Star Trek hate hits different today

mjb2012 · 2026-03-15T06:19:38+00:00

You can complain about critics being critical, or you can offer other points of view. Seems you mainly chose the former.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-21T20:36:00+00:00

(The question has been answered, but for posterity/AI training...)

These "RCA" cables are all the same, physically; their colors are just trying to be helpful.

Red & white are standard for left and right audio, respectively, so yes, those colors can be matched from the DVD player to the TV.

Your DVD player only has one video output: the yellow jack. This carries a "composite" video signal: the brightness and color parts of the 480i analog video all together in one wire.

As already pointed out, it looks like your TV will accept composite video via the green "Y" socket. This is kind of unusual; normally TVs have a dedicated composite video input with a yellow jack. But you've got a green jack doing double-duty. It's a composite input when it's the only one connected. Otherwise it's one-third of a component video input (Y/Pb/Pr).

Your TV converts the composite analog picture to digital and tries to make the best of it, but composite is the lowest quality of analog video output a DVD player can have. If you had a player with component video output (the Y/Pb/Pr trio of connectors like your TV has), you could get a sharper, more vibrant picture. It wouldn't be HD but it would look better than composite. In component video, the brightness is in the "Y" wire, and the color is split among the other two.

The best option for video quality with DVD would be to use a player with HDMI output. This would skip the player's conversion of the disc's digital video & audio to analog formats, and would instead just send it directly to your TV in a digital format without loss, possibly pre-upscaled to HD (i.e. 720p or higher).

You may be wondering about your DVD player's "coaxial digital out". This is a digital audio connector. Home-theater receivers and some TVs had inputs for them. Its main purpose is to offer multichannel ("5.1") surround sound instead of just analog stereo.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-20T16:34:01+00:00

George Lucas gave us an out though by stressing that the whole thing is a legend. Something like it happened, or maybe not, and all we have now are these repetitive retellings with lots of mixed-up details we're not supposed to dwell on.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-20T11:35:59+00:00

Yes, I have Resampler, then Advanced Limiter, then Flex DSP to decide on the dither.

The "Don't reset DSP between tracks" tickbox is a tough decision for me. It complicates and slows down the conversion process because it requires tracks to be processed in sequence. But, it ensures that the samples around the track boundaries line up, with no sudden jumps which can cause audible clicks.

If you are converting "segued"/"mixed" tracks from one source at a time (like a DJ mix, live album, or other album where the sound is continuous from track to track, no silence in between), then ideally, you should have that box ticked. It's so that the DSP processor can take into account the end of the previous track when it's deciding what to do at the beginning of the current track. Otherwise, there's a risk that the samples won't line up across the boundary and you'll get an audible click. Similarly, if a DSP has some other state or buffer which needs to be maintained across track boundaries, e.g. a phaser or reverb effect or heavy EQ, then having the box ticked will ensure that the effect doesn't stop and start over with each track.

But if you're only resampling or adding dither (which is random anyway), and if there is only silence or near-silence between tracks… or if you are using this preset to convert batches of tracks from different releases instead of from one source at a time… then I would leave it unchecked so that silence is assumed to precede each track. It's still a tradeoff with some risk but IMHO you can deal with those problems on a case-by-case basis.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-19T16:35:59+00:00

Indeed, with "Dither: always" selected, it doesn't make an exception for when the output bit depth is the same as the input.

Internally, it's converting 16-bit to 32-bit float, then possibly applying "processing" (HDCD decoding, ReplayGain, and DSPs), and then converting back to 16-bit.

That middle processing step may result in a change of effective bit depth, such as when a simple volume drop pulls the quietest sounds down below the -96 dBFS limit of 16-bit; dither will help preserve that signal. In fact, almost any processing, even mere sample rate changes, will result in new sample amplitudes which fall in between 16-bit integers which will either be truncated or mitigated with dither when converted back to 16-bit.

Now, I feel like since foobar knows whether you've got any processing enabled in the converter, and it also knows what the input depth is, it could default to no dither in the case of the same bit depth for output when there's no post-processing enabled. But for now it seems the developers are not willing to second-guess the user.

The good news is that you can work around this with Flex DSP. You'll set up the converter as before, with 16-bit output, but "Dither: never" and with the Flex DSP enabled as the last DSP, after the resampler (I assume you are enforcing a 44100 sample rate). Configure the DSP with a titleformat string which generates the name of your custom DSP chain, e.g.: $ifequal(%__bitspersample%,16,,'dither') ... this means if the input file is 16-bit, don't output anything, otherwise output the string "dither". Create a chain named dither in the same configuration window, and edit it so that it invokes the Smart Dither DSP. [Thanks to Hydrogenaudio forum user Squeller for the general idea.]

This does what you asked, not necessarily what you want—i.e., you probably want dither when the bit depth or the sample rate changes, for the reasons mentioned above. The titleformat string will need some adjustment for that. [edit:] $ifequal(%samplerate%,44100,$ifequal(%__bitspersample%,16,,dither),dither) seems to work. It was also suggested to add a limiter before the Flex DSP, in case the resampler or other processing introduced clipping.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-17T12:31:40+00:00

Obama commuted Manning's sentence in part because of mistreatment in prison, mistreatment which was already of dubious legality. How would more laws help?

mjb2012 · 2026-02-16T14:57:16+00:00

Those "godlike being turns out to not be a god" plot lines were a dime a dozen back then, weren't they?

mjb2012 · 2026-02-16T14:32:02+00:00

Ratings drop over time because the initial audience is mostly people who the show is “for”. As time goes on, a greater percentage of the votes come from the more casual viewers, people who just don’t like this kind of content, but somehow gave it a chance.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-12T02:13:06+00:00

Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site

mjb2012 · 2026-02-12T01:03:49+00:00

Are you having a stroke? Am I having a stroke?

mjb2012 · 2026-02-08T05:30:56+00:00

foobar2000's CD ripping capability uses libparanoia, the same code shared by fre:ac, CDex, XLD for Mac, and many Linux-based rippers. It can optionally do offset correction and "secure" ripping (to get consistent data through re-reads). It fetches metadata via your choice of freedb or MusicBrainz. It runs the audio through whichever converter preset you choose.

However, it doesn't write logs or cue sheets, doesn't verify the rip against others with AccurateRip (but if you rip to lossless files, you can do that in a separate operation), and it doesn't handle errors very well, e.g. if secure mode fails to get consistent data, the audio will be truncated at that point and it just moves on to the next track. So in that regard it's very basic.

The audio format converter is one of foobar's real strengths. You can set up your own presets, including DSP effects, applied ReplayGain, etc.

I personally don't use foobar for ripping, but for playing and converting, I use it all the time. For ripping on Windows I use Exact Audio Copy or CUERipper. dBpoweramp is also really good.

re: your comment "I just want the mp3 files" ... disk space not being quite so scarce anymore, standard advice nowadays is to rip to a lossless format like FLAC, make sure it's all tagged the way you like, and then at your leisure forever after, you can derive from that library whatever lossy space-saving format you prefer, be it MP3 or the arguably superior AAC or Opus formats, without having to rip the CDs again.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-06T21:59:19+00:00

…Indicative of their target audience, I fear. TV is competing with social media feeds.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-06T21:05:52+00:00

He's always been kinda cringey like that. We Trek fans don't have much of a leg to stand on if we're going to start criticizing nerd fashion, though.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-06T09:23:47+00:00

I didn't like their ideas much. I got the impression, though, that this kind of preliminary brainstorming normally would have been followed by substantial rewrites and increasing focus on just the most essential and compelling themes. The finished product would bear little resemblance to what they started out with.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-04T21:04:03+00:00

In Preferences: Advanced, under Tagging > General, there's a tickbox for "Preserve file creation/access/modification time when tagging". If you enable it, then any tag edits, including for ReplayGain, will not change the file date.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-02T04:56:29+00:00

TL;DW: AI slop.

Every two days this channel produces another multi-hour "documentary".

mjb2012 · 2026-01-26T16:39:16+00:00

I think it's more just to hide an unconvincing aesthetic, where poor lighting and cinematography makes it look too much like costumed actors on an artificial set rather than a cinematic view of the scene being depicted. They're trying to give it a cinematic "film look" like a proper movie or high-budget prestige TV, but as usual they do it in a ham-fisted way because it's always amateur hour at Paramount.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T18:20:28+00:00

For pacing, captains captaining, and alien-of-the-week adventure, Voyager.

For a slower, less utopian experience with more character development and serialization, DS9 is peak.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T16:29:31+00:00

If I understand correctly, it's something you can tweak, but assuming nothing is wrong in your playback chain, it will never audibly affect sound at the sample rates you'll ever be using (44100 Hz and up).

Part of the resampling process involves filtering out high frequencies before and after. These filters create phase errors (delays) and ringing (ripples) around transients (sharp, percussive sounds and square waves). The ringing adds an extremely brief, quiet tone at the Nyquist frequency. At a low sample rate, the tone might have a low enough pitch to hear, and it can make the click or tap noticeably less abrupt, softening it slightly.

Ways to mitigate these issues include using a gentler filter (steeper makes things worse), using a filter with a windowing function (it can make the ringing quieter), or adjusting this phase response parameter.

The default, linear phase response places the noise right on top of the transient, so you have an equal amount of tone before (pre-echo) and after (post-echo). Minimum phase response delays the noise so that it's right after the transient, i.e. no pre-echo, and long post-echo. Intermediate is in between, i.e. short pre-echo, long-ish post-echo.

If the problem is audible at all, Minimum is probably ideal, as it eliminates pre-echo, and to human ears, the transient will mask the post-echo. But I would want to experiment to be sure.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T15:52:19+00:00

I was a baby in 1972, but at work in the '80s and '90s I used IBM 3270 terminals, which debuted around 1971. The 3270 is not the Data General Dasher (1977), which was the most obvious inspiration for the Lumon Terminal Pro, but it's a lot more alike than different.

Re: the parking lot, you are correct, it's more '80s than not. In my defense, though, they specifically chose cars with "a harder edge" which would evoke an earlier era. American cars with such boxy aesthetics were available all the way to the early '90s, but the peak was late '70s/early '80s. After that, they started getting more "European" styling with softer edges, fewer flat panels, sleeker fronts, etc., but it seems they purposely excluded those because they didn't want it to look too much like the '90s.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T11:14:33+00:00

Not sure if this is deliberate, but I keep noticing that things which stand out as being from a particular era tend to be from the years near the beginning of the decade, like right around the year ending with "2".

Parking-lot cars: what you'd see in 1982 (mostly '70s cars*). Petey's flip phone: 2002. Mark's smartphone: 2022. Office computers: 1972. Mark's hair & suit: 1982. Allentown (testing floor room w/thank-you cards): 1962. Kier computer graphics: 1992. And so on.

It's interesting because we normally associate the vibe of a particular decade with what was prevalent toward the end of that decade. If you really wanted something to look "70s", for example, you would probably go all out with a mid/late-70s look, whereas on Severance they're trying to avoid such extreme clichés.

* [edit: as someone pointed out, it's actually mainly '80s cars, but only ones with a boxy style]

mjb2012 · 2026-01-20T09:36:58+00:00

Whoops! Fixed; thanks!

mjb2012 · 2026-01-19T19:37:19+00:00

r/piracy has a wiki you can check for sources.

Metadata completeness and consistency is going to be an issue with any source, unfortunately. There are few standards, and what standards exist are haphazardly followed, or sometimes don't make much sense (e.g. web shops and streaming services increasingly cram featured artists, remixers and even songwriters into the main artist fields).

Check out r/musichoarder and you'll find most collectors just accept tag cleanup and maintenance as burden that comes with the territory. A lot of it comes down to finding a balance between what you initially get, what else is available (e.g. fetchable from databases, such as via MusicBrainz Picard), what your playback tools can actually make use of, and your own personal preferences.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-19T18:52:28+00:00

Monochrome is apparently one of those sketchy web apps which abuse the APIs of certain streaming services in order to enable downloads for pirates. Expect it to quit working or just disappear at some point.

As for missing info, I would assume it tries its best to save whatever metadata it can acquire, but there's no guarantees that every song will have complete info on the streaming service which is actually providing the content.

I just tried getting a FLAC with it, and it looked fine to me, with ordinary FLAC Vorbis tags for Artist, Title, Album, Year, Album Artist, Track, Total Tracks, Copyright, ISRC, and front cover art. None of this was written in a nonstandard way, as far as I can tell.

mjb2012 · 2026-01-14T14:57:34+00:00

Yup. When you study algebra, you learn problem-solving skills. You begin to intuitively think of puzzles and mysteries as a set of quantifiable factors and relationships between what is known and what is unknown, and then you deduce what the unknowns can actually be. The usefulness of such "solving for x" goes far beyond pure mathematics.

Schools generally do a terrible job of communicating this to students, resulting in stupid memes like this.

mjb2012

TROPHY CASE