should have several hundred movies added to my collection. The video quality is perfectly fine for me, and I like good quality. Until I move to HDTV and blue ray DVD, the quality is excellent. And even with HDTV and blue ray, so long as component video connections (a la progressive scan cables) are available, nearly perfect sampling will still be easy to do. (Which is why Hollywood would like the HDTV sets to be sealed, with only digital inputs. Except that they tried this trick with twiddling with the specs of past HD generations. A lot of HDTV receivers and monitors are already out there, and changing the spec yet again and making the suckers, er, "early adopters," have to scrap their systems is not going to go over very well.)
DRM is not going to stop file sharing. They're trying to catch smoke with nets.
Indeed. --Tim May (.sig for Everything list background) Corralitos, CA. Born in 1951. Retired from Intel in 1986. Current main interest: category and topos theory, math, quantum reality, cosmology. Background: physics, Intel, crypto, Cypherpunks Friends, After more than 7 years with my got.net e-mail address, "tcmay@got.net", the amount of unsolicited e-mail I am getting on a daily basis has escalated sharply in recent months. So my new address is "timcmay@got.net" Please make a note of it and change your address books...if you wish to reach me in the future! Mail to my old address will be forwarded to my new adress for a few weeks, but then will start bouncing. P.S. I plan to make strong efforts to stop my new address from being harvested by spammers, such as using "timcmay@got.removethis.net" in Usenet posts. I hope this works. --Tim, timcmay@got.net