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Falsehoods programmers believe about video

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Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#61

Post by innocentoldguy »

franciscop wrote: post #18

The original one ( http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... ) left me bafled. Then I realized you have to strike a balance; otherwise you cannot deal with names at all. The point where drawing the line depends on your industry/customers, but I'd safely say that it's too restrictive nowadays so these lists are useful somewhat and of course they are interesting.

People's names is one area I think developers constantly bugger up. For example, my last name has a space in it, but half the websites I register on either:

1. Throw an error and won't let me enter my last name as it is supposed to be spelled.

2. Truncate the last part of my last name.

3. Try to be clever and end up shoving the first half of my last name into a middle-name field.

My preference for names, addresses, and other personal data is to stop trying to constrain people to preconceived "standards" and just let them enter their information the way they want it to be.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#62

Post by kibwen »

smallnamespace wrote: post #57
kibwen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that you have to draw a line somewhere based on technical and business constraints, but an important takeaway of the names article is that you almost certainly don't need to do anything with a name other than treat it as an opaque string that can be displayed back to the user. For example, I'm struggling to think of a good reason why user registration would require separate first name and last name fields,…

But sometimes your government expects names to be broken into given and family names (the US, Japan, and China all seem to make this assumption -- every government form I've seen from those countries wants your name fully broken out). I've no direct experience with, say, Russian or Latin American governments, but cultures that use explicit patronymic or matronymic names might expect that broken out as well. If you ev…

I'm explicitly disregarding government websites here, since the government has a legitimate reason to care about my full name (and gets to define what a "legal" name means), and also 99% of the websites that I sign up for are unrelated to the government. There's no reason for a social network to report the names of all its users to a government agency automatically, and I'm skeptical that even my bank would have such a requirement.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#64

Post by kibwen »

mysterypie wrote: post #55
kibwen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the marketing department may believe, but in reality that's super creepy. Let's not pretend that I'm on a friendly first-name basis with corporations, or that in reality I'm anything more than an autogenerated numeric ID in a database as far as the corporation is concerned. Furthermore, nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort. And why does any company thin…

> nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort Really? I've been assuming that addressing people by first name--even people you've just met--is now the default, at least for the United States and Canada. Are you in the USA/Canada, by the way? I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well. You had to say, Mr. last-name or Mr…

For whatever reason, a large number of the people I know go by names that are not their legal first name. Some go by their middle; some drop letters from their first name in idiosyncratic ways; some keep the same pronunciation but have a different spelling; some change the spelling while leaving the pronunciation and then drop letters; some go by irc nicks even in person; a rare few just invent words that have nothing to do with their names and go by that. Maybe it's a unique symptom of growing up in an era where we communicate via online systems that demand unique usernames?

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#65

Post by deadmutex »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #44
derefr wrote: post #26

> rendering subtitles at the output resolution is better than rendering them at the video resolution I would like to know what's wrong with this approach. I watch a lot of commentated speed-run videos: that's often something like ~244p video, plus soft subtitles. The subtitles get rendered at the source resolution (presumably, into the video framebuffer) and then upscaled along with the image, forcing them to be a ti…

It's also missing the most common error I see: conflating subtitles with closed captions. Closed captions are positioned on the screen to indicate who's talking, have descriptive audio for sound effects, and should be in a high contrast easy to read font (most people with hearing deficiencies also have problems seeing, ie: out of date prescriptions for both hearing aids and eye glasses). As far as I know, QuickTime d…

AFAIK, The YouTube implementation does all of those.

Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbqPe-IceP4

Please do not spread falsehoods.

Disclamer: I work at YouTube.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#66

Post by nradov »

artpepper wrote: post #52
franciscop wrote: post #18

The original one ( http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... ) left me bafled. Then I realized you have to strike a balance; otherwise you cannot deal with names at all. The point where drawing the line depends on your industry/customers, but I'd safely say that it's too restrictive nowadays so these lists are useful somewhat and of course they are interesting.

What I take from the names article is to make sure you understand your requirements. A blogging platform will have different requirements than, say, electronic medical records.

For EMRs, the HL7 FHIR HumanName datatype covers most of what's needed. Patients can have 0 or more names, each of which can have a full string representation plus 0 or more separate family / given / prefix / suffix components. And each name can be tagged with a usage type (official / maiden / nickname / etc) and validity date range.

http://www.hl7.org/FHIR/datatypes.html#HumanName

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#67

Post by nercht12 »

mysterypie wrote: post #55
kibwen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the marketing department may believe, but in reality that's super creepy. Let's not pretend that I'm on a friendly first-name basis with corporations, or that in reality I'm anything more than an autogenerated numeric ID in a database as far as the corporation is concerned. Furthermore, nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort. And why does any company thin…

> nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort Really? I've been assuming that addressing people by first name--even people you've just met--is now the default, at least for the United States and Canada. Are you in the USA/Canada, by the way? I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well. You had to say, Mr. last-name or Mr…

I personally don't like the shift, even being in the younger crowd. Calling someone by their first name sounds not only presumptuous but leaves you in an awkward spot of guessing whether to use a nickname (you may heard they've been given) or their full first name. With some coworkers, it's fine 'cause we're on a friendly basis anyways, but if I don't know from Adam, I prefer people don't use my first name. It only lowers my respect for them.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#68

Post by haasn »

mrob wrote: post #54
jheriko wrote: post #45

it is true, video is a nightmare mess littered with weird functionality nobody needs. (limited range only just disappeared in rec 2100, optionally??? really??? i'm not worried about my electron gun in my CRT from 1975 these days...nor do i want to know what a Y or a Cb or a Cr means because everything is RGB and B&W TV is long dead... and 4:2:2 is not exactly compression so much as computational overhead etc.. etc.)…

Chroma subsampling isn't going anywhere. You'll usually get subjectively better quality with 4:2:0 chroma compared to 4:4:4 at the same bitrate. And this means you can't have everything in RGB, so all the colorspace conversion complexity can't be ignored. Try experimenting with chroma subsampling in JPGs, but note that not all image viewers have good chroma upscaling. MPV can display still images as well as video and…

> Chroma subsampling isn't going anywhere. You'll usually get subjectively better quality with 4:2:0 chroma compared to 4:4:4 at the same bitrate. And this means you can't have everything in RGB, so all the colorspace conversion complexity can't be ignored.

What's more, YCbCr is more efficiently compressed than RGB even if you don't subsample, for the same reason that a DCT saves bits even if you don't quantize: Linearly dependent or redundant information is moved into fewer components, in this case most of the information moves into the Y channel with the Cb and Cr both being very flat in comparison. (Just look at a typical YCbCr image reinterpreted as grayscale to see what I meant)

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#69

Post by nercht12 »

kibwen wrote: post #64
mysterypie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort Really? I've been assuming that addressing people by first name--even people you've just met--is now the default, at least for the United States and Canada. Are you in the USA/Canada, by the way? I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well. You had to say, Mr. last-name or Mr…

For whatever reason, a large number of the people I know go by names that are not their legal first name. Some go by their middle; some drop letters from their first name in idiosyncratic ways; some keep the same pronunciation but have a different spelling; some change the spelling while leaving the pronunciation and then drop letters; some go by irc nicks even in person; a rare few just invent words that have nothin…

Could be. If you've heard of someone primarily referred to by their online pseudonym, it may be less awkward calling them that than trying to guess at how they wish to be addressed using their real name. It's still awkward though.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#70

Post by JoshTriplett »

akiselev wrote: post #40
derefr wrote: post #26

> rendering subtitles at the output resolution is better than rendering them at the video resolution I would like to know what's wrong with this approach. I watch a lot of commentated speed-run videos: that's often something like ~244p video, plus soft subtitles. The subtitles get rendered at the source resolution (presumably, into the video framebuffer) and then upscaled along with the image, forcing them to be a ti…

I think that point should be amended to say "rendering subtitles at the output resolution is always better than rendering them at the video resolution." You don't want to upscale 244p soft subtitles to 1080p but you do want to default to giving video authors creative control over how the subtitles are displayed. The ASS subtitle format allows for some very complex styling that can be used as an artistic element in vi…

> There's also the issue of coordinates for where the subtitles are supposed to be that all go to shit if you render them on a transformed (up/downscaled) frame.

Sure, you have to transform the coordinates to the output. But still, better to render fonts at the final resolution; they'll always look better than if scaled after rendering.

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