[mythtv-users] Myka is Shipping

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday 18 June 2009 20:07:05 David Brodbeck wrote:
> Tom Dexter wrote:
> > Jeez...I would certainly hope so...doubling the mpeg encode/decode
> > artifacts as a regular practice would be criminal.
>
> Isn't that exactly what Comcast, DishTV, etc. are doing when they
> reencode to save bandwidth?
>
> Reminds me a little of working with analog videotape and linear editing,
> in the bad old days, when you had to worry about generation loss any
> time you edited video.

You're not going back far enough. When we used EditVue to locate the proper 
cut points on the 2" Quad tape, then physically spliced the tape, we didn't 
have to worry about generation loss.

We did, of course, have to worry about the tape breaking at the splice points.

(EditVue was a mixture of carbonyl iron and Freon TF. The iron would align 
along the control track pulses, allowing you to see where they were. It's 
probably banned now as dangerous, but it was probably safer than Pic-Clear, 
which was used to fill scratches in film).

I still have a few of the carbonyl iron capsules that you dissolved in Freon 
TF to make your own "EditVue". Perhaps this was an early form of video 
piracy.

After that, it wasn't until the D-2 machines came along that we could ignore 
generation loss.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org