Phantom Gorilla

The largest single problem I’ve heard of with BBC Radio Widget is a Flash security dialog, which beachballs the computer. Only a very few people get it — and I’m not sure why — but the solution is here.

This is a moan — if you don’t like to hear people venting their petty frustrations, look away now!

So today, I’ve waited five minutes for a train which started at the station I was at. (How did it manage to be late? I don’t know.) Narrowly avoid missing an appointment.

On the way home, I miss my connection because my first train is five minutes late, and I have to sit on the platform watching the seconds tick by. I catch it, and arrive at the halfway point only to find that half the trains are running an hour late — except mine, of course, which has just left — and now I’ll be waiting an hour for the next one. Finally, I end up stuck near some smelly people (like, seriously stinking-of-something-unmentionable, smell-them-from-several-seats-away smelly).

Not as bad as when I was heading to York a couple of months ago, though. £40 for a 90-mile journey, paid on the morning. Got on the (late) train, and was greeted by an announcement that we’d be further delayed. Waited ten minutes, then a further announcement that we’re moving to the end of the platform to get out of the way. As we stop, a scant thirty seconds later, we’re told the service is cancelled. And we have to walk all the way back along the platform.

Over the course of the next half hour, they cancel one train after another — each time insisting that the train will run, right up until the point of cancellation. (It later turns out that the line was completely blocked, so they’d have known no trains could run. They almost certainly knew at the time they were happily selling me tickets, too.)

Awesome. No wonder people like cars.

So, I wanted to listen to TMS while I work in the charity shop. There’s nothing like a bit of slightly-mad banter to liven up a slow afternoon. Unfortunately, as any real Englishman will know, it’s only available on Radio 4 LW, or Five Live Sports Extra (which is digital/internet only); and I don’t have any portable kit capable of picking it up. I also don’t have an internet connection in the shop.

I do have an iPhone, but it’s an iPhone 2G and it’s running on Vodafone UK, who don’t have an EDGE network. (I’m with them despite this as they’re considerably less sucky than O2 in every other conceivable way.) That means GPRS, which tops out at a realistic 3-5kB/s. Not exactly speedy, and supporting a radio stream of only around 24kbps – considerably lower than the 48+ needed for apps like InternetRadioBox to get me delicious internet radio straight from Auntie.

The solution? NiceCast. It’s hooked up to grab audio from my widget on my Mac back home (running in Flash mode so I at least start off with good audio), which it encodes to 24kbps mono MP3 for streaming to my phone (password-protected; don’t sue me, personal use only!), and then plays in InternetRadioBox. Turns out it’s quite reliable, and the audio sounds surprisingly good (it’s only voice, after all). I’m sat here right now listening to the Ashes with my phone lying on the desk, feeling very smug. It’d be better if it didn’t look like England were going to be all out for under a hundred, of course…

Granted, it’s blocking the phone’s connection so I won’t get any calls or SMS messages while I listen. And the real problem will come if my connection drops at all back home and the widget screws up autoresume, because I’ve got no way of resetting it. But that’s not going to happen. (Can you hear me, MacBook? I said THAT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.)

I realise this isn’t exactly news, but one more small voice can’t harm: eBay is dying. Slowly, messily, rotten with scammers and spammers and all the low-life scum who are the reason we can’t have nice things.

A year ago, I sold a MacBook on eBay. I had a couple of “Would you end it early?” offers, but nothing worse. The eventual buyer was happy, I was happy, and I rather enjoyed the experience.

This year, I sold an iPod and a broken Mac mini. Woah. One bid cancellation (a perfectly sane bid, which the guy left in place for 24 hours, not the “wrong amount” as he claimed), one request to ship to Cyprus (despite my clear terms stating no international shipping), complete with petulent retort when I pointed this out! One request for German postage, but this sounded more legit. Still refused. Two offers of cash to end the iPod early (for way below market value; I guess it’s worth a try, eh?). And that’s just what I can remember. I enjoyed it rather less.

A friend of mine sold his old iPhone today. Not only has he spent the last week politely telling people wanting to do dodgy deals and international shipping (probably to some distant relative in Nigeria) to fuck off, and not only did he have a fellow withdraw a bid because he “couldn’t contact the seller” (my arse) which eBay essentially ignored after having it reported – but when the iPhone finally ended it was to an American account. Registered the previous day. Which had no feedback. And had been bidding on high priced electronics.

Clearly a scumbag scammer. It happens. What shocked me was that his second place bidder was almost identically positioned – except that he’d been even more prolific, bidding on dozens of items in the last day.

One of the accounts was no longer registered within an hour of the auction’s end.

Fortunately, in this case the third place bidder seemed to be legitimate, and jumped on a second chance offer pretty quickly – with immediate payment. So, this time it ended… okay; but I can’t see my friend selling more on eBay soon.

Fraud on eBay.com is no secret, but eBay.co.uk had been holding out. No longer, it seems. eBay don’t care, because they just keep jacking up their fees to keep profits rising despite a fall in usage, but it’s so shortsighted. The worse it gets, the fewer real transactions take place, and you can only raise the prices so far before they’re an even bigger discouragement than the fraud. (At least you can avoid fraud, with due diligence.)

Eventually there won’t be anyone left but the scammers. And they’re not exactly the best customers.

You may or may not have heard about the disagreement over HTML 5′s video codec support. Let’s ignore the patent arguments completely, and the licensing fees (which I’m sympathetic to) — I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t bring anything useful to the table.

Basically, the choice is between H.264 and Ogg/Theora, and both Google and Apple think Theora sucks — for hardware support, and in general. (By the way, I’ll apologise now for my inconsistent references to Ogg and Theora; for reference, Ogg is the umbrella project, Theora is the video codec, and Vorbis is the audio codec.)

Let’s examine video quality. Noses were put out of joint by this comment from a Google guy:

If yt were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the internet.

Clearly, that’s hyperbole. Equally clearly, he doesn’t think much of Theora’s video quality. (Bear in mind, this is coming from the side that’s shipping support for both H.264 and Theora in Chrome; he has fewer reasons for bias than, say, an Apple guy who has some investment in H.264′s success.) This prompted a comparison from Greg Maxwell at Xiph, the people behind Ogg. I’ll summarise my criticisms of that comparison in Handy List Format:

• Only the first pictures compare H.264 and Theora. The second set compare H.263, the legacy YouTube codec, and Theora, which is not even slightly relevant to HTML 5 (and only relevant to the quotation above if we’re being slightly pedantic).
• YouTube’s H.264 files aren’t anywhere near the best quality that H.264 can deliver. They’re designed for mobile playback, and as such are designed to be playable by common, low-cost mobile hardware. Files designed for desktop playback — even GPU-accelerated playback — can have much more complex features enabled, and deliver vastly better quality at the same file size. The Ogg files, to my knowledge, are the best that the codec can deliver, without regard for the power of the hardware needed to play it back.
• Even this H.264 file clearly clearly beats Theora. Note especially the grainy banding around the water lilies, which is often indicative of a codec that’s struggling slightly at the specified bitrate.
• The Theora files were encoded by an expert, but the H.264 files were encoded with catch-all settings by an automated process. Anyone vaguely serious about video will tell you that different clips need different treatment, and a human who knows what he’s doing will totally outclass a machine which applies the same settings to every clip.
• H.264 is famously useful at all kinds of bitrates and resolutions. Most codecs are only suitable for a limited range of values, so even if H.264 can be outclassed under specific circumstances (and, again, I see no evidence here that Theora’s going to do that), it wins for its versatility.

So, you’ll gather I’m not a giant fan of Ogg either. From my lengthy use of H.264, my (admittedly limited) exposure to Theora, and considering the opinions of those I trust, I can’t convince myself that Ogg is anything other than inferior. This is not to say that it’s irrelevant, or unimpressive; just less desirable in this context.

The lack of hardware support, though, is inescapable. Lots of video cards have H.264 decoding capabilities, which allow the playback of compatible video without stressing the computer. This is a Good Thing™. There aren’t any such decoder chips for Theora (or if there are, they’re extremely rare), which means decoding would have to be done on the CPU. While that’s generally fine for desktops (if inefficient, even a possible problem for HD video), it completely rules out mobile devices; iPods, iPhones et al rely on hardware decoding to play back video, as their CPUs are about an order of magnitude too weak. So, this alone is probably a deal-killer for anyone interested in mobile video… as both Google and Apple are.

Think of the situation with Flash video. That is largely CPU-grunt-based, and runs bearably on the desktop. When it comes to mobiles, it’s like running through treacle, and really not a viable option. Apple and Google even went to the trouble of creating an H.264-based alternative — which can utilise hardware acceleration — to YouTube for the iPhone. We’ve got essentially the same choice here: either go with Ogg/Theora, which will exclude mobile browsers completely and perpetuate exactly the same bloody mess of incompatibility that HTML 5 is supposed to help resolve, or go with a solution which can easily be supported on a wide gamut of platforms.

So why don’t Apple follow Google, preferring H.264 but implementing both? They’ve actually, of course, taken a quintessentially Jobsian position: a crappy implementation is worse than none at all. (Especially if Theora’s adoption might harm the chances of something better coming along.)

So, what to do? Ian Hickson wrote a remarkably even-handed review of the situation and concluded that any requirement for codec compatibility had to be dropped, to prevent an unworkable specification.

His conclusion rather surprises me though. What’s wrong with requiring at least Ogg or H.264 support of compatible browsers? Sure, it’s just codifying the status quo, and it means that there’s no single file that can be guaranteed to play in every HTML 5-capable browser. It does, though, protect against any further fragmentation in support.

Needing two files might be inconvenient. But it beats 3. Or 4. Or 5…