Mpeg-4

love it

...I had the weirdest premonition you were gonna ask about this - not that I regularly have premonitions about people on GFY, 'cause that would be just fucked up.

It rocks on my mac is all I can say. I was thinking of using it for previews on a DVD sales site, but I'm unsure how compatible it is.

I invented mpeg-4.. i also have the patent on it.. please send my % to [email protected]

mpeg4 is that new?

Got some samples somewhere?

just skip right to 10..fuck the other numbers

http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/

brain in a vat. another version of "we're all characters in somebody's dream"?

pretty much the reverse (and without reference to dreams). it's an idea that's been kicked around for quite some time in phil circles.

"Skepticism about the character of the external world has been a perennial philosophical problem. A 20th century version of the problem, presented in Hilary Putnam's Reason, Truth, and History, proposes this scenario: While you were sleeping last night, an evil scientist sneaked into your room, anesthetized you, kidnapped you, and took you back to her laboratory. Once there, the scientist removed your brain, put it in a vat, and hooked it up to a sophisticated computer with a remarkable program that allows it to feed your nerve endings signals that duplicate the sensory impulses that usually inform your brain about what your body is doing and where you are. You wake up in what looks like your body, in what looks like your bed, put on what appear to be your slippers, and go about what appears to be your normal life. Since everything looks the same to you, you never suspect that in fact you are just a Brain-in-a-Vat, being fed fake signals that make it seem like everything is normal. The $64 million dollar question for philosophers is, of course,

How do you know that you are not a brain in a vat?"


Well, from the above scenario, I was a whole person the day before the evil scientist stole my brain and put it in a vat. Something would feel different on a cellular level.

the entire idea is *if* an evil scientist had the ability to connect all of your nerve endings and stimulate them in such a fashion that you would *not* be able to distinguish them from your current sensory interactions with the world. *then* (once we are assuming that), how can you (is it even possible to) know that you are not a brain in a vat?

if you could sense something at the cellular level, then you would be taking away one of the most important presumptions of this thought experiment. and there would be nothing more to discuss.

hilary putnam's refutation is: if that were true, you would not even be able to logically produce such a thought. because the thought itself (assuming you are indeed a brain in a vat) *must* be is false by it's very nature (in relation to the assumption of your brain being in a vat).

silly philosophy stuff.

my refutation to putnam would be that we would question the reality of our existence because we do so already.

I've been doing some live MPEG4 streaming work using a Darwin server and a Linux encoder, the quality can't be beat but most people have a lot of trouble configuring the plug-in to work right.

Too blocky for me. I hate to say this but Real 9 is kicking everyones ass on a size vs quality scale.

Still... I hate Realnetworks.

I thought that the newest versions of WMV and REAL was based on MPEG4

FuckifIknow all-o-that. I only know what I see on my encoders. Have a look around - http://www.real.com / http://www.windowsmedia.com - and tell me what what you find out.