Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool

Tim May timcmay at got.net
Tue Jul 8 11:04:26 PDT 2003


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,

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"tcmay at got.net", the amount of unsolicited e-mail I am getting on a 
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Please make a note of it and change your address books...if you wish to 
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P.S. I plan to make strong efforts to stop my new address from being 
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--Tim, timcmay at got.net





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