On Tue, 2010-05-11 at 16:42 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote: > Now if we could only solve the ultimate mystery: Why the folks > designing video standards selected audio and video frame rates with no > common divisors :-). Well, I'll blame computer geeks who don't think things through like engineers, for a lot of them. Much of the digital video schemes seem to have been purely to squeeze data down to a rate that works across dial up, or allows sending of small files. It's obvious that quality was not the main factor. For decades, the goal of film production (the actual film that goes into the camera) was to make it better and better. Digital video, on the other hand, has been trying to work out how little data they can get away with. I work in video production, and have resisted the move from analogue to digital, as much as I can, for the reason you brought up, amongst one or two others. Such as a plethora of incompatible standards, permanent storage issues... The early digitisation schemes had non-synchronous sound and pictures, they just drifted along, and would only stay in sync by pure luck of the clock rate of your sound card (which would change with temperature, and be different from other people's). Capture and playback used completely separate audio and video hardware. For anything more than a few minutes of video, you'd have to resample the audio to compensate, and the resampling was a highly experimental, and time consuming, trial and error method to work out the factor. It was obvious to me, from the few minutes of trying to use someone else's digital edit suite, that there should be an exact, and synchronised, relationship between video and audio. Quite how someone could spend months, or probably years, developing a system that didn't work that way, without realising the problem, is beyond me. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines