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RIP, Niklaus, and thank you for your invention of Pascal. Without any competition, Pascal is, by far, the best language I have used in the almost 50 years since I started programming. The C family has nothing to offer that can compare to the functionality and readability of Pascal.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: functionality and readability
Are frequently at odds with other things which C is really good at.
I haven't used Pascal since college, it never paid the bills.
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That certainly true; it never caught on. I used it for electronics testing in Aerospace, where maintainability is paramount, and there is no better language for readability. Alas, it lacked a lot of the bare metal programming capability that the C family brought to the table, and that was its doom, I suspect.
Will Rogers never met me.
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And the 255-character string limit?
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That was never a problem when I was actively programming, and I believe that was extended as part of their adoption of OOP with version 5.5+. Back in those days, testing was performed by setting up instruments with string commands, then triggering them with events generated by the test code. Reports were collected by reading instrument registers, so string length was never an issue. I was happy with the introduction of named Calls at the time, as everything the company I worked for used procedure calls that had numbers, and the only way to find out how to call them with parameters was to beg the Systems Programming group for documentation on a particular Call. Strange times, and everything was proprietary and dynamic; it wasn't unusual to use three programming languages on one Project. We are so very much better off today!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Joke? pure horror!
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Clippy + HAL
I'm sorry Dave I can't let you compose that sentence, it's not grammatically correct.
As the aircraft designer said, "Simplicate and add lightness".
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.0 JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: SimpleWizardUpdate
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I miss Clippy. He was always, and is apparently still good for a laugh.
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Why could they not see the writing on the Windows?
Oh, I know this one was goofy, even by my standards
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Just came back (see above)
Glad to see you around Paul.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Thanks!
I'm easing into it ... but I'm getting there.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Wordle 929 4/6
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Wordle 929 2/6
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Wordle 929 4/6
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In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Wordle 929 5/6*
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Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have. -Anon
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. -Frederick Nietzsche
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Wordle 929 3/6*
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42.54 seconds
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Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
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Wordle 929 3/6
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Jeremy Falcon
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Years ago I ripped most of my purchased DVD collection, to VOB files in AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders, so if I were so inclined to re-burn them to DVD, these would be compatible with "regular" players.
They're taking quite a bit of room however (4.37GB for a full single-layer disc, twice for dual-layer), and I know the h.265 codec is a lot more efficient than the old MPEG-4 used by DVDs.
I know there's a lot of programs that probably can convert those, even though h.265 is really designed for higher-resolution videos. My problem is trust - can I trust that the conversion will be done correctly? What I mean by that, is that I've seen conversions where audio and video would slowly start to drift, so much that by the time a 2-hour movie ends, the audio is "off" by a few seconds with the video being played back. And I know the source is okay. Worse, if I quickly jump to various parts in the video, this is NOT apparent, so the only way I can really tell whether a converted video suffers from this is to watch it from start to finish.
Obviously I don't want to do that with a few hundred discs.
Has anyone done this sort of conversion before (specifically, with the h.265 codec), and can vouch that the program used does NOT introduce this sort of problem?
I don't really care about preserving menus, extras, subtitles, alternate audio tracks, etc. If I can end up with a single, much smaller .mkv or .mp4 file (over a set of 4+GB folders with multiple VOB files), I'll be happy.
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The only one I've ever used is from Leawo.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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I have done similar conversions on quite a number of videos, after first copy them to hard disk the way you describe. I tried a few conversion programs, but most recommendations pointed to HandBrake. After trying it, I never looked back.
It does an excellent job. It can handle a great variety of input formats, and a great variety of output formats, including both H.264 and H.265. If your source has multiple soundtrack options, you can select which one to use, and if the output format support multiple sound tracks, you can select several. If your source has subtitle tracks, you can select one to be hardburned (merged into the image itself), or if the output format supports separate subtitle tracks, you can select which ones from the source to include.
HandBrake can convert resolutions, correct incorrect aspect ratios (as you often see e.g. on YouTube downloads), can mask off letterboxing edges. Arbitrary cropping - some movies digitized from analog video have a few 'nervous' scan lines at the bottom of the image. It can convert between a large selection of different video coding formats. For video conversion, you can adjust the quality/result size - and you'll be surprised by how low you can set the quality before anyone would notice any deterioration! (But make sure to use a quality setting significantly above the level where you notice artifacts!)
One 'disadvantage' is that HandBrake really knows to make use of your CPU - every full and HT core, for a long time at 90-95% load. I guess that is one of the reasons why conversion results are so good. But be prepared to go away and do something else (e.g. get a good night's sleep) if you have set up a work list for HandBrake to convert a couple dozen movies
Another 'disadvantage' is that HandBrake has so much functionality that the UI is bound to be somewhat complex. It isn't more complex than it must be to provide all its functionality, but you may feel somewhat bewildered the first few times you use it. There is a 'preview' facility for you to verify that you have picked up the right sound track and subtitle track, the the right cropping and aspect ratio correction etc. - use it liberally, especially until you feel that you have become an expert HandBrake user!
HandBrake does not handle any sort of copy protection, region protection etc., but once you have your DVD/BDs on the hard disk, those problems have been solved, e.g. by using a copy program bypassing such restrictions, or none of your DVDs are from 'foreign' regions.
A couple of final warnings: One of my primary uses of HandBrake is to bring my favorite movies to friends for watching with them, on a memory stick for their smart TV. At the current, lots of my friends have TVs that can display H.264 videos, but not H.265! So usually, I make H.264 copies to the memory stick I bring along (even though a 32 GB stick cannot hold the full quality of BD that makes use the full capacity of the disk).
Second point: Most of my friends' TV sets can interpret .srt subtitle files - but half of them take for granted that the .srt file is inn UTF8 format, the other half that it is ISO 8859-1 (aka. 'ANSI'). When you start watching the movie, to discover that non-ASCII characters come out wrong, it really is disturbing having to dig up some PC with a plain text editor that can read the file in the 'wrong' encoding and write it back in the 'right' encoding, before make a new attempt at playing the video with the .srt file. So when I expect anyone in the audience to have a need for subtitles, I let HandBrake create a file with hardburned subtitles, even though that means they cannot be turned off at play time. (Note: I also watch quite a few movies in other spoken languages than English!)
Maybe both H.264/265 and ANSI/UTF8 issues with the smartTVs of my friends are related to Norway going all-digital TV distribution in 2008, 15 years ago: Lots of the digital TV sets are a few years old. In other countries, where digital TV arrived later, the average TV set may be a lot newer, and prepared for both H.265 and both text encodings.
Or, you may be completely unconcerned about subtitles, as all the movies you watch hav3e an English language soundtrack.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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trΓΈnderen wrote: Most of my friends' TV sets can interpret .srt subtitle files I prefer to include those as additional subtitle tracks in HandBrake when I do the conversion. It also lets you select the encoding (UTF-8 or a bunch of others).
Mircea
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Thanks for the thorough discussion.
I'm somewhat familiar with Handbrake, although not all of its nooks and crannies. I was hoping that, once I found settings that worked well enough for a sample or two, I'd be able to just re-use those same settings for all my rips, consistently. But if I have to experiment with different settings for various files...it'll probably never get done.
I can't imagine it's safe to say there's a set of one-size-fits-all settings? In theory, it should be safe to consider all my rips were done in a consistent fashion.
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