Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
-
[Frank Gothmann] “Avid doesn’t rely on QT internally, but you need to output your content at a certain point and that is pretty much QT in Avid. No avi wrapper for DnxHD, only QT. Reference files rely on QT etc. etc. Same for Premiere. Neither DnxHD, Prores or Cineform exist on Linux so unless you want to export as uncompressed and up your storage space bigtime its a problem.”
What about MXF? I thought that was Avid’s native DNxHD container these days. DaVinci supports DNxHD on Linux. FFmpeg can be called upon to encode and convert almost anything, including DNxHD (which is open source).
I don’t think the barriers are that high.
Best,
Andy -
[Tim Wilson] “I found 4 of ’em in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Prices start at $100. My recommendation: Matrox MXO2, which has lots of other dandy features. More than $100, but more than worth it. :-)”
I thought you were referring to some kind of Thunderbolt PCIe card for adding the interface to a PC that doesn’t have it on the motherboard.
From your previous post:
[Tim Wilson] “Yeah, yeah, I get the convenience of having it on the motherboard. , I also get why people are loathe to think about expanding their Macs — it’s a pain, and there’s so little room to grow that it would be silly to think about wasting one of those opportunities on low-grade I/O.
The Z workstations, though, have a ton of expansion options, and it’s all done without. No tools – not for swapping out motherboards, power supplies, RAM or anything else, including opening the box. Sure as sh^t not for something as simple as adding Thunderbolt.”
That is not what the MXO2 is. And to my knowledge there are no Thunderbolt PCIe cards. Intel said when they launched the technology last year that the Thunderbolt controller needed direct access to the PCH and thus could not be added as a card.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “You mean on a theoretical Linux port?
Well, no.
Another reason that it’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
ffmpeg isn’t an OS API, it is an open source reverse-engineered codec processing framework. It does include an API, libavcodec. ffmpeg is also available for OS X, by the way. I don’t know if it is used by any NLE on any platform (unless you count Cinelerra).
Adobe in particular with Mercury Engine and it’s reliance on NVIDIA is in an easier position to port (I imagine), since it is calling NVIDIA APIs and NVIDIA certainly supports Linux. It is the fact that Avid and Adobe do not rely on an OS vendor for playback and media processing that makes them good candidates for porting.
Best,
Andy -
-
Yeah, it can be used to support play back and transcode for a bunch of formats, but I don’t think Avid’s playback engine or Adobe’s Mercury Engine rely on it to do what they do within the respective NLEs.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I thought ffmpeg takes care of that, sorta?”
Does it? For who?
Best,
Andy -
[Bret Williams] “Well, since Thunderbolt was and is the future, I’ve been waiting for them to ADD it to the towers so I could buy one.”
Thunderbolt is the future of I/O for space-constrained devices. PCIe is vastly more powerful though, and if a new Mac Pro totally eschews PCIe in favor of the much slower Thunderbolt for I/O, it will be bitterly disappointing.
[Bret Williams] “I’m not buying a MacPro without esata and thunderbolt. It’s not the processors, it’s the whole package.”
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Thunderbolt on a Mac Pro (hopefully not in place of PCIe slots), but I’d be shocked to see built-in eSATA. Apple’s had that available to build in for almost a decade and they never have.
Best,
Andy -
[Tim Wilson] “I doubt it….but it wouldn’t matter. You can buy a Thunderbolt adapter for $150 today.”
Where? Who makes it? Have a link?
[Tim Wilson] “Tell that to iOS, my friend. LOL (Yes, literally, actually laughing out loud.)”
iOS is only distributed on touch devices. Have you got it running on a desktop?
[Tim Wilson] “The point isn’t a tablet OS on the desktop for either company. The point is to have one iOS everywhere. Or, perhaps more accurately, getting rid of the current notion of an OS altogether.”
Is it? What do you base that statement on? Apple has demonstrated commitment to two parallel OSes (i.e. Mountain Lion, committing to an annual rev cycle for OS X). Microsoft is the one trying to cram it all into one package with Windows 8. The desktop is a second class citizen. Windows 8 always seems to want me in Metro.
Best,
Andy -
[Frank Gothmann] “Metro on a Desktop machine is stupid and I’d rather not have it but it’s one click on a tile and I am on the windows desktop as it used to be.”
But with no Start Menu, you are slammed right back into Metro to do anything, though I suppose you can just saturate your task bar with the software you use most of the time and try to avoid the Start Screen.
[Frank Gothmann] “Avid/Adobe on Linux – unfortunately I can’t see that happening. Too much that would need to be tweaked to bring functionality on par with the other OSes, Apple would have to port Quicktime to Linux (and Quicktime is dead) etc. etc.”
Do you mean tweaking of Linux or tweaking of the apps? Neither Adobe nor Avid rely on QuickTime. They both have their own playback engines. Pro Res would be out though.
Best,
Andy -
From the new iPad’s tech specs (emphasis mine):
Video formats supported: H.264 video up to 1080p, 30 frames per second, High Profile level 4.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format
…which happen to be the exact same video playback specs as the iPad 2.Best,
Andy