Author: Ultra Slacker

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Megapixel per se

iPhone 6 Protruding Camera Lens

Joanna Stern, writing for WSJ.com:

A quick camera reminder: Looking at the megapixel numbers when comparing phones won’t help you at all. An 8-megapixel camera with a superior sensor can take far better photos, even more detailed ones, than a 21-megapixel camera with an inferior one.

I’m really glad to see Joanna Stern mentions this. For years, a lot of so-called Tech Journalists still measuring the quality of a camera by the pixel-count alone.

Some few years ago, a clerk/salesperson at a store that shall remain nameless adamantly told me that a 13-Megapixel point-and-shoot camera captured better image than an 8-Megapixel DSLR Camera.

On a personal note, Joanna Stern lost one point for using the term “phablet” for a product category. Just call it a big-ass phones and it would’ve sound much better.

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Handbrake 0.10.0

HandBrake icon

Handbrake, the Open-Source tool for converting video, has reach a version 0.10.0. Yes, it is Handbrake 0.10.0.

Encoders
We are introducing several new encoders with this release and replacing others.

  • Intel QuickSync Video
    is a hardware based H.264 encoder that is available on Intel CPUs. Currently, QSV is only supported on Windows but we hope to bring this to Linux users in the future. Thanks to the good people at Intel for making this possible!
  • H.265
    is now available through x265 1.4. While this encoder is still fairly new, we have seen some promising results come out of it. It’s still under heavy active development and is only going to improve over time!
  • VP8
    using the libvpx encoder. We have now deprecated Theora (VP3) in favour of VP8 which is a more modern encoder offering better quality encodes at lower file sizes.
  • LibFaac
    Has now officially been removed due to GPL compatibility issues, and replaced with the libav AAC encoder as the new default for Windows and Linux. In addition, we have added the FDK AAC encoder for Windows and Linux as a optional compile-time option. The Mac release will continue to use CoreAudio as the default.
  • As usual, we’ve updated a number of the core libraries including x264 and libav

Handbrake is available for OS X, Ubuntu and Windows.

As a content creator, I certainly am thankful to the people who have been working on Handbrake.

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Google Chrome Crashes in OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 Beta

Google Chrome Crases in OS X 10.10.2 beta build 14C68k

From Chromium Project:

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Open Chrome.
2. Attempt to interact with the browser in any way.

What is the expected behavior?
Browser should work.

What went wrong?
The browser crashes completely on every start attempt.

After further investigation, it seems the crash happens when built-in Trackpad or Magic Trackpad is used to interact with Google Chrome on any Macs running OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 build 14C68k.

Further discussion:

#9 Mike.Had…@gmail.com
-[NSTouch _initWithPreviousTouch:newPhase:position:isResting:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance

isResting Available in OS X v10.6 through OS X v10.9

ie deprecated in 10.10 Yosemite and looks like removed in 10.10.2

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/AppKit/Reference/NSTouch_Class/index.html

We’ll see if this issue would be resolved in the next build of OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 seed.