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ATP

159: A Typo On Your Brake Pads

 

00:00:00   every single person on Twitter is telling me

00:00:04   about the Bernie Sanders fish thing.

00:00:06   Didn't that happen like a day or two ago?

00:00:07   I don't know.

00:00:08   - Well, you can lump them in with all the people

00:00:11   telling me about the latest aftermarket Ferrari

00:00:14   with my name on it.

00:00:15   - We gotta talk about that.

00:00:16   This could be our pre-show neutral.

00:00:18   There is a Ferrari, now how do they say it?

00:00:21   Is it Syracuse or do they say it a different way?

00:00:24   - This is not a new thing.

00:00:25   this company has done this to every mid-engine V8 Ferrari for like the past three generations.

00:00:32   Like it's not, they always look yellow and black, they're always kind of gaudy, they

00:00:36   always have that same name.

00:00:37   They always have the name "Saracusa"?

00:00:38   Yeah, well, it's some, what's the first part, so it's an M or something?

00:00:42   Masonry.

00:00:43   It's like an aftermarket tuner, like, uh, like, uh...

00:00:45   Like Ruff?

00:00:46   Yeah, or, uh, what's the BMW almost, what's the D?

00:00:48   Dinan, Dinan, I don't know how it's said.

00:00:50   Dinan is how I've always pronounced it.

00:00:51   It's pronounced "Saracusa".

00:00:52   for Mustangs and, you know, anyway, they do this all the time, but you know, every time

00:00:58   it comes out, someone sees it for the first time and they tell me about it.

00:01:02   I've never seen this before. You have? I have sent you the picture of,

00:01:05   like, the 458 version. I've never seen it either.

00:01:08   I'm telling you, I don't think you've said this the last time.

00:01:10   I think I also sent you the – maybe the one – I didn't know you before that, but

00:01:14   you've seen it before. Mm-hmm.

00:01:15   All right, so it's just like an aftermarket modder that mods and resells messed up Ferraris

00:01:21   with your name on them?

00:01:22   >> JEAN-MICHELLE DERIENZO-MARTIN Yep. Cool. All right.

00:01:23   >> JEAN-MICHELLE DERIENZO-MARTIN And there are—and there are always yellow and black,

00:01:25   which some people find gaudy, so do I. Like, I would never pick those colors, but I don't

00:01:29   think they're as hideous as a lot of people do. I mean, it's like, if you're going

00:01:31   to go yellow and black, it's sure as hell as yellow and black, isn't it? I mean, it's

00:01:35   like the, you know, lime green Lamborghinis or whatever. Like, some people—some people

00:01:38   like that for their exotic cars.

00:01:40   >> JEAN-MICHELLE DERIENZO-MARTIN Out of curiosity, so like, kind of like the

00:01:42   passed the John test here. If you were given one of these, would you sell it for a different

00:01:47   one? Or would you keep this one?

00:01:49   - Sell, sell, sell, sell.

00:01:50   - Okay.

00:01:51   (laughing)

00:01:52   - Because like, I mean, you'd get good money for it. It would have no miles on it. It would

00:01:56   be brand new. And these specially modified ones, like they do, people who want this,

00:02:00   you know, they're all lightened and have extra carbon fiber in them and all this stuff, you'd

00:02:03   get good money for it. You could buy a standard. I would rather have a box stock boring red

00:02:08   one than this.

00:02:10   You know, I like to think in my peaceful, happy place in my mind that people who would

00:02:16   have the means to buy a Ferrari like this would have better taste than to choose this

00:02:22   one.

00:02:23   But I don't think it's that bad.

00:02:25   I don't think it's untasteful.

00:02:27   For example, I think the baby food, metallic orange, weird, mustardy kind of yellow BMWs

00:02:35   are unpleasing.

00:02:37   this looks like a matchbox car. If you're going for that look, don't go halfway. If

00:02:44   you want to have fins and flares and extreme contrasting colors, this is that, and it is

00:02:50   a reasonable execution of that. I think it is a valid aesthetic. It's like the old difference

00:02:56   between Lamborghini and Ferrari. Lamborghini was always how many intakes and ducts and

00:03:02   sharp angles and fins and wedges and stuff when we put on there, and Ferrari was a little

00:03:06   bit smoother, and this is kind of like taking a Ferrari and going in the Lamborghini direction.

00:03:10   So I don't think it's actually ugly. I just think it's too loud for my taste, but I think

00:03:15   it is a competent execution of that style.

00:03:18   So if you were given one, immediately sell?

00:03:21   Yep. I think I would too.

00:03:23   I absolutely would, but my—

00:03:25   I mean, it's worth good money. Like, you would get more money than selling a regular

00:03:28   one, because it is more rare, and it has desirable characteristics for people who want to race

00:03:33   them or whatever you want to do with this thing.

00:03:34   I don't know, sometimes mods make something less valuable. I would venture to say that

00:03:39   most mods make cars less valuable.

00:03:42   For aftermarket things, like again, if you got a BMW with a bunch of aftermarket modifications,

00:03:47   that is desirable for anyone who wants an aftermarket modified BMW. They will give you

00:03:51   more money than a fresh off the lot stock BMW.

00:03:55   When I did buy a used BMW, I specifically sought one out that was unmodified. And then

00:04:03   When I went, I had to drive to Maryland to see the one I found, and the windows were

00:04:08   all tinted.

00:04:09   I'm like, "Oh, shit.

00:04:10   I didn't want that."

00:04:11   But I figured that's easy to undo, so I bought that one, brought it home, and immediately

00:04:16   brought it to a tint place to remove all the tint.

00:04:18   I didn't know that.

00:04:19   Is that right?

00:04:20   Yeah, yeah.

00:04:21   That was the one.

00:04:22   Well, it was chipped also.

00:04:23   It was ECU modded.

00:04:24   So, I don't know.

00:04:25   I'm not a modder, so I don't really understand the whole deal with it or the whole culture

00:04:30   behind it.

00:04:31   So I just assume that it's just not for me.

00:04:33   - Well, you know, it depends on what you're after, right?

00:04:36   Like, I agree with you that I would never, ever, ever

00:04:39   buy a car that I've known to be modified.

00:04:42   But that being said, I put a chip in my car,

00:04:46   which is to say, I mean, I say put a chip in it.

00:04:49   It's all software, you know, there's no physical bits to it.

00:04:52   But I did that to my car.

00:04:54   I have a Cobb on it, and I like it, but--

00:04:58   - A what? - It's a Cobb.

00:04:59   It's COBB. It's the company that has a box that lets you reprogram the computer.

00:05:08   And so that's what I've done to my car. And it's better, for sure. It's faster, and I

00:05:11   like it. But I wouldn't say that it's night and day better. And this is the first car

00:05:16   I can remember that I've done any sort of real modification to. I've never tinted a

00:05:20   car even though I kind of would like to, but eh, it's not worth it. I've never put aftermarket

00:05:25   wheels on a car. Oof, not worth that.

00:05:28   You should have seen how ridiculous I looked getting out of a car with black tinted windows.

00:05:33   I actually kind of am sad that I didn't.

00:05:36   It lasted less than a week.

00:05:38   That was literally the first thing I did when I brought her home.

00:05:41   I drove it home and I think that same day I called a tint place to schedule an appointment

00:05:45   to get it taken off.

00:05:46   That's not surprising.

00:05:47   Jon, have you ever done any sort of mods to your car?

00:05:50   No, but if I did, I would do the ones like the ones of those day aftermarket tuners that

00:05:54   that I described before, where they do things that try to make the car better.

00:06:00   So lightweight parts, take some part that's heavy and put in a part that is equally strong

00:06:03   but lighter.

00:06:04   That's always good, right?

00:06:06   Or inside the engine, if you could change titanium connecting rods to increase the red

00:06:11   line or whatever.

00:06:13   Those type of modifications seem to be more significant.

00:06:16   Exactly the same things that the M Division does that AMG does or whatever.

00:06:21   that actually make the car better in whatever way you want to make the car better. Less

00:06:26   window tinting and custom paint and ground effects and more of the things that the manufacturer

00:06:32   would do to make the car better. Indeed. Alright, well I'm sad that you would not be a fan of

00:06:39   the Ferrari Syracuse. I don't know what, I mean if the roles were reversed and that was

00:06:43   the Ferrari list, I mean how could you not? Although that would be a terrible name. It's

00:06:46   nice that it has your name all over the thing, but it just, I don't know, that's not what

00:06:50   I want to have a Ferrari. I want it to be red. Call me crazy. What would a Ferrari list

00:06:54   be? I don't even know. Oh, of course! It'd be white. That's it. We're done. Same as it

00:07:03   ever was. You'd get the four-wheel drive one, right? The ugly four-wheel drive one. Oh,

00:07:07   would you two stop? That's what you want. Yeah, that's it. Alright, can we move on to

00:07:12   follow-up? I probably should have done some research about the mono-xamarin confusion,

00:07:19   And we got a handful of emails about this, and I promptly looked at them and said, "Yeah,

00:07:24   it's whatever."

00:07:25   And then I archived them.

00:07:27   Do you want to take a stab, Jon, to explain?

00:07:29   I was going to stop you when you were saying it during this show, but I figured just to

00:07:32   let it slide in normally cares.

00:07:34   But apparently a lot of people care.

00:07:35   I don't know all the details of this, but I at least know that Mono was the name—was

00:07:39   not interchangeable with Xamarin.

00:07:40   Xamarin was a company name, Mono was the name of the open source implementation of .NET,

00:07:45   they're related to each other, but it's not as if Mono became Xamarin.

00:07:50   Some people wrote us things that we talked about on previous shows, that what Xamarin

00:07:53   was doing was making a way for you to write iOS applications by writing in C# to use their

00:07:57   framework and you could deploy to iOS and other platforms and stuff, and Microsoft buying

00:08:01   them, gives them a company that lets you write applications in C# and have them run on more

00:08:06   than just Windows Phone.

00:08:08   Didn't we have a whole show where we talked about that?

00:08:11   What it would be like to write an iOS app in C#?

00:08:15   talked about it a long time ago, so long ago that it's not likely I'm going to bother putting

00:08:19   it in the show notes.

00:08:20   Yeah, but anyway, I think the only people who care are people who already know the intricacies

00:08:24   better than we do, and the people who don't, we can just leave it at, if you want to know

00:08:30   more details about it, look it up. What we said on the last show was a little bit muddled.

00:08:35   But then again, this whole thing I feel like is a little bit muddled, like trying to figure

00:08:38   out what they're doing with this technology, what products does Xamarin have now versus

00:08:42   what is Microsoft buying? They're buying the people, the expertise, do they care, how much

00:08:47   do they care about the products that the company has now versus the company that Microsoft

00:08:51   wants them to build or maybe take what they've already built and modified in one way or another.

00:08:55   And there was this flurry of stories about it. You mentioned something, 2KZ, like the

00:08:59   past few weeks about Microsoft's various projects to let people run applications from other

00:09:07   mobile platforms on Windows Mobile, so like, you know, take your iOS app and run it on

00:09:12   Windows Phone or on Windows 10 or whatever, and we'll run Android apps, or you'll be able

00:09:18   to recompile your Android apps for Windows Phone. I forgot what they were called. Weren't

00:09:23   they all the kinds of like woods, island wood, pine wood, anyway. Obviously we're not keeping

00:09:30   up on all these various projects. A couple of them were canned recently, a couple of

00:09:34   them live on. It's all part of Microsoft's ongoing struggle to figure out how to take

00:09:39   what is by all accounts a reasonable mobile platform, at least as reasonable as Android,

00:09:44   certainly better than Android was in Android's early days, and try to find a way to make

00:09:49   it viable in the market. Because at this point, Android and iOS have so much momentum that

00:09:56   they're just trying to, you know, trying to get customers, trying to get developers. It's

00:10:01   the really tough chicken egg situation that Apple found itself in with the Mac where the

00:10:07   PC just came to dominate and no matter how much better the Mac was, it was just difficult

00:10:11   to get people to develop for it. And one of the strategies people suggested is, oh, Mac

00:10:16   should run Windows programs or it should be easy to write a program for Windows and port

00:10:20   that program to the Mac. And Apple steadfastly held against that saying, no, we don't want

00:10:25   like we don't want people to, we know that might get people to port their applications

00:10:29   those would be crappy Windows ports. We want people to write real Mac applications and

00:10:34   be real Mac developers and do everything the right way. Was that a mistake? Would it have

00:10:40   made no difference? I don't know. It's what Apple did. It's certainly kind of the high

00:10:44   road. Microsoft is kind of trying everything at this point. What if we make it easier for

00:10:48   you to take your iOS application and use some or all of that work to get that same application

00:10:55   running on Windows? Would that help get developers? What if we will run Android apps period? Just

00:10:59   will take the binaries and run them somehow magically. Like, all sorts of ideas to try

00:11:03   to get some traction in the market. To my eyes, as someone who supported Apple's decisions,

00:11:10   not to license Mac OS and everything back in the days, I think those efforts are not

00:11:15   going to help them, but at least they're trying, right?

00:11:18   Yeah, I mean, I guess. So yeah, I'm sorry to the people who are really into Mono and

00:11:23   and Xamarin and this whole ecosystem.

00:11:26   I, like Jon said, it's fairly confusing for me

00:11:29   since I don't live and breathe it to keep it all apart.

00:11:31   And I'm sorry I got that a little bit screwed up.

00:11:35   - I'm sorry to both Windows phone users

00:11:36   for saying something wrong about your platform.

00:11:38   (laughing)

00:11:40   - Please email Marco.

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00:12:57   - So Apple made an oops in the last week.

00:13:01   - Oh, geez, this is bad.

00:13:03   This is so bad.

00:13:05   - It's not that bad, it's funny.

00:13:07   - It's bad.

00:13:08   - The fix was really easy.

00:13:10   All right, so what are we talking about here?

00:13:11   Casey, you're the summarizer.

00:13:13   - I am the summarizer in chief, am I not?

00:13:16   So my understanding of the situation was,

00:13:19   Apple has a mechanism by way they can

00:13:21   blacklist kernel extensions.

00:13:24   And I can't think of any particular examples offhand,

00:13:26   but there are times when a kernel extension will go bad

00:13:29   and they can blacklist it and--

00:13:30   - It's usually used for malware.

00:13:32   Like if they discover some kind of

00:13:33   kernel extension malware,

00:13:35   I think the intention of this system

00:13:37   is for them to be able to very quickly disable it

00:13:41   on all Macs globally within a very short amount of time.

00:13:44   And the other example I think of is the one from this thing,

00:13:47   which is if they have a new version of an extension

00:13:50   because they know the old one, how they can exploit,

00:13:52   or something like their own kernel extensions,

00:13:54   they wanna blacklist the old one

00:13:56   so that people's Macs aren't exploitable

00:13:59   because they'll give you a new one.

00:14:00   Here, use this new one.

00:14:02   And then, by the way, make sure the old one

00:14:03   isn't ever loaded again

00:14:04   'cause we know there's a problem with that one.

00:14:05   - Yep. - Right.

00:14:06   And this extends, like we're having clarification

00:14:08   from tips from the chat room,

00:14:09   this extends also to binaries, to apps.

00:14:12   If they can blacklist any binary

00:14:14   that is deemed malware.

00:14:16   And so it really is a very good feature for malware

00:14:20   to prevent the spread of it

00:14:21   and to disable stuff that gets out there.

00:14:23   So it's a good feature that I'm glad it's there.

00:14:27   However, they messed something up this time.

00:14:29   - Yeah, so it's important to note

00:14:31   that these blacklist entries can ride

00:14:35   without doing a formal software update.

00:14:38   Of course, it's still some sort of software update

00:14:41   that's happening behind the scenes,

00:14:42   But the key is that it's happening behind the scenes.

00:14:45   And so without any user intervention, you can just have this update, this blacklist

00:14:50   update happen to you, and things that are blacklisted will just magically go away.

00:14:56   Well, I didn't really think much of this, or maybe I didn't even know about it, but

00:15:00   then a few days ago, I could swear I saw Jason Snell saying, "All of a sudden my iMac's

00:15:06   Ethernet port isn't working anymore.

00:15:09   Is anyone else seeing this?

00:15:10   What's going on here?"

00:15:12   Mine was working on my night on my iMac so I didn't think much of it and then fast forward about 24 hours

00:15:17   And it turns out that Apple blacklisted their own ethernet driver

00:15:22   Whoops without shipping a replacement because that was that's that's my understanding is that's where this went wrong

00:15:29   They had a new version of this driver. It's coming with like 1011 for or whatever which is not out yet. I think still

00:15:34   And

00:15:38   So they blacklisted the old one and there you know

00:15:41   You're supposed to get the blacklist at the same time you get the upgrade to the new one

00:15:43   But instead the blacklist for the old one went out

00:15:45   But the upgrade to the new one did not

00:15:47   So if you're Jason Snell all of a sudden your Mac appears not to have an Ethernet port or however this manifested like basically

00:15:52   Ethernet is not going to go because the kernel extension will not be loaded and you have no replacement

00:15:57   Yeah, and and the end they did within I don't know a few hours

00:16:02   Maybe like they did fairly quickly

00:16:04   fix that with the next version of the definitions

00:16:08   that it downloads, but that didn't do you any good

00:16:11   if you rebooted in the meantime there

00:16:14   and then you had no ethernet

00:16:15   with which to download that update.

00:16:17   And not to mention the fact that I think

00:16:20   it's not like it comes up and tells you error dialogue.

00:16:24   Hey, your ethernet kernel extension is no longer working

00:16:27   because we deemed it insecure.

00:16:28   They don't tell you anything.

00:16:29   It just fails silently.

00:16:30   Your ethernet just disappears if you reboot.

00:16:33   these software updates, they happen facelessly,

00:16:35   behind the scenes, you don't see them,

00:16:36   they don't go through, there's no spinner,

00:16:39   there's no dialogue, there's no thing popping up,

00:16:41   there's no, oh, I see the Mac App Store launching,

00:16:43   none of that happens, it just magically gets updated.

00:16:45   - Yeah, and as far as I know, you can't disable it, right?

00:16:48   - You probably can, you can disable anything.

00:16:49   - I mean, you could firewall it,

00:16:50   but there's no setting to not do those, right?

00:16:54   - Probably just rename the binary that it uses

00:16:57   if it doesn't use Software Update D or whatever.

00:17:00   There's always ways to stop this stuff,

00:17:01   but yeah, in general, for the regular person,

00:17:02   there is no way, there is no button or checkbox

00:17:04   or preference pane for you to not do that.

00:17:06   - Right, and I mean, so the good thing is,

00:17:08   like, at least it didn't also affect Wi-Fi,

00:17:11   so that probably cut down substantially

00:17:13   on the number of computers that were affected by this.

00:17:15   - 'Cause who uses E-SNN, right?

00:17:17   - Yeah, well, he's like us, and a lot of people,

00:17:20   it turns out, but I think what's most concerning

00:17:23   about this, like, look, no one's perfect,

00:17:26   but it just seems like this, to me,

00:17:29   feels a lot like the same kind of problem

00:17:31   as the whole Mac App Store certificate expiration problem

00:17:35   that happened twice in the last few months,

00:17:38   just the latter one seemed to only happen to developers,

00:17:40   but where it just seems like there's this really critical

00:17:45   function of the system that something seemingly

00:17:49   just rushed out there without being tested

00:17:51   or with some degree of carelessness.

00:17:53   And it doesn't bode well for the Mac

00:17:56   when Apple seems to not be devoting the resources

00:18:00   to what should be their most stable, secure platform.

00:18:04   The Mac should be a rock.

00:18:06   It should be rock stable because it is mature.

00:18:09   It's not changing that quickly anymore.

00:18:11   It's not like, it isn't like iOS

00:18:13   where things are moving really fast

00:18:14   and there's constantly new stuff.

00:18:16   It's the rock.

00:18:17   It should be stable.

00:18:19   And the fact that they're doing things like this

00:18:22   with some kind of failure in the process

00:18:25   where things are getting out

00:18:26   that break things pretty badly like this,

00:18:29   it really makes me concerned for the process they have in place to validate these things

00:18:35   and to test for these things and for the overall amount of resources that they're giving

00:18:41   the Mac. Because everything we keep hearing from people inside the company is that basically

00:18:45   whenever there's like a new hot project engineers get moved around like crazy. Like

00:18:49   there's constantly like engineers getting pulled off of certain projects or going to

00:18:52   work at a more interesting group or whatever else. It seems like there's lots of internal

00:18:56   moving the people around, and that often leaves things effectively staffless. And it feels

00:19:03   to me from the outside like most of the Mac is effectively staffless. And that's concerning

00:19:09   to me as, and because what happens then when things are staffless like this inside Apple,

00:19:16   what tends to happen is at some point, you know, a year later, somebody dictates, "Hey,

00:19:21   we need to have a new version of OS X with 10 new features or 100 new features or whatever,"

00:19:26   And then people kind of get temporarily brought in

00:19:28   and they do this kind of like drive-by work

00:19:31   and then they go back to other stuff.

00:19:32   And again, I don't know if this is how it works,

00:19:34   but this is how it feels.

00:19:35   And this kind of matches up

00:19:36   with a little bit of things we've heard.

00:19:38   And so it just seems like,

00:19:40   it seems like Apple does not dedicate resources full-time

00:19:44   to things that I think need full-time resources.

00:19:49   And that to me is very concerning.

00:19:52   - I don't know what to make of it.

00:19:53   I mean, on the one side I feel like Apple's job as a hardware and software vendor is not

00:20:00   to make this mistake.

00:20:01   But just like we were talking about with the police officers earlier, everyone's human,

00:20:05   everyone makes mistakes.

00:20:06   I don't know if it's fair for us to try to assume what happened.

00:20:13   I mean, I don't know if this is somebody dropped the ball, I don't know if this is somebody

00:20:17   hit a button a little too early accidentally.

00:20:19   It doesn't really matter.

00:20:21   But certainly a lot of what we've talked about in a couple of different subjects over the

00:20:25   last few episodes of the show is perception.

00:20:28   And when we're already of the perception that Apple doesn't have the attention to detail

00:20:33   that they used to, things like this don't—doesn't really help.

00:20:38   Similarly, you know, another similar example is Stephen Hackett noticing just the other

00:20:44   day—and I don't know how I never noticed this—that there's a really kind of crummy

00:20:50   and semi-aggregious typo in disk utility.

00:20:54   And he says at the bottom of this post, "While this may seem silly" — because this is just

00:20:59   a typo, it's not like functionally broken — "while this may seem silly, it's this attention

00:21:03   to detail stuff that worries me about Apple software."

00:21:07   And that's, I think, why we're harping on this, is because Apple — companies of this

00:21:14   size and companies that tout how much they pay attention to detail, they shouldn't

00:21:23   really make mistakes like these. And if they do, they shouldn't be often. And granted,

00:21:28   blacklisting an Ethernet driver is very, very different than transposing a couple of words

00:21:32   in Disk Utility. But…

00:21:33   Jared Ranerelle Well, but you know what? Like Disk Utility,

00:21:35   like, first of all, like, that was part of a big Disk Utility update and redesign that

00:21:40   probably didn't need to happen. I don't know, I'm not familiar with the logic that

00:21:43   the way in behind it, but it's a system utility that got basically a redesign that

00:21:48   removed a bunch of features and made it look nicer. Only geeks were ever using this. This

00:21:53   doesn't need to be made nicer in a way that negatively affected it. It's like you don't

00:21:59   want disk utility of all things to have a drive-by sloppily done update. A typo in disk

00:22:05   utility is like a typo on your break pads. You really don't want any signs of carelessness

00:22:12   in that.

00:22:13   And so it just, it worries me that it just seems like

00:22:17   nothing is off limits for carelessness with the Mac

00:22:21   and with what Apple's working on.

00:22:24   And again, like, so many people, us included,

00:22:28   depend on this platform to be stable and to be our rock

00:22:33   where we get our work done, it doesn't move that fast

00:22:36   anymore but we don't care, it's, this is the stability here

00:22:40   in an industry where all the mobile stuff is always up in the air and always crazy and

00:22:45   everything's constantly in beta, at best we get to like a point two or point three

00:22:50   point release on things before we get the next new version that's a total mess again.

00:22:55   At least the Mac should be stable. It should be the rock. It should not be getting careless

00:23:01   updates or careless actions and it should not be short staffed.

00:23:06   I don't know, I think the Ethernet driver, I don't consider that a big deal because

00:23:09   like think of how long this mechanism has existed and think of how many times they've

00:23:13   messed it up.

00:23:14   Like this is the only time I can think of that they've messed it up and it's existed

00:23:16   for a long time and it was fixed very easily and it's very simple.

00:23:19   So I totally give them a pass on that one.

00:23:22   I'm reminded of like, you guys don't remember this, Mac OS 754, or System 754, sorry, it

00:23:28   was not Mac OS 754, I blame the internet for that, that they had basically two versions

00:23:33   of like that it reached golden master back in the days when that actually meant something

00:23:37   because they would print floppy disks and stuff and then they had to stop and say oh

00:23:41   no actually we made a mistake and here's the new new version but some of the old version

00:23:46   got out so for a certain period of time there were multiple official binaries of system

00:23:53   7.5.4 and floppy disks floating around or you couldn't be sure exactly which one you

00:23:57   had because they all just said 7.5.4 and they didn't have build numbers visible to users

00:24:01   at that time so anyway stuff like that happens.

00:24:03   It's not a big deal.

00:24:04   The Mac App Store certificate signing thing, I think that is emblematic of like, well,

00:24:09   this is supposed to be a major feature and you have the iOS App Store and it's the type

00:24:13   of thing that is really complicated and hard to get right and requires forethought and

00:24:17   care and like it's not so simple as like, oops, well, we'll just wait, you know, and

00:24:22   another silent update will fix this.

00:24:23   Lots of people were left in situations where their apps wouldn't launch and all that stuff.

00:24:26   That I think shows a lack of investment in the Mac of like not being prepared for that

00:24:32   that eventuality because like because if you think of something like that happen on the

00:24:34   iPhone and then for the same period of time the same percentage of iPhone users would

00:24:37   tap icons in their phones and nothing would launch that would be just a disaster of epic

00:24:41   proportions I mean and in some degree it's like well the iPhone sells more that's why

00:24:44   it gets more attention or whatever but yeah we all think there should be a little bit

00:24:48   more care on the Mac and the disk utility one disk utility is the least of disk systems

00:24:53   problems I think it did it did need a GUI refresh this GUI refresh is not a great GUI

00:24:59   refresh but I don't think anyone would care that much if it wasn't for the two

00:25:03   things that Marco mentioned. Removing features, which is like I was using that

00:25:07   like you know you haven't replaced it with anything there's no promise of

00:25:11   being replaced for anything the old thing worked why is it gone with no

00:25:16   explanation so removing features is bad and then having I should put a link the

00:25:20   show notes but someone linked to something I think was MJ sigh again

00:25:25   Linking to the story that Casey was just talking about, about the typo, but just saying like

00:25:30   SuperDuper leverages some of the same command line utilities and frameworks that are underneath

00:25:35   disk utility, and SuperDuper has a mode where it will clone your drive and you can tell

00:25:40   it erase the destination drive first and then clone onto it.

00:25:44   And he was getting like out of disk space warnings, and it's because the system code

00:25:49   that erases the volume would tell SuperDuper, "Yep, totally just erased that volume for

00:25:53   you.

00:25:54   ahead and fill it and super duper would go to try to fill it and eventually fill the

00:25:57   disk because the disk wasn't erased.

00:25:59   Like the underlying disk utility functionality of "please erase this volume for me" would

00:26:04   report success but have actually failed.

00:26:07   And that type of failure is like, forget about cosmetics.

00:26:10   So it's like missing features and features that work worse now.

00:26:13   Basic features like "please erase this volume for me."

00:26:16   That's kind of untenable.

00:26:17   So that's why I think the disk utility update is bad.

00:26:21   Not because the GUI is weird and they kind of, you know, the windows aren't resizable

00:26:24   and it's hard to see the messages or whatever,

00:26:25   like it did need a GUI refresh.

00:26:27   Feel free to do that anytime you want,

00:26:28   but when the underlying functionality is either removed

00:26:31   or doesn't work right, that's a real bummer.

00:26:33   - Well yeah, this was not a utility

00:26:36   that was very customer-facing.

00:26:38   Again, this was like a really technical utility

00:26:41   that only geeks really ever used.

00:26:44   If you don't have the resources,

00:26:47   or if you're not willing to devote the resources

00:26:50   to do it right, then just leave it be for another release,

00:26:53   because no one is pressuring you to redesign something

00:26:57   like that that already works.

00:27:00   And if the best you can do is to replace it

00:27:03   with a version that doesn't work as well,

00:27:05   then don't do that redesign.

00:27:08   It's like, you know, just like with DiscoveryD.

00:27:12   Yeah, you redesigned this whole thing,

00:27:13   you rewrote this whole thing,

00:27:15   but the new one works worse.

00:27:17   And eventually they came around to the right decision,

00:27:18   which was, okay, we'll go back to the old one.

00:27:20   With Disk Utility, I feel like they should do

00:27:21   the same thing, either fix the new one, which I think is probably a big job, and it seems

00:27:27   to probably not have a lot of resources devoted to it, I'm guessing that was one of those

00:27:31   drive-by updates, or just put the old one back because it was fine. It didn't not work,

00:27:39   like it was fine, it just was a little bit ugly, but who cares, it's a utility.

00:27:42   - You gotta think that, so there's the GUI part of it, which is not most of the application,

00:27:46   and then there's the underlying frameworks and command line utilities, and the fact that

00:27:50   that some of those either disappear or stop working, those must have changed. It's not

00:27:56   just that they put a bad GUI on top of it, which is fine, put back the old GUI. There

00:28:00   must have been underlying changes to the parts of the system that deal with disks, all those

00:28:06   frameworks, or the command line utilities or whatever. So it might not be just as simple

00:28:11   as put in the old version of the Disk Utility application. It's a—like many of the things

00:28:16   Apple makes—it's a series of frameworks, and there's a GUI front end, and there's

00:28:19   There's a command line front end and it goes all the way down through the system.

00:28:24   And I'm trying to think why they got rid of those features.

00:28:26   Maybe they're just trying to reduce the surface area of bugs.

00:28:28   I think they got rid of software RAID or something.

00:28:31   And I don't think it's a bad idea to say, "So few of our customers use this.

00:28:38   Supporting it is really difficult.

00:28:39   It should go away.

00:28:40   It's not going to be supported from now on."

00:28:42   It's disappointing to people, but you can do that in a good way.

00:28:47   basically I would say give everyone a warning, tell them the software rate is going away,

00:28:50   give them alternatives instead of just let you wake up and you're like, "Oh, new version

00:28:53   disk is like, wait, where does that command go?" Like it wasn't sort of communicated

00:28:57   out in any way or there wasn't like one year where every time you select software rate

00:29:00   it would tell you, "Software rate will be unsupported in the next version, you should

00:29:03   stop," you know what I mean? Like there's good and bad transitions. But then having

00:29:07   the thing that says it erases disks, fail to erase a disk but report success, that's

00:29:13   That's just bad, and I don't know what the fix for that is.

00:29:16   I like to imagine, of course, that they're redoing this because they're ripping out all

00:29:20   this stuff in anticipation of the new file system that's going to come in 2017.

00:29:25   But who knows if that's even related.

00:29:27   So anyway, they redid Activity Monitor a couple years ago, too.

00:29:31   I think all those applications that sit in the utilities folder, they should get updates

00:29:34   like every five years or so.

00:29:36   Like they should have complete GUI refreshes or whatever.

00:29:38   But like Marco said, there's no rush.

00:29:40   If you don't have time to do it this year, wait till next year.

00:29:42   It's not like people are like,

00:29:43   "Oh, I was gonna upgrade to the new OS,

00:29:44   "but they didn't upgrade to Activity Monitor this year."

00:29:47   No one cares, it's fine.

00:29:48   - Yeah, I would rather have just the old one

00:29:51   that still works than a new one that doesn't.

00:29:54   - Yeah, and to the credit for all the people

00:29:56   who do the underlying file system stuff,

00:29:57   like core storage and everything,

00:29:59   and all the stuff that that enables,

00:30:00   like the new version of FileVault,

00:30:01   I don't know how many years that was in gestation,

00:30:03   but when it came, it worked.

00:30:05   The new version of FileVault was,

00:30:08   the old version was terrifying,

00:30:09   and it's all sorts of fun, it was crazy.

00:30:11   And the new version sadly had the same name,

00:30:13   but it's like everyone who tried it,

00:30:14   it's like you do it and it just works, right?

00:30:17   And they had to do so much plumbing changes

00:30:19   to make that happen.

00:30:20   Like, you know, all of core storage and all that stuff,

00:30:22   like that's a significant change,

00:30:24   but they waited until it was basically ready.

00:30:26   I mean, it's not like there weren't bugs

00:30:27   and not like they didn't fix them and everything,

00:30:28   but like it was clearly like production caliber

00:30:32   on the when it was released, right?

00:30:34   And even though they improved the next year

00:30:35   and the next year and the next year after that,

00:30:37   like I think it was, everyone was shocked

00:30:38   by how much of a non-issue it was.

00:30:41   Is your disk encrypted?

00:30:41   Yeah, I checked the checkbox and I drew some passwords,

00:30:44   now my disk is encrypted, I don't even notice,

00:30:46   it doesn't affect my life, it's like magic.

00:30:48   That's the way things should be.

00:30:50   That's the way the new file system will be in 2017,

00:30:52   right guys?

00:30:53   - Honestly, I'm a little scared.

00:30:57   Because I question whether today's Apple,

00:31:01   with what they're showing us by their actions here,

00:31:04   can they deliver a really big, really important,

00:31:09   stable new generation of something that large.

00:31:14   Like, can Apple deliver a new file system

00:31:17   for the Mac today without massive bugs?

00:31:22   - Well, they've been working on it

00:31:23   for like 20 years now, right?

00:31:25   It's gotta be so good now.

00:31:27   - But where are those people, you know,

00:31:29   what are they, how, in how many directions

00:31:31   are those resources being pulled right now?

00:31:34   - We don't know if there's any resources.

00:31:35   We don't know if there's even a project.

00:31:36   We know nothing!

00:31:37   - That's true, but you know,

00:31:39   Whatever this is, if there is a new file system here,

00:31:43   Apple from five years ago might have been able to ship it

00:31:46   and it might have worked.

00:31:47   But I really, honestly, I'm worried about Apple today,

00:31:51   about whether they can do this kind of very large new project

00:31:56   on a platform, on the Mac, on a platform

00:31:59   that they don't really seem to be devoting

00:32:02   substantial resources to anymore.

00:32:04   - I think they're totally capable,

00:32:06   it's just a question of making the call

00:32:08   to pull the trigger. That's all it comes down to. Is it ready? Go the go/no to go decision.

00:32:12   Is it ready this year or is it not ready this year? You just make the right call on that and

00:32:16   it's like it's like the whole Mac is like disk utility. No one's in a big hurry. Like if it's

00:32:23   not ready, don't ship it. If it's ready, ship it. That's it. Because I totally believe the capabilities

00:32:28   are all there. Even resource starved, even with people getting pulled off to work on the mystical

00:32:32   car or whatever they're doing. All that doesn't push your dates back. That's all that should happen.

00:32:36   Well, except that what I think we see now that today's Apple would much rather hit a

00:32:41   ship date than ship something perfect.

00:32:44   I think you're taking this way too far when it comes to the file system example, because

00:32:47   the file system is one of the bases of the entire Mac pyramid.

00:32:53   I mean, if you screw that up, that's a big damn deal.

00:32:58   And I think that Apple is smart enough to realize that if they're really going to pull

00:33:02   the trigger on a new file system, if this is really gonna happen, kind of like what

00:33:07   John was saying a minute ago, they're gonna make sure that they are ready and they are

00:33:11   going to test the snot out of that. It's not the sort of thing that you can just say, "Weee,

00:33:18   why not?" You know, and fire from the hip, "Pew, pew, pew, let's give it a shot, let's

00:33:21   see what happens."

00:33:22   They did that with HRS+ though.

00:33:23   Oh, come on.

00:33:24   You guys don't remember that. Let me tell you a little bit about what that was like.

00:33:27   Oh, God.

00:33:28   Please do. Like, gather around the fire, kids.

00:33:29   Oh, here we go.

00:33:30   Here we go.

00:33:31   Let Grandpa tell you about the file system.

00:33:33   So there was MFS, we're not going to talk about that.

00:33:36   There was HFS, which was fine for a while.

00:33:37   And then Mac OS 8.1, I think, came out.

00:33:42   And that had a new file system they're calling the HFS+.

00:33:45   And if you were installing it onto an empty volume, you could format as HFS+ and install

00:33:51   your operating system, and you'd be in this brave new world.

00:33:54   They also had a feature-- this is my recollection.

00:33:55   People can correct me if I'm wrong.

00:33:57   I could be mixing up third-party stuff.

00:33:58   but I'm pretty sure first party had a feature where you could say, "I've got an HFS disk."

00:34:03   And in those days, like, disks were tiny and they were always full because they were tiny.

00:34:07   You could say, "I want to upgrade to Mac OS 8.1, and I would also like you to change

00:34:13   my volume from HFS to HFS Plus in place.

00:34:18   Change the format of the file system without deleting my data.

00:34:21   Leave the data there, but convert the thing from HFS to HFS Plus."

00:34:25   That sounds like a bad idea.

00:34:27   That process, as you might imagine,

00:34:29   because these were not days of log-structured file systems

00:34:32   where it's write-only file systems.

00:34:33   You can do this in BTRFS and lots of other things

00:34:37   because of the way they're laid out in a reasonably safe way.

00:34:40   But this was like a literal in-place,

00:34:43   if you unplug your computer in the middle of this

00:34:45   or if anything goes wrong, kiss your stuff goodbye.

00:34:49   And it was terrifying.

00:34:51   And we didn't have any place to--

00:34:52   we couldn't do online backups because for me anyway

00:34:54   and for most people there was no online, right?

00:34:56   And didn't have enough hard disk space

00:34:58   to actually make a real, like no one had backups

00:35:00   'cause there was no way to back up.

00:35:01   Like I had one hard drive,

00:35:04   or I had multiple hard drives,

00:35:05   but they were all filled with stuff, like where, and so.

00:35:07   - Yeah, it spun uphill both ways.

00:35:09   - Right, and so what was your choice?

00:35:10   Like if you wanted HFS+ then, who didn't, right?

00:35:12   Wow, 255 character file names, I don't, you know.

00:35:15   Anyway, most of the good stuff in HFS+ wasn't even exposed,

00:35:18   but the bottom line is you could at least have a block size

00:35:20   that made it so, you know, a text file with one byte in it,

00:35:23   it didn't take up this then obscene amount of space because that was the problem with

00:35:27   HFS is that as the volumes got bigger, the block size had to grow proportionally.

00:35:31   And so no matter how small you made your file, your minimum file size kept going up and up

00:35:35   to a size that we wouldn't care about today.

00:35:37   I think it was like we were all upset because it was like 4K for a single character file

00:35:41   like more than 4K and that was too big.

00:35:43   Anyway, the benefits weren't even all that great and the risks were tremendous.

00:35:47   And if you wanted to upgrade, you had to either erase your disk, in which case you needed

00:35:52   to have a backup or do this in-place backup.

00:35:54   And it was not, it was touch and go there for a year or two.

00:35:59   And I mean, we probably didn't hear as much about it

00:36:02   because people weren't online as much back then

00:36:04   and talking to each other about all the problems

00:36:06   that are inherent to that, but it was really scary.

00:36:09   These days, though I was gonna say to Casey's thing,

00:36:11   I like all the fossils

00:36:12   and they're gonna make sure it's super safe.

00:36:13   Remember, HFS+ runs on the phone too.

00:36:16   So you're pretty much guaranteed

00:36:18   that if they're replacing it with anything,

00:36:20   it's gonna, you know, like that's,

00:36:22   that's bet the company kind of stuff.

00:36:24   There's no way in hell they would replace HFS Plus

00:36:26   with anything else on the phone if they weren't damn sure

00:36:31   that it fulfilled the requirements of it.

00:36:34   So I have some faith that we will not see a file system

00:36:38   until that happens.

00:36:39   Do I have faith that that means the file system

00:36:41   will be out in 2017?

00:36:42   I don't know.

00:36:43   But like, you know, just take your time, get it right.

00:36:47   You know, we waited this long, whatever.

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00:38:37   So Jon, since you're already a little bit fired up, tell me how it is you kind of just

00:38:43   have disk-free Blu-rays. How is that even possible?

00:38:46   Oh, we're going to do that topic next? Alright, before we jump to that, though, the chat room

00:38:50   wants to say this, and it's another story for the youngins, although you guys have probably

00:38:55   heard it and I'll do it quickly. Back to the fire!

00:38:58   Yeah, the other fun thing about the HVSS+ conversion—I don't know if this is still

00:39:04   true, probably not, but I don't remember—there were some recent articles, like it came up

00:39:06   again on the modern internet a couple years ago, so maybe you could find those blog posts.

00:39:11   But anyway, when it converted your disk, it would do this clever thing where it would

00:39:16   if this HFS+ disk was read by a system that predates HFS+, rather than saying this disk

00:39:22   is unreadable, would you like to initialize?

00:39:24   As in like, I have no idea what the hell this disk is.

00:39:27   If the disk would appear to older disks as an HFS disk, it had like this little miniature

00:39:32   HFS disk volume entry in it, in the place where old, in a place where a pre-HFS+ system

00:39:39   would look for it.

00:39:40   The only thing on that disk was a little tiny readme file that explained what the hell HFS+

00:39:43   is and where all your crap went.

00:39:45   And it was just the ideal cute little Mac thing where instead of just telling your thing

00:39:52   is initialized and telling your disk is unreadable and scaring people and tricking them into

00:39:56   accidentally hitting the erase button because they don't know what else to do, your disk

00:39:59   would mount and you'd be like, "Where the hell's all my stuff?"

00:40:02   And you would see this one little text file, this one little readme file sitting there.

00:40:06   And what else can you do there but I guess I'll read this file.

00:40:09   I forget what it was called, it was like,

00:40:13   something about like, where did my files go,

00:40:15   or please read me or whatever.

00:40:16   Like, it was trying to help you say, look here,

00:40:20   and we'll tell you what the heck's going on.

00:40:21   And it would say, oh, this is just 'cause you've been

00:40:22   foreign with HVSS Plus, but there's a new format,

00:40:24   and you're booted into an old system,

00:40:25   and blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:40:26   That was like, that's the good stuff.

00:40:30   That's the good Apple Mac way.

00:40:32   Kind of whimsical, kind of fun, technically super clever,

00:40:35   because they control everything from top to bottom,

00:40:37   can do this. They can say, "We're going to define a new volume format, but we're going

00:40:42   to leave a spot for this funny little wrapper." And I don't remember when the wrapper went

00:40:46   away or if it's still there. It's probably gone now. But I always like that, and that

00:40:51   is, I think, the example of Apple at its best.

00:40:54   So tell me, Jon, how do you handle Blu-rays these days?

00:40:57   Oh, this topic. This topic. I try to handle them not at all. So we've talked about Blu-rays

00:41:05   a little bit, as in like, you know, where did you get this movie? Did you get it on

00:41:09   iTunes? How do you watch movies? All our different Plex things, streaming things from Netflix,

00:41:16   from HBO Go, all sorts of ways that we watch television movies these days. And I would

00:41:21   always chime in at a certain point to say, "Oh, I buy the movies that I care about on

00:41:24   Blu-ray." Because despite the fact that Blu-ray is awful, everybody knows Blu-ray is awful,

00:41:30   for all the reasons that anyone who's ever used a Blu-ray knows it takes a million years

00:41:34   to load, you're waiting for the menus to load, they show you previews that sometimes you

00:41:38   can't skip, you just want to watch the movie, there's a spinning disk in there that probably

00:41:43   makes noise, or more noise than a digital file anyway, you have to get the disk out

00:41:48   of its case, you gotta stick it into a little thing, you know, like it's all...

00:41:51   Do they still run Java?

00:41:52   Yeah, very often, they will run Java or try to download something, or you have compatibility

00:41:57   problems, my favorite one is like, I have lots of fancy equipment that can in theory

00:42:00   play blu-rays and every once in a while one of them will be like get me on a menu screen

00:42:04   where it won't let me select the play button or where it will freeze on a menu screen

00:42:09   and it's just like and this is after you've sat through previews or tried to skip them or figure

00:42:13   out which button you have to hit to get past the previews can i advance track can i hit top menu

00:42:17   can i pop up menu you know like and you get through that and then the menu freezes and you can

00:42:21   hit play i love i love blu-rays like it's like you know it's like this committee looked at the dvd

00:42:26   format. And they were like, "You know what this needs? More prohibited user operations,

00:42:32   software updates, and Java."

00:42:34   Yeah, and software, like running software. It's, yeah. So it's an incredibly misguided

00:42:41   customer-hostile format, and really, you just want to watch the movie. That's all you want.

00:42:47   You want the movie to start playing now. So why do I keep buying Blu-rays? I keep buying

00:42:51   because it continues to be the highest quality version of the movie that you can get. And

00:42:58   not all movies I care about, I get a lot of movies, especially like kids movies on iTunes

00:43:01   or whatever, like, you know, they're fine. But for the movies I really care about, I

00:43:05   want the highest quality version that I can buy, that a regular consumer can buy. And

00:43:09   Blu-ray is it. Blu-ray discs are huge. You can get a Blu-ray movie that's like tens of

00:43:13   gigabytes. Yes, they're still compressed. It's not like it's uncompressed, but they're compressed

00:43:18   at a higher bit rate with better algorithms and like they are, you know, they have, some

00:43:22   of them have uncompressed audio on them or, you know, multiple higher resolution audio

00:43:27   tracks and all sorts of good things about it.

00:43:28   You know, it is the best copy of a movie you can get.

00:43:31   So all the movies I care about I get on Blu-ray.

00:43:36   All the movies that I really, really, you know, appreciate.

00:43:40   And I have a setup that can play them correctly on my fancy TV and everything's good.

00:43:43   Except of course I hate Blu-ray.

00:43:45   So what I'm always looking for, not like really actively, but just like be on the lookout

00:43:49   for this, is the point where I can take my Blu-rays and get the bits off of them and

00:43:57   put them onto a hard drive somewhere and then watch them from that hard drive.

00:44:02   Now all the menus are gone, like I'm just taking the movie.

00:44:04   All the stupid menus, all the FBI warnings, all the Java applets, all the previews, all

00:44:09   that is gone.

00:44:10   But are you confessing to a felony?

00:44:11   I don't know.

00:44:12   I just want the bits off of the disk

00:44:16   and then I want to be able to play those bits and

00:44:19   have it be exactly the same as it would be if I put the the the blu-ray into the drive except without all the bad parts and

00:44:27   I have all these boxes connected to my television and I've got my big Synology down there

00:44:33   That's got a lot of room on it

00:44:34   And like I said, I've not been actively seeking this out

00:44:37   But I figured at a certain point just from my normal churn of the various boxes that are attached to my TV

00:44:42   I will probably eventually get to the point where this is the thing that can happen

00:44:46   And I thought I might have been at that point because as we've discussed on past shows

00:44:49   I'm running Plex on my new Apple TV, and I finally got my Plex library kind of in order

00:44:55   and

00:44:58   Lots of things have Plex clients my TiVo has a Plex client my television can read things directly off the Synology off the server

00:45:04   that it runs, my Apple TV box can do it, like I have so many different choices, I can run

00:45:08   the server off my computer, which, by the way, I don't know if it occurs to people to

00:45:13   do this and maybe it's not recommended, but if you have a NAS, you can mount your NAS

00:45:17   on your Mac and then run Plex on your Mac with the NAS mounted where all your video

00:45:24   is. That's exactly what I do. Right. But you can also have, like Synology has a Plex server

00:45:30   on it. So I have a Plex server on my NAS and I have another Plex server on my Mac, both

00:45:36   of which are pointing to the exact same video files. And they more or less stay in sync

00:45:40   with each other. Like they don't fight each other and everything, and so why would you

00:45:43   do that? Why would you choose between them? Well, I don't like to have the Mac on all

00:45:46   the time, but if there's something that needs some kind of heavy transcoding to be able

00:45:49   to play at all, the Mac can handle it and the Synology might not be able to. So, and

00:45:54   really, just, I don't know, I'm just playing with things. But anyway, so that's the situation

00:45:58   them in, and I figured, I think I'm at the point where I can do this now.

00:46:01   So I bought myself like a $50 Blu-ray drive.

00:46:04   That's how cheap they are these days for your computer.

00:46:06   You know, just like a little thing you put in a little Blu-ray that hooks up to USB.

00:46:09   Yup, bag of hurt.

00:46:11   Yup.

00:46:12   And then get, you know, make MKV or some other program that you're going to ask to.

00:46:16   You know, people might say, "I'm going to rip my Blu-rays," but I'm not re-encoding them.

00:46:20   I am not running them through compression algorithms.

00:46:23   I just want the bits off the disk, exactly as they are, not changed in any possible way,

00:46:28   right?

00:46:29   Because isn't that exactly what MakeMKV does?

00:46:31   Yeah, I think people have workflows where it goes through this whole big process and

00:46:35   actually rewrites.

00:46:36   We can talk to Don Melton about what his workflow is.

00:46:41   He's always re-encoding all his movies, and I'm like, "So do you have the original uncompressed

00:46:45   thing somewhere?

00:46:46   That's your input?

00:46:47   Or do you feed disks in forever?"

00:46:48   I don't know what it does.

00:46:49   But anyway, yeah, MakeMKV will let you select which tracks you want off the thing, and it

00:46:52   just pull them off exactly as they are bit for bit, which is exactly what I want.

00:46:56   Not for all my movies.

00:46:57   Again, like, I have most of the things that I don't care that much about I'll buy on iTunes

00:47:00   or I'll watch on Netflix, I don't have to store them at all, but for the handful of

00:47:04   my very, very favorite movies, right?

00:47:07   And I did this.

00:47:08   Seemed to go okay.

00:47:09   Like, I just did it for two or three experimental movies off of Blu-ray.

00:47:13   And again, they're huge, like 20 or 30 gigabytes.

00:47:16   Like you're gonna run a disk space real fast if you take your movie library of 300 movies

00:47:20   and just do the math, you will see that it will take a lot of room.

00:47:23   But I was just doing a couple of them.

00:47:25   And I thought it was home free, because I'm like, great, got the bits off the disk, I've

00:47:30   got a million places I can put these bits that I can play them, I can put them on Plex

00:47:34   and have it serve for my Mac, I can put them on Plex and have them serve my Synology, I

00:47:37   can put them on my Synology, have it serve from DLNA server, on my television, I can

00:47:41   play them from PlayStation 3, I can play them from PlayStation 4, I was hooked up to my

00:47:45   television but it's not.

00:47:46   I could play them from my Apple TV.

00:47:48   I can play them from the television itself.

00:47:51   I probably can play them from the Wii U if I wanted to.

00:47:54   Who knows what they have out?

00:47:55   I have so many options.

00:47:56   I'm like, surely one of these will work to do what I want.

00:47:59   And they almost do.

00:48:01   They're really close.

00:48:02   They're really close.

00:48:03   But I had forgotten about two things.

00:48:06   One, I mean, I didn't really forget about this,

00:48:08   but I figured something I had would have it work.

00:48:10   I'd forgotten about 24 frames per second cadence.

00:48:15   Movies, most movies that we know of, that people like these days are shot at 20 frames

00:48:21   per second for a variety of historical reasons.

00:48:24   And most televisions, for a different variety of historical reasons, most flat screen televisions

00:48:30   show a new frame at some multiple that 24 does not go into evenly.

00:48:35   So they may be more than 60 hertz these days.

00:48:39   But like, well...

00:48:40   Aren't there 120 ones?

00:48:41   Yeah, yeah.

00:48:42   Aren't there 120 ones?

00:48:43   Yeah, yeah, there's 120 and 240 and stuff like that, right?

00:48:46   So if you have one of those televisions and you can get 24 into it evenly, you're fine.

00:48:49   But if you're like me and you have a plasma television that doesn't have, doesn't display

00:48:53   at, you know, if you have a device that doesn't output at even multiple 24, that's usually

00:48:58   what it is, not so much the television set.

00:49:00   So the best example is the Apple TV, which I believe outputs at 60 hertz, which is what

00:49:04   all our Macs output at, like 60 refresh of your screen each second, right?

00:49:08   And if you've got 24 frames of video and you're trying to put it out over a connection that's

00:49:13   going to show 60 frames every second, the math doesn't work out for you there.

00:49:17   So you have to, because you can't show, like say you have frame number one, frame number

00:49:21   two, frame number three.

00:49:24   What they end up doing is they show frame number one three times.

00:49:26   They show frame number two two times.

00:49:28   They show frame number three three times.

00:49:29   And it's like three, two, three, two, three, two, three, two.

00:49:33   And that's not what you want because you're showing the frames an uneven number of times.

00:49:37   It's supposed to be one frame for 1/24th of a second,

00:49:40   then the next frame for 1/24th of a second.

00:49:42   Every frame should be shown

00:49:43   for exactly the same amount of time.

00:49:44   But if you're sending 60 updates a second,

00:49:46   you just can't do that with 24 frames per second, right?

00:49:48   And it doesn't matter what your television does

00:49:50   if the output device is like that.

00:49:52   Now, very clever modern televisions have a thing

00:49:54   where they will do three to two cadence detection,

00:49:56   where they will figure out,

00:49:58   seems like this device is sending me like one frame

00:50:00   three times that never changes,

00:50:01   and the next frame it sends me two times,

00:50:03   and that one is the same for the two things,

00:50:04   and then it sends me the next frame three times,

00:50:06   the next one too. Oh, I see what's going on there. And it fixes it for you. It re-expands

00:50:11   the frame rate and displays them because it has a refresh rate that's a multiple of 24

00:50:15   and you're fine. And then when you actually look at it on the television, it shows you

00:50:18   each frame for exactly the same amount of time. Every frame comes on for one twenty-fourth

00:50:21   of a second. That's awesome. I didn't know TVs were that smart. Yeah, mine doesn't do

00:50:26   that because it's A, not that smart and B, like that process as you can imagine is kind

00:50:31   of like detecting that and handling it correctly is potentially problematic. So what you really

00:50:35   want is for the device that you're playing the movie on to say, "Look, I'm going to send

00:50:41   it at not at 2400 per second, but at 24 frames per second cadence. So I'm going to send you

00:50:45   some multiple of 24, right?" Whether I can't do the math in my head, but is 96 a multiple

00:50:50   or 120 or 240 or whatever. Yes. Anyway, "I'm going to send you some multiple of 24 and

00:50:57   then you, television, realize that I'm sending to you at this frame rate and display, television

00:51:02   decide to update exactly this thing. So if I send you 96 hertz television, please display

00:51:08   96 hertz. And everyone's fine. And so like frame for number one is shown, you know, three

00:51:12   or four times and frame, all the frames, you know, that's when they say it's 24 frames

00:51:16   a second, they don't mean that your television is updating 24 times a second. That would

00:51:19   look terrible for most television technologies. All they mean is that the cadence is correct.

00:51:24   That the first frame is shown for one 24th of a second exactly. And the second frame

00:51:27   is shown for 1/24th of a second exactly.

00:51:31   That's what you want to happen.

00:51:32   And when I put a Blu-ray player in my PlayStation 3, it does exactly that.

00:51:36   It sends it out 24 frames per second cadence, my television realizes that the PlayStation

00:51:40   wants to talk to it that way, they negotiate over HDMI, my television changes to be at

00:51:45   exactly a 24 frame per second cadence.

00:51:47   That is the only way you see a Blu-ray the way it's supposed to look without what they

00:51:50   call judder.

00:51:51   Judder is what they call it when you see the 3-2-3-2-3-2 type thing.

00:51:55   especially when they have like a pan or some quick motion where it seems herky-jerky because

00:52:00   it is jerky because it's not smooth motion, they're not showing each frame for 1/24th

00:52:03   of a second.

00:52:05   I thought surely I have some box that can take this 24 hertz Blu-ray and show it like

00:52:09   that.

00:52:10   But it turns out for the most part I don't.

00:52:13   The Apple TV won't do it because the Apple TV has a fixed refresh rate and for whatever

00:52:18   reason my television does not detect that it's getting 3.2 and it can't reverse the

00:52:23   process.

00:52:24   I don't think there's anything I can do on my Apple TV to convince it to output at 96

00:52:28   or 48 or something like that.

00:52:32   The last forum entry I saw from some Apple person answering, they basically said, "Applications

00:52:36   on the Apple TV have no power to affect what's going out over the HDMI cable, like the refresh

00:52:41   rate.

00:52:42   They can't change that.

00:52:43   It's fixed and it's part of the OS."

00:52:45   It's possible a future OS update could change to either let applications control that or

00:52:50   or let users control it with some setting or something,

00:52:52   but right now it doesn't.

00:52:54   And how do I know that my television

00:52:57   isn't correctly detecting the 3.2 cadence

00:52:59   and fixing it for me?

00:53:01   You can kind of tell by looking at like scenes

00:53:03   and movies and pans or whatever,

00:53:04   but there's a much easier way to tell.

00:53:05   There's a lot of little test movies that you can download

00:53:08   that show, for example,

00:53:09   a white box marching across the screen.

00:53:12   And for the first frame, the white box is on the left.

00:53:15   And for the next frame, the white box is moved one unit over

00:53:17   and the next frame, so you see 24 boxes,

00:53:19   light up one after the other. Each frame one of the boxes is lit up. All you do is take

00:53:23   your fancy marker arm and expensive camera and figure out how to change the shutter speed

00:53:28   to exactly one second. You play that movie on your television, you take a picture of

00:53:32   your television with an exposure time of one second, then you look at the picture. If your

00:53:38   television is doing the right thing, you should see 24 grayish boxes that look exactly the

00:53:42   same brightness. Because every single one of those squares was on screen for exactly

00:53:46   one twenty-fourth of a second, and one twenty-fourth of a second is the same exposure on your camera

00:53:50   sensor. So that's what you should see. If it's doing it wrong, what you will see is

00:53:55   bright squared dim square, bright squared dim square, bright squared dim square. The

00:53:58   bright ones were the ones that were shown for three frames, and the dim ones were the

00:54:01   ones that were shown for two frames. So just to be double extra sure, I experimentally

00:54:04   determined that yes, no combination of Apple TV plus Flex will produce anything except

00:54:10   for the one I had had like a clock dial to, which also made the hands go around a clock

00:54:14   and 20, well not a clock, but like a thing in 24 increments and you would see bright

00:54:17   hand, dark hand, bright hand, dark hand. It was such a pain in the ass to figure out how

00:54:21   to get my camera to do exposure in one second because I don't know any of the terminology

00:54:25   in camera land. I was like, "S, shutter, shutter speed, exposure." Like, once and the correct

00:54:32   setting, I don't even remember what the hell it was called, but the correct setting said

00:54:35   1 and then like the inch sign, like a quote, "1 inch, 2 inch." I'm like, "That's seconds?

00:54:40   That's not, I mean, I guess minutes is a single prime and seconds is the..."

00:54:44   - Because normally it's showing you a fraction of a second

00:54:47   in most other cases, so it will say like,

00:54:48   it might just say like 500,

00:54:51   which is one five hundredth of a second.

00:54:54   So they do that little quote thing,

00:54:55   just, yeah, I think it is like degree of minutes,

00:54:58   seconds kind of reference there,

00:54:59   but I think it's more just to be very different

00:55:03   from what it was showing before,

00:55:04   so you don't have like five

00:55:06   and think it's one fifth of a second.

00:55:08   - Yeah, very confusing people don't know photography.

00:55:10   But anyway, Apple TV, no go, which is a shame,

00:55:13   Because that's what I wanted to do.

00:55:14   Apple TV has no fan, it's got Plex on it, I could put my, you know, that's where I put

00:55:18   my blue earbuds right into Plex.

00:55:19   Plex will play them just fine.

00:55:20   I can, you know, it'll play the movie, but won't get the right cadence.

00:55:23   Did your family see you doing this test?

00:55:26   No, they weren't around at this time.

00:55:29   Or maybe they were asleep.

00:55:31   It's a silent test.

00:55:34   And so, I asked about it on Twitter, I got some suggestions, like, "Oh, you should try

00:55:38   on your TiVo."

00:55:39   I'd forgotten my TiVo even had a Plex client.

00:55:41   But guess what?

00:55:42   TiVo has a Plex client.

00:55:43   Is it HD?

00:55:44   Is it slow?

00:55:45   It's slow, but it will output 24Hz and it will negotiate with my television and convince

00:55:51   my television to display.

00:55:53   I mean it says 24Hz, but again it's not really 24.

00:55:55   It will app at 24 frames per second cadence, but everything else about it is awful.

00:55:59   I think it's only 720p, so I think it's like reconverting the video.

00:56:06   At the very least the menus appear to be 720p and it down mixes all the audio to some stereo.

00:56:11   it doesn't do multi-channel at all.

00:56:14   I think the closest I got was I had managed to,

00:56:18   I forget which one it was that did this,

00:56:20   I think I had managed through like the PlayStation 3,

00:56:23   which is my good Blu-ray player

00:56:24   that does the correct cadence.

00:56:25   I think I got everything except for,

00:56:27   it wouldn't do uncompressed linear PCM audio,

00:56:30   which the Kill Bill Blu-ray has on it.

00:56:33   It would only do the AC3 one.

00:56:34   And I wasn't entirely convinced

00:56:37   that it had gotten the cadence right either.

00:56:38   I don't remember if I redid the test on that.

00:56:40   but bottom line is none of the devices I had fulfilled this requirement and I don't really

00:56:44   blame them because this is not a mainstream use. Nobody cares about this. They just want, like,

00:56:48   if you just, if I just rip these movies and just play them like regular people can't tell that the

00:56:52   cadence is wrong, they don't care that they've been recompressed. Nobody can hear the difference

00:56:57   between compressed and uncompressed audio. I certainly can't on my crappy speakers, but

00:57:01   it's the principle of the matter as you can imagine. And I really do think that I would

00:57:05   notice the cadence in the same way you can notice like soap opera effect or whatever.

00:57:08   I really do want the frame rate to be right.

00:57:09   And the whole point of this experiment is, if I can't get it all the way, then I'll just

00:57:14   go back to watching — because I do have compressed rips of all these things, it's

00:57:16   not like I can't see the movie, and I can put it in the Blu-ray when I really care about

00:57:19   it, right?

00:57:20   But I'm so close.

00:57:22   So close.

00:57:23   So many devices are capable of doing everything, they just haven't gotten the last little bit,

00:57:27   which is, please pass through the audio in whatever format it is directly to my receiver,

00:57:33   which can understand all these formats and can play all of them.

00:57:36   Please don't try to downmix.

00:57:37   Please don't refuse to use linear PCM and only send AC3.

00:57:41   Please don't do anything like that.

00:57:42   Please don't change the video.

00:57:44   Please don't try to change the 720p.

00:57:46   And get the display cadence right between the television, which totally supports this

00:57:51   if you talk to it in a reasonable way.

00:57:54   Talk to the television the right way.

00:57:57   And I got a lot of suggestions for alternatives that will do this.

00:57:59   Obviously if I was to get a home theater PC I can do it.

00:58:02   Lots of Mac and PC solutions do this.

00:58:04   Obviously I'm not going to do that, even a fanless one.

00:58:07   I'm not going to build myself a home theater PC.

00:58:09   I'm not signing up for that.

00:58:10   You won't even build yourself a gaming PC,

00:58:11   even though you really probably should.

00:58:14   You won't even do that.

00:58:14   So there's no way you're building an HD PC.

00:58:16   Firewatch is pretty smooth on the 5K iMac,

00:58:18   let me tell you.

00:58:20   It's pretty nice.

00:58:21   I know that that's a very demanding game,

00:58:22   but yeah, I'm not signing up to that game.

00:58:24   I know I could do that.

00:58:25   I definitely could.

00:58:26   A lot of people suggested Raspberry Pi,

00:58:28   which actually I actually kind of consider

00:58:29   'cause I'm like, you know what,

00:58:30   that seems simpler than a home theater PC.

00:58:33   Can they do that?

00:58:34   Like are they powerful enough to do that kind of role?

00:58:35   Yeah, people who are using it for that say it might be borderline, but I was like, "Is

00:58:40   there something I can buy?

00:58:41   Can I buy a package thing that is really a Raspberry Pi all packaged together already?

00:58:46   I don't want to have to do any of the crap.

00:58:47   Is there a Raspberry Pi guts in a box that I can buy?"

00:58:50   And mostly like, "No, you kind of got to do a little bit of stuff yourself."

00:58:53   So it's like, "Nah, not quite for me."

00:58:55   There's the Android Shield, the Nvidia Shield TV thing, which runs Android TV, and Fire

00:59:02   iTV both now I believe have options to mess with the refresh rate so you can force it

00:59:08   to output in the right format, but there were some questions about whether they supported

00:59:13   the pass-through of the audio and everything.

00:59:15   And the Nvidia Shield is like $200.

00:59:16   I mean, it's a gaming thing.

00:59:17   It's not just for a television box.

00:59:18   And it does have a fan, although people assure me that the fan basically never turns on or

00:59:22   is inaudible or whatever.

00:59:24   You would find when it turns on.

00:59:27   It's big.

00:59:28   I mean, it's practically like a little miniature game console.

00:59:30   So that I think, that's the closest thing I came to considering buying, but I really

00:59:34   I don't want to have, I think I'm almost out of inputs and I don't want to blow one more

00:59:38   input on something like this and have one more remote and one more controller and thing

00:59:42   or whatever.

00:59:43   So right now I'm holding pattern on this.

00:59:45   I haven't ripped anymore my Blu-rays because it does take a little while to do that.

00:59:49   I think I'm pinning my hopes basically on the Apple TV because I feel like they're really

00:59:53   close to getting it right and people have complained to Apple about not supporting this.

00:59:59   I think we even talked about it.

01:00:00   The reason they might not do it is, well,

01:00:03   if you change to a 24 frame per second cadence,

01:00:05   the GUI looks gross on the actual device

01:00:08   when you're going through the menus.

01:00:09   And they don't want to change it when you hit play

01:00:11   because it's not a good experience to have that flicker,

01:00:13   HDMI, refresh rate change thingy.

01:00:16   - I can see their solution being

01:00:18   that they would just offer 120.

01:00:20   And they would say, I'm sending you 120 for everything.

01:00:24   And then the whole UI would run on 120.

01:00:25   - Well, that's what I mean.

01:00:26   But 24 frames per second cadence doesn't mean 24.

01:00:28   It just means that you're at that cadence.

01:00:31   But I don't know if the portions of the GUI system,

01:00:36   like when you're running the Mac part of it,

01:00:38   I don't know if the Mac operating system

01:00:41   can operate at that kind of refresh rate.

01:00:44   I understand they could do it for video output,

01:00:45   like negotiating over HDMI and everything,

01:00:47   but for the GUI part of it,

01:00:50   does the Mac do anything at like 240 frames per second

01:00:53   or 120?

01:00:54   Well, ATPtipster says it can.

01:00:55   I guess that we've never encountered it

01:00:56   because obviously every LCD is 60 hertz, right?

01:00:58   So it doesn't come up.

01:00:59   It's not like the old CRT days where, you know,

01:01:01   fancy CRT you could refresh at 120 hertz

01:01:03   and everything would be so smooth and awesome

01:01:05   and a little bit dim because it's kind of flickery.

01:01:08   - Well the iPad Pro has dynamic refresh rate

01:01:10   and I think, and it samples like the digitizer at 60

01:01:14   and I mean at I think 120 and the pencil I think at 240.

01:01:19   So it can sample things faster.

01:01:22   - But it's only displaying 60, yeah.

01:01:24   - Yeah, I think the UI is, even on the iPad Pro,

01:01:26   even in those, I think the UI is still fixed to 60,

01:01:29   but I'm sure they could, if they wanted to,

01:01:32   I'm sure they could push for that

01:01:34   for something like the Apple TV,

01:01:36   where the Apple TV is kind of special

01:01:38   because it's the only device that runs iOS

01:01:42   that doesn't need to be concerned at all

01:01:44   about power efficiency.

01:01:45   So if something just needs a higher wattage GPU

01:01:50   or more power draw, on the Apple TV you can do that,

01:01:53   within obviously the thermal bounds of the enclosure,

01:01:57   but you have much more headroom there

01:01:59   than you do in something like an iPad or an iPhone

01:02:02   where power efficiency is more important to conserve.

01:02:06   - I'm a little bit afraid they might not consider an issue

01:02:08   because from the other people who are like me

01:02:11   trying to do similar things with Apple TV boxes,

01:02:13   a lot of them ran the experiment with the camera exposure

01:02:16   and they saw evenly colored boxes across their screen.

01:02:20   Which means they're, these are all people

01:02:22   with LCDs television, which means their modern LCDs are figuring out the 3.2 coming off of

01:02:27   the, I assume, 60 hertz coming out of the Apple TV, and they're fixing it, right?

01:02:31   And so if that's the case, maybe that's Apple's solution.

01:02:33   It's like, oh, it's just always going to be 60 hertz house, and you have to deal with

01:02:35   it.

01:02:36   But if there's any hope, it's going to be the thing connected to a TV.

01:02:39   Like its whole point is to show television and movies.

01:02:41   And movies are all 24 frames per second, except for like The Hobbit and stuff and all the

01:02:45   high-end frame rate stuff, right?

01:02:46   So…

01:02:47   We should have already hated it, right?

01:02:48   I didn't hate it.

01:02:49   Like, it looked a little bit weird, but I would be pretty much on board if everyone

01:02:54   wanted to make their movies like that.

01:02:55   They just got to figure out how to make movies like that in the right way.

01:03:00   It's like HD.

01:03:01   Like, all of a sudden all your sets look really crappy in HD because the sets were made for

01:03:04   standard def, and now you realize it's like a cardboard box and a fake television in the

01:03:07   background.

01:03:09   So I did not hate high frame rate, but I think those examples of high frame rate did not

01:03:14   do the format of any justice.

01:03:16   I feel like it could be done well.

01:03:17   But anyway, that's like for the you know the movies

01:03:20   I love and so many the movies that I have they're all 24

01:03:23   So I want some way to display them in that way, and so I guess like the file system

01:03:28   I will just be patiently waiting at certain point

01:03:30   I will probably just give up and buy like you know the the Nvidia shield or something some box that can do that

01:03:35   I don't think it'll ever do a home theater PC

01:03:37   Because if I want to do that I would've done that long ago like I could have done that ages ago

01:03:41   I just I just I was so close just so close to getting what I want

01:03:45   Just you just need a little bit more and the for those clients out there that are like like the the ttbone that you're down

01:03:52   Mixing everything to start with like why even bother like I know most people don't have surround fine

01:03:56   You can have that be the default like

01:03:58   Because it takes more work to down mix like just pass it through like have an option to say hey

01:04:02   If they're sending me multi-channel audio, do you want me to just pass that through because you have a receiver check this checkbox

01:04:07   It's easier to pass it through than it is to down mix it

01:04:10   So there's some silliness going on and the TV box market as always

01:04:15   But anyway, I was impressed. I've still remained impressed with Plex and Apple TV combination for television shows and other things that don't have this frame rate issue

01:04:23   But I still can't quite get rid of my blu-rays and my relatively noisy blu-ray player quite yet

01:04:30   You know if there's anything I've learned from listening to you talk about this John and Marco talking about headphones constantly

01:04:37   It's that I am so friggin glad that I don't have the crazy

01:04:44   Discerning eyes slash ears that you guys have because I have never noticed this this jankiness that you're discussing

01:04:52   I

01:04:54   love my

01:04:56   $20 crappy Bluetooth headphones that I use every day that I've talked about ad nauseum on this show

01:05:01   I mean not to say I don't appreciate a good set of headphones and not to say I'm sure I

01:05:05   that I wouldn't appreciate a

01:05:08   perfectly 24 frames per second movie as shown on a TV that's very very nice like yours is but

01:05:15   This stuff just doesn't bother me and oh man. I'm so thankful for that. Do you notice the soap opera effect?

01:05:21   I don't even know what that is. I've heard of it, but I don't even know what it is

01:05:23   Just don't even don't even learn about it. I don't know. I don't want to know

01:05:26   I don't want I think I think everybody can notice that once they are once they become aware because I feel like that is the

01:05:32   Problem it it's like it's like the FedEx arrow like everyone can see it

01:05:35   but before you have seen it, your mind isn't ruined.

01:05:38   - Exactly.

01:05:38   - Or you don't know what it is that you're seeing.

01:05:41   - Then let's not find out. - There could be something

01:05:42   off about it, but it looks a little bit,

01:05:44   I mean, even for me, the first time I saw it,

01:05:46   when I got my first television that supported that feature,

01:05:49   I immediately, I was like, "Ugh, what the hell?"

01:05:51   I'm like, and then I remember like half a second,

01:05:52   like, "Oh, it must come like that out of the box."

01:05:55   But if I hadn't read about it beforehand,

01:05:56   I would have thought, "This new TV is weird, maybe."

01:05:59   And people just get used to it.

01:06:01   Casey, I feel like making you go over

01:06:02   to your television right now,

01:06:03   and adjusting it to make sure that it is showing the full 1080 picture instead of chopping

01:06:09   off the sides.

01:06:10   Oh, it's not. Oh, it's not. And it drives me preserved because occasionally on the Apple

01:06:13   TV I can tell where it's getting clipped and I keep telling the TV, "No, show me everything

01:06:18   pixel for pixel," and then it keeps forgetting every time I turn it off that I've told it

01:06:21   that.

01:06:22   It keeps forgetting? No, Casey, this is the—you finally found a way to get Jon to drive to

01:06:26   your house.

01:06:27   That's true. Yeah. So you tell me, Jon, how to get my—I think it's a Toshiba TV—to

01:06:33   Remember that I want full-frame and not chop off the understand why it wouldn't well the only trick

01:06:39   I know that if it's not remembering can you name your input PC?

01:06:41   Can you rename your inputs it is yes, and it is named PC?

01:06:45   Maybe you have like a bum battery somewhere, and there's not keeping the

01:06:50   Like how does it forget like what's the point of that feature who's gonna change it every time they turn on the television?

01:06:54   Oh, no, so to be clear what I'm doing is I'm hitting

01:06:57   I think it's picked size for picture size on the remote and it will let me adjust

01:07:02   It will let me adjust, you know, through several different options. I don't remember what they are right now, but one of them is

01:07:08   like full res or dot for dot. I forget exactly what it's called, but it will let me adjust to that.

01:07:13   However, every time I turn the TV off and then turn the TV back on,

01:07:18   it goes back to whatever the default mode is.

01:07:21   You got a Google for like your television model, manual, PDF, or like there's always something like, you know,

01:07:26   service, hidden service menu where you type in some numeric code and some crazy menu comes up on the screen.

01:07:31   there may be a way to do it and if you can't you just get rid of the television

01:07:33   because honestly that's that's obscene where or or you just live with it or

01:07:39   just resign yourself to a missing a whole bunch of the picture and be having

01:07:44   the rest of the picture stretched out yep that's gross and to the soap opera

01:07:48   effect if you have any said I don't want to know I don't want to know I'm gonna

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01:10:43   Yep.

01:10:44   Casey, on your television.

01:10:45   I want to know. Oh, God.

01:10:46   If there are any settings.

01:10:48   - So I love how like, so a long time ago,

01:10:51   and I think like 2003-ish,

01:10:54   I had one of the very first DVD burners,

01:10:57   and I stupidly picked the wrong side of a format war,

01:10:59   and I got DVD+R instead of DVD-R,

01:11:01   but before they were universal, doesn't matter.

01:11:04   Anyway, at the time, the DVDs only held single layer,

01:11:09   so they were only 4.7 gigs,

01:11:10   and most movie DVDs at the time were dual layer 8.5 gigs.

01:11:15   So I had to, at that time, in order to pirate movies,

01:11:18   was the only reason you would need a DVD burner in 2002 or 2003, I wanted, or excuse me, to

01:11:24   back up my movies, I had to transcode it and I had to basically break apart the DVD structure,

01:11:30   transcode the video to fit on the single layer disks from the commercial double layer disks.

01:11:37   And that's the time in my life when I really discovered just how incredibly messy and complicated

01:11:43   video is. Things like all these different frame rates, whether it was interlaced, interlacing

01:11:49   is the worst thing in the universe. And then you have all the, if the aspect ratio was

01:11:55   wrong, and then you have audio sync issues possibly, and the tools, there was no hand

01:12:00   break at the time. The tools were like six different tools. This one would demux the

01:12:05   file, this one would remux the file, this one would transcode, and you had to, it was

01:12:09   was a huge mess. And I remember thinking, in just a few years, video will be simple.

01:12:17   That was 13 years ago. And it sounds like video still isn't simple. It's just the

01:12:23   complications now are a little bit different. Like, you still have some of the same ones.

01:12:27   We solved some of the old ones. We introduced new ones as time went on. And then added Java

01:12:33   and software updates. I mean, just, this whole world, it just seems like it is so unnecessarily

01:12:39   complex but yet just never get simplified.

01:12:41   We're on the right track with like digital downloads and everything. It's just that

01:12:46   like it's like the last mile. The last mile equivalent is alright. So we all agree on

01:12:51   a set of formats that are reasonable. Interlacing is gone. Audio sync shouldn't be an issue

01:12:55   anymore because you get like the package of files. We have ways to distribute reasonably

01:12:59   sized digital files that look really good that have multi-channel audio. Even the pirating

01:13:04   formats are all pretty nice now.

01:13:06   Like it's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of uniformity.

01:13:09   I mean, you know, the magic of MKV and all that other stuff, right?

01:13:13   But it's the last mile.

01:13:14   It's like, okay, how do I take these digital bits, which are nice and uniform, and I can

01:13:17   play almost anywhere?

01:13:19   How do I show them on my television and listen to them through my television speakers or

01:13:23   whatever speakers I have on my television in a way that doesn't subtly change or some

01:13:29   would say ruin the content?

01:13:31   Because the video file has a certain frame rate, and if you don't show it at some multiple

01:13:35   of that frame rate, it's going to look weird.

01:13:38   And if you have multi-channel audio, and you downmix it all to stereo, it's going to be

01:13:44   weird.

01:13:45   Or if you just drop the back channels, and there's a piece of dialogue or a sound effect

01:13:48   that only happens in the back channels, it's going to be weird.

01:13:50   And that's before you even get into how many times is this compressed and how many times

01:13:54   is it recompressed.

01:13:55   Recompressing a double-sided, double-layer DVD on a single layer, that's gross.

01:13:58   Because MPEG-2 looked gross to begin with.

01:14:00   you're just making it worse so I would never have bothered with that.

01:14:03   It was 2003.

01:14:04   No, yeah, it's not good though.

01:14:07   You gotta play the pure MPEG-2 because that's as good as it's gonna get.

01:14:11   Yeah, but back then you were lucky if you had like a 10 gig hard drive.

01:14:14   Yeah.

01:14:15   Oh no, I guess by that time we had like 60, but still, that was still not a lot when you

01:14:19   have 8 gig DVDs and you have a 60 gig hard drive.

01:14:24   And the final part of the final mile was what I was just telling Casey, which is televisions

01:14:29   for a variety of good and bad reasons, try to do stuff with the picture to make it look

01:14:33   quote unquote better or more correct or whatever and a lot of the things they do to the picture

01:14:39   make it look crazy.

01:14:40   Like, for example, the high refresh rate LCDs that refresh at 240 hertz decide, you know

01:14:46   what?

01:14:47   We're refreshing at 240 hertz.

01:14:48   If I'm showing a 24 frames per second movie, what the hell is the point of me showing frame

01:14:52   number one ten times?

01:14:54   Can we do something clever and basically say instead of showing frame number one ten times

01:14:57   And then frame number two ten times.

01:14:59   We know what frame number one and frame number two are going to be like.

01:15:02   Can we show twenty pictures where frame number one slowly morphs into frame number two?

01:15:07   Alright, thanks for our three sponsors this week.

01:15:10   I'm just going to continue into the after show, so it's your choice.

01:15:16   Audible.com, Igloo, and Casper, and we will see you next week.

01:15:23   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:15:27   'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:15:30   Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:15:33   John didn't do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn't let him

01:15:38   'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:15:40   Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:15:43   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:15:49   If you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:15:57   So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:16:02   N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:16:09   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:16:12   They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)

01:16:17   Tech podcast so long

01:16:21   So anyway, that effect, where it takes

01:16:26   it takes 10 of frame number one, 10 of frame number two, and tries to make 20 frames

01:16:30   each of which starts at one and ends at two, but each one has a little thing in between

01:16:34   that's like called by a million different names, by a million different manufacturers

01:16:38   motion smoothing, picture interpolation, magic shadow

01:16:42   I totally blanked. Try that one more time because I don't think I understand at all

01:16:46   All right, so you've got--

01:16:48   [BEEP]

01:16:50   I couldn't resist.

01:16:51   I'm sorry.

01:16:52   [LAUGHTER]

01:16:55   Casey just hung up the call.

01:16:57   Did I hang up everything?

01:16:58   Sorry.

01:16:59   Yes.

01:16:59   I'm sorry.

01:17:01   Oh, I initiated tonight, didn't I?

01:17:04   I couldn't tell what hung up on where, because I'm like, well,

01:17:08   if he had hung up, he would have gone away.

01:17:10   But then why has Marco gone too?

01:17:12   Yeah, sorry.

01:17:12   I forgot that I kicked off the call today.

01:17:14   That's even more and less comedic than I intended.

01:17:18   This new chick that you have of hanging up on podcasts just needs to stop.

01:17:23   Sit down, Casey.

01:17:24   We need to have a talk to you about hanging up on podcasts.

01:17:26   You can do it once and it might be funny, but if it becomes a thing, now we have an

01:17:30   issue and now we have to talk about how you're hanging up on podcasts.

01:17:33   Now we need an intervention.

01:17:35   Is affecting other people, mostly me.

01:17:39   Oh, goodness.

01:17:41   Good anyway. I hope you do understand the motion-s

01:18:09   to you. Even things like sports will look different and weird. If your

01:18:12   television has any features about like super brightness enhancer magical

01:18:17   sparkly make better just turn all of those off. If you don't know what they

01:18:20   are just turn them off off off off not low not medium like how much noise

01:18:23   reduction do I want off off off off off and then you turn everything off and if

01:18:28   you don't like how your television looks with everything off you probably have a

01:18:31   crappy TV maybe consider turning one or two things back on to make your your

01:18:36   crappy TV look better. But realistically, if you have a reasonable television, turn

01:18:40   all that stuff off. I will put a link in the show notes to my "Fill Your TV" article, which

01:18:45   was just the most basic plea to get people to show the full HD picture on their television,

01:18:49   which I don't think is unreasonable. Like, is that crazy that they send a 1080 picture

01:18:54   and you decide, "You know what? I don't need to see the inch around the whole... Stretch

01:18:58   it out so I don't see that part of the screen." Don't do that. That is the easiest setting

01:19:02   that everyone can fix on their television. Everything else is much more complicated.

01:19:05   You can calibrate your television, you can get these calibration apps, all blah blah

01:19:08   blah.

01:19:09   So, I would just say start by having your picture filled with your television.

01:19:13   I'm glad that Casey figured out how to do it on his television.

01:19:15   I'm sad that his television apparently is not listening to him when he does it.

01:19:18   Well, that may or may not be true.

01:19:20   It very well could be user error.

01:19:21   And there might be some, not even like hidden…

01:19:24   Go to the menus or something instead of doing it on the fly.

01:19:26   Sure.

01:19:27   And I have looked, but I've only spent a moment looking at it.

01:19:31   it very well could be that I'm just either not realizing what the setting is called or

01:19:36   not looking in the right place. Like, I feel like I'm a reasonably bright guy, but I wouldn't

01:19:41   completely put it past me.

01:19:42   You got it. It's always like one for one or dot for dot or like you said all the things

01:19:46   of like the various names that they call them. It's not always straightforward. I think I

01:19:49   mentioned this in the article about like sometimes it's called size one. On my television it's

01:19:53   called size one and size two, which makes no freaking sense. And I would never remember

01:19:57   which one is which, but I just never change it and my television remembers, so I don't

01:20:00   to worry about that. Although, actually, that's not true. I changed it recently because the

01:20:03   stupid Wii U, I've complained about this before, in Wii mode, when you play Wii games in the

01:20:08   Wii U, because the Wii U will play old Wii games, Wii games were standard deaf, right?

01:20:12   So when the Wii U plays them, it outputs into the title safe area, like it outputs the shrunken

01:20:18   image on your HD screen. So if you have your television calibrated correctly and you play

01:20:21   a Wii game, there's a black border around the entire Wii game. And the only way to fix

01:20:26   it because Nintendo is stupid, is to change the size of your television and say, "Alright,

01:20:30   while you're playing this game, go into the stupid overscan mode where you stretch everything

01:20:34   just so you'll get the image to fill the screen and not have weird burn-in around the edges

01:20:38   or whatever."

01:20:39   So I have changed that a couple times for my kids to play Wii games, but in general

01:20:43   I leave it on the correct mode, as everybody should, because why would, you know, you're

01:20:47   paying for the whole picture, why not see it all?

01:20:50   It does drive me nuts on the Apple TV.

01:20:52   I forget specifically what it is, but there's something, like a menu or maybe it's the music

01:20:56   something that that is clearly cut off on the bottom and it drives me berserk

01:21:01   but not enough that I've spent the time spelunking through the the owners manual

01:21:06   and the menu system and all that trying to find the right switch to flip. Now I'm

01:21:11   rooting for Declan to destroy your television accidentally. Thanks man.

01:21:15   Smear some peanut butter into some very important part of it. He's gonna have to

01:21:19   get a lot taller because it's up on the wall. Oh you would hate where my TV is come to

01:21:23   think of it because it's above our fireplace on the wall.

01:21:25   It's the wrong place for it.

01:21:26   Yeah, I know.

01:21:27   It's way higher than it should be.

01:21:31   But there's no other good spot for it.

01:21:32   I see that.

01:21:33   You ever see like a house magazine, like interior decorating magazine or some sort of home-proven

01:21:38   magazine?

01:21:39   Every single freaking house they show has television about the fireplace.

01:21:41   And I'm like, "Who are these people?"

01:21:43   Yeah, but the house magazine, they also have like white couches.

01:21:47   And like even Casey is—you don't have a white couch, do you?

01:21:51   No, Brown.

01:21:52   Yeah.

01:21:53   who gets white everything, like you wouldn't get a white couch.

01:21:56   He wouldn't have a white couch for long.

01:21:57   Now the Declan's on the move.

01:21:58   Yeah.

01:21:59   Well, just life exists.

01:22:00   Like, nobody can have a white couch for more than like 10

01:22:03   minutes before it's not white anymore.

01:22:05   But if you look at all those magazines,

01:22:07   all their furniture is all white,

01:22:08   because it doesn't need to be functional.

01:22:10   It just needs to look good in a picture.

01:22:12   New England, you see a lot of it because New England houses

01:22:14   were made before televisions existed.

01:22:16   So there's no place to put a television.

01:22:18   There's either windows on the wall.

01:22:20   Like, there's no place to put a television where

01:22:21   where you can have a couch on, you know, you have a television here and a couch on the

01:22:24   opposite side. So the only place to do it is, like, a lot of the rooms are arranged

01:22:27   so you can have a couch facing your fireplace, because that's what they gathered around before

01:22:31   they had television, right? And so the only place you have for your flat TV, like, that's

01:22:36   why people are excited by flat panel television. Now we can finally hold it, hang it over our

01:22:39   fireplace. But then, I don't know, doesn't your neck hurt from, like, looking up towards

01:22:43   the ceiling all the time? It's the wrong place for a TV.

01:22:45   Oh, it's unequivocally the wrong place for a TV. But the problem is we have, if you're

01:22:49   sitting on the couch, the way we have the room arranged, it's a very, very wide but

01:22:54   very short room, if that makes sense. And so the couch is facing the fireplace, just

01:22:57   like you said, and above the fireplace is the TV because it's really the only decent

01:23:02   place for it in the room. I mean, Marco spent a handful of times. In terms of the room,

01:23:08   that's the best place for the TV. And to me, the room is the priority, not the TV. And

01:23:13   so we've put it in what is unequivocally, inarguably, the wrong place because I'd rather

01:23:18   the room look good, or well, be reasonably arranged over the TV being the most perfect

01:23:24   viewing position.

01:23:25   Well, you and Tiff should get together with your little society if we don't care where

01:23:28   the television is or what.

01:23:30   Margo's television is too high and the historical society demands that he have a soundbar.

01:23:34   And those are two kind of things that are absolutely in opposition to my value system.

01:23:41   I don't care about anything in the room except the TV.

01:23:44   And I don't have a good place for my TV either.

01:23:48   Like I have the same problem.

01:23:49   I have a New England house that's centered around the fireplace.

01:23:52   I have almost no place to put my TV.

01:23:54   Almost.

01:23:55   I just found one place to wedge it and I did the best I can, but at the very least it's

01:23:58   at the right height.

01:23:59   Well, and the funny thing is my house was built in like '98 or something like that.

01:24:02   So I don't know why the family room was…

01:24:05   Tradition.

01:24:06   I guess, yeah.

01:24:07   It is a certain style of home and a certain style of home was made that way.

01:24:09   Now, rich people homes and modern homes always have a room, like a home theater room or like

01:24:14   a room for like the room is that is absolutely 100% designed to say this entire wall is for

01:24:19   you to put all your expensive AV equipment and directly opposite that entire wall is

01:24:23   seating for a bunch of people who are facing it exactly like there's a thing and you are

01:24:27   facing it and there's always like one perfect seat exactly in the middle of the room exactly

01:24:31   in the middle of the surround speakers where you're looking at the screen head on at exactly

01:24:34   the right height. Every rich person has that in it. But unless you're doing new construction

01:24:39   or buying a house from a rich person, you don't have that. You just have a house that's

01:24:42   made in a handful of styles, most of which—all the styles that were invented before televisions

01:24:48   were around flat panel or otherwise, and so they just don't have a place for a TV in

01:24:52   them.

01:24:53   I'm just impressed that at the resolve of people like Casey who wall-mount a TV—because

01:25:02   we've lived in this house now for about five or six years. The TV has been in the

01:25:08   in the same spot the entire time.

01:25:10   I cannot think of a different place

01:25:12   that we would put a TV than where the TV is.

01:25:15   - Yeah, you've got challenges too,

01:25:16   and you're, because it's a big open room.

01:25:18   - Right, but still, we've never placed a TV anywhere else,

01:25:21   we never wanted it to be anywhere else,

01:25:22   we put the TV there the day we moved in,

01:25:24   and we've never moved it because it works great.

01:25:26   And I still, I still wouldn't wall mount it,

01:25:29   because to me that feels like such a big commitment,

01:25:32   and it makes everything so much less flexible.

01:25:34   I still would not wall mount it.

01:25:36   - The cool wall mounts have like a swing arm

01:25:38   can like face it in different directions and stuff, well that's not a big deal.

01:25:42   Especially with modern television, you don't realize because you have an older television,

01:25:44   but modern televisions are so thin and light that it's basically like a big monitor on

01:25:47   an arm.

01:25:48   It's actually pretty cool.

01:25:49   And it's just a couple of bolts into the wall.

01:25:50   It's not that big of a deal.

01:25:53   Not that I'm saying you should do it.

01:25:54   I think your TV is fine where it is, but you have the same problem.

01:25:56   Where else could you put your television?

01:25:58   I can't like, unless you decide to make an artificial wall out of your television, which

01:26:01   I have to admit is probably something I would consider in your house.

01:26:05   not if Tiff had any say in it, but because that's the real dream. Here's the real dream

01:26:10   of people who are...

01:26:11   I would love to have you come over and suggest this to Tiff.

01:26:14   Have people who have TV obsessions, here's what you want. Obviously you want like a dedicated

01:26:18   room, although I'm not that big about like a dedicated home theater room like down in

01:26:21   the basement because I feel like you're always going to use like whatever the upstairs room

01:26:24   is near the kitchen, so I would make that my television room. And you know, the television

01:26:27   is there and it's facing me and the speakers are all arranged in the right way and all

01:26:32   that other stuff. But here's the important part. The whole wall that has the television

01:26:36   and the speakers in it or in front of it or whatever, there has to be a room behind that

01:26:41   wall. That can't be like the end. Because getting to the crap behind all your AV equipment

01:26:46   is a nightmare. So all the fancy rich people houses have essentially all your AV equipment

01:26:51   and then you can walk behind it either because the rest of the house continues behind it

01:26:55   or because it's just like a crawl space or an alcove or a cubby for both ventilation

01:26:59   And because it is that is the ultimate luxury being able to walk behind your AV equipment

01:27:03   See all the wires have them all arranged like you're in a data center

01:27:06   Like they're all perfectly routed like you think that cable is going from racks in and just that is just amazing for me

01:27:11   I can't get at my stuff without like contorting my body like a you know

01:27:15   a

01:27:16   yoga master getting behind there and bending down having a little flashlight and trying it's just impossible because who the hell has enough room to

01:27:22   Have a room behind their television stuff

01:27:25   stuff. The only purpose of which is to get at the back of all your television stuff.

01:27:29   Rich people, that's why. The entire rest of the country. That's who.

01:27:32   No. No. Everyone else except people who live on the coasts.

01:27:34   No, they have big giant houses in McMansions, but unless you have a dedicated home theater

01:27:38   room, even the people who wall mount it, it's like, "Well, you got one shot at this and

01:27:42   the HDMI cable's going down through the wall and it's going to poke out over here and this

01:27:45   is where you need to put your stuff and if you ever need to mess around behind there,

01:27:48   you're basically going to have to unplug it or slide your whole thing out or it has to

01:27:51   be on wheels, like, it's a big pain. So I've only ever seen people who have dedicated rooms

01:27:58   to also be able to have a room behind the room to get your AV stuff. And that is where

01:28:02   it's at.

01:28:04   Your next house, John.

01:28:05   Yeah, right now. My never house.

01:28:08   [BEEP]