Nemolus

Having not particularly been a perfect updater for the past few months, I decided to keep up some updates with you, hopefully to channel away any anger that might've been ignited by things such as important as me having not updated anything lately, or as trivial as the subprime mortgage crises around the world, or all the fuzzes about Tibet, or then the consequential clamorous drama of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Torch. With you rolling your eyes, lemme continue. Drupal 6.2 was released early this month, thanks to cynix I managed to get this website updated to this latest version, with tons of errors popped up during the upgrade process. As frequently as how I had always been updating my site, SONY continued its constant firmware update for Playstion 3, to version 2.3, this time bringing in new features such as DTS-HD MA support. Now PS3 could easily put XBOX360 to shame in the multimedia territory, supporting many audio-visual features that are not supported by the latter, such as: AC3 in .avi / .m2ts containers, AAC HE / AAC 5.1 (with HDMI 1.3) in .mp4 containers, Blu-ray BD-R profile 1.3 and BluRay BD-live profile 2.0 disks, Ble-ray disks with DTS-HD and DTS-HD MA audio tracks, and some limited subtitle rendering functions. While it's all good to have all these supports, both of these consoles' hardware support for media in general are actually quite limited, especially when it comes to supporting various codecs' profiles and levels, or managing containers that have liberal combination of video and audio tracks, or rending different types of subtitles. For example, both PS3 and XBOX360 (as well as all the modern video cards) can only support MPEG-4 AVC up to level 4.1, and in no short terms will they be able to playback an .mkv file embedding an .ssa subtitle. But neither of them were designed with the intention of playing back all media files, which is why I finally made a plan to upgrade my Paleozoic PC (I'm actually being polite to this computer which I'm writing this very article on, the real version is me dumping it and getting a new one, but shhh, she is really old®, but I don't wanna hurt her feelings...who said it was a she...), anyway, here's the list: MOBO: ASUS P5K-E P35 MEM: OCZ Platinum XTC 2X1G PC2-8000 DDR2-1000 CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 GPU: NVIDIA Geforce 8800GT PSU: Corsair TX650W HSF: Thermaltake Big Typhoon Rev. CL-p0310-01 Oh, and maybe also a set of Bowers-Wilkins 800 series Hi-Fi system if I could sell one of my kidneys on eBay or myself to prostitution, in which scenario (with the money), I wouldn't mind getting a Steinway grand piano as well...but I'd better have a huge kidney or a huge... Anyways, in keeping more with the cruel reality, besides my ambition to output all types of media at all resolutions including 1080p at 60fps with all subtitles to my roommate's HDTV, I do wish the new PC can also run PCSX2, **THE** PS2 emulator, at high resolutions with 16x anti-aliasing, at full fps, such as running frames like this: In comparison below is a non-filtered frame (resized to 800x600), which is close to what we get from PS2 on TV, but better without loss of quality due to transmission via analog video cables: Also, with the new PC I wouldn't awfully mind running the newly updated WinXP Pro SP3, VMWared with Apple OSX Leopard and Linux Ubuntu 8.04. Then for you audio-visual geeks, here are some tools that I lately found out interesting: EAC3to, a tool able to convert E-AC3, TrueHD, PCM and DTS-HD audio tracks to AC3, DTS or FLAC; able to extract/remux BluRay/HD-DVD EVO/VOB streams to raw or mkv files; tsMuxeR, a very versatile tool to mux/demux various types of audio/video/subtile tracks into and out of .ts/.m2ts containers; HCEnc, an MPEG-2 encoder with a lot of advanced options open for you to play with, such as DC precision from 8 to 11 bits, colorimetry setting for BT.601 and BT.709, and profiled/customized/adaptive matrix configuration, etc. While some of you couldn't care any less, 雲のむこう、約束の場所: ＆秒速5センチメートル: both works of 新海誠 樣, are released to Blu-ray DVD on April 18th in Japan. That's about it for now. Some new updates will be out shortly, like, the way The ePSXe Team promised more than four years ago. Last but not least, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Robin! (who, despite of my many invitations, never visited my site anyway.) And by the way, I've got a girl friend now. oh wait, I don't...That was just to wake you up a bit after such a long and boring muttering update.

愿各位來年事事如意, 開心快樂!

Lion Gate Bridge & West Vancouver Stanley Park, Downtown Vancouver Gas Town, Downtown Vancouver Graville Bridge, Downtown Vancouver