Dilithium Crystalworks

YouTube Captioning = Fail

March 10th, 2010 13:46 pm by Ed

PCmag has an article up about the new captioning "feature" that's been rolled out on YouTube where they're now trying to automatically generate closed captions for all videos.

The article says that

The technology still isn't perfect, but Google is also using YouTube, with its vast array of accents, languages, background noise, and other distractions to improve its technology.

"Still isn't perfect" is, to say the very least, an understatement. I've seen some prime examples such as what's said in the video is "in a custom search" and the captioning routine translated it as Indianapolis job search ... I'd list more examples but basically the speech recognition is, in my experience so far, less than 30% accurate. Most of what it produces is total gibberish.

I think that this "feature" should have stayed in the testing labs until they could manage at least 75% accuracy. As it is it's a complete waste of time, bandwidth and Youtube's processing power.

Technorati Tags: closed caption, youtube, caption, speech recognition

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Posted in Internet, Software, opinion | No Comments »

Wikipedia DUH Moment

March 10th, 2010 13:41 pm by Ed

I just read something on slashdot that, in my opinion, qualifies as a classic "DUH moment". Seems that somebody decided to to a big study about why exactly Wikipedia articles vary so much in quality.

I think this is just another one of those waist of time and money studies that really have no point. Anybody that knows even a little bit about Wikipedia can answer the question about why the quality of articles varies. It's simply that just about anyone can create or edit an article.

For example somebody can create an article about the history of ping pong tables, then six other people can come along and edit that article, adding or subtracting anything they wanted to it. Granted, there are editors that review articles for accuracy and fix edits but because of how big that job is, literally millions of articles, there is no point in time when most of them are going to be good quality articles. No study is even needed. All you need is to think for ten seconds about the obvious.

Technorati Tags: waste of time, wikipedia, study, article quality

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Posted in Internet, opinion | No Comments »

Finally! Affordable DL Media!

March 9th, 2010 09:15 am by Ed

I've got quite a collection of video stuff that I've put together over the last two or three years. There's so much of it that it's filled just about almost one hundred gigabytes of my two hundred and fifty gigabyte hard drive. That's quite a bit of video.

The problem is that, because of the way that I want to make this stuff into DVD's, I *NEED* to use dual layer media to do the job. Single layer disks are only good for just a little over four gigabytes of storage and I'm needing to put at least eight gigabytes on each disk. The problem is that up until now, I haven't been able to find dual layer media on sale at an affordable price to allow me to get enough disks (allowing for the occasional coaster that happens no matter how good the disks, device and burning software are) to do the job.

Now however, I've *FINALLY* managed to find a supply of 8x Double Layer Media in a decent quantity AND at an affordable price. Not only that, but it's not just some el-cheapo off brand, its Memorex, which is one of my favorite brands of storage media and the one I trust the most.

This means that I'll finally be able to get those DVD's burned and once they are confirmed to work, clear the source files off of my hard drive and free up some very badly needed space.

Technorati Tags: dvd, video, dual layer

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Posted in Misc, Movies, Video | 2 Comments »