2014 — 15 May: Thursday
'Scuse the rush1 following a much later wake up than is normally the case. 08:58? What's the world coming to?
No time...
... left to check the result of last night's audio experiment. I set the Humax Freesat digital PVR to swallow up the 3-hour "Gideon Coe" programme on BBC 6Music between 21:00 and midnight, and will be interested to see how / if / whether I manage to extract it all in one piece digitally, convert it to MP3, and (in any sense) "beat" the audio quality2 of the BBC's own "podcast" format 128kbps AAC file that can be downloaded using the get_iplayer command line utility.
It's delightful...
... to see that Clive James is making me laugh once again, despite his recent dreadful health battles:
When I was young, cartoons by James Thurber were so widely known that people would refer to them in conversation just by quoting the captions. I remember not quite understanding the reference in one caption: "I said the hounds of spring are on winter's traces — but let it pass, let it pass". I thought the line very funny at the time but I didn't know that Thurber was quoting Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon". You don't need to get the reference to get the joke; but the joke eventually got me to Swinburne, who would gradually turn out to be the most accomplished poet that I couldn't stand. Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, would occasionally throw in an alliterative line for effect ("Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad") but Swinburne wanted the whole poem to be that way: a meal of popcorn. Sometimes, in his blizzard of alliteration, he failed to notice that he had written an identity rhyme instead of a rhyme...
I do admire...
... fine pieces of religious logic:
James Blish, anyone?
A nice walk...
... with a very welcome pint of Guinness to accompany lunch at the halfway point. Rather a lot of contour lines, too, and quite closely-packed. But the bluebells were sadly "past it".
Audio tinkering
The .ts transmission stream file of yesterday evening's 3-hour BBC 6Music radio programme (as captured digitally by my Humax Freesat PVR) weighs in at 234MB and, when inspected by MediaInfo, reports as one audio stream, MPEG audio, with an overall bitrate of 182kbps. Since the first audio stream clocks in at 160kbps at a sample rate of 48KHz, two channels I can only assume the "rest" is the video encoding of a blank screen for the duration of the transmitted programme.
Converting this .ts file into an MP3 of VBR approximating to 165kbps (the nearest I could match, by selecting "quality level 4") yields a file of 186MB delivering a nominal 145kbps, 48KHz, stereo result. The playback is of indistinguishable quality from the raw .ts file.
Meanwhile, using the get_iplayer command line utility, with --mode=best, to download what the BBC has made available brings in a file of 171MB mpeg-4 (Apple audio with iTunes info) delivering 128kbps, 44.1KHz, stereo. It also sounds fine.
Six of one, as they say, and half a dozen of the other.
When I destroyed...
... my original AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (such a catchy name) 6-core incarnation of BlackBeast there were some among my acquaintance who thought I'd (even further) over-specified its replacement when I got the 4-core, hyperthreading Intel i7 2600K. The DVDs I'd been ripping (with Handbrake) on the AMD were capable of driving CPU usage up to 100% and making its temperature rather toasty, even with all fans on maximum. I was managing to rip standard definition video material at around 70 frames per second, reading data from my DVD drive and writing the result to one of my SATA II spinning rust data drives. On the Intel, the CPU usage hovered around the 50% point on the same task.
Step forward a little. I've just been transcoding a few of my ancient Humax video recordings (after digitally extracting them) from their .ts format to .mp4 (again using HandBrake). Turns out, when you read the input file from one SATA III SSD and write the transcoded result to another SATA III SSD, you can once again drive the CPU usage back up to 100%. But, this time, you can also process over 270 frames per second, too.