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minato posted:But it did fill a huge gap back in the early days of the internet. Browsers didn't do dynamic HTML very well, and Flash video was a huge improvement over RealPlayer and Quicktime. Speaking of that, when can QuickTime finally hurry up and die? It was meant to add multimedia capabilities to the existing QuickDraw rendering engine (hence the name) in MacOS 6, and 23 years later still hasn't gone away.
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Jun 13, 2015 19:08
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davidspackage posted:I loved Flash. I always wished for a version of the program optimized totally for animation, but then it was never meant for the kind of lengthy animations I liked making with it. I should probably learn After Effects to keep doing that kind of stuff. To give you an idea of just how bad Flash was for mobile, the prototype Adobe supplied to Apple in order to convince them to support Flash on iOS drained the battery in half an hour: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/231806385/adobe-gets-bitchy-over-the-iphone-and-flash-bit quote:About six months ago, a friend who was working closely along side adobe’s flash application development team told me that they received a prototype of Flash for iPhone. The prototype allowed the iPhone to have less than half an hour of battery life using flash. They then sent the prototype to apple and suggested incorporating this prototype iPhone flash into the iPhone OS in the next update.
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Jun 13, 2015 19:10
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cowtown posted:Copyright gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to publicly exhibit a movie: *Lending*, even renting, is not public exhibition. http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet07 quote:The first sale exception (§109) copyright allows an owner of a work to lend, rent or other depose of the work. Because of this, libraries can lend, people can sell videos or books at their garage sale, Amazon call sell new and used books, and second hand book stores are a legitimate business. If a video rental store is showing a movie on their in-store displays, that's public exhibition, and they need public performance rights in order to do so legally. They do not need public performance rights simply to rent out videos they've purchased, First Sale makes that legal.
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Jun 13, 2015 19:13
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First Sale only applies to the distribution of legally obtained media. The copyright holder still holds the exclusive rights to reproduce/manufacturer and publicly perform the work. Public performance is irrelevant in this situation since the rental is intended for private use only.
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Jun 14, 2015 00:03
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I have heard that the terms libraries have to deal with for digital audio books are really stupid. Like they can only lend them out a certain number of times before buying it again, to simulate wear. Like maybe 30 times or something dumb like that?
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Jun 14, 2015 15:32
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Light Gun Man posted:I have heard that the terms libraries have to deal with for digital audio books are really stupid. Like they can only lend them out a certain number of times before buying it again, to simulate wear. Like maybe 30 times or something dumb like that? I think some libraries require a "check out" of a digital item and when the item is "checked out", it becomes unavailable to anyone else until it's checked in. 
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Jun 14, 2015 15:56
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Last Chance posted:I think some libraries require a "check out" of a digital item and when the item is "checked out", it becomes unavailable to anyone else until it's checked in. This makes more sense to me than use limits for replacement. You have one use license to lend out, so one person gets it at a time.
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Jun 14, 2015 18:19
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Dewgy posted:This makes more sense to me than use limits for replacement. You have one use license to lend out, so one person gets it at a time. That's how my local library did it last time I looked, the wait list for most stuff was like months.
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Jun 14, 2015 18:37
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Yeah, I get the license thing, but it still seems archaic to limit digital items to one or two copies. There has to be a better way.
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Jun 14, 2015 19:42
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Book publishers are just assholes when it comes right down to it.
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Jun 14, 2015 20:02
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Last Chance posted:I think some libraries require a "check out" of a digital item and when the item is "checked out", it becomes unavailable to anyone else until it's checked in. The library i work at has some textbooks available as ebooks online. For a course with 60+ people, a text book will sometimes allow 1 person at a time. That's just for reading it online, if you want to download it you get a limited number of pages that are only available for a short period of time. 300 page book? You only get to keep 14 pages.
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Jun 14, 2015 20:48
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:The inventory control program we used (gently caress yeah MS-DOS) would keep track of the ratio of how much we paid to how much we'd made off any particular title, and would alert us to move a movie from "HOT NEW RELEASES" or whatever to "CURRENT HITS" when it hit 1:1 to make room for new stuff. Did your store use Video Butler? The video store I worked at used it. It said "copyright 1986-2007" when it started up. This was in 2013. 
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Jun 14, 2015 21:04
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Star Man posted:Book publishers are just assholes when it comes right down to it. This is actually one of the issues with the internet coming around. It's effectively free to duplicate information but people are putting artificial limits on that because money. Ideally we could just say "OK then everything is free" and pay content creators in some way other than sales. Unfortunately there are greedy companies that just have to have their hands in every pie and really don't like it if somebody consumes any form of media without paying for it somehow.
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Jun 14, 2015 22:04
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ToxicSlurpee posted:This is actually one of the issues with the internet coming around. It's effectively free to duplicate information but people are putting artificial limits on that because money. Ideally we could just say "OK then everything is free" and pay content creators in some way other than sales. Unfortunately there are greedy companies that just have to have their hands in every pie and really don't like it if somebody consumes any form of media without paying for it somehow. This is basically it, yeah. Yes let us make the drat library of all places make believe that a digital item can't be seen by millions of people at once every day forever, because gently caress you pay me. So dumb.
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Jun 14, 2015 22:21
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atomicthumbs posted:Did your store use Video Butler? The video store I worked at used it. It said "copyright 1986-2007" when it started up. It's been ages. I don't remember what it was called. The interface was hideous as hell and you had to memorize all sorts of shortcut keys in order to run it. I do remember being told that in exchange for a king's ransom, the company that sold it to our store delivered and set up computers pre-loaded with the software (really just off-the-shelf machines running MS-DOS with the program's executable in their autoexec.bat), as well as the network and "backup server" (another off-the-shelf deal with a tape backup drive) back in the 80s. Though the store has changed hands at least once since I left, it's actually still running the same loving software on the same goddamn machines to this very day. No joke. We paid a hefty yearly fee for service and support, which included monthly delivery of a floppy disk containing movie database updates. The company had no way of knowing what your store would buy, so they just sent out a file with everything that had come out on video in the past month, listing the movies' runtimes, single-sentence synopses, ratings, etc. and you added all that to your local database. Our store was small, so our database had tons of poo poo in it we didn't carry (we didn't have any porn, independent films, weird poo poo like Troma titles, etc.), making for some really interesting Friday and Saturday nights (when we closed at midnight) when the place would be dead and we'd fire up the database and go through all the porn titles, laughing until our sides ached. A drunk customer would stumble in from the pub down the street at 11:30 on a Saturday night wanting to end his evening with Kickboxer and we'd be red-faced and in tears while ringing him up, unable to tell him we weren't laughing at him, but instead at Santa Claus Cums to Town and Anal Nation.
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Jun 14, 2015 22:30
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I was poking around the internet looking for more information on my current obsession, Gateway to Apshai (a 1983 dungeon crawl for C64 and Atari), and found this neat comment on a blog review of it:quote:Just a few notes from the programmer/artist/producer/everything else who was responsible for Gateway to Apshai. It remains the favorite of all the games I ever created, simply because of one thing - it was incredible tight and efficient. Remember how long ago this was - all of that stuff fit into one 32K (K, not M) cartrige, and would run with as little as 16K of RAM. Quite an achievement, all things considered. I'd always thought the AI was primitive because it was 1983 and programmers hadn't figured out how to make it better. I hadn't thought about that 32K space limit. (The best strategy in this game was to get monsters stuck on walls, then kill them from the other side.) Also, it's hard to fathom that the whole game was the creation of one person. And it wasn't a small indie release, it was a mainstream, popular game you could buy at Target.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:00
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:It's been ages. I don't remember what it was called. The interface was hideous as hell and you had to memorize all sorts of shortcut keys in order to run it. I'm fairly certain we ran the exact same system that you're talking about at the shithole little video shop I managed at, for awhile in '94 "Just New Reeleases" (sic) I too forgot what it was called, however. My favourite porn title from the database was "Red Hot: It's a Gorbasm"
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Jun 15, 2015 18:02
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pookel posted:I was poking around the internet looking for more information on my current obsession, Gateway to Apshai (a 1983 dungeon crawl for C64 and Atari), and found this neat comment on a blog review of it: I happened to look at the credits in the Tomb Raider III manual last week and it was one (Playstation manual-sized) page. And that's what I consider a modern game. Then when you get to the "new" Tomb Raider, you've got 40 minutes of scrolling credits.
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Jun 15, 2015 18:09
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Snaguaro posted:My favourite porn title from the database was "Red Hot: It's a Gorbasm" All the wage slave-level employees were high school students. On Friday and Saturday nights, the boss demanded that nobody under the age of 18 work alone because of fears that drunks leaving the bar down the street would wander in and cause trouble (none ever did, it was usually just our Van Damme fan asking where Kickboxer was in slurred speech for the millionth time). So what are two bored highschoolers to do when stuck alone on a Friday or Saturday night in a big empty video store? When we found the porn section of that database it was like Christmas. Thousands upon thousands of hilarious titles, each with its own short synopsis. Anal Nation was funny enough on its own but when we read that it was based on the TV series Alien Nation we absolutely lost our poo poo. Rambone II had us howling, too. Some other notable titles that had us gasping for air on those late nights were Black Chicks in Heat (didn't really need to read the synopsis for that one) and Barbara the Barbarian.
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Jun 15, 2015 19:07
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:All the wage slave-level employees were high school students. On Friday and Saturday nights, the boss demanded that nobody under the age of 18 work alone because of fears that drunks leaving the bar down the street would wander in and cause trouble (none ever did, it was usually just our Van Damme fan asking where Kickboxer was in slurred speech for the millionth time). The title Saving Ryan's Privates will always have a special place in my heart. Don't know if it's a real porn or not, but it should be.
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Jun 15, 2015 19:38
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flosofl posted:The title Saving Ryan's Privates will always have a special place in my heart. Don't know if it's a real porn or not, but it should be. IIRC, it's real, and it's Shaving Ryan's Privates.
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Jun 15, 2015 20:27
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flosofl posted:The title Saving Ryan's Privates will always have a special place in my heart. Don't know if it's a real porn or not, but it should be. I'm reminded of a stupid game me and my friends used to play back in High School where you'd take a movie title and replace a word in it with the word Penis, cause we were immature idiots Also speaking of obsolete technology, I have one of those combination VCR/DVD Players just lying around, which is useful as I still have a couple dozen VHS tapes lying around
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Jun 15, 2015 21:27
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I'm not proud of it, but I was using VHS tapes to record TV programs up till about 2009 or so, until the VHS player broke. Now I just have 2 big boxes full of tapes I can't get rid of because some of them have family home movies on them and almost none of them are labelled...
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Jun 15, 2015 22:11
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drrockso20 posted:
I thought nearly all DVD players could play VCDs because of some standard.
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Jun 15, 2015 22:19
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Fyadophobic posted:I'm not proud of it, but I was using VHS tapes to record TV programs up till about 2009 or so, until the VHS player broke. Now I just have 2 big boxes full of tapes I can't get rid of because some of them have family home movies on them and almost none of them are labelled... Hit up a pawn shop, get a cheap working VCR, and use something like this to transfer/re-encode on your PC: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/transfer-vhs-tapes-to-your-computer/
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Jun 15, 2015 22:43
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Ozz81 posted:Hit up a pawn shop, get a cheap working VCR, and use something like this to transfer/re-encode on your PC: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/transfer-vhs-tapes-to-your-computer/ I had one of those devices years ago, but had a serious problem with frames being dropped. Now I use a standalone DVD recorder.
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Jun 15, 2015 22:55
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axolotl farmer posted:I thought nearly all DVD players could play VCDs because of some standard. VCR, not VCD.
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Jun 16, 2015 00:07
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Toast Museum posted:VCR, not VCD.  reading is hard
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Jun 16, 2015 06:07
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axolotl farmer posted:I thought nearly all DVD players could play VCDs because of some standard. I thought that for at least several years into the DVD lifecycle there was one company that mainly owned the rights to the VCD patents and they were expecting royalties from any DVD machine producer to have that feature included. As a funny side note to that, I seem to recall some generic brand around mid-00s I think had their company raided by the feds for IP theft along those lines: http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/16/fbi-seizes-20-000-cyberhome-dvd-players/ I had one of these. It stopped working after about a year of very little use, all things considered. I think I only ever recorded 2-3 disks of stuff with it.
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Jun 16, 2015 06:52
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JediTalentAgent posted:I thought that for at least several years into the DVD lifecycle there was one company that mainly owned the rights to the VCD patents and they were expecting royalties from any DVD machine producer to have that feature included. My first DVD player was the Samsung 709 it cost about £300 at the time and was easily converted to a multi region machine which is what sold it to me, It would also play VCD but only retail version's home burnt VCD's would get spat out unless they we're burnt onto one specific brand of CD-R. I remember spending hours working out how to rip a DVD and convert it into a VCD format (practicing first on a short clip from Limp Bizkit's Break Stuff video from the "Rollin" DVD single, my excitement when I put the disc into my Samsung and after a few seconds of loading that 30 second clip played flawlessly. I figured I'd cracked it and went about the same procedure for a full movie, a procedure that would take somewhere in the region of 100 hours, it was a glorious time before DVD Burners became the norm. Ironically that DVD player wouldn't even consider a burnt DVD so I had to purchase a new player, some cheap piece of poo poo that played DivX as well, it died within a year but the Samsung that lasted a full 10 years I loved that machine.
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Jun 16, 2015 07:45
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I actually still have the remote controller 'code' memorized for my first DVD player to access the secret features menu. Oddly enough, I never even really used it for anything, if I remember correctly. Never ever bothered to get around to getting imported discs or anything. Could have sworn some players actually even had macrovision on/off codes, too. Man, that was a thing: Just having people figure out button combos on a remote to unlock features.
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Jun 16, 2015 07:54
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JediTalentAgent posted:. Could have sworn some players actually even had macrovision on/off codes, too. Yup I had the Macrovision turned off, that combined with multi-region capabilities meant I could run VHS copies off to loan to friends etc who didnt have DVD players. Also Region 1 DVD's would come out considerably earlier than region 2, on quite a few occasion's I'd have a movie on DVD whilst it was still in cinema's.
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Jun 16, 2015 08:35
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Gaz2k21 posted:Yup I had the Macrovision turned off, that combined with multi-region capabilities meant I could run VHS copies off to loan to friends etc who didnt have DVD players. Here is a fun read: http://anarchivism.org/w/How_to_Rip_VHS
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Jun 16, 2015 09:10
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JediTalentAgent posted:I actually still have the remote controller 'code' memorized for my first DVD player to access the secret features menu. Oddly enough, I never even really used it for anything, if I remember correctly. Never ever bothered to get around to getting imported discs or anything. Could have sworn some players actually even had macrovision on/off codes, too. Reminds me of the service menus you could access with button sequences in Sony Ericsson phones circa 2002. I used to love surreptitiously accessing them on people's phones when they left them unattended and setting them to constantly vibrate because I was an antisocial little poo poo.
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Jun 16, 2015 10:56
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And the debug mode on soda vending machines! You have to physically open up the machine and press buttons on the inside to make it dispense without paying or change the price, but hitting the product selection buttons in a certain order (4-2-3-1, where 1 is the one at the top) would show the temperature, sales numbers, etc. on the little LCD screen that showed the price.sinking belle posted:Reminds me of the service menus you could access with button sequences in Sony Ericsson phones circa 2002. I used to love surreptitiously accessing them on people's phones when they left them unattended and setting them to constantly vibrate because I was an antisocial little poo poo.
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Jun 16, 2015 12:49
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Gaz2k21 posted:My first DVD player was the Samsung 709 it cost about £300 at the time and was easily converted to a multi region machine which is what sold it to me, It would also play VCD but only retail version's home burnt VCD's would get spat out unless they we're burnt onto one specific brand of CD-R.
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Jun 16, 2015 13:33
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drrockso20 posted:I'm reminded of a stupid game me and my friends used to play back in High School where you'd take a movie title and replace a word in it with the word Penis, cause we were immature idiots I think everyone did that when they were 14. Ours was "sex", which I personally feel peaked with the entire Star Trek series being converted into Sex Trek - subtitles and all. As I recall it was The Wrath of Khan't, The Search For Cock, The Voyage Homo, The Anal Frontier and The Undiscovered oval office. Things which are thankfully obsolete: my adolescence.
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Jun 16, 2015 15:14
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Here's something I miss doing: My smartphone is great for texting, surfing the internet, and playing games, but it kind of sucks as an actual phone. Hands-free is basically impossible.
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Jun 16, 2015 16:17
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pookel posted:Here's something I miss doing: Go hog wild: http://www.amazon.com/Native-Union-...PD9B2A98PANV5DX
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Jun 16, 2015 16:45
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pookel posted:Here's something I miss doing: Unless you have an earpiece, in which case it's way better for hands-free.
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