I've been building web applications, and managing web environments for many years now.

Over the last 8 or ten years, the increased interactivity in a site based upon complex client side software that does things to the DOM, based upon logic outside the DOM has caused what I consider to be many headaches. While its ability to give us value, like inline video, and cute animations and such are good, they are not in and of themselves, reasons to engineer new types of content around them. What they do provide is impetus to change.

Flash and its bretheren are just more of a pain in the ass than they are worth. But I've never really seen any adverse effects, other than stories like this:

I browse to a site, and it requires a newer version of flash.

I upgrade the flash on my machine. I open my browser, and browse to the URL of the site above, and still get the same problem. I installed the lastest and greatest, but it still thinks it needs something newer.

This happens over and over until I give up.

So, I've had prroblems with getting flash to work properly, but its never really interfered with things i was trying to do.

Until today.

There is a problem in WordPress where the version of Flash that you are using will cause the media upload panel to not work properly.

I had to disable the Shockwave Flash 10 plugin in a friends browser, because it was disabling, or making invisible certain controls on the media upload screen in WordPress.

I didn't look at the html, and css to see what was going on, but

Well, I was shocked. What is Flash doing marking up the page's DOM anyway? Does WordPress actually use Flash for something? Why on earth would they, if they want to maintain any semblance of web standards compliance?

It just seems pointless to me - to have an infrastructure as simple as the web be burdened with complexities that cause incompatibilities that have such weird side effects. I'd love to see the Flash source code.- based upon just this evidence alone, I bet its just a mess.

Enough ranting.

I've been upgrading the MythTV server in the basement. I still have the Hauppuage card, so NTSC works fine. But, its time to have some HDTV... I have to prepare for the transition.

I purchased a pcHDTV 5500. It was plug and play to get it work, I did upgrade the MythTV Software to Mythdora 5, as well. Everything went very smoothly.

I am now a month into recording, and testing. I love being able to encode HD. the image is beautiful. Playback however is somewhat troublesome. It's Apple's fault... Here's why.

When I run Mythfrontend on my iBook G4, I get really crappy playback, dropped frames, choppy audio. It just doesn't work.

From my testing, transcoding the video to 1024 pixels wide, and 2.2Mb/s seems to do the trick. I can try different sampling rates, but this works just fine.

When i play an HD stream on my laptop, I get cpu utilization of 100%. So the machine's processor is doing all the heavy lifting. What kind of video card is in an iBook? A Radeo Mobility 9200, of course. It turns out that this card has a built in MPEG2 decoder. This means that the machine is perfectly capable of HD playback.

Now the question becomes - what do I do to enable the use of that hardware?

in Mythfrontend, I chose MacAccellerated, and quartz-opengl for the video playback drivers. The way I understand it, this should enable the graphics hardware to playback the MPEG2 stream.

Tiger uses a Cocoa component called CoreImage to manage the display. So, is CoreImage being used on this machine, and with this card?

So, I fired up System Profiler, and clicked on Graphics/Displays - here's what i got:

Chipset Model:    ATY,RV280M9+
Type:    Display
Bus:    AGP
VRAM (Total):    32 MB
Vendor:    ATI (0x1002)
Device ID:    0x5c63
Revision ID:    0x0001
ROM Revision:    113-xxxxx-142
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type:    LCD
Resolution:    1024 x 768
Depth:    32-bit Color
Built-In:    Yes
Core Image:    Not Supported
Main Display:    Yes
Mirror:    Off
Online:    Yes
Quartz Extreme:    Supported

Notice the report says Core Image is Not Supported. Bummer. This means I have no way of taking adavantage of the MPEG decoder in the card. That is, unless there's something I dont know. I've looked around a little, and it seems like access to that component is not allowed.

Why would Apple NOT provide complete access to the card's internals? It would make this completely serviceable machine USABLE, no?