Oh, And One More Thing...
Okay, one last bit of Tiger news, but it’s related to the industry. The eventual progression of all end-user media towards High Definition is inevitable. Once you get it, you really don’t ever want to watch regular res stuff again.
I got this thing, and now I spend my TV time watching Discovery HD because it looks so damn cool. I don’t even care about the content.
Up until two days ago, if you wanted to download and watch HD video on your computer, you couldn’t. At least, not from any of the major video apps (e.g. Windows Media, Real).
Now you can. Tiger includes QuickTime 7, which has a new codec that supports high-definition video.
If you have QuickTime 7, check out the downloadable HD trailer for Batman Begins. It’s absolutely gorgeous.
Okay, I promise, no more Tiger talk. Coming up, an article on the screenwriting equivalent of the final exam essay—the dreaded arbitration statement.
I’m still waiting for my shipment, because I decided to save $30.
Regretfully saving $,
Eric
Actually, the Batman trailer looks even gorgeous-er than most people can tell, because for true 16:9 1080p HD you need a monitor that goes 1920 pixels wide. These are rare.
(Quick math - 9 is to 16 as 1080 is to 1920)
I have a 21 inch LaCie CRT that is capable of that fine a resolution (1920 x 1440), and trust me, the HD Batman trailer looks cool.
One thing I learned…Tiger eats memory. I was running Panther on a 1.5 Ghz G4 with 512 megs of RAM. Within a day or two, everything had slowed to a crawl.
Checking the ~/var/vm folder confirmed my suspicions. I had seven mongo swapfiles, clearly resulting from the OS using the hard drive when RAM ran short.
$175 or so got me another gig of memory. I snapped it in today, and Tiger is now sprinting.