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Homer's picture

Graphics Card Prices 2018

EVGA GTX 970 SSCThis is a table of all Nvidia graphics cards currently worth considering (IMHO), along with the maximum price you should aim to pay for them. The main objective here is to find the best possible graphics card at the lowest price.

The criteria for selection is that they must be capable of playing modern AAA titles at reasonable framerates and quality settings at 1080p, or 720p at a push, where "reasonable" is at least 30fps at medium quality settings (i.e. console gaming standard). Obviously higher is better, but of course also more expensive.

The table is sorted (roughly) in ascending order of GPU performance (there's a huge variance in benchmark results), is based on a combination of ShadowTech's GPU Tier list 2017, from the Linus Tech Tips forum, and Steven Walton's comprehensive GPU benchmarks on Titanfall 2, and includes older-generation cards, as far back as the GTX 660. Anything below that is probably not very useful for modern titles, including the current-generation GT 1030, which I've only included as a baseline reference. I've also excluded everything above the GTX 1060 3GB, as the 6GB model is very poor value for money (anything up to 50% higher price, but only 5% faster performance), and everything else is just far too expensive (including the second-hand prices for the GTX 980 Ti).

Homer's picture

Video Fixer

Here's a script I wrote to "fix" videos I ripped from DVD/BD, where the rip is too big to fit on a FAT32 formatted flash drive (my Smart TV doesn't recognise NTFS or ext2/3/4 filesystems), has the wrong resolution/aspect, and/or possibly contains multiple language audio tracks I don't need (my Smart TV also doesn't play DTS audio).

Homer's picture

High quality MPEG-4 transcoding with Mencoder

Rather than just provide a script, I've decided to present this solution as a sort of informal thesis, so hopefully it will help others to reinterpret it for their own purposes. As of 10th Dec 2011 this article is still a work in progress, so if it seems incomplete then please have patience, and come back later.

Objective: Transcode video from any source to MPEG-4 ASP (note: this is DivX 4/5, not MPEG-4 AVC/H.264), for playback on most standalone devices, keeping the file size reasonable, whilst retaining as much quality as possible, but without any regard to transcoding time or CPU utilisation. In this case I'm also going to hardsub (render subtitles directly onto the output video) a SRT subtitles file previously ripped from the source's forced subs (subtitles that only appear when foreign language is spoken, in a soundtrack that is otherwise in your locale's language). You can rip your own subtitles files using SubRip (Windows, also works under Wine) or Avidemux (multi-platform), or just download them from places like opensubtitles.org.

Note: The method used here is extremely CPU intensive, which may cause your PC to die of exhaustion, and you to die of boredom. You have been warned. :) However, the result is worth it IMHO, as the video quality is exceptional. H.264 generally produces better results at lower bitrates (or so Messiah Jobs keeps telling us), but unfortunately it's not compatible with nearly as many devices as DivX/XviD (e.g. most Smart TVs will play MPEG-4 ASP DivX/XviD files, but not MPEG-4 AVC H.264 files, mainly because H.264 is infested with a ton of nasty patents that make it difficult and expensive for manufacturers to implement). Also for compatibility reasons I've chosen the AVI 2.0 container format, and forced the FourCC from FMP4 to DX50.

Homer's picture

Slated Goes To Bollywood

Microsoft India caught red-handed on CCTV threatening an ISO official.

Homer's picture

Apple Kill QuickTime With DRM, Then Censor Complaints

Oh dear, the MacHeads are not happy bunnies...

Looks like a recent update to QuickTime has introduced some kind of DRM enforcement, that effectively renders it useless (pun intended).

Worse still, complaints about this update are being censored on Apple's support forums.

Apple - Support - Discussions - After QT7.4, AE error-you do not have ...

It seems that Apple has deleted (again) one part of this discussion...

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