Posts by Dave 126

Re: BBC and Flash

The BBC is moving away from from Flash, having had a HTML5 player in Beta since September:

Apple iOS, Windows 10 Mobile and BlackBerry users will get the HTML5 player by default, as will compatible desktop browsers where Adobe Flash is not installed or enabled.

...

However, the only OS X browser it works on is Opera 32. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/html5 ). The reason the BBC give is that "Safari on Mac OS X doesn’t support AVC3 via its Media Source Extensions implementation. It does, however, support HLS, and whilst we could offer HLS streams to Mac OS X Safari users (some of you have noticed that you can pretend to be an iPad and you get a working player) we’ve deliberately not enabled it during the trial. " Apparently trying to achieve the full capabilities of iPlayer (HD programmes, Live Rewind etc) in HLS would be too much effort for just one platform, and slow the complete switch away from Flash.

( http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/8be5501d-43e7-4bf6-8f1e-e7037980a0f0 )

So, I don't know how this works, or even what AVC3 is, but could it be that tricky for Apple to implement? It doesn't affect me, but can somene make a 'feature request' to Apple? Or do all Mac users watch content through iPads and iTVs instead?

Still, it is encouraging that the BBC is already on the road away from Flash.

Re: Aahh!

> Apparently you think I live in the UK. I do not ;)

Your browser's address bar reads: Theregister.co.uk...

If you engage in a discussion about consumer rights, fine, but please respect that the the UK is the default value.

Also, you have used that icon incorrectly - if you hover your mouse over each icon, you can read a guide to how to use it. For the icon you have used, we'd be expecting references to equations, rockets, or very, very small things at least!

Anyways, no worries, and welcome to the Reg! : )

Re: @Dave126

>What if it connects to the neighbour's network? Or somebody walking past?

Android TVs don't do that! Stop plucking bullshit out of the air, FFS!

There is nothing stopping you from using these TVs as dumb screens - just don't connect them to the fucking network if you don't want to. It. Really. Is. That. Simple.

>But, sadly, that doesn't sound flash enough for marketing so this shite is wheeled out instead.

This 'shite' (iPlayer et al) is useful for many people and adds less than tenner for the bill of materials on a £400+ television, if that.

Re: Good news for *big* screen fans though ...

Or for viewing in wider range of lighting conditions: Just buy a TV but don't connect it to a network. Easy.

If you want the 'smart' functionality, it can be delegated to a discrete and low cost dongle.

Projectors are good for some circumstances, but not for all.

Re: Android TV

> there will be nothing you can do

That is evidently incorrect. You can do something, and it is easy: Do not connect your TV to a network. Strewth.

Re: Aahh!

'Reasonable time' is the phrase arrived at by our elected representatives, not the TV vendors. Five years is not the mean time before failure, either. Nothing is stopping you from making a case to Trading Standards if your TV fails after seven years - five years is merely a figure that the vendors are using, and what they offer has no effect on your statutory rights. However, what is 'reasonable' depends upon the product.

If you really have an issue with it, write to your MP.

People don't see themselves as being 'nickle and dimed' when the television they can buy for £500 today is far bigger and of higher resolution than a set the same money would have bought them a few years back. Oh, and don't suggest the general public are 'stupid' - it betrays your ignorance.

>What I really want to know is "How is the user going to fix this problem when they don't even have a PC any more?"

Well, if the product proves to be 'not fit for the purpose for which it was sold', the onus is on the retailer to sort the issue out for the buyer

If you don't want a connected TV, don't connect it to your network.

Similarly: If you don't want your TV to pick up terrestrial broadcasts, don't plug in an aerial.

For smaller sizes, you could just buy yourself a monitor I guess, but at bigger sizes every TV using the latest panel technology (OLED, Quantum Dot, local dimming etc) will have a 'smart' functionality and a tuner or two. The functionality really doesn't add much to the cost of the TV.

Re: Short term problem @dave_126

Absolutely, James. And yeah, even if there is some good content on TV (the David Attenborough programme about Bioluminescence on BBC is awe inspiring) it might not be broadcast when I want to watch it - so yeah, streaming is how I watch most of my video.

For sure, it is *nice* to have streaming built into the TV, but the chances are that your PVR, Blu-Ray player or games console can do the streaming duties too. If not, a Chromecast or equivalent can be had for next to nothing (compared to a TV) and a phone or tablet makes a good remote control (especially when you need to enter text to search for content). Heck, I've got an old phone in a draw that happily stream HD video over a HDMI cable.

A large reason that we are seeing 'smart TVs' being sold is that the required circuitry adds very little to the cost of a TV. It's a bit like 3D functionality - it doesn't add to the cost of TV, because the refresh rates have been made higher for other purposes - so it is included even if the buyer isn't likely to use it.

(Actually, some of the BBC Nature stuff deserves to be bought on Blu-Ray - video of flocks of birds will upset streaming codecs. :))

Re: Android TV

>The whole thing is hideous and I would give it a couple of years at most before personalised ads start getting shoved down to the viewer and there will be nothing you can do

Er, just use the TV as a dumb screen and use the HDMI inputs for your choice of box, dongle, Blu Ray or computer. If you don't want the TV's smart features, just don't connect it to the internet. Easy. You have several HDMI ports, USB, Composite, and even DisplayPort on some models. A good number of people with Sky or Cable boxes don't even use the TV's built in tuners.

>because you agreed to the Google licence agreement when you bought the telly - yes really - I'm not making this up.

It seems that you are making this up. FFS, it's a Sony TV, and Sony will always have it work with other video sources (that they would like you to buy from them). Unlike their smartphones, Sony don't *need* to run Android on their TVs - their previous TV UI's were fine for select input / change volume/ adjust picture - so Google don't have the same leverage to make Sony hobble their TVs even if the wanted to.

Re: Short term problem

@Rich 2

Yeah, that's all true, but you don't *have* to use the TV's built-in streaming hardware. You can get the same functionality from a discrete box or dongle in the event of the TV's OS becoming out of date or unsupported.

HD streaming dongles start at around £15, the 4K versions will have dropped in price by the time there is enough 4K content around to be worth bothering with.

Re: Short term problem

>Why the joke icon????

Because unlike a phone, a TV doesn't need network access to perform its primary function - displaying video. All of the 'smart' or 'connected' functionality can be provided by an inexpensive (compared to the tv) box or dongle. Therefore, a TV with an out-of-date OS is still fit for purpose - hence the joke icon.

TV updates that affect the playback of video (adding new HDR formats, for example) can be done by downloading the update on a computer and transferring it to the TV with a USB stick.

Re: Aahh!

Modern TVs come with a 5 year guarantee as standard, in keeping with our statuary right to have it last a 'reasonable' time.

All the Sony TVs have Android built in, and they make some of the best LED TVs, along with Samsung who use their own Tizen OS.

LG, who are the only ones making OLED tvs, use WebOS.

LED sets are brighter, so perhaps more suitable for watching in well lit situations, OLED sets have perfectly black blacks, making them better for watching movies with the lights down.

You won't be able to buy a 'dumb screen' at a TV sizes, but nobody is forcing you to plug an ethernet cable into it. By the time 4K content is more widely available, external HDMI 2.0 boxes should be cheaper.

Re: Don't blame the OEMs

>Google, with its perpetual attention deficit disorder, never sat down and thought properly about an update mechanism for Android.

They didn't have a choice - The way most ARM-based systems were designed doesn't allow for a one-ROM-fits-all (Linux distro-style) updating. Google bought Android in, as they were desperate to catch up with the iPhone. That was at the beginning.

In Act 2, silicon was advancing so much that two-year-old phones weren't really worth updating. It's only been the last couple of years that older phones have been good enough to keep using (though of course a new budget, but pretty good, Android phone won't break the bank).

>We need something like linux for phones. Something that users can install on a wide range of hardware and still have something functional.

>>Isn't that what AOSP ROMs like Cyanogenmod are?

Alas, no - those ROMs still need to compiled beforehand to work on a specific handset.

Re: If it works for Apple...

>Just as Safari and other Apple services are an inextricable part of iOS.... ...Sure, using the Oracle lawsuit might be an easy excuse, but if the EU likes how Apple does things, might as well jump on the bandwagon.

The EU only tries to hobble companies that they consider to be abusing their dominant market position... Apple have a small (but lucrative) slice of the market, so they will be left alone.

Re: Speaking as a consumer ...

>all the existing customizable phones are hopelessly out of date?

Out of date? If it still makes phone calls and sends texts, it won't be out of date. I'm aware of the good work done by people on XDA, but really, they are often trying to customise something that should have been good enough to begin with, bringing bugs and security holes onto the process. I'd be interested to see a percentage figure for the number of phones that run an Android version that din't come from the vendor. It's a phone, not a toy.

Android has slow updates because of its architecture - Google were in a hurry to catch up with the iPhone at the time. The way ChromeOS updates show how Google would like things to be done.

Re: I'm sure thunderbolt is great...

You don't have to buy your Thunderbolt cables from Apple.

It's a bit like FireWire, some version of which were faster than USB 2 - most people ('consumers') didn't really need the extra speed and features (not being packet-based, FW is a more natural fit for audio recording gear). Of course, the people who did need it, initially for high res scanners and then digital video cameras, made good use of it (or whatever the hell it was Sony called it) for many years.

Niche kit always looks a bit pricey, regardless of who makes it.

Re: Even a broken clock etc. etc.

> file sizes and storage density having all but stagnated in the past decade.

4K televisions are becoming very inexpensive, and they like to be fed with a lot of data (their resolution is higher, but they also use more bits per pixel). I mention this because video files have driven consumer HDD sizes and interconnects in the past.

Re: SCSI anyone?

You're not imagining. Intel developed the optical version of Thunderbolt - then called LightPeak - first, before reverting to copper on cost grounds. Apple contributed the Thunderbolt name, and it was mainly Apple who used it - though Sony, bless 'em, made a VAIO laptop with a USB-A Thunderbolt port for driving an external GPU.

This was some years ago now (indeed, VAIOs were still Sony), but it is only now that the idea of external GPUs are gaining traction amongst the gaming crowd. And Apple's next cinema display is rumoured to have its own GPU, because its existing Macbook Pros don't have a connection capable of shunting 5K video.

As always, I'll let the gamers and Apple users pay the first-adopter's premium and iron out the bugs, and look forward to it being cheap and reliable in a year or two.

Thunderbolt started off as an Intel concept that used optical fibres called LightPeak but it proved too costly, so they reverted to copper, and Apple contributed the Thunderbolt name. Lightpeak seemed an attractive idea to me at the time, because a noisey computer / server / GPU farm could be kept in the next room - or indeed the garden shed - without much compromise. These days though, computers good enough for my purposes are generally cooler and quieter.

I keep hearing about photonic circuitry too, but it seems to be a few years off at the very least.

As regards consumer and desktop devices, copper-cable based solutions offer a usability advantage of optical connections* - they can carry power, so a single cable can do 'everything' (power, video, storage, peripherals etc).

*Yeah, some people are working on power-over-fibre, but the use cases remain specialised (underwater robots, MRI machines, physics labs etc). My instinctual reaction to 'consumer fibre with 5W lasers beams' is "Arghh, my eyes my beautiful eyes!!"

Re: I use it all the time!

When I do use Google voice search, I'm still surprised at how well it works. It's curious that I'm still surprised, I guess.

My accent is closer to RP than some people's, and for some odd reason I'm more likely to use it when I'm confident that it will understand me correctly (i.e, I know it find find 'star wars cinema' easier than some rare place name )

Re: Back to the Future

I once worked in a UK nuclear site... Down some scarcely used corridors would be black and photos of the physicists from the early days... Most of them smoking a pipe.

Re: Back to the Future

http://www.readanybook.com/ebook/day-of-the-moron-229

Re: The answer is no...

Yeah, but isn't the name Henry Ford as well known as Karl Benz or Rudolf Diesel?

For that matter, Isambard Kingdom Brunel is famous too - again, for the scale of his implementation of existing inventions.

50:50? Dr Strangelove disagrees!

Dr. Strangelove: Well, that would not be necessary, Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years

Russian Ambassador: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Re: selected from applications sent in by the public

I'd rather send them to Venus and leave Mars unsullied for when we can send decent people there!

In this same week, Elon Musk has been outlining his ideas for how a Martian direct democracy might work - simple ideas, such as laws having an expiry date after which they must be actively renewed. A direct democracy sounds like it wouldn't benefit from IP lawyers and reality TV idiots.

Re: Why not try and burst it

The challenge in performing such an experiment would be to simulate the sheer velocity of a micro-meteorite. Probably easier to examine the results of the real thing.

The Soviets test-fired a canon in orbit in the 1970s, but it isn't around any more. Also, it shot rounds at around 700 metrews oper second, compared the *average* speed of a micrometeorite of 22,000 metres per second - though of course its slugs were bigger than a micrometeorite.

This sort of destructive testing is probably much easier on Earth, with pressure differences and temperatures controlled in a lab.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18187/here-is-the-soviet-unions-secret-space-cannon/