Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

Being a little bored and too lazy to do any meaningfull work. Ive looked at wikis main page and on that the Paradox of choice caught my eye, thinking its some interresting thing about math like the Axiom of choice is.

After reading the article iam puzzled why something like that is on wikipedia at all. Not to mention how things like that get linked from the front page.

Psychology has together with astrology always been a little astray from science and logic. But that article is really missing the point. Consumers dont have a problem with too many choices, they have a problem with making choices based on lack of information, wrong and irrelevant information (as presented in advertisements).
If one has a small set of products to choose from at the supermarkt one can try them all or at least a significant fraction of them and then in the future choose the best (considering quality, taste, price, …). With more products trying a significant fraction becomes impossible, one has to rely on other means of comparission. With many products thats still dead easy, for example after trying 3 differnt brands of noodles one realzes they all taste the same. So simply choosing the cheapest is the ideal choice. The same is true in a sense for green tea. None of the green teas from supermarkets i tried tastes as good as a random one from a real tea shop. It gets a lot trickier with these frozen, refrigerated, canned or dried, ready made foods there are far too many to try them all. Theres no obvious trend of taste vs. price, not even a reliable taste vs. brand trend. Only thing which has been always true is that cooked by my (grand)mother or myself tastes better :). I think supermarkets really should add some “number of packs sold per month” and “average customer rating” to their price tags.

Supperior (no frozen and dried crap), half finished, yesterday:

Finished (still yesterday)

What has happened in the last ehm week since the previous weekly news, well alot …

• some ffserver-IPv6-linux fix by Nicolas George
• some ffserver-IPv6-macosx fix by Ronald S. Bultje
• flv files with invalid headers work again after a fix by me
• a vorbis decoder crash after “floor0 dec: booknumber too high” has been fixed by me
• make ffmpeg stop if writing fails instead of continuing by me
• split adx into adxenc.c and adxdec.c by aurel
• improvements to the mpeg-ps detection which fix several mp3 files which where misdetected as mpeg-ps, by me
• make the NellyMoser decoder use our generic mdct, finding out how to do this and doing it by fabrice
• Electronic Arts XAS ADPCM decoder by peter ross and aurel
• Electronic Arts .cdata demuxer by peter ross and aurel
• RICE2 entropy coding and variable block size for flac support by Josh Coalson
• reorder codec registration to prefer native implementations by diego
• Warn user if bitrate parameter is too low by ramiro (using 100 instead of 100k was a pretty common cause of silly bug reports …)
• List enabled code in configure output by ramiro
• Remove libvorbis Vorbis decoding support by diego (our vorbis decoder IS bugfree :) at least as far as we know)
• fix interlaced_frame flag for h.264 by jeff downs and Reinhard Nissl
• dont send hundreads of RTCP packets by luca abeni
• adpcm-ima encoder bugfix by Timofei V. Bondarenko
• some of the MMS patches by Björn Axelsson hit svn, still quite a few to go
• various h.264 fixes by Jeff Downs
• Musepack SV8 demuxer and decoder by kostya
• a-law/mu-law/16bit PCM support in SDP by luca abeni
• ipv6/ipv4 udp cleanup by luca abeni
• MPEG2 in RTP muxer support by luca abeni
• split audio and video grabbing code into libavdevice by luca abeni
• split wmv2 in its own files by aurel
• intrax8 decoder by “someone”, now finally we can decode all wmv2 files
• export top_field_first flag for h.264 by Reinhard Nissl
• our own ogg muxer written by Baptiste, now finally you can store your music and videos in the worst container ever designed without having to depend on libogg
• remove libogg support by Baptiste
• 44.1kHz support and various other small improvements for our nellymoser decoder by alex
• flv v9 32bit pts support by alex
• remove important functions from snow by diego
• mpegts demuxer segfault fix by jeff
• Optimize memory management and some cleanup of the rm demuxer by roberto
• remove perror() usage and take meassures against its reintroduction by luca abeni
• dynamically allocate ByteIOContext in AVFormatContext so changes to it dont break the ABI by Björn Axelsson
• VC-1 MMX DSP functions by Christophe GISQUET
• part of the RV30/RV40 patchset from kostya hit svn, the rest should likely hit svn soon as well assuming i and kostya arent too lazy
• pcm_s16le_planar support for electronicarts files by aurel
• some stuff needed for OS/2 support by Dave Yeo
• split vc1dsp_mmx out into its own compilation unit by aurel
• MLP/TrueHD parser by Ian Caulfield
• pause/play/seek support for the protocol API by Björn Axelsson
• wma sound artefact fix by reimar
• change british english to amerikan by diego and others, yes we all hate british english :)
• make our rm muxer generate files playable by realplayer by kostya, i guess this once worked already in the past …
• dnxhd 720p encoding and decoding support by baptiste
• improvments to the mp3 detection by me
• fix asf muxer so that asf files work better on win ce by me
• Adpcm_swf regressions tests by benjamin
• several segfault fixes in the mov demuxer by baptiste and takis
• Many small fixes by various people ive been too lazy to list

Missing things, duplicated entries and wrong entries as well as spelling errors are unintended, if you find anything missing/wrong/duplicated tell me and ill fix it, dont bother telling me that every second word contains a typo i do know that already :)