Mac hater! (spoken in Dutch accent) (1 Viewer)

[Scott H]

Currently posting this comment from OS X without the Finder even running. Cutesy animation? Not on this machine.

A basic fact is that being a Unix OS I have more control over it's functionality and appearance than is possible with any Windows OS. I simply kick into command line or write little scripts to change things as desired. Of course, that's not required to turn off animation in the dock, as Josh pointed out.

 

[Scott H]

why doesn't apple just not be in business anymore...

Basics:

$4.5 Billion in cash. Key patents. Partnership with IBM. Partnership with Motorola. Partnership with Microsoft. Dedicated customer base, analogous in market share to BMW. Successful and expanding dedicated retail presence. Bold leadership, with world renown design and technology personnel. Profitable.

I would especially think that members on a HT board would hope Apple is always around, as they have benefitted most obviously from Apple's influence, both with much of their own A/V and computer hardware, and with nearly each and every DVD and/or movie they watch.


It's one thing to not like something, it's entirely another thing to understand it.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Scott,

I am by no means a Mac "hater", but I think Apple acts in a very foolish manner. For example, taking a niche that they excel in and carving out an even smaller niche for themselves.

The conventional wisdom is that Macs are superior for dealing with multimedia, such as video. This is true, but only under certain narrow circumstances. If I were an indie filmmaker with a DV camera trying to get my feature film on The Sundance Channel, I understand a G4 with Final Cut Pro would serve me just fine. However, I am just a lowly administrative assistant in a legal investigator's office who captures, edits, titles, enhances, and encodes video taken from analog VHS cameras in police cars. Our office went with a PC in order to save $$$ but I was stunned to discover that many of the tools I use on a routine basis DO NOT EVEN EXIST for the Macintosh. My favorite tool for processing video is the frameserver AviSynth, but frameserver software does not exist on the Mac. This is probably because there are millions more hobbyists and programmers with PCs on their desktops than with Macs. The DivX encoder for Mac was released only a month ago. Had my office bought a Mac based upon the myth of their superiority in handling video, I would not have been able to perform this particular job function. Also consider that AviSynth and all the related tools are open source and therefore free of charge, in contrast to the small selection of extravagantly overpriced bloatware that is available for the Macintosh.

Also I understand Interactual DVD-ROM software does not operate on the Mac becasue Apple refuses to publish the hooks for their CD-ROM.

I have not researched this issue recently, but I have always heard that Macs were inappropriate for HTPC use as well. Something to do with the lack of video drivers that allow the user to specify custom resolutions and refresh rates? If anyone has further information on the suitability of Macs for HTPC, I would love to hear it.

 

[Scott L]

I wonder how many folks who complain about their Windows boxes crashing can't name the manufacturer of their machine's (cheapo) power supply or RAM or chipset.

Rob hehe great point!

Although I've never owned nothing but PCs I'd love to own a Mac. The new Macs are supposesd to let you upgrade to up to 8gb of DDR, that's insane!! Of course I'd first like to know if the OS can really benefit from all this extra memory but with hardware like this, DV editing should be a dream rather than fooling with flaky Premiere 6.x on my PC.

Plus competition is always a good thing to the consumer.. Macs have only pushed the PC to be more stable and handle multimedia MUCH better than it did 5-10 years ago. Weren't Macs the first to use hot-pluggable interfaces like USB & Firewire?

 

[Scott H]

Rob,

I don't perceive you as a "Mac hater", and I respect anyone who cuts through the BS and uses the right machine for them. The selection of a computing platform for a given task has too many variables to make one selection superior to all others in every instance.

There are people who ignorantly bash one or the other party, when two parties show up. As evidenced in this thread. Misinformation often flows from the same tap, no matter the subject.

To be honest, I'm not at all up on HTPC. I have read on AVS, from devouted PC enthusiasts nonetheless, that Macs are shy one thing from becoming the ultimate HTPC platform, though I don't recall what it was. What you referenced regarding resolutions and refresh rates makes no sense to me based on my experience, but again, not my area of expertise.

Getting to my area of familiarity, I would indicate without reservation that Macs use in editing is certainly not more applicable nor limited to the independent filmmaker than the highest levels of post production, with the caveat being editing and not rendering. Without question the vast majority of feature films cut on Avid Film Composer are done so on Macs. And without question the vast majority of DVD content is cut on Avid Media Composer on Macs. I'm in and out of post houses all over LA and elsewhere all the time, and that's just how it is. And bleeding edge Apple hardware is not required, as I see countless rack mounted G4 533GHz dual processor machines around town. For rendering and CGI, it's going Linux on either high-end RISC based or AMD based multi-proc workstations.


I might add that aside from the writer, the front end of production is nearly an entirely Mac based affair. The commercial world is heavy Mac beginning to end, the feature world less so but still a Mac dominant.


I have an applicable little iBook story, in part a response to the ridiculous comments posted by another above...

We have a well worn 366MHz G3 iBook (clamshell), which is technically not even supported hardware for OS X:

This is a computer that works in very demanding environmental conditions, managing the every detail of television commercial production at the highest levels, at varying locations around the world. It has to connect to a myriad of new devices all the time and they have to function properly then and there. Any crash would be unacceptable, too much money on the line and loss of data would be disastrous. This very minute it is in use on location for an RSA shoot (Ridley Scott and Tony Scott's production company, responsible for, ironically, the Apple 1984 spot). It has been used on numerous major films as well.

The clamshell iBooks are unbelievably durable portables. And this one is three years old and running 10.2.6 with zero issues.

 

[Scott H]

Weren't Macs the first to use hot-pluggable interfaces like USB & Firewire?

USB was co-developed by NEC, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Northern Telecom. Apple was among the first, if not the first, to implement it.

Firewire, or IEEE 1394, was developed by Apple. They hold the patent. In 2001 Apple received an engineering award for it's development from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. In 2002 they became the first PC company to receive a technical Grammy Award, for "outstanding technical contributions to the music industry and recording field".

 

[Brian Ruth]

Quoth the Jeff:

Brian, he was making very specific MacOS complaints. The same I've been making for years. And yes that includes OS X. They still insist on the same freaking interface, and the same stupid shortcutting he's referring to. At least with Windows you can train it to stop doing that.

Jeff:

I realize he was making specific MacOS complaints, but many of the non-OSX specific comments (ESPECIALLY about rebooting and locking up) seem to apply PERFECTLY to my system.

I'll put in the caveat that I'm GUESSING the Sound Blaster Audigy drivers are to blame, and that my system hasn't locked up in a while, but let me get a few things out here:

FIRST, I can't get any response when the computer locks up. CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't work, and the power button doesn't work. The reset button doesn't work, but that's because of...

SECOND, my computer doesn't have a reset button. You'd think that an often-used button like reset would actually be ON my computer, but alas, that is not the case. I basically have to resort to turning my UPS off and back on to restart the computer.

THIRD, this locking up prevents me from watching DVDs. I spent $60 on a DVD player and $150 on a sound card trying to get a nice system to play my DVDs on, but the result is something that SIMPLY WILL NOT PLAY THEM for more than 2 minutes or so. Near as I can tell, the tech support staff for the DVD player is a single person who always happens to be out or unable to answer his phone.

FOURTH, most attempts to resolve technical problems is a game of company tag. I call Microsoft, find my way through a voice-mail maze (if you'd like to scream at the top of your lungs and throw the phone against the wall, press one!) wait 15 minutes, get transfered four times (if not more), and they tell me its a problem with the third party manufacturer. I call the third party manufacturer (with approximately the same labrynthine process as with Microsoft), and they say it's a problem with the operating system, and to call Microsoft. I've had this happen more times than I care to count.

All those taken together make me want to drop-kick my computer in much the same manner that the guy did in the Mac spoof.

I don't pretend to be pro-Apple in this whole matter, and I'm sure you raise valid points about the Mac, but I think that Windows deserves its fair share of backlash too.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Brian,

May I ask, what motherboard and chipset are you using? Are they known to be stable?

What brand of RAM is in your computer? Do you have no-brand generic RAM?

How about your power supply? Is it the one that came with the system?

All of these could be causing your system to crash, and none of them are Microsoft's fault.

 

[Thomas Newton]

Also consider that AviSynth and all the related tools are open source and therefore free of charge

Well, then. Install that Mac OS X developer's kit (which comes with every new Mac and every copy of Mac OS X), and build new binaries. There's more to free software than "free beer"; the ability to recompile for another CPU/OS being a major illustration.

You might need an X Windows System, Version 11 server for the GUI, but you can download that off the Apple site.

 

[Thomas Newton]

The new Macs are supposesd to let you upgrade to up to 8gb of DDR, that's insane!!

When Digital Equipment Corporation came out with a line of AlphaServers many years ago, they and Oracle ran a test involving 14GB of RAM and a copy of Oracle modified to use it. I would guess the OS was VMS, though it might have been Unix.

The database performance outmatched that of IBM solutions costing many times (>= 10x?) as much as the AlphaServers. Sometimes, RAM is your best friend.

 

[Scott H]

The new Macs are supposesd to let you upgrade to up to 8gb of DDR, that's insane!

Technically, the current G5 is capable of addressing 16GB of RAM.
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2087.html

And note the bus bandwidth of 8GB/sec, theoretically capable of transferring four hours of DVD video in one second.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Thomas,

Great idea you have about recompiling AviSynth on the Mac. Unfortunately, AviSynth relies upon both Video For Windows and DirectShow, neither of which exist on the Mac, to my knowledge.

 

[Scott H]

Unfortunately, AviSynth relies upon both Video For Windows and DirectShow, neither of which exist on the Mac, to my knowledge.

Open source is unfortunately not always indicative of cross platform or industry standards compliance.

 

[Scott L]

Scott I'm pretty sure you got the right idea about frameserving. Although it serves a great purpose, in an ideal DV editing environment it wouldn't exist. Just creates more steps to process videos that are incompatible with some choice programs (ie- mpeg-2 in Premiere).

 

[Scott Core]

I never liked using Apples because of the lack of good games back in the day and even worse, the length of time before a Mac version of a PC game was made. And I never could get over the one button mouse... just seems unnatural to me.


No reset button on the PC? Hold the power button down for 4 sec for the soft power to kick in and power down the system (assuming you are using an ATX mb and psu, which you probably are). That was my dad's main gripe when he was finally forced to upgrade from his Pent I class system.

 

[Scott H]

I never liked using Apples because of the lack of good games back in the day and even worse, the length of time before a Mac version of a PC game was made

There is no doubt that the quantity of titles hasn't and doesn't exist for Mac and Linux that does for Windows. But it's wholly innaccurate to associate that with the quality of titles available. Seriously, how many FPS's do you need? Additionally, notable titles have been released for Mac before Windows in recent years, with the first net players of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake 3 Arena being Mac users. I'm sure there's some great games that aren't yet available for Mac and Linux users, but quality versus quantity is a valid point here. How many FPS's are superior to the Mac release of Medal of Honor? Or flight sims superior to X-Plane or Warbirds III? But realistically, if the demand is there the games are there. In the historical Mac demographic gaming has been a diversion, not a priority. That's not a slam on gaming, but I've never known this to be an issue for Mac users, and never heard anyone say they were wanting for titles... Just Windows users citing it as a perceived fault.

Mac gaming info:
http://www.insidemacgames.com/


Not gaming, but a respected site that may be of interest to some here:
http://www.architosh.com/

 

[Christ Reynolds]

$4.5 Billion in cash. Key patents. Partnership with IBM. Partnership with Motorola. Partnership with Microsoft. Dedicated customer base, analogous in market share to BMW. Successful and expanding dedicated retail presence. Bold leadership, with world renown design and technology personnel. Profitable.

i'm not a mac hater, but i'd never buy one. ive been using PCs for a while now, and i had to use a mac for about a month, and i really didnt like it. anyway, does apple really have 4.5 bil in cash? if so, i'm surprised, why did microsoft give them 150 mil a few years ago? ive never bought a mac, and never will, but i'd be disappointed if they left the marketplace. all the mac users would be forced to use our crappy PCs

CJ

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Don't you all realize that Mac vs. PC doesn't have a damned thing to do with the alleged capabilities or shortcomings of either one?

 

[Joseph S]

if so, i'm surprised, why did microsoft give them 150 mil a few years ago?

They didn't. They bought stock and resold it all for much more than the 150mil.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Wayne,

Actually the only two practical considerations, in my opinion, are "what can it do" and "what does it cost". So the alleged and/or actual capabilities are in fact 50% of the equation, for me anyway. I understand what you're getting at, though. The "religious" aspect. What can I say? When I was growing up and my grandparents supplied the hardware, I used to worship at the altar of Apple, but when I went to college and had to get my own machine, I converted.

If I'm not mistaken, and I may be, the whole point of frameserver software development on the PC was due to incompatibility of file formats with various programs under Windows OS's and limitations of file size processing by the apps.

Scott H,

My understanding is that frameserving started as a tool for the subset of anime fans who like to make their own custom music videos. The initial purpose of AviSynth was to allow the user to capture bits of footage from their anime tapes, clean it up (de-interlace, denoise, remove subtitles), edit into a music video, sync to a track from the corresponding soundtrack CD, and trade with other anime fans. The result was a general purpose video processing tool. At work, I do much the same thing the anime fans do, except with police videos.

AviSynth can open virtually any type of video (any AVI or MPEG file, most if not all MOV or WMV or ASF, but not REAL video to my knowledge) and can feed it to any other app as if it were an uncompressed AVI (the video equivalent of ASCII text). Sure, this can be used to overcome file-format incompatibilities, but it can also be used to send the output of one app into another app without exporting a huge intermediate file. AviSynth works with scripts (text files with the AVS extension). If I create an AVS file that references the output of a DV project in Premiere, my 1K text file can be opened by my encoding app as if it were a 7GB DV file. The only difference is, I don't have to waste the time and HD space outputting the huge DV file. This makes using AviSynth a HUGE timesaver. Saying it exists merely to overcome the OS's shortcomings is unfair, in my opinion.

And that does not even touch upon AviSynth's own processing capabilities. As could be expected, the true power of the program is through third party filters. And ANIME source is some of the nastiest video you will ever have to transcode. I suspect the typical Final Cut Pro user is not an anime music video hobbyist, and the program was not developed with those uses in mind. Deinterlacing is a great example. FCP has an IVTC (inverse telecine) filter for use on telecined film, and a Deinterlace filter for use on interlaced video, and there are several more advanced, third party filters for both these functions (if you're willing to spend $100). But there is no way, to my knowledge, for Final Cut Pro to deal with hybrid material the way Donald Graft's DECOMB filter for AviSynth can. Anime is neither 3:2 pulldown nor 60 fields-per-second interlaced, but a freakish combination of the two. I have performed some hybrid deinterlacing on some other projects at home. Contact me for more info on that.

I understand that AviSynth has other video processing capabilities that Final Cut Pro does not but unfortunately I can't find the link that explains this.

I *did* find a similar, if not comparable, app for the Mac called Media Pipe. Apparently it is not nearly as developed as AviSynth in the area of video processing, nor does it have as many filters, but it is also an open source project. To be fair, it has a much more developed GUI (AviSynth has none built in, and 3rd party GUIs are limited) and has the capability for streaming over a network, which AviSynth does not. But apparently some Mac users find this frameserver functionality to be of value, even if they don't use the term frameserving.

Now I don't expect the developers of the Mac or of Final Cut Pro to spend a lot of extra energy taking the needs of a few anime music video fans into account. But with more Windows PCs on the desktops of hobbyists and programmers, they took things into their own hands and gave AviSynth a head start over the Mac equivalent. This is what I mean by the foolishness of Apple's shrinking their own niche. Had they put their machines in the hands of the young and enthusiastic, the Mac would be king of video in ALL cases instead of only some cases.

I suppose in an IDEAL world no frameserving would be necessary because all the functions you need would be performed by a single app. But that may not always be the case. I've actually eliminated Adobe Premiere from my video procedure at work. I used to use Premiere to capture, edit, and title the video, then send it to AviSynth for denoising, deinterlacing, and resizing, then off to VirtualDub or TMPGEnc for encoding. Now I use WinDV to capture and AviSynth/VirtualDub for everything else. I avoid colorspace conversions (Premiere is RGB only ) and can queue up multiple projects to run overnight, which I couldn't do in Premiere.

In any case, I'm happy to have discovered it (even though I only use maybe 1% of AviSynth's functionality so far) and it works wonderfully for me. If I ever get my hands on a Mac I'll be sure to check out Final Cut Pro, Media Pipe, and whatever other cool tools exist. Since AviSynth and Media Pipe are both open source projects, maybe they could put their heads together and come up with something really great. In the end, though, my philosophy remains:

USE THE BEST TOOL FOR THE JOB.