[MEncoder-users] Using SI units in mencoder

Wed Feb 9 01:50:14 CET 2005

On Tuesday, 08 February 2005 at 17:59, Tetsuo Yokozuka wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 00:32:31 -0800, RC <rcooley at spamcop.net> wrote:
[...]
> > I hear some ice-cream manufacturers are selling "half-gallons" of
> > their products, which are less than half a gallon...  Should we
> > re-define terms every time they get miss-used in order to scam people?
> 
> A gallon is a gallon, a liter is a liter, a kilo is a kilo. Besides,
> at least hard drive manufacturers *always* specify on their products
> that they are using powers of 10 (not that it should be necessary).

Well, the IT world is somewhat different than the rest of the world. We're
interested in binary units, not decimal. 10 is not a round number for us,
but 16 is. It was traditional to call 1024 bytes a kilobyte, "KB" for
short. In the beginning, it was good, because it was different from kB or
k"anything". The trouble began, when the quantities became larger. How to
differentiate between M in megabytes (1024KB) and M in, for example,
megabits (1000kb)? But the geeks were already set in their ways and
learned to understand from the context, which was which. Then, the hard
drive manufacturers started to use megabytes for thousands of bytes to
"inflate" their products capacity for marketing purposes and the trouble
began.

Still, tradition is very important to us and I don't think you'll convince
anyone here to start using kibibytes or mebibytes for 1024 bytes and 1024
kilobytes.

> That said, at least be consistent with the units you use. I don't know
> what 'mb' is. Megabit ? Megabyte? Does it mean 1,000,000 bits or
> bytes, or 1,048,576 ?

"mb" is "milibit", 1/1000th of a bit. And yes, I know, it doesn't make
sense to use such an unit.

> Reading the other replies in this thread, I can't even argue. You guys
> are so stubborn. Fortunately, the GPL allows me to modify the program
> and to publish those modifications. I've made a patch against MPlayer
> 1.0pre6a that turns every unit into SI units. Anyone interested in
> hosting it may contact me by e-mail. Even if it's just me, at least I
> won't bug you with this issue anymore.

Show us the patch. If it makes sense, you'll have my vote. Just don't
use "kibibytes" or something like that.

R.

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://rpm.greysector.net/mplayer/
"I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey.
 We stand between the darkness ... and the light."
        -- Delenn in Grey Council in Babylon 5:"Babylon Squared"