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Topic: Philosophical question (Read 4330 times) previous topic - next topic
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Philosophical question

I am curious about your viewpoint on sth strange for me.
Many "ordinary people" don't have any objection against DVD and/or jpeg. They say "It is great quality!" But in the same time they say "MP3 is crap!"
You know what I mean: DVD is loosy like a mp3 and it's far from transparency! IMO it's interesting contradiction.

Philosophical question

Reply #1 –
About the DVD sentence, this partly because you cannot easily have a far better quality with home equipment. You can say MP3 is crap because you own the CDs and have a nearly professionnal sound system at home etc, etc... Harder to have the same situation with video.

And I never saw anybody saying that jpegs were great in themselves. That's probably because they don't compare with the source photography/painting whatever, since they are watching it on a screen.

Philosophical question

Reply #2 –
That depends on what MP3/s they listen to... MANY MP3's are crap. Encoded with crappy encoders like Xing and Blade and Plugger. So they sound like complete crap. Others though, are encoded with LAME 3.90.2, or an alpha 3.94, so they sound -MUCH- (understatement) better, and many people wouldn't consider them to be of bad quality, and many even wouldn't notice a difference from the original.
DVDs are encoded with very high quality MPEG-2 encoders, and in my opinion, yeah, they look great. Certainly not perfect, but not so annoying. Personally, i don't know crappy JPEG compressors. A "90% quality" JPEG will usually look great and many times it will be hard to notice a difference from the original. Many JPEG's are simply over compressed, like at very low qualities, so they can look crappy as well.
JP2 (JPEG 2) now that's a really impressive format.
If you use Windows, try SlowView, a free JP2 compressor is included.

Philosophical question

Reply #3 –
Thanks a lot for the link SK1! 
I didn't know about JP2 , I'm eager to check it out.
SlowView even supports the underrated and rarely used DJVU format from AT&T 

Philosophical question

Reply #4 –
Quote
About the DVD sentence, this partly because you cannot easily have a far better quality with home equipment. You can say MP3 is crap because you own the CDs and have a nearly professionnal sound system at home etc, etc... Harder to have the same situation with video.

I see your point. I think that the problem is a bit of psychological: If you encode audio to loosy you 'degrade'...

Philosophical question

Reply #5 –
Quote
That depends on what MP3/s they listen to... MANY MP3's are crap. Encoded with crappy encoders like Xing and Blade and Plugger. So they sound like complete crap. Others though, are encoded with LAME 3.90.2, or an alpha 3.94, so they sound -MUCH- (understatement) better, and many people wouldn't consider them to be of bad quality, and many even wouldn't notice a difference from the original.

Agree. Undoubtedly bad rips and bad encodes contribute to the bad reputation of mp3

Quote
If you use Windows, try SlowView, a free JP2 compressor is included.

Thanx for the info about SlowView, offtopic - do you think jp2 has great future? (at least as jpeg ?) for now it's rather not widely known (vide Megaman post)

Philosophical question

Reply #6 –
Beats me . I hope so. And well i suppose it will be very popular in the future. However, that's just my guess.
Here's a good place to start for JPEG 2000 information.

Enough with the off-topic discussions, i can sense people getting angry .
Oh and, you're both welcome!

Philosophical question

Reply #7 –
I was disappointed by the JP2 support on Slowview....very good quality but the smallest size I got is about twice as big as a similar quality JPG. 
I'm doing something wrong or the plugin is buggy , because I've searched on Google and everyone says that JP2 has better quality and higher compression.
BTW , you have to download a small separate dll to read/write DJVU files.

Sorry for wandering really off-topic 

About the "MP3 is crap" issue...I don't consider low bitrate MP3 as crap.Most LAME or FhG encodings at 128kbps are "listenable" and I consider many of them in my collection as a treasure because it is really hard to get stuff that I couldn't get in other ways.I think of many Metallica and Megadeth bootlegs right now , most of them 128 to 192kbps CBR.I love that stuff , even knowing it's low quality. 
Of course I dislike Xing/Blade/Plugger low bitrate encodings , they're annoying , but sometimes you just can't get very rare stuff in better quality.They sound bad , they're annoying , yes.But they're not "trash".Something bad is better than nothing (I don't think the same way about girlfriends , though    ).

Philosophical question

Reply #8 –
[span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%']Small ot text ..
I don't think you're doing something wrong. The quality/size ratios are really different between jpg and jp2 i think. Maybe just try compressing at lower percent of quality?

(to keep it a liiiitle on topic, slowview has vorbis support as well!  seperate plug-in too)[/span]

Philosophical question

Reply #9 –
I tried 10% (lowest possible) quality before , what were you thinking?  .Still twice as big as a similar quality JPG.

The Ogg Vorbis plugin for SlowView is huge (1.6 MB if IIRC).That's crazy.
 

Philosophical question

Reply #10 –
I totally have no idea who/what's to "blame" . Maybe you should email Nic about it (SlowView author) or post in the forum.
And it's 1.6 MB?! Wow that's huge... (i use it only for viewing pictures)