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ZiNgA BuRgA · 23/02/2012 11:50 PM

(23/02/2012 11:41 PM)Assassinator Wrote:
(23/02/2012 09:23 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:
(23/02/2012 08:08 PM)Assassinator Wrote: At least you can get fiber at all.

I don't know when the fuck fiber will come to my part of Canberra.
I'd seriously much prefer ADSL2+ over this Telstra poo poo.
TPG and Exetel have like unlimited (or near unlimited) plans for $60/mo (6 month contract), and fairly usable plans for like $50/mo at 24/1Mbps.

What, your place has fiber but not ADSL2? That's strange.

Wee're getting fibre because the phone lines are being removed.
Basically the phone exchange is being 'destroyed' so that a hospital can go there. Instead of sticking up another exchange, they decided to move everyone onto fibre instead.

So basically, all of South Brisbane is forced to go to fibre, and there's practically no-one other than Telstra offering it.
Great way to monopolize the area.

Assassinator · 24/02/2012 06:38 AM

(23/02/2012 11:50 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote: Wee're getting fibre because the phone lines are being removed.
Basically the phone exchange is being 'destroyed' so that a hospital can go there. Instead of sticking up another exchange, they decided to move everyone onto fibre instead.

So basically, all of South Brisbane is forced to go to fibre, and there's practically no-one other than Telstra offering it.
Great way to monopolize the area.

$78 itself isn't bad too bad, I mean you get 100mbit/s and stuff it's logical that you need to pay more than ADSL2. Also it's only $18 more every month, just work for 1 more hour every month.

However, I completely agree 2 year contracts sucks balls.

I'm still on my old plan which is $60 for 100GB ADSL2 ($60 is just for net, then another $25 or something for phone). Contract is up should swap now.

ZiNgA BuRgA · 25/02/2012 03:14 AM

But 100Mbps is like unnecessary. Many servers are on 100Mbps (and in the US), so you won't really get that speed anyway. Difference between, say, 30Mbps and 100Mbps in this day and age really isn't that much IMO. 5GB/mo quota is a joke - need to go on the 200GB/mo plan to actually get any use out of it.
It's probably $88 now, IDK, might try digging out the pamphlet if I do decided to try the special.
That's $78/mo for internet + phone, so better than yours, but still a fair bit more than, say, Exetel's $50/mo for 200GB 24Mbps ADSL2+ and phone.

But yeah, it's only $18, and I wouldn't mind going with it for a few months, but the contract length stuffs that up. So really, it's actually $18/mo plus opportunity cost of anything cheaper in the future. As this is Telstra's line, and I don't think other ISPs can simply install their own "DSLAM", it's unlikely Telstra will reduce the costs. The possible change comes from NBNCo possibly buying over the fibre setup in the next two years, in which case wee'll probably get better deals.
If NBNCo doesn't buy it any time relatively soon, then 2 year contracts probably aren't that bad, but then 24*$18 = $432 for 50% less quota over 2 years isn't exactly appealing either...

Assassinator · 25/02/2012 05:48 AM

(25/02/2012 03:14 AM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote: That's $78/mo for internet + phone, so better than yours, but still a fair bit more than, say, Exetel's $50/mo for 200GB 24Mbps ADSL2+ and phone.

My deal is more than 1 year old now, of course it sucks. My previous deal 2 years ago is even worse, only 10GB or 12GB of quota if I remember correctly, like $60 a month (including phone so $40 without phone). See this is why I would hesitate to sign into a long contract.

ZiNgA BuRgA · 26/02/2012 05:18 AM

So I've been having fun trying to squeeze out space on my 2TB drive.
As I tend not to waste space, and thus, all the 'low hanging fruit' space saving techniques have been done (eg 7z'ing up old stuff), I've turned to more drastic measures.

So far:

re-encode the video of lecture recordings (10GB » 5GB), as it seems to be fixed 128kbps 1fps H.264 using QuickTime, so hell inefficient. Can't do much about audio (32kbps LC-AAC)
I happen to have some World of Warcraft install files + patches, totalling 15.4GB. I noticed that there's some zlib streams in there, so I tried applying precomp to it, expanding it to 27.6GB, indicating that there's a fair bit more than just zlib (but can't do much about that). After LZMA2, goes down to 11.6GB, about 4GB saved
Currently running packJPG on several GB of photos/pictures. Unfortunately the GUI seems to refuse to process more than about 49 files at a time, so I'm chunking things up. Maybe I'll write a script to do the rest instead >_> I'm getting around a 30% saving over the JPEGs captured from the digital camera, so quite good, especially considering it's lossless. There's no .pjg viewer unfortunately. Maybe I'll write a XnView plugin for it some time... Should save a few GB

I shall continue!

(lol at what I'm doing to save a few GB)

Assassinator · 26/02/2012 06:03 AM

Just buy a new HDD lol.

I cleared around 200GB of space a few days ago.  Mainly uninstalling old games, and deleting old files from back then when I did a lot of video encoding (lossless intermediates and old ISOs).

But yeah, lecture videos are generally pretty inefficiently coded, the ones I have are pretty bad too.  If I can be fucked one day I will re-encode all of them (probably just modify my PSP encoding script to carry over audio instead of reencoding, change some settings and feed all the vids through it).

0.5fps probably enough for lecture vids.  Actually chainging fps wouldn't really make much of a difference because frames that are the same get compressed to pretty much nothing anyway.

Example...

Code:

General
Complete name                            : F:\ANU\COMP2610\COMP2610 2011-10-19.mp4
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID                                 : mp42
File size                                : 128 MiB
Duration                                 : 51mn 2s
Overall bit rate                         : 352 Kbps
Encoded date                             : UTC 2011-10-19 05:15:12
Tagged date                              : UTC 2011-10-19 05:15:25

Video
ID                                       : 2
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : Main@L3.1
Format settings, CABAC                   : No
Format settings, ReFrames                : 2 frames
Codec ID                                 : avc1
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Video Coding
Duration                                 : 51mn 2s
Bit rate                                 : 287 Kbps
Width                                    : 960 pixels
Height                                   : 768 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 5:4
Frame rate mode                          : Variable
Frame rate                               : 3.096 fps
Minimum frame rate                       : 1.496 fps
Maximum frame rate                       : 31.579 fps
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.126
Stream size                              : 105 MiB (82%)
Language                                 : English
Encoded date                             : UTC 2011-10-19 05:06:39
Tagged date                              : UTC 2011-10-19 05:15:25
Color primaries                          : BT.709-5, BT.1361, IEC 61966-2-4, SMPTE RP177
Transfer characteristics                 : BT.709-5, BT.1361
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.709-5, BT.1361, IEC 61966-2-4 709, SMPTE RP177

Audio
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AAC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile                           : LC
Codec ID                                 : 40
Duration                                 : 50mn 57s
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 64.0 Kbps
Channel(s)                               : 1 channel
Channel positions                        : Front: C
Sampling rate                            : 32.0 KHz
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Stream size                              : 23.0 MiB (18%)
Language                                 : English
Encoded date                             : UTC 2011-10-19 05:06:38
Tagged date                              : UTC 2011-10-19 05:15:25

ZiNgA BuRgA · 26/02/2012 11:24 PM

Mine are captured at 1fps 640x480.
Set max keyint to 60, cause you loose a lot of efficiency sticking it to 10 frames.

Turns out the packJPG command line tool accepts wildcards, so no need to write a script (yay).
And interestingly enough, Exetel's application status page now has a planned activation date for my order. So either the status there is wrong, the guy "lied" to me, or something interesting happened. It does mention "This may change in the future, or could still be rejected.", so who knows...
Oh well, it's better if it is activated.

Assassinator · 27/02/2012 06:13 AM

(26/02/2012 11:24 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote: Mine are captured at 1fps 640x480.
Set max keyint to 60, cause you loose a lot of efficiency sticking it to 10 frames.

I thought it defaults to 250...

Maybe I remembered wrong, dunno.

ZiNgA BuRgA · 27/02/2012 05:08 PM

Yes, it defaults to 250, which is really a pain when you need to seek on players that go to the last keyframe...
I was referring to the recommended 10 seconds = 10 frames.

ZiNgA BuRgA · 08/03/2012 05:28 AM

Grr, managed to finally write a working XnView plugin to view packJPG files, after finding that gcc mangles DLL export names by default (need to use "-Wl,--kill-at"), libjpeg forces you to use a setjmp error handler, and then gcc mangling C++ function names (need to stick extern "C" before them).
The plugin seems to cause XnView to crash, and I'm guessing it's due to the packJPG library using a crapload of global variables. Which means that multithreading screws everything over.
Web search doesn't seem to show a way to force DLLs to be loaded multiple times - that could've been a workaround...
Written in C++ and not using classes?
Looks like I'm going to have to do a fair bit of refactoring to fix up the library >_>

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