I Had to Reboot My Car Today
John:
so are you recording in a format that is not just call recorder nope start recording in a format that is not just call recorder you're just asking me to mess things up oh because you're afraid he's gonna pull casey my ups lasts for at least five minutes i'm actually plugged into it so yes yes oh wait i hear the truck do you hear it do you hear it's driving away let's see maybe it's leaving yeah i think it's driving away all right
Casey:
So Marco had just asked John if he could start a crash resilient sound recording program so that if this truck was doing some sort of electrical work and suddenly the power went out, it wouldn't be a big deal because John hopefully would be using something that isn't call recorder like I was using when my Mac crapped out.
Marco:
Which I can tell you why that matters if we ever get to talk about the MP3 file format.
Casey:
I would love to do that, actually.
Casey:
But anyway, John had said to Marco, oh, well, it doesn't matter because my UPS lasts for at least five minutes and I'm plugged into my UPS.
John:
That's how I said it?
John:
That was an accurate reproduction?
Casey:
That is a completely flawless reproduction.
Casey:
It was effectively verbatim.
John:
If only it was recorded.
John:
Oh, yes, it was on my end, on my full recorder recording.
John:
It will successfully make it to disc.
Casey:
So anyway, I bring all this up because not 20 minutes ago, I was sitting at my iMac knowing that I'm going to be going out of town and thinking to myself, all right, I don't know what to do because I really want to let this thing run for another week and see if it reboots itself.
Casey:
And if it doesn't, I think at that point, I will personally be fairly convinced that the OEM RAM is good and that the OWC RAM was bad.
Casey:
But I'm probably going to be using Plex at some point.
Casey:
The Plex server is the iMac.
Casey:
If this thing turns itself off, I don't have any mechanism to turn it back on.
Casey:
Should I turn it off and plug it into the battery part of the EPS?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
And I decided not to because I went into system preferences and confirmed that the little checkbox that reads, so start up automatically after a power failure.
Casey:
And so I'm just going on faith that either we won't have a power failure or if we do, the Mac will start itself back up.
Casey:
And somebody in the chat is asking, you don't shut down your machine at night like the rest of us.
Casey:
No, this thing is on always.
Casey:
I turn the screen off.
John:
Yep, I'm the exact same way.
John:
No one should be shutting down their machines at night anymore, ever.
John:
Doesn't make any sense.
Casey:
To be fair, there's no reason not to, I guess.
Marco:
No, there is.
Marco:
There is a pretty big reason.
Marco:
They do use a good amount of power, but probably the ideal balance between functionality and power savings is sleep mode.
Marco:
To actually put the machine to sleep, not the deep hibernation mode, but regular sleep mode, that is, I think, a great balance for most people.
John:
You don't have to put it to sleep.
John:
Your energy saver settings should do that for you.
John:
After one hour of idle time, go to sleep or whatever.
Casey:
Yeah, but not I don't want that happening during the day, though, when I'm awake, because at any moment I might want to do something on this Mac remotely.
Casey:
And yes, I could do wake on land, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But that's what scheduled sleep is for.
John:
Then, if you know, you know, scheduled to go to sleep at 11 p.m.
John:
every day and wake up at 5 a.m.
John:
and you're fine.
Casey:
I didn't know that that was a thing.
John:
That's a thing.
John:
Oh, yeah, schedule.
John:
That's how I do my Backblaze backups.
John:
My computer wakes itself up at around 3 a.m.
John:
and does Backblaze and then goes to sleep.
John:
So I don't actually run it continuously all day.
John:
I just do like nightly backups.
Casey:
Interesting.
John:
So I assume the wake up is the Mac feature and then Backblaze is the thing to say put it to sleep when it's done?
John:
Backblaze has its own independent schedule, which is either run continuously or choose when you want me to run.
John:
So I have two independent schedules that I just synchronize regularly.
John:
good old cron style say the mac wakes up at three or the mac wakes up at 255 and backblaze starts at three and yeah so every day you're ruining five minutes of power usage of your computer you're just wasting that power it's not five minutes it stays awake for like an hour i let it do all its stuff during that time i probably just time machine backups and like power nap is like i think predates or post dates my mac but power nap will have things wake up from their sleep and do time machine backups and check mail and stuff but it doesn't help with backblaze
John:
Although, technically, if it wakes up to do a time machine, Backblaze will also run if you have it set to continue.
John:
Anyway, the point is, this scheduling feature is part of OS X. It's been there for years and years and years.
John:
You should use it.
John:
It's cool.
Casey:
Yeah, I probably should sleep this thing at night, but I just never do.
Casey:
And I say that only because nothing is happening on it while I'm sleeping.
Casey:
I mean, I guess that one of you guys, or maybe like Jason Snell since he's three hours in the past, might be trying to watch something off of my Plex server that I've shared with you guys.
Casey:
But in principle, there's no reason I shouldn't just let the thing sleep at like midnight or one o'clock or something like that and wake itself back up at like six or seven in the morning.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, you can use that as, like, your own kind of, like, political statement of, you know, you guys should really go to bed.
Marco:
Like, stop watching Top Gear off my Plexer.
Marco:
You need to go to sleep.
Casey:
Well, I just thought it was funny because I was having this internal debate with myself about whether or not I should move the Mac onto the battery side of the UPS.
Casey:
And once I have... It should only be a question of when, not whether.
Casey:
Well, sure.
Casey:
And that's exactly what I was about to say, actually.
Casey:
Once I have my data point with regard to the OEM RAM...
Casey:
At that juncture, I will move it over to the battery side of the UPS, but I don't want to mess with anything until then.
Marco:
I am still a little concerned that there was that one seeming GPU-related failure, like a day after you put the stock RAM back in.
Marco:
That's the only thing that's weird about this to me that says maybe this is a more complex problem.
Marco:
But the fact that it hasn't happened at all in, what, three weeks or something, and it was happening about every week, that is a pretty strong switch over there.
Marco:
So I'm not entirely ready to say it's definitely the RAM, but I'm probably about ready to say you should at least get the RAM swapped.
Casey:
Yeah, and basically, as I've said in the past, all I'm doing right now is trying to get a data point so that I can go to OWC or Mac Sales, whatever the hell they're called, and say, hey, listen, you know, I was having reboots once a week.
Casey:
I put the OEM RAM back in.
Casey:
It ran for blank.
Casey:
without a reboot i'm pretty confident it's the ram can you send me new sticks and actually i don't have the individual's name handy but um somebody had sent me a couple of tweets over the last couple of weeks saying that they had similar issues with owc ram and ended up returning it i think and i presume at this point i'm well out of the return window because i got this computer in january
Casey:
But anyways, they said that they had gotten crucial RAM instead, and thus far it had been flawless.
Casey:
Although, to be fair, it had only been a few days at that point.
Casey:
So I think what I'll try to do is I'll try to do a return on the OWC RAM, assuming my test plays out the way I expect it will.
Casey:
And then if that RAM has similar issues at that point, I'll probably either ask to return it or I should say an exchange or whatever.
Casey:
And then I'll ask to return it if the new hypothetical RAM has the same issue and maybe just get like, you know, crucial RAM or something like that.
Casey:
Anyway, we should probably do some follow up.
Casey:
Is John doing Lens Rentals wrong?
John:
Yeah, I got an email today that said this is a reminder from LensRental.com.
John:
This is a reminder that your rental ended yesterday and our system indicates that it has not been sent back to us.
John:
So I was surprised by this email because first of all, my rental didn't end yesterday.
John:
It ended on Monday and yesterday was Wednesday.
John:
And I sent it back on Monday.
John:
And of course, when I sent it back, I got a receipt from the FedEx place and I took a picture of the receipt with my phone.
John:
So as soon as I got this email, I could immediately reply with a picture of my receipt with a tracking number that if they entered into the FedEx website, they would see was on truck for delivery back to their place in Missouri or whatever they are.
John:
And my question is to Marco, who's done this before, did I do it wrong?
John:
Am I supposed to enter my tracking number after I return it?
John:
Am I supposed to go to the website and click a button to say that I shipped it back?
John:
Did I mess this up somehow?
John:
You didn't mess it up at all.
John:
Basically, something messed up that doesn't usually do that.
John:
Anyway, they don't have the lens I want to rent for...
John:
always vacation so i'm kind of upset about that too which uh what lens is it it's a lens that i probably don't want to buy because it's a thousand dollars and it's a i'm trying to find like a zoom a zoom that i wouldn't want to buy because it's like a compromise but it's a pretty good compromise this is the sony vario tessar t star e 16 to 70 millimeter it's a very compact zoom it's like if you want to just have one lens on your camera on vacation
John:
It takes decent pictures at many ranges and has a pretty good zoom range.
John:
Not really, really big zoom, but pretty wide to pretty close up and folds back to a small size.
John:
This looks like a good lens for that.
John:
But then again, it's also $1,000.
John:
And do I really want to spend $1,000 on a zoom lens that...
Marco:
isn't optically that amazing but it really is very flexible and it's much smaller than the zoom lens i had so i'm thinking of renting that and then just buying some primes with the camera yeah i mean honestly and i was actually very pleased we got a lot of feedback from other photographers so far uh basically saying that they too and these are some some pro photographers uh that they too only own primes and and some of them said i occasionally rent a zoom for for like an event but
Marco:
For the most part, there's been a number of people who are basically saying that they agree with my plea last episode to please consider only using primes and please at least get the 50 prime equivalent for your system.
Marco:
There were actually quite a lot of those.
Marco:
That was very nice to hear.
Marco:
So it does seem like you are looking at that.
Marco:
I also neglected to mention last show, if you're not looking at the Sony system, I would also give serious consideration to the Fuji X-T line or X-Pro line.
Marco:
There was the X-T1 that a lot of people loved.
Marco:
I believe the X-T2 is now out, or at least it's about to be out.
Marco:
The whole Fuji X-Trans sensor thing is kind of cool and has some pretty cool advantages.
Marco:
So I would strongly recommend, if you don't want to jump all the way up to Sony's A6300 slash A7 price ranges, consider the Fuji X line.
Marco:
Because it is, I have not had any direct experience with it, but it is very well regarded.
Marco:
And a lot of people like that a lot at the slightly lower price point.
John:
People were trying to talk me into micro four thirds.
John:
I'm totally aware of all these things.
John:
I think I've read every single review on DP review for every 2016 camera at this point.
John:
So I'm very aware of the things.
John:
I'm pretty settled on the Sony body.
John:
I'm willing to pay the extra money.
John:
It's a camera that I used.
John:
It's a known known at this point.
John:
I rented it.
John:
I used it.
John:
I liked it.
John:
The Fugees are less expensive, but I don't mind the extra cost for the body, especially when I'm looking at
Marco:
lenses that all cost a bazillion dollars anyway still no purchases made but i'm thinking about it also worth pointing out as one person did that i also neglected to mention last episode the the lenses that i buy are the full frame lenses the fe line in sony's parlance uh john would not need to buy the fe lens he could buy the crop sensor e lenses and so like like the lens you were just mentioning john that that is not available in full frame there is no equivalent to that for full frame
Marco:
I know.
John:
That's why it's a good lens.
John:
It's perfect for my camera.
John:
That's why it's a versatile lens.
John:
Well, for my camera, I don't want to pay the amount of money I'd have to pay for a full-frame version of the same lens, and I don't want the size that that would bring.
John:
So here is a lens made specifically for my size sensor that is very compact, that has a good zoom range, that is optically pretty good.
Marco:
exactly yeah so for your needs i i do recommend for most people that they like that if they have the budget for one of these sony a7 series full frame cameras to step up to it if you can because the quality difference is immense however for what you are using and for for your stated uh needs for zoom lenses basically for really far reaching but also small and
Marco:
I would not recommend full frame.
Marco:
I think you're making the right move by not going full frame for that particular reason.
Marco:
It pains me to say that.
John:
I would go full frame if the body wasn't so big.
John:
I would sacrifice the zoom if the body wasn't so big and if the body wasn't literally three times the cost.
John:
It's not a small price jump.
John:
I'd pay a couple hundred extra, but $3,500, I'm out.
Marco:
And one thing to consider, if you don't want to go all the way to the $3,000 A7R II, the regular A7 II without the R came out something like six to nine months earlier.
Marco:
And I rented one of those before I decided to wait for and then buy the A7R II.
Marco:
The regular A7 II is not that much more money than the A6300.
Marco:
And it's not quite as advanced in some of the newer stuff, like some of the video features and the focus.
Marco:
I think there aren't as many phase-detect focus points on it, I think.
Marco:
And the burst mode thing, and it's bigger.
Marco:
Like, yeah, no, I looked at it.
Marco:
But the sensor for the A7 II, it is full frame.
Marco:
And I think, I mean, you can get those things for what, like $1,400 or $1,500?
Marco:
For what they are, they're an incredible value right now because it's kind of like last year's model that's still for sale, basically.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That is a very good buy if you want full frame, but don't want to spend like three grand on it.
Marco:
And compared to what was available, like if you wanted full frame before the Sony A series, you had to go like for like, you know, a 5D Mark II Mark III.
Marco:
And those were like $3,000 cameras.
Marco:
That used to be the only way to get full frame.
Marco:
Like that was like the entry point for full frame was these like $3,000 Canon big SLRs.
Marco:
to have something like the sony a7 series and to have their full frame sensor starting at like 1500 bucks is amazing for for quality photography and for bringing that to people it's really quite something yeah i'm going to do the casey prediction now and say here's what's actually going to happen i'm going to get this camera we're going to use it for a few years
John:
The new whatever replaces your camera is going to come out and or there's going to be a full frame camera in a similar form factor to the 6300.
John:
And several years after buying this camera and a bunch of lenses, I'm going to sell it all and buy a full frame mirrorless camera, which may or may not be from Sony.
John:
So I know that's going to happen like it's inevitable, but I'm willing to spend the three or four years now with this small camera as a transitional phase.
John:
Yeah, that's totally fair.
Marco:
Honestly, I would bet against that future for you just because like... You think I'm too cheap?
Marco:
No, I think... Fair, fair.
Marco:
I mean, that might be a factor here, but I've been talking to you about cameras for like two years now or three years now, and you've never wavered on the point of like, I like good cameras, but I will never buy one that's that nice.
John:
I know because it's a money pit.
John:
I know I'm susceptible to this money pit.
John:
And my wife made me enter it.
John:
And as predicted, once you have one and use it a lot, like you just... It's... I know.
John:
I know myself.
John:
I was trying to avoid this particular money pit.
John:
Now I'm easing into the money pit.
John:
And also I feel like your camera is like... I feel like your camera is still a little bit in transition.
John:
I feel like this whole mirrorless revolution is kind of like just getting going here.
John:
And I want to... I really believe that you could...
John:
Have a decent full-frame camera with all of your features in a smaller form factor that has even better performance.
John:
I think that is coming.
John:
I just have to wait like five to seven years, and I'm willing to wait.
John:
And the 6300 is really cool, and I think I'll use that while I wait.
Marco:
I'm not sure it's going to get that much smaller, honestly, because...
Marco:
like like the the the a7 line before the two the a7 to a7 r2 the regular a7 line was a little bit smaller one of the reasons that had to get bigger was the giant uh in-body stabilizer thing there if you look there's actually a teardown on i fix it of the a7 r2 there really is not a lot of room in there to to shrink this thing any further and also if they did shrink it further somehow that would probably mean an even smaller battery and
John:
and that's the last thing this thing needs like there's plenty of room for more battery if they need to talk to apple about scalped batteries or something there's room for more battery and you can't change them i'm totally willing to not have the embody stabilization like do the the 6300 but with a full frame sensor but without the stabilization like anyway i i believe in the future of technology and i believe cameras will get smaller and better and
Marco:
uh so i'm willing to wait it out and even if it doesn't if you don't if you don't want the stabilization hold on how much is an a7r the regular the first a7r actually that's a contrast only you don't want that but that's the old camera slow slow burst mode and not as good sensor
John:
Yeah, you don't want contrast autofocus.
John:
Never mind.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Forget about it.
John:
Anyway, we're getting enough camera talk.
John:
At some point, I'll buy something.
John:
Then we'll talk about it some more.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
We got a bit of feedback with regard to QNX, which is that real-time operating system.
Casey:
And Dan Dodge, I believe is the gentleman's name, that was co-founder and is now working at Apple.
Casey:
Two different anonymous sources.
Casey:
The first told us that the M5 that Marco had, My335, both the iDrive systems are running on QNX.
Casey:
And this particular individual also added that there really isn't any requirement for real-time OS for infotainment.
Casey:
It just kind of happens to use QNX.
Marco:
It's kind of like the standard that everybody does.
Casey:
Yeah, I was about to say, and that's apparently fairly popular.
Casey:
And furthermore, from what I understand, the CarPlay features that are in a lot of modern cars, a lot of that support happens at the QNX OS level, even before the iDrive tier, if you will, or level in the software.
Casey:
And then a different anonymous source wrote us a really fascinating email, which I'd love to read the whole thing, but I presume John has called out a couple of parts that I'll read to you.
Casey:
The biggest performance problem in car UIs is usually the embedded chipset used.
Casey:
Our system has to work on 10-plus chipsets by different manufacturers.
Casey:
Car companies save every cent on their chipset.
Casey:
The fact that some cars built today still have less than 128 megs RAM, although RAM costs almost nothing, shows that perfectly.
Casey:
As my head of engineering once said to me, they'd rather spend money on three software engineers for two years trying to get that system to run as efficiently as possible rather than spending a few dollars more on each chip.
Casey:
And that's because of the economy of scale that, you know, when you're building 11 gazillion cars, a few dollars per car really starts to add up.
Casey:
And I just, I mean, it makes sense, but I didn't really think of it that way until this anonymous little birdie wrote in and said that.
Casey:
So I thought that was fascinating.
John:
It doesn't make sense.
John:
It's the exact definition of penny wise pound foolish.
John:
Like, well, because I think like, oh, you're right about the math and how it multiplies out.
John:
But you're wrong about the car companies are wrong about the value provided by having good software.
John:
The good software is an important differentiator, increasingly important differentiator in cars.
John:
And you saving two bucks on that chip.
John:
is not worth the value lost to your brand like all the people like marco said he drives this this you know really nice mercedes but it's disgusted by the infotainment system you spent all this money in this car uh you know so many parts in the mercedes are 50 cents more expensive than they are in other cars one cent more expensive one dollar more expensive from like the fuel lines to the filters to the mufflers to every single part of that car is just a little tiny bit more expensive than honda that's what makes it a mercedes
John:
The software you can't treat like, oh, well, we're only going to put 120 megs RAM because doubling the RAM would cost three extra cents.
John:
And instead of we're going to we're going to spend, you know, have three engineers work on this and to jam the software into this tiny little chipset with a small amount of RAM because, hey, it's cheaper.
John:
Do the math.
John:
It is cheaper, but you're making your product worse in a way that is way out of proportion to the money that you save.
John:
If you just add up like, OK, two bucks, two extra bucks per car times the number of cars we sell, you're adding so much more value to your brand as Mercedes as a car that people want to buy.
John:
by making decent software and you make decent software by not making your software engineers have to jam their software into a bunch of weird underpowered chipsets that are ram constrained is it's a terrible idea and you know that this email ends say the good part is uh all these problems are slowly getting worked on the companies creating these infotainment systems are slowly getting better understanding the technology hurdles and some car companies that really care are taking this away from third-party
John:
a vendor is basically taking it in-house kind of like a tesla does so they're getting better about this but the mindset is like totally wrong and you know we're totally not blaming the people who make these infotainment systems because you know as this person said they have to write this thing it has to work on these terrible washing machine chip sets that are in these cars because they're cheap
John:
And of course they're terrible.
John:
And by the way, the infotainment system on QNX thing, that was in response to the last episode where we were talking about QNX.
John:
And it's like, well, you don't need a real-time operating system for the infotainment.
John:
You need it for like the self-driving car, the automatic stopping system that prevents you from hitting pedestrians and other things that are...
John:
critical that need to be in real time but qnx is also a reliable popular embedded operating system so like i said just use it for the infotainment systems too maybe they're not even using the real-time features like this was my question like what what is it about the infotainment system that needs real time and the answer is nothing it's just you know it's a good embedded operating system with that automotive engineers are familiar with that runs in a runs on those washing machine chips with a tiny amount of ram so there you have it i should also point out that i had to reboot my car today
Marco:
How do you do that?
Marco:
It happens.
Marco:
You hold down a key combination, right?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And I should point out, too, this is the third time I've had to do this since I went in the car for three months.
Casey:
You should really look at the Ram, Marco.
Casey:
I hear that's troubling these days.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
So what was the symptom?
Marco:
So the first time I had to reboot it... So there's two screens.
Marco:
There's the screen where the speedometer is right in front of you on the little dash console thing.
Marco:
And there's the giant touchscreen in the middle.
Marco:
And those are actually running two different computers.
Marco:
The one in front of the driver is kind of like a sub-interface that remotely controls the main one in the center.
Marco:
And the main one in the center also controls all the HVAC stuff, all the media stuff...
Marco:
um and and a bunch of other things that are not driving but are a lot of other accessory features of the interior so i went out one afternoon and the the driver facing one said there's a problem with your center console call service i hate talking on the phone so rather than calling customer service i just searched the web for like this error message and uh found like some forums posts and everything saying like oh just reboot it
Marco:
and then it took me another 10 minutes to figure out how the heck do you reboot it and the way you reboot it is like the steering wheel has a little like jog wheel on each side like by the by the buttons like for the controls and if you hold if you click in both of those jog wheels and hold them in for like five seconds the center screen reboots
Marco:
Interesting.
Marco:
So I did that.
Marco:
It fixed the problem.
Marco:
It came back up.
Marco:
It takes like 20, 30 seconds to reboot.
Marco:
Came back up.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
And then I did it willingly about a month ago because the navigation, when it highlights the road you're supposed to drive on with a blue overlay...
Marco:
Sometimes, if you zoom or pan or otherwise cause the map to redraw, sometimes the blue overlay stops drawing reliably.
Marco:
It'll either omit sections or it'll just not draw at all.
Marco:
And it looks like it's maybe running out of texture memory or something, and so the texture is just not being painted right or something.
Marco:
I don't know how the system is working in enough detail to say for sure, but it looks like some kind of memory leak bug that slowly this just stops working very well.
Marco:
And actually, when I had the service loaner, when I got my windshield replaced, that car had that same symptom where it just wasn't drawing the overlay right.
Marco:
So I know it's not just my car.
Marco:
I used to know how to fix it in the service loaner, but now I do.
Marco:
You just reboot it and it's immediately better.
Marco:
And then today, the center console just stopped responding and like the audio froze and it was playing over Bluetooth.
Marco:
So it wasn't like a cable issue.
Marco:
and yeah so i was like driving at the time so like well i hope doesn't do anything weird so i was at a i was stopped at traffic lights i'm like all right good time hold them in reboot it was fine like came back up again totally fine um i will say overall like you know now that we're on the subject of these infotainment systems
Marco:
It kind of annoys me that Tesla is working on all these automatic driving things and pouring so much of their resources into that while their in-car navigation and media system still could use a lot of improvement.
Marco:
It's still pretty rudimentary.
Marco:
It is nice in that it has the big touchscreen and everything, but the media interface is extremely basic.
Marco:
it it supports very little of bluetooth audio capabilities control capabilities doesn't support like artwork and stuff like that uh doesn't support fast forward and rewind like doesn't there's no of course browsing or anything no ipod interface no carplay so like they're they're they're missing a lot there and then the navigation is also very rudimentary you can't set waypoints you can't like you know say all right well drive here to here but use this highway or drive here to here but stop here in the middle you can't do that you have to just make separate trips and
Marco:
And so stuff like that.
Marco:
And also the directions like the map, the map images come from Google.
Marco:
But I think Tesla has its own street data.
Marco:
And Tesla also provides its own navigation, despite wherever the data is coming from.
Marco:
Like it's not using Google's navigation.
Marco:
Tesla has its own navigation.
Marco:
And Tesla's time estimates are never right with traffic.
Marco:
and it it is not very good navigating around traffic heavy cities like i've made the mistake of following a couple times uh for manhattan and it was a disaster every time uh and like it was not that not the driving in manhattan had to be a disaster it just made really bad choices and i followed them and then i you know i i would look over like oh i if i would have just stayed on the highway one more exit i would have bypassed all of this that took me 40 minutes you know so
Marco:
Overall, Tesla's head unit is... The navigation system is... It's good.
Marco:
I love having the big screen.
Marco:
However, I wish they'd put more resources into that because it seems like they haven't really touched that in a long time.
Marco:
And for them to be putting all this amazing effort into cool AI features and stuff, that's nice.
Marco:
If you look at the big picture, if these things end up saving lives, that's awesome.
Marco:
And that is more important.
Marco:
But at the same time, as a customer of their car, I do wish the system was better.
Marco:
And it is kind of weird that such a tech-forward company has kind of dropped the ball on the basic features of their technology in the car facing the user, you know?
Marco:
Also, the touchscreen is just really sluggish.
Marco:
Like, navigating the map is very, very low frame rate technology.
Marco:
It's kind of like navigating Google Maps on a Pentium 3.
Marco:
It's not like using an iPad.
Marco:
It's not at all like that.
Marco:
It's very sluggish and there's all this latency in the interface.
Marco:
And you do kind of expect more from a car of that caliber.
John:
So features aside, getting back to the rebooting your car and stuff, you kind of... Well, I don't know.
John:
It's hard to separate it from the features when talking about this, but I think a lot of regular people have this feeling, and it's easy for us to slip into it, too, is like...
John:
when things were simpler and didn't have as much computer stuff they were more reliable because there were fewer things that can go wrong and as soon as they started adding software to their stuff like when we talked about this with smart tv that old smart tv post i had from ces so worst products through software they had all the software and it just makes the thing less reliable and more annoying to use
John:
And you're speaking of it in terms of the basics, like they've added a bunch of software to the car, which is good, and they're better at it than a lot of other people.
John:
But on the other hand, it's also less reliable.
John:
And my terrible, terrible infotainment, if you want to even call it that system on my Honda Accord, I've never had to reboot it, but it's just terrible all the time.
John:
So that's kind of like in the in-between phase where...
John:
Everything is not as simple as it used to be like on my wife's accord that has no infotainment screen at all.
John:
That was, you know, it's simple fixed function, everything implemented in hardware with, you know, some very rudimentary firmware, you would even call it no sort of general purpose touchscreen menu system software, like nothing like that.
John:
There's a bunch of CPUs in there, there's a bunch of memory, but they're all basically like little embedded systems.
John:
that's like as far as the car industry can go along the lines of like everything is super reliable and as we all know as programmers but it's sometimes easy to forget as consumers as soon as you make real live software like a gui you can't make it the same way as an embedded system you have to have a gui framework and an api and like you know regular application development for human interaction um
John:
as opposed to this is custom software for this little chip that controls the radio and instead of you know it's not like the more you start making a platform the more you start making what we know is like a pc style platform where you build applications on top of it where you're farther farther away from that ideal embedded system that just has like a rom or something and you just get all the bugs out of it and you get it right or if there are bugs they're sort of known bugs where once you start having real live software
John:
it's there's nothing so far that we as humans have been able to figure out how to do to make uh that software as reliable as the thing without software without sacrificing huge things like just okay it will you know we'll do space probe reliability metrics but it will take us years and years to write a very small amount of code and the limitations are so onerous that no one would ever want to do anything that way unless you're writing a space probe in which case you have no choice right
John:
but cars are not space probes the the the cost benefit ratios are different so bottom line is once you add software to cars you have to reboot your car like essentially that is inevitable uh you know we do want software to be added to our cars we because we think it's a better user interface and they can do a lot of stuff but you will have to reboot your car like there's no like if only you had tried harder tesla then marco wouldn't have had to reboot his car like there's there's there's you know there's a sliding scale of quality but
John:
A car with software is never going to be as reliable as the car with a hardware radio.
John:
Because the hardware radio either works or it doesn't.
John:
And when it stops working, you throw it out and you put in a new hardware radio.
John:
And for the life of that hardware radio, it doesn't change.
John:
There's no firmware updates.
John:
There's no software being sent to it.
John:
And it's doing so much less.
John:
It's doing so, so much less than Marco's thing.
John:
It's like pulling images and doing GPS and navigating and talking to you and putting images up on the screen.
John:
It's doing so much less.
John:
It's not as if there's magic sauce.
John:
When you do more stuff, it's more complicated.
John:
software has bugs the more software you have the more bugs you have uh and until we get like a sort of emergent ai to write and fix our software for us that seems to be the way of things probably for most of our life uh so we should just kind of get used to this now the features discussion i think is a separate issue which mark was saying like you have you know you're gonna have bugs you have a lot of software spend more of your time here instead of less of your time there and we say the same thing about apple especially on the mac like
John:
if you're not, don't try to look for the next big feature to add.
John:
Why don't you just make all the features that are already there much more reliable?
John:
And that definitely is possible.
John:
And it is something Tesla should be doing.
John:
But, uh, whenever I feel like high and mighty about the fact that I never had to reboot my cord, I realized it's only because it doesn't really have as much software and features as Marco's car does.
John:
And as soon as it does, it's going to be just as bad.
John:
Uh, and you know, we as programmers understand why that happens because software without bugs doesn't exist.
John:
And more, more software, more bugs.
Um,
Casey:
I see what you did there.
John:
Wow.
John:
Is that depressing?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But like, you know, that's the way of things.
John:
I feel like we should understand that better than anyone because we do it for a living and we know what it's really like.
Marco:
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Bye.
Casey:
Jamie is written in, and they asked,
Casey:
Marco, would you like to comment?
Marco:
Yeah, so this is in response to my discussion about audio drift being a problem in long podcast recordings where basically when your sound card is sampling your microphone at 44,100 times per second, then over the course of like a two-hour recording...
Marco:
what your computer thinks is the correct time and the number of samples it has recorded might be off from your co-host's computer by like half a second to one second.
Marco:
And it's just due to imprecision between the computers.
Marco:
Like, my sound chip might just be, you know, 0.0001% less accurate than yours, but when you're doing 44,100 samples per second over two hours...
Marco:
that could start to add up to something noticeable because it only takes like a half second for the two tracks to be off before you can really notice it.
Marco:
My reply to Jamie's feedback here is, I don't know why they can't do it.
Marco:
I mean, if it's possible to do it somewhere else, I don't know why.
Marco:
I'm sure there's a good reason because this has been a problem for a long time.
Marco:
One of the ways that this problem gets avoided in professional equipment, which Jamie's probably familiar with, if you look at pro audio gear, like really pro audio gear,
Marco:
There is usually a clock input and output port on the back, and you can use separate devices for clock generation.
Marco:
So what they do is they don't rely on incredible precision to make sure that this device and this device have exactly the same precision on their clock chips.
Marco:
No, they just outsource the problem.
Marco:
They declare one source of the clock rate to be authoritative, and
Marco:
And they just hardwire all to each other and say, all right, this device is providing the clock for me.
Marco:
So my internal circuitry is not going to do it.
Marco:
This is a role I know very little about.
Marco:
I just know that this exists.
Marco:
So if I if I'm getting those details wrong, I apologize.
Marco:
But that's the gist of it.
Marco:
That is how that role deals with it.
Marco:
It's not by getting incredibly purchased components.
Marco:
It's simply by outsourcing the problem to one device and saying, OK, you're the master of the clock.
John:
I put this feedback in there because I had the same question when you were describing it.
John:
And I was thinking along the lines of, look, the clocks have to be pretty darn accurate from one computer to the next.
John:
Could it be instead that because, again, we're not using real time operating systems here to record our audio?
John:
that it's easy to miss a frame here and there because some other thing happens.
John:
And it's not a big deal.
John:
You'll never notice it audio-wise.
John:
But if you add that up, like, in other words, it's basically a software problem and not a hardware problem, that the quartz crystals in our computers are all close enough to each other that it wouldn't matter.
John:
But our computers aren't hardware audio recording devices.
John:
They're general-purpose computers.
John:
And in the end, it's a piece of software that's pulling samples off a bus and so many things in the middle of it.
John:
missing a few things here and there but i don't i guess that wouldn't explain systemic drift because if it was really a random error and it was equal on all our computers maybe it would even out anyway i don't know the answer either um your theory sounds reasonable but i have the same questions about like look quartz crystals should be accurate and matching but then again i didn't know about this whole thing of having a clock being fed into multiple audio components so i don't know what to think so if you are an audio person who does audio on computers and you know the definitive answer
John:
Please write in and tell us.
John:
Yeah, that'd be great.
Marco:
Also, for whatever it's worth, I've always noticed that laptops have way more drift than desktops.
Marco:
Mac Pros have way less drift than iMacs.
Marco:
So it does seem to possibly be related to just the quality and the conditions of the components.
John:
I wouldn't say the components.
John:
A laptop may just be under more stress.
John:
It's more likely to be thermal throttling up and down and doing other stuff.
John:
Again, I would imagine that the clock crystals inside the related chips and all those things are of equal quality, but we are not solid-state audio recording devices like a little handheld thing you do.
John:
It's a whole computer in there, so so much can go wrong between the samples being pulled off this really complicated bus and going out to a file.
John:
So anyway...
John:
Please write in and tell us.
John:
But, you know, we all see the results.
John:
If you want to try this experiment yourself, feel free.
John:
Do a double ender podcast with two friends across the country on a laptop and try to put the audio together and you'll realize why you need Marco's thing.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's see here.
Casey:
So one of you put in here and I'm quoting the Arm Mac feedback that won't die.
Casey:
It won't.
John:
people keep suggesting it it's been like oh three months six months this this literally will not die and i feel like now fine okay fine we will address it quote it's obvious what's going on with the mac lineup colon total arm reboot this is from a tweet this is a concise form of what everyone is telling us every time we complain about where are the new
John:
macs why aren't they updating the mac pro it's taken so long with the mac pro updates everything says don't buy and the mac buying guide thing on the mac rumor site doesn't seem like they care about the mac anymore and everyone's like you dummies it's because every single mac is being converted to arm and they're just taking a long time well i don't understand why you don't realize that why don't you reply to my tweets all the macs are going arm
John:
maybe maybe all the max are going arm uh we've talked about that many many times in the past um a couple things i have to say about that and the reason why we don't bring that up first of all we've talked about our max forever on past shows and all the different trade-offs inherent and then we're not going to rehash all that right um but first if all the max are going arm still kind of doesn't excuse the tremendous delay like you
Marco:
look at the intel transition they didn't stop selling power pc max and not update them for three years before the transition to x86 right and they knew that was coming for a long time you sell the old computers right along until you tell the world hey world we're changing to a new architecture well in all fairness though that's a bad example because back then the mac was apple's main product like they cared a lot more about it they prioritize it a lot more engineering wise these days it doesn't seem like it is that high of a
John:
But if it's not a high priority, it's not a high priority whether it's changing or not.
John:
And that gets back to last week's argument of like maybe it's not high enough priority to care to switch to ARM because then you'd have to develop ARM chips suitable for all your Mac line and that costs a lot of money.
John:
But anyway, the second thing is and the conventional wisdom about the ARM transition is...
John:
If Apple is going to convert to ARM, they have to essentially pre-announce it because developers need to get their stuff together the same way they pre-announced the x86 transition.
John:
They didn't announce it and say, and you can buy an x86 Mac today.
John:
Nope.
John:
They had to announce it to developers first.
John:
And then developers could get like that test hardware.
John:
It was like a Pentium 4 in a cheese grater case.
John:
And you could make sure you recompile your apps and update all the tools and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
could be could be that apple is uh converting their whole line to arm but that is not the that is not the obvious explanation of what's going on and it's not even the number one most likely explanation it's probably like the number two or three possible explanation and i would be very surprised if apple was converting the entire mac line to arm and
John:
And didn't tell the world and developers before you could buy the hardware.
John:
So I don't know anyone you have anything else to add about this this eternal feedback that that that tells us we're adults for not realizing it's a complete arm reboot.
Marco:
Like it's a nice idea if you don't think about it for too long or if you if you're not that familiar with with what would be involved or like the markets here.
Marco:
I just don't think it's realistic.
Marco:
I don't think there's... Not to say that Apple couldn't release a whole line of ARM Macs, but that... They totally could.
Marco:
Yeah, as we've talked about, and we're all under the impression that they probably have ARM OS X running in the labs and have for some time.
Marco:
They probably just maintain it as a parallel...
Marco:
just-in-case branch, but there really is just not a lot of motivation for them to do that right now.
Marco:
As we discussed, you know, I'll summarize it briefly.
Marco:
Basically, it would take a lot of work, would have a lot of downsides, and Intel just isn't bad enough yet.
John:
Yeah, and again, what I get coming back to is like,
John:
arm max yes no whatever but the delay in updating all the macs is unrelated because like there is no reason why you would say because we're doing the arm thing therefore we're going to delay it's not as if they would say we we don't have time to update those old cruddy macs we're going to take every person who was working on mac hardware before and put them all on the arm hardware that you know it's
John:
it doesn't make any sense and also because there have been massive delays in the past like the cheese grater mac pro not being updated forever and that wasn't explained by an arm reboot either it's just plain like there's so many more explicable reasons about skylight having bugs and taking a long time to come out and being delayed and then skipping generations like those are the actual reasons why there's a delay
John:
Even if they come out with a complete ARM reboot in a month, I will still say this theory was wrong.
John:
Why?
John:
Because all those delays were not related to the ARM reboot.
John:
They're related to all the things we've talked about so many times.
John:
It's not speculation that they skipped chip generations.
John:
They did.
John:
They skipped them.
John:
And then it's not speculation that Skylight was delayed and had rollout problems.
John:
That's a real thing that happened.
John:
That alone is sufficient to explain the delay.
John:
And what we're complaining about in the past shows is, hey, Apple, don't skip generations.
John:
Because if you do, any bump in Intel's plan makes your computers embarrassingly late.
John:
Bingo.
John:
And by the way, update your GPUs.
Casey:
Well, and the other thing I just want to throw in there really quickly is that it's been for me personally less of an issue since my new job and since I'm doing iOS development.
Casey:
But in my last job and a job or two before that as well.
Casey:
All of the developers, generally speaking, used Macs, but they all lived in VMware Fusion or Parallels or VirtualBox if they really hated their lives.
Casey:
And virtualizing against the same chipset is fairly easy.
Casey:
To have OS X running on x86 and then virtualize Windows, which is also running on x86, that's fairly straightforward and easy –
Casey:
If this was an ARM Mac trying to virtualize x86, that would have just slowed everything down tremendously in all likelihood and would really be a potentially very bad thing for business users that need to have VMs.
Casey:
Even business users that need VMs, not for their day-to-day, but for their one old legacy app that only runs on IE6.
Casey:
And so they need to boot into XP and a VM to use that one app.
Casey:
That happened a lot in past jobs.
Casey:
And maybe if it's just that one app in IE6, you can deal with it being slow.
Casey:
But I mean, up until this job, I lived in VMware Fusion and I was developing in VMware Fusion.
Casey:
And it would probably be a lot worse if the Mac in which I was using wasn't Intel.
Casey:
And to the point that I would probably have to use some crappy Dell or Lenovo or something like that.
Casey:
And that would be just sad.
John:
yeah microsoft did take a run at this arm transition with uh whatever the windows for arm thing for their surface thing and that's not going so well they did it badly they didn't commit they're just like well we're also gonna have an arm version of windows that's cool right guys and the the market was like not not that cool because we need to run our x86 software yeah the only way to do it is the way apple does it which is like look we're changing everything from 68k to power pc get on board
John:
And if they do an ARM transition on Mac, I feel like they're going to do the same thing.
John:
They're not going to let the two computers live on, which will mean exactly like Casey said, if you've got to run that x86 software virtualization, you're going to be super sad.
John:
And it's not going to be feasible.
John:
It's going to be like the bad old days when I ran virtual PC to run x86 software on PowerPC.
John:
And it was so slow.
John:
Just the worst.
Casey:
Do you remember, I think we talked about this at some point, but they had the like daughter cards for old, old, old Macs.
Casey:
I remember hearing about this when I was a kid.
John:
Yeah, but they had like 486s on them and stuff.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
It was basically just like a whole PC on a card.
John:
Yep, that's what it was.
Casey:
Right, right.
Casey:
And this was just so that you could have a somewhat livable virtualization experience on ancient Macs.
Casey:
All right, one last piece of follow-up, and then we are finally done.
Marco:
I can't believe we're still in follow-up.
Casey:
I know, especially since we recorded, what, two nights ago, three nights ago?
Casey:
How is this possible?
Marco:
These are topics.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
These are really just topics.
John:
No, these are all—I can justify every single one of these for being follow-up, and so can you, because you know what they're about.
John:
Apple is follow-up.
Casey:
Oh, stop it.
John:
We talked about it last episode.
Casey:
I have issues with long follow-up, but it just so happens that we have long follow-up.
Casey:
Gwyneth Paltrow and Will.i.am, which we sort of kind of knew, and Gary Vaynerchuk, I hope I pronounced that right, are going to be the advisors for Planet of the Apps.
Casey:
That was just announced, was that today or yesterday?
Casey:
Sometime recently, as we record this.
John:
Gwyneth Paltrow is going to be a mentor to the contestants, so I guess she's there for like just...
John:
moral support and like motivates them i'm not quite sure what her credentials are to help people develop applications but like you go guys anyway and she's famous um and vandercheck vandercheck is uh he's a vc um so he i guess he's on the vc side of the shark tank fence will i am is a famous person who likes apple who's worked with apple a lot
John:
He's an entertainment industry person, and I guess that's relevant to building apps if you're related to entertainment.
John:
And they will serve as advisors, which I'm not sure is different than a mentor.
John:
Anyway, if you're wondering who they're going to get to be on the show, Vaynerchuk, that's right up the middle of what I would expect in VCs who...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Did he do Corked with Dan Benjamin, or was that a different guy?
Marco:
No, that's Dan Siederholm, I believe.
Marco:
All right, yeah, okay.
Marco:
And every day he would just go and do this five-minute video featuring a couple of wine reviews from a really New Jersey middle-class approach to wine.
Marco:
So it was very low BS, reviewing low-cost stuff.
Marco:
And he was very good at describing how it tasted.
Marco:
Oh, this tastes like grass.
Marco:
He was surprisingly charismatic and excellent at this seemingly boring topic of wine reviews.
Marco:
Anyway, so then his whole career kind of ballooned after that of being this kind of outrageous, loud guy who promotes stuff and talks to businesses about how to do stuff.
Marco:
But actually, I would say of this list of people, he is probably by far the most qualified to advise people on this.
Marco:
on on how to on how to do their app stuff although i i have i admit i have not followed his work very closely recently uh but from what he has done in the past he's definitely more related and and is better at knowing like how to promote stuff real-time follow-up gary vanischuk did buy corked he bought it from the two that uh from dan zener home and uh dan benjamin
John:
yeah and by the way i found this out by googling and it's on the site winecast.net brief aside if we could all go to winecast.net everybody and look at the logo in the upper left hand corner do not make your logo look like a condom oh oh wow gracious that's with a tiny little sperm like crawling its way bad job winecast i love i'm also seeing a php warning being emitted into the page on top yeah mysql dumb fields expects parameter one to be a resource boolean given
John:
Wow.
John:
That's fine.
John:
Anyway, bad logo.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So yeah, so it's Gary Vaynerchuk, Will.i.am, who I believe we had already known was involved with this from a producer standpoint or something, or advisor or something like that.
Casey:
And like you said, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, I don't think this is really meant for us.
Casey:
And we talked about this a lot in the past.
Casey:
We don't need to go into this too much, but I don't think this is a show meant for us.
Casey:
I think it's in theory, a show meant for people who are not really in the industry, but I'm, I'm, I'm curious to see it.
Casey:
I will certainly watch just like, you know, the new top gear.
Casey:
I will watch an episode or two and assuming it's not Apple music.
Casey:
So I guess maybe I can't because I don't subscribe to Apple music.
Casey:
But anyway, if I can, I will watch it off my Plex server.
Casey:
yeah right if i can uh i will watch an episode or two and i i suspect it will not be very good but you know what you don't know until you try so we'll see what happens i'll watch it for gary v i like him so i will gladly watch it for him fair enough all right at this point i think we are officially out of follow-up so uh what else is awesome these days oh yeah we need a break and a cigarette no i don't smoke neither do none of us do
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
I can see John, like, sneaking under the deck or something.
John:
Smoking is not the least likely thing you'll ever see me doing.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
If any of the three of us had a secret smoking habit, John would be by far the most amusing one to have.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
Smoking out, like, under the tree that drops the acorns, hitting him every so often.
Marco:
Oh, God.
John:
I told you, the tree is defeated for the most part.
John:
All the limbs are cut off.
John:
One questionable limb when I look up might still be in line of sight, but a lot of that tree is all gone now.
John:
We've solved that problem.
John:
Now you can get your Ferrari.
John:
For my wife's new Accord.
John:
Not safe for a Ferrari because you don't want to leave that outside in the winter and you don't want to squeeze it into my garage.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
We're also sponsored this week by Harry's.
Marco:
Go to harrys.com slash ATP to get $5 off your first purchase.
Marco:
You know how razor companies keep putting out new models and raising their already high prices?
Marco:
Well, Harry's does not believe in upcharging.
Marco:
They just made a bunch of improvements to their razors, and they're keeping prices exactly the same.
Marco:
So it's still just $2 per blade cartridge compared to $4 or more you will pay for the big brands at the drugstore.
Marco:
So Harry's five blade razors now with these new improvements now include they still have the same five blades.
Marco:
They now have a softer flex hinge for a more comfortable glide.
Marco:
They have a trimmer blade for hard to reach places.
Marco:
They have a lubricating strip on one side and a textured handle for more control when it's wet.
Marco:
So it has like a rubber grip on the handle now.
Marco:
So, Harry's was founded by two friends to offer people a great shave at a fair price.
Marco:
These razors, you know, they market them mostly towards men.
Marco:
However, we hear from lots of women.
Marco:
These are really unisex razors and women use them too and they are great for both.
Marco:
Now, quality is 100% guaranteed.
Marco:
If you don't love your shave, Harry's will fully refund your money.
Marco:
And these blades are made in this incredible German blade factory that Harry's bought.
Marco:
And they sell their own razors direct from this factory.
Marco:
And because of selling direct and they own the factory and there's no retailers or anything else, they literally charge you half the price or less of what you're paying at the drugstore for similar blades from big brands.
Marco:
So I got the starter set today.
Marco:
The Harry starter set is an amazing deal.
Marco:
You get a weighted razor handle of your choice, moisturizing shave cream, three precision-engineered five-blade cartridges, and a travel cover, all for just $15.
Marco:
And that's $15 is the regular price.
Marco:
But again, if you go to harrys.com slash ATP...
Marco:
you will get $5 off your first purchase.
Marco:
So that means you could get the starter kit for just $10.
Marco:
So that would be $10 to cover handle, shaving cream, and three blade cartridges.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Marco:
That's an incredible deal.
Marco:
So right now, go to harrys.com slash ATP to claim that deal.
Marco:
That's harrys.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Casey:
There's a rumor that Apple has pivoted their brand and is going to be taking a different approach to the Apple TV as in like the set top, the television set sort of thing.
Casey:
Again?
Casey:
Again.
Casey:
Recode reports that they're going to make the most baller TV guide ever.
Marco:
That's a growth industry.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I guess the plan is to be able to let you search and no matter where the thing you're looking for may be, be it paid or not or whatever, it will figure out a way to get it to you, presumably through your existing accounts like Netflix or whatever, which I think you can do already, but also perhaps by partnerships with some of the traditional TV folks like maybe ABC or CBS or something like that.
Casey:
So, I mean, this is kind of cool, and I would certainly be interested in it, but, I mean, like you said, Marco, this is, I don't know, TV... I don't want to say it's not long for this world, because, I mean, it's been around for a long time, and I don't see it going away that soon, but I...
Casey:
I mean, is this the sign of major changes in how we consume our television?
Casey:
I mean, that and Netflix and Amazon creating their own television shows.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What do you think?
Marco:
This seems like kind of an extension of what they're already trying to do with the Apple TV.
Marco:
They already have Universal Search.
Marco:
And I think it is still limited to partners only on the Apple TV, at least, if not on iOS.
Marco:
So they already have cross-provider search with Siri and being able to search for a TV show or movie or whatever and say, all right, well, it's available on Netflix and on HBO Go and for iTunes.
Marco:
They can already list all this.
Marco:
That's already there.
Marco:
So if this is just kind of an extension of that or an expansion of that, that's great.
Marco:
That's good.
Marco:
I would question their ability to get these deals, though, because it seems like we've been hearing reports for, what, three years now that Apple keeps trying to make a TV service, like one grand new TV service to rule them all, or something along those lines.
Yeah.
Marco:
honestly i you know like there was a story i was making fun of you know last week or whenever about it about eddie q walk into the meeting with tv executives wearing like shoes without socks and a hawaiian shirt and jeans or whatever whatever it was and and apple's basically like you know we're apple screw you method of negotiation with tv companies and who knows if that was real or not you know we don't really know and how accurate that was you know
John:
That was a story sourced from TV executives, by the way.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Of course they're going to say the other side was unreasonable in our negotiation, and they wore the wrong clothes.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So chances are those details are probably not 100% accurate, but it was probably the gist of it.
Marco:
It's very likely that that was the gist of what happened.
Marco:
And we've heard similar attitudes.
Marco:
We've heard of that before from both Eddie Q and Apple.
Marco:
So it wouldn't surprise me if the gist of this is true.
John:
I would say that the TV companies are being more unreasonable in these scenarios.
John:
If you are a TV company, it seems like Apple is being unreasonable because Apple is not budging on things they want you to do that you are never going to do.
John:
But if you were to be a third party outside observer and say, what things are the TV people never going to do and what things does Apple want?
Marco:
you would say it's probably better for everyone involved or at least it's probably better for us as the consumer if you if tv companies you did what apple asked but the question is is it better for the tv companies and maybe maybe not so that's why we don't have a deal well that's the thing i mean like we we've heard for years now that apple is you know they're they're working on that on this new thing and the details of what that new thing is shifts slightly over time but the gist has been the same they're working on some kind of tv plan that unifies multiple tv sources and something or other you know
Marco:
whether that's related to the new apple tv or not like that that's been the plan for years now and it just seems like they aren't getting the deals and so maybe this approach they're taking to deal making they're walking in there as though they own the place and i think at one time you know like maybe they did at one time have that kind of power in certain industries but
Marco:
But I think it's pretty clear that what they're doing isn't working.
Marco:
And so when we see another report that says, oh, well, now the new thing is they're going to be this version of this plan.
Marco:
Well, show me any evidence from the past that we should believe them on this.
Marco:
Like, there's nothing.
John:
Well, that's why they're pivoting, though, because they've failed with the past approaches.
John:
They're not sticking to the past approaches.
John:
They're pivoting and trying new things.
John:
But in some respects, I think Apple still feels like time is on their side.
John:
And they may be right because...
John:
the holdouts in all this are not the netflixes of the world but it's like the abc nbc disney you know cbs like those are the the difficult ones there and all the local television and all the deals with other things so apple's apple's most recent pivot that we have in front of us in our houses now is like the future of tv is apps and we make apple tv and on your apple tv you can find an app for major league baseball you can find an nfl app you can find out for abc cbs netflix showtime hbo like that's what you can find and this
John:
I wouldn't even call this a pivot, but this latest rumor is basically that Apple's new approach, sort of their version of the omnivorous box that I talked about in the last show, like we will take in all content and provide you one unified interface.
John:
Like the current Apple TV is like, here's your unified interface.
John:
It's a bunch of rounded rectangles.
John:
uh isn't that a great unified interface and you can do series search across them and you know like like as this article says like they already have a thing where people who make the disney app or the espn app or the nfl app if you use apple's apis and make your information searchable that when you say show me whatever that the apple tv can search across all of them but it's not quite the same as a tv guide like a lot of what a lot of people want to do is say what's on or what are the series that are currently running that are popular like we can imagine a much better interface to television
John:
that is independent of where the show has come from.
John:
TiVo does this, as many people have written about TiVo.
John:
TiVo has a thing where you can search for stuff and it's like, here's this show.
John:
It's airing these episodes.
John:
These five are streaming.
John:
The season pass is showed with different icons to see where you can get them from.
John:
But that's what we all want.
John:
We don't want to have to switch inputs.
John:
We want one unified interface to everything.
John:
The old way, which Apple declined to participate in, which I still think would have been a good idea because it shows so far no one has been able to do it.
John:
So they could have been doing that old thing anyway, is to just be a box that takes input from all the different places.
John:
But nowadays, TV doesn't come from all these different sources, from cable, from these, you know, like it comes increasingly across the Internet.
John:
But there's still these whole things that come across, you know, all the television networks.
John:
You still have the similar omnivorous box program, but Apple has been able to persuade the networks for the most part to put apps on their platform.
John:
Like, we're getting close, guys, right?
John:
All we need to do, the last thing, is to give people, like, a unified interface to that, to all that programming across all these apps.
John:
only instead of the interface being here's a bunch of rounded rectangles arrange them how you want and pick the one you want or talking to this uh terrible remote control and try to find the show you want we want to provide what people are kind of used to like a guide maybe it doesn't look like the big grid or whatever and we will we will be the face of television to people in the same way that tivo is the face of television to anyone who had tivo especially the days before streaming services but even with the streaming services it's kind of worse because you got to go find the client but anyway apple wants to be the face of television the one unified interface the one box you never change inputs it's always on apple tv you can watch whatever you want
John:
to do that they need to make deals the deals are not happening because most of the deals are probably not in the interest of the networks and you can imagine if you're the network like if your only interest was we are the network we we want to survive as a thing that can extract money um i think there's a lot of problems for that long term anyway but it would say never give up the primacy of you know never give up the interface to television to apple like
John:
don't don't let them be the face of television they are just decreasing your value making you just one more source of content and then the only value you have is your ability to produce quality content that people want to watch and network television uh for the most part is terrified of that because historically they have not been really good at that and it's only because of the legacy of the fact that they have these certain frequencies in the airwaves that they're abc nbc cbs and you know fox or whatever and although fox arguably got its place by having quality content
John:
they're being outcompeted by hbo and netflix and amazon for crying out loud in some cases in the hey can we make interesting content that people want to watch uh if that's the only competition if it's like apple is the interface and the programs come from these services that you pay for and you pay for the service that has the shows you want the networks are like people are going to pay to watch ncis colon some other word
John:
those people are really old and they're dying and everyone else is watching you know Game of Thrones on streaming services and so of course they're terrified of that future but in the meantime that basically means that Apple's strategy of like we are the unified interface to all your television is a no-go because there's still enough television particularly live television local news and sports that is tied up behind owners and contracts for companies that don't want to be basically disenfranchised so
John:
I don't know if this latest strategy of Apple is I mean, I guess it's better than the old ones.
John:
And at least you can do something.
John:
But I don't know if it's ever going to work.
John:
And I think the whole like, well, finally, we don't have a deal that Apple's trying to wait them out.
John:
It's like, look, we don't have to do anything.
John:
Network television, everything.
John:
Netflix and HBO and Showtime and Amazon and AMC and all these other cable companies are just nibbling, coming at you from all sides.
John:
They're making better content.
John:
There's more of them.
John:
People are willing to pay for their services, whereas they're only willing to pay for you as part of a bundle.
John:
You get to be over the air, but...
John:
that like all this legacy stuff like we'll just wait you out and so i feel like apple is walking away from the table with their flip-flops and hawaiian shirt and saying all right well we tried we made we made another run out of this time but time is on our side every for every year you refuse to do a deal with us your competitors make you less and less relevant and when the generation of kids that's born today grows up they're not going to care what the hell you are and all their shows are going to be in other networks and once that happens we have good relationships with the netflix's of the world and
John:
and they're already on our app platform, and we just need to make a really good app platform.
John:
They haven't quite done that yet, but in the meantime, we will just keep sliding that terrible remote around our rectangles and being careful not to ever touch it while watching TV.
John:
Don't touch it.
John:
You'll mess everything up.
Marco:
Honestly, do you think this is more about UI control or more about just money?
Marco:
If I had to take a guess, I don't think the TV execs give two craps about the UI.
Marco:
I think it all comes down to money.
John:
Yep.
John:
It's not that it's not.
John:
Well, the money is the reason Apple won't do the deal because the other companies won't do a deal that Apple wants a deal that's palatable to customers.
John:
And the parties have to be involved in that deal want more money that like Apple would have to charge too much for.
John:
That's why this never that's basically what it comes down to.
John:
So you're right.
John:
It does come down to money.
John:
But like.
John:
Why do the networks want so much money?
John:
Because it's not like the UI.
John:
They just don't want to be taken out of the equation.
John:
They want you to move your little rectangle to go to the ABC app.
John:
They want you to know that ABC is a thing, a brand that means something, that the shows are on ABC.
John:
They don't want you to just...
John:
say what's on and see a giant undifferentiated grid with maybe an abc logo somewhere on it and just say this is all of television and i will pick the show i want to watch because again that reduces them entirely to the quality of the shows they produce and they don't want that because they need they need the the other intangible bs branding stuff to prop up the fact that they make worse shows than other people like they it used to be the fact that like they are channel four and they come over the airwaves and they're one of the five sets of channels that come in good on your little rabbit ears and
John:
And therefore they have a default importance that you cannot argue with, even if all their shows are crap.
John:
Um, if they're just another provider of video behind a unified interface, undifferentiated, made not any different than any of the other services that some of which may not even be quote unquote real TV stations like Amazon, uh, that's not good for them.
John:
So that's, you know, you're right.
John:
The money I think is definitely a part of it and why the deals don't happen, but why do they want so much money?
John:
What's the big deal?
John:
Uh, because, uh,
John:
If they're going to give up that role, they want to be paid for it handsomely because, you know, they're CBS or whatever.
Casey:
I feel like this is AT&T in the iPhone or singular at the time in the iPhone all over again.
Casey:
It's not exactly analogous because I think to my recollection, AT&T or singular at the time was
Casey:
was really not doing terribly well, and Verizon was just eating their lunch.
Casey:
And I think they were kind of on the ropes and knew it.
Casey:
And to their credit, they had the wherewithal to know that they were on the ropes and make this really onerous deal with Apple from their perspective.
Casey:
But it ended up paying out for them big time.
Casey:
And I can't help but wonder who's going to be the singular of the big American TV channels, you know, the Fox, the ABC, the CBS.
Casey:
And NBC, you know, who's going to be the first one of them to say uncle and make a deal?
Casey:
And will that be better that way?
Casey:
Will it be worse?
Casey:
Will they end up becoming more popular and rolling in cash?
Casey:
Or are they just going to be hastening their own demise?
John:
Well, and the difference here is, like, you only need one cell carrier.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Like, once you got the cell carrier, now you have an iPhone as a product.
John:
But until you get them all... It's kind of like the music labels.
John:
If iTunes... If the iTunes Music Store had rolled out with some of the labels but not other ones, it's tough.
Marco:
Honestly, like, I...
Marco:
We have not seen Apple score a lot of great content deals in recent years.
Marco:
I really do question whether... Obviously, anything we hear about these deals is always rumor and speculation and everything because they're not going to go talk about how they went or anything.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It just seems like Apple's negotiating position might just be wrong or possibly too arrogant or asking too much or whatever the conditions are.
John:
It depends if you think time is on their side.
John:
If you think time is on their side, it's like the longer we wait, the next time we come to the table, we will be even stronger because you will have been weakened by your internet native competitors.
John:
And I think that's been true.
John:
Every time that Apple has gone back to the table, they have been in a stronger position because the networks have been in a weaker position, not because of anything Apple did, but because of what the competitors to the networks have done.
John:
So I think, I mean, you may argue if they don't make a deal, then someone else will come and sweep this way.
John:
But they are developing the Apple TV.
John:
It is improving, unlike...
John:
you know some other products they might have where you know the apple he was in a drought and now it's sort of on the track again it's just a question of whether someone else is going to get there first and but nobody like as far as i'm aware nobody has deals with every all these networks because because of the the itunes thing everyone is scared to be like as an industry we can't all sign a deal with one company because that takes away too much power so let's all just bargain individually with each things like hulu is i forget who's behind hulu is that nbc
John:
or comcast come you know cable town whatever um it's it's balkanized because everyone's afraid to give one technology company too much uh power but i i don't know i'm i'm kind of in favor of not doing a deal that is unfavorable because if they do that deal like financially speaking they'd have to take a loss on every subscription or they would have to make it too expensive and it would be unappealing like they have to undercut cable is what they have to do they have to be able to offer a thing that's like this is like cable but either
Casey:
cheaper and way better or way better and around the same price they can't say this is like cable but 25 more but hey there's a bunch of good features because no one's going to go for that all right so apple today has announced or let slip i'm not entirely clear what happened here but announced oh it was announced okay because i saw a tweet fly by of somebody taking like a picture of a slide at some conference or something like that and so i wasn't sure if this like leaked or if it was formally announced
Casey:
Anyway, Apple, I guess, announced that they're doing a bug bounty program.
Casey:
And so if you're not familiar with what that is, basically that means if you find a bug in some of Apple's code, and the specifics change per company, but generally speaking, the way it works is if you can exercise it and show Apple, rather than letting it out into the wild...
Casey:
If you come to Apple and say, hey, I found a bug, here's how you exercise it, and you do the right thing, in quotes, then they will pay you, in some cases, a tremendous amount of money for having done the right thing and brought that bug to them and not just used it for nefarious purposes.
Casey:
And what's also interesting, apparently, if you choose to donate the money that they give you, which in some cases is up to $200,000—
Casey:
They will match that donation one for one.
Casey:
So that $200,000 hypothetically becomes $400,000.
Casey:
I think this is a great thing.
Casey:
The relative prices I thought were a little bit weird.
Casey:
$200,000 was for the bootloader or something pretty low level, which made sense.
Casey:
But the secure enclave was half that or maybe even a quarter of that, which struck me as very weird.
Casey:
I would assume that the secure enclave, if you found a bug in that, that would be worth easily as much as the highest reward, easily worth $200,000.
John:
You have to price them not just how valuable it is to find the vulnerability, but how difficult, which translates to how many vulnerabilities you think people will find.
John:
So it's kind of depressing where you're like, what is it?
John:
Sandboxing vulnerability is only 25K.
John:
Sandboxing vulnerabilities are serious, but I think Apple thinks there's probably a lot of them and they're probably not as hard to find as boot realm vulnerabilities.
John:
So it's a balancing act of like, how do you price these things?
John:
You can't just price them on how important they are.
John:
if you're kind of afraid that you have like tons of sandboxing bugs because you will you know if it's 200k each and you get 300 of them that starts to add up even apple doesn't like to just give away money but the charity thing is a total apple move to kind of like guilt you into not keeping the money yourself uh by by spending even more of their own money um this this has been i think we had something way way down the show notes that someone can find and delete
John:
later about you know the problem with apple is they don't have bug bounty programs every other company has bug bounty programs and so people find bugs in apple stuff and it's more valuable for the people who find the bugs to like sell it to jailbreak people or use it for malware than it is to go to apple because from apple you get nothing you don't even get like a thank you like you just throw it into a black hole and they don't fix it for a year and then you fret about whether you feel the good the white hat people are like
John:
I sent you this bug Apple for free.
John:
It's super serious.
John:
I have a suspicion that I'm not the only person in the world who knows it.
John:
I haven't told anybody, but if I know it, that probably means the bad guys know it too.
John:
And it's been six months since I reported it to you, and I've heard nothing.
John:
If I don't hear from you soon, I'm going to tell the world, hey, guys, you all have a phone that's vulnerable to this exploit, and chances are good the bad guys already know about it.
John:
And then Apple gets cranky about that, or why are you disclosing?
John:
And then the people are like, well, why don't you fix the damn bug?
John:
People have vulnerable phones.
John:
And anyway, the bug bounty program...
John:
adjust the incentives to uh to make things nicer they have an incentive to give it to apple apple has an incentive to do something about it i suppose um and they you know it's it's more likely it makes it more valuable that even the bad guys will say i found this exploit how can i make the most money from it it's like you know what i can make 100k right now guaranteed if i do this and i just give it to apple so i hope this works and by the way this was announced at the black hat conference which is this big uh you know
John:
as the name implies a hacker conference or security vulnerabilities and stuff as far as i'm aware apple has not had a any formal presence or a particularly prominent formal presence like their their relationship with the community the security community has been sort of standoffish you know as evidenced by not having a bug bounty program and people being cranky about sending things to apple and they're not hearing anything and this is just another it's about it's about as friendly as they've been to the developer community
John:
well it's a little bit worse because when when you find a security vulnerability apple's kind of angry about it like they're they're not particularly grateful and security researchers like have done that thing where they said i sent this to you apple i did responsible disclosure but you haven't done anything so then i'm going to announce it to the world and apple's like don't announce it to the world we hate you now it's like but i found this bug and anyway it's a fraught relationship but this is another tiny step along the line of tim cook's more open apple that apple sends what was it their their head of security engineering to black hat
John:
to speak there to represent apple and to say here we have this thing that everyone else in the world has had forever uh you know they're playing catch up but this is apple being more open and doing more of the things that everyone has said they should always do so thumbs up yeah this is this is only good things it is kind of embarrassing that this wasn't already in place given the rest of the market however this is great progress and i'm glad they're doing it
Casey:
Yep, I completely echo what you guys said.
Casey:
I can't believe it's taking this long, but at least I got there.
Casey:
That's what matters.
John:
One more thing on this, as someone in the chat room pointed out, as in the stories we're pointing out, like, it's baby steps.
John:
This is not a program where, hey, anybody who finds a bug, report it to us.
John:
It's an invite-only program.
John:
where if you find a bug, if you are among this class of people that Apple says, we find you are trustworthy and you have the skills, so please send us a bug.
John:
But there's also this thing, I think this is from Gruber's site, sources that Apple mentioned, if someone outside the program discovers an exploit in one of these classes, they could be added to the program, so it isn't completely closed.
John:
And I don't understand if that makes sense.
John:
Look, it's closed or it's not.
John:
It's like, well, it's closed, but if you find a vulnerability, we will add you to the group that's closed.
John:
So I guess if you can...
John:
demonstrate that you're a good guy by giving them an important bug they will put you into the program but then do you not get paid for the bug to put you you know apple apple be appling i guess you know it could just make it open to everybody but they don't uh but it's kind of open so anyway uh maybe next year we'll be announcing that black hat that the bug bounty program is open to everybody just like everyone else's bug bounty program but they would keep 30 yeah right wow
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Thanks a lot to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
And a final note for today's episode, speaking of things that have taken a long time, diversity at Apple.
Casey:
Progress, it seems, is being made.
Casey:
I was looking at these numbers when they were released a day or two ago, and it didn't seem like...
Casey:
Things were too terribly rosy, like year on year.
Casey:
And I'm trying to find which specifically number it was, but I can't at the moment.
Casey:
But suffice to say, Apple's released their annual, semi-annual diversity page and diversity numbers.
Casey:
And one of the more impressive things that I think we definitely need to applaud is that they claim to have 100 percent pay equity.
Casey:
across all of Apple so that any job that a woman would do, that a man would do, those two people should make the exact same amount of money for doing that exact same job.
Casey:
And of course, everything's open to interpretation, so it's hard to say whether or not that's really real, but Apple is claiming and is asserting that that's the case.
Casey:
So, I mean, that's stupendous.
Casey:
Oh, here it is.
Casey:
The number that I didn't like was data from the last three years, most of the way down the page.
Casey:
2015, 54% of Apple was white.
Casey:
2016, 56% of Apple was white, which is not getting more diverse.
Casey:
It's getting less diverse.
Casey:
So that's not good.
Casey:
But I'm nitpicking, perhaps, on one particular data point.
Casey:
But, you know, it's 1% less male-dominated.
Casey:
We went from 69% to 68%, which is an improvement.
Casey:
And one thing that they've made very clear on this site is that their hiring practices are changing.
Casey:
So it says, our hiring trend over the past three years.
Casey:
We are steadily attracting more and more underrepresented talent.
Casey:
Global female new hires in 2014 is 31 percent.
Casey:
2016 is 37 percent.
Casey:
And U.S.
Casey:
what is it?
Casey:
URM is underrepresented something or other underrepresented minorities.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
USURMs, new hires.
Casey:
God, URMs just sounds so dismissive.
Casey:
I don't like that at all.
Casey:
But anyway, 21% in 2014, 24%, 2015, 27% in 2016.
Casey:
So definite improvement in new hires, which should be celebrated.
Casey:
So a little bit of good, a little bit of bad.
Casey:
But the fact that they seem to be paying this much attention to it, I think is 100% good.
John:
This is some borderline Amazon charts down here, though, like they have three three data points now.
John:
So like they had two and you can make a line out of two, but it's more impressive when you have three.
John:
And of course, the highlight here are the lines with the slopes that are going up and to the right.
John:
And, you know, they are doing better with new hires of underrepresented minorities are doing better with with female hires.
John:
Right.
John:
So they show these things, but there's nothing along the y axis.
John:
There is no y axis.
John:
They just show they decide 21 percent is like a centimeter from the bottom and 27 percent is like three times higher.
John:
27 is not three times higher than 21.
John:
Oh, it's not zero-based?
John:
No.
John:
I mean, yeah.
John:
Anyway, positive trends.
John:
Progress is slow.
John:
They're highlighting where they're doing the best, obviously.
John:
And new hires, if you're going to do the best somewhere, like that's, you know, it's, you know, forward-looking.
John:
Try to...
John:
try to fix this going forward as much as possible uh and the other numbers yeah i don't know anyway one of the most important things is that apple has a web page at apple.com diversity and that they're open and transparent with these things but as always like there's a tension between
John:
Oh, good job, Apple.
John:
Slap on the back.
John:
You really care about this.
John:
Let's give you cookies for being caring and having a web page.
John:
And on the other hand, it's like, but on the other hand, these numbers aren't awesome.
John:
And so Apple's job is kind of, it's kind of weird making this web page.
John:
Your job making this web page is...
John:
Show that Apple cares.
John:
The website is there, right?
John:
Good.
John:
Show the progress Apple is making, but also be honest and upfront as they have been in the past about where your problems are.
John:
And I think that's maybe where this falls down a little bit because their original diversity thing was like, we take a look at a diversity.
John:
We are not doing a good enough job.
John:
Like it was totally unflinching saying like, oh, there's good and bad.
John:
No, the first run of this, I forget what year it was, was like, we are not happy with this.
John:
We are not doing a good job.
John:
We are not meeting our own standards for how this should be.
John:
And the same pages, this page this year is more about like, hey, we're doing well and everything.
John:
I'm sure internally they still have their eyes on the prize and like, all right, there's still progress to be made.
John:
But there is a danger of falling into the trap where every time they've come out these numbers that we just parrot back the the the cherry stats that are getting better and don't realize like the overall picture is still pretty grim.
John:
um so i don't know like i don't want to slam them for not making progress faster because again like it takes a long time to turn a ship this big it's not like you're going to fire all your employees and start over again from scratch uh and new hiring is the place where you can fix things and they're doing better
John:
But on the other hand, there's a long road ahead.
John:
So I hope I hope this page is still here 15 years from now.
John:
And I hope if you were to do the 15 year graph with an actual labeled y axis, that it would still show equally encouraging a zero based y axis.
John:
It would show equally encouraging trends.
Casey:
Yeah, it's tough because I want to celebrate this so much, but there's a lot of room for improvement.
Casey:
I mean, 2016 global gender in what they describe as tech is 77% and 56% of it is white.
Casey:
Like that's...
Casey:
It's a lot of room for improvement there.
Casey:
But I mean, if you look at, to be fair, if you look at my company, there are four Android developers, four iOS developers, and every single one of us is a white male.
Casey:
So, I mean, I shouldn't really be throwing stones on this myself.
Casey:
But I hope we get better.
Casey:
I would love to see us get better.
Casey:
And hopefully as we open other offices, we will get better.
Casey:
But it's, I don't know, it's hard and it shouldn't be, but it is.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Hover, Harry's, and Linode, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, Marco, you and I went through a deeply painful episode last week when we had to hear about TiVo for entirely too long.
John:
And remind me again why that was so painful.
John:
Because I just don't care.
John:
I just really don't care.
John:
It's painful to hear about things you don't care about?
Casey:
It's painful?
Casey:
No, I'm just being silly.
Casey:
It's not painful.
Marco:
I actually thought it was going to be worse than it was.
Marco:
I just zoned out and I just pretended like I was listening to Hypercritical.
Marco:
And I just forgot that I could talk for most of the time and just pretend like I was listening to Hypercritical.
Marco:
And for that, it was great because it was basically a brief interlude of Hypercritical.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
No, I'm just giving you a hard time, John.
John:
Well, this is not going to be a brief interlude of Build and Analyze because I don't think you would have ever talked about the MP3 file format on Build and Analyze.
John:
No, I didn't know that much about it back then.
John:
But even if you did, this is very nitty-gritty, I feel like.
Casey:
So tell us what it is that we need to know and don't know about the MP3 file format because I genuinely am very interested.
Marco:
So this is basically kind of like this developer rat hole I fell into last weekend where I had some work time.
Marco:
And rather than do what I'm supposed to be doing this summer, which is updating Overcast to iOS 10 and making a whole new Watch app and making a Today widget and all this other garbage, instead I was procrastinating by working on Forecast, my MP3 encoder.
Marco:
And I decided, you know, let me just do whatever work is required to make it work with VBR output.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
To back up a little bit, just a high-level version of the MP3 file format.
Marco:
So the way MP3s work at a very high level, and please, if you're a nerd about this stuff, please forgive me about these details if I'm getting any of them wrong.
Marco:
I'm trying to give a very high-level overview here.
Marco:
The way lossy compression works is basically try to not store things that you probably won't notice if they're not stored.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And then for the things you do notice, try to store them with less precision.
Marco:
In an MP3, one of the famous ways it does this is by omitting sounds that you probably won't hear.
Marco:
And so obviously things that are outside the range of human hearing, that's the easy one.
Marco:
They also do things like there's a principle called masking, where if there's a very quiet sound and a very loud sound at the same time,
Marco:
The very loud sound is going to be so overpowering, the very quiet sound is going to be drowned out.
Marco:
So there's no reason to store the information about the very quiet sound because the very loud sound, that's all you'll hear.
Marco:
One way they achieve the size savings is just by omitting things that are just kind of drowned out or that you won't hear.
Marco:
Another way they do it is by reducing the precision of the things you do hear.
Marco:
And so there are a few different tricks they can do for this because basically the precision at which we perceive what we hear is not constant throughout the frequency range.
Marco:
Very low frequencies, very high frequencies, we tend not to have as much precision about perceiving those things.
Marco:
And so they can store those less precisely and therefore using less data.
Marco:
They can also do things like in a stereo recording where you might have,
Marco:
very very similar sound coming out of left and right channels with just slight differences so there's there's a method called joint stereo where basically this is the left channel and the right channel differs by this much and just sort of the difference for the right channel we are also very bad at perceiving not not only the details about very high pitch and very low pitch sounds but also where they're coming from and you might realize this like if if you if you can hear a very high pitch sound like in your house like it like back in the old days like you'd hear the very high pitch whine of a crt tv
Marco:
And you could just walk into a house, you could hear, like I can hear there's a TV on somewhere in the house, but you might not be able to pick out where exactly, like what direction exactly it was coming from.
Marco:
Also, similar reason why subwoofers in home theater systems tend to just be one subwoofer that you just put somewhere and it kind of doesn't matter because the very low frequencies, again, you're not nearly as good at perceiving where they're coming from.
Marco:
So they can do things there, too.
Marco:
They can save space there, too, with things like, all right, well, you know, if we have to store this separated stereo image here, maybe we can just store the average of the very high and very low stuff in the middle and not have to worry about the sides, you know, not have the separation.
Marco:
So the whole principle of the MP3 file format and all lossy audio formats is based on this idea of figure out what we can either omit entirely from storing and then figure out tricks we can use to store it less precisely.
Marco:
Obviously, though, as you lower the amount of space you're willing to spend on it, as you lower the bitrate, how many bits per second you're willing to devote to storing this, you start hearing artifacts.
Marco:
You start hearing the quality loss.
Marco:
You start hearing, oh, now this is sounding muffled, or that's sounding distorted, or that's sounding weird, or that symbol hit kind of sounded weirdly telephonic.
Marco:
You start hearing flaws.
Marco:
I don't want to get into too many of the details of the argument over whether you can hear the difference or not.
Marco:
Generally, most tests show that about 192 kilobits per second, you don't really hear the difference in most things for most people.
Marco:
That's beside the point, though.
Marco:
So when you're encoding a podcast, there's a few different ways you can go about managing the bitrate, how many bits per second you are willing to spend on the audio.
Marco:
The most direct kind is constant bitrate or CBR, which basically... So MP3 files are divided into frames.
Marco:
It's just a time slice.
Marco:
Every frame is 1,152 samples.
Marco:
Whatever your sample rate is, like at 44K, that's like 26 milliseconds.
Marco:
Every frame, you have a bitrate and you say, all right, well, in constant bitrate mode, every frame will get 96 kilobits or 64 kilobits or 128 kilobits or whatever.
Marco:
And that's a very simple way to do things.
Marco:
And that mostly works.
Marco:
And podcasts are almost always encoded that way.
Marco:
I started to wonder why exactly, you know, because we also have these other methods that are based on variable bit rates or VBR.
Marco:
The encoder has some idea about the complexity of each frame.
Marco:
Each one of those little 26 millisecond, each one of those little time slices, the encoder can decide this part I'm encoding right now, this little time slice is a pretty complex, there's a lot going on here.
Marco:
So to encode this with a certain degree of perceived quality, I need more bits.
Marco:
And then maybe like three seconds later, there's a quieter passage or a simpler passage.
Marco:
And you can say, you know, this part, I don't need this many bits.
Marco:
I can encode this at a lower bit rate.
Marco:
You know, you can have the encoder kind of decide on a target perceived quality level and just use as many bits as you need to achieve that quality level and have it just vary constantly throughout the file.
Marco:
For podcasts, this is an obvious choice, right?
Marco:
It makes sense that for podcasts that should work really well because podcasts have a lot of silence.
Marco:
I've kind of built my current living on this.
Marco:
Podcasts have a lot of silence and voice is pretty easy.
Marco:
And then occasionally you throw in like a music clip or a music bed running under things or a theme song or a clip from TV or something like that.
Marco:
So you occasionally have more complex stuff that could use more complexity.
Marco:
And like in our show, we started out being a 64 kilobit mono show for like the first year or two.
Marco:
And it sounded okay.
Marco:
It didn't sound great.
Marco:
It sounded okay.
Marco:
One of the things that sounded the worst was our theme song.
Marco:
because 64k mono is kind of terrible for music a while back now maybe a year ago or something like that i switched to 96k stereo and it made the theme song sound way better and anytime we'd insert a clip like from a steve jobs keynote or anything it made all those sound way better any kind of musical clip or any kind of insert sounded way better
Marco:
And our voices sounded better, too.
Marco:
And even though the entire rest of the podcast is us talking, and I don't do any kind of stereo separation, so it's just a mono thing, because of the way the joint stereo encoding works, we just get all 96 kilobits to our mono channel for the entire rest of the file.
Marco:
Because it can say, all right, well, the channels are encoded as like, you know, the main channel equals this, and the difference in the other channel is zero, basically.
Marco:
So you get all the bits to yourself.
Marco:
And then only when you have a stereo thing inserted do you then split up the bits as necessary between the channels.
Marco:
So it is really a great way to do it.
Marco:
But what would be even better would be a VBR encoding.
Marco:
All these silences between all the words I'm speaking, those would get like the minimum frame size, which I think is 32 kilobits per second.
Marco:
So like the minimum frame size for all those silences because it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
You won't hear the difference.
Marco:
And then when we throw in a music clip or something, that could go all the way up to like 192 to really get the music to be perfect quality.
Marco:
If you did it that way, it wouldn't take up very much more space.
Marco:
In fact, it probably takes up less space.
Marco:
And in my tests, it actually would take up about maybe 25% less space than my constant 96K to have similar voice quality as we have now, but then have the ability to put in like our theme song at effectively perfect quality.
Marco:
So why don't we do this?
Marco:
So I spent the weekend adding the capability to forecast to say, you know what, let me just give it the ability to output VBR files because it wasn't that much more work and I got to dive into the format and learn a bit more about it.
Marco:
There's also, for completeness, there's something called ABR, which is average bitrate.
Marco:
And the idea here is...
Marco:
It is VBR, but instead of targeting a certain quality level, it just says, try to keep the bitrate at exactly this average over time.
Marco:
So basically, if you have a couple of very brief frames where you can... For this second of audio, you need more quality, but for the other 30 seconds around it, you don't.
Marco:
You can have little temporary jumps there, but ABR would not work for the case I'm talking about, which is...
Marco:
If I say, you know, average bit rate of our whole file, it needs to be this.
Marco:
Well, the theme song is going to just blow that because the theme song needs like two minutes of really high quality.
Marco:
So the average during that time is going to be way higher.
Marco:
And so it basically doesn't work right.
Marco:
Like you could have a few seconds of higher quality, but not minutes of higher quality.
Marco:
So that wouldn't work for our needs.
Marco:
So I really started trying to figure out like, how can I get a true VBR encoding in the world of podcasts?
Marco:
Because again, VBR has been around for almost 20 years.
Marco:
This is not a new thing.
Marco:
And yet almost no podcast or VBR.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Off the top of your head, can you guys think of why this might be?
Casey:
Because podcatchers don't support it for some reason or another, or they didn't at some point?
Casey:
Or what about the hardware, actually?
Casey:
The old hardware, the old iPod hardware?
Marco:
Good question.
Marco:
Honestly, I think by the time iPods came out in 2001, I think all the hardware supported it.
Marco:
In the very early days, some hardware would have problems with it, and maybe...
Marco:
If you had one of the first MP3 CD players or MP3 Flash players like the Diamond Rio, if you had some of the very first MP3 players or software or car stereos that played MP3s, maybe there'd be a problem there.
Marco:
But VBR compatibility has been solved so long ago in all this stuff because it's literally almost 20 years old.
John:
My music has always been VBR.
John:
I've never done CBR from the second I ever made an MP3.
John:
I have the choice VBR or constant bid rate.
John:
And it's like, why would I choose constant VBR always?
John:
And it's always played.
John:
And obviously I started listening to it on.
John:
Actually, I did.
John:
We had a Yamaha MP3 player for like running or whatever, like the size of a shuffle.
John:
And that played VBR.
John:
So no, I don't think it's the hardware either.
Marco:
Yeah, so what I found out, the main problem with VBR is streaming.
Marco:
When you're streaming, when a player plays back a stream file, if you need to jump ahead to a timestamp and you haven't downloaded that part of the file yet, like you don't have that far, the way this is usually done is the player will download the first few hundred kilobytes.
Marco:
Basically, they'll download the first part of the file to get all the header information and everything, all the metadata.
Marco:
And then they will terminate that connection and make a new connection that jumps ahead using a range request to begin playback like 50 megabytes into the file.
Marco:
So it doesn't have to download all of everything in the middle there to get there.
Marco:
So the problem is it needs to be able to predict at what byte offset in the file maps to the timestamp that it's going to.
Marco:
It also needs to know how long the file is.
Marco:
Duration is another challenge here.
Marco:
And with a constant bitrate or ABR, average bitrate kind of scheme, you can do that pretty effectively.
Marco:
MP3, once you have the byte stream...
Marco:
i mentioned this in the past show once you have the byte stream like you can jump ahead to a certain byte point and then every mp3 frame every one of those 26 millisecond time slices begins with a certain byte pattern that's easy to seek to and and locate so you can jump into an mp3 byte stream at any point any byte and you can just scan forward until you see 11 ones basically you know an ffe or whatever it is you can scan forward until you see that and then that's your frame header you can start playing from there
Marco:
But you still have to know where you are.
Marco:
So if you jump ahead to byte position, you know, 50 megabytes, expecting that to be timestamp one hour and 20 minutes, there's nothing in the file in the byte stream that says I am timestamp one hour and 20 minutes at that point.
Marco:
So you have to already know the timestamp that you are at.
Marco:
You have to keep track yourself as the decoder, as the player.
Marco:
And so in a file where you know the constant bitrate, where it's kept the same, you can just do the math.
Marco:
You can say, all right, well, you know, I know the music data began at byte zero, and you know the file is 100 megabytes, and you know the duration from the header says it's an hour long.
Marco:
So if you jump to 0.50 megabytes, that's right in the middle, so that should be 30 minutes.
Marco:
Done.
Marco:
In a constant bitrate file, that's true.
Marco:
You know, it'll probably solve this problem.
John:
quick time i know you hate those container formats and the mp mp mpeg 4 for a container formats that spawn from it because they're all complicated and you have multiple atoms and streams or whatever but i'm pretty sure they solve this one but anyway yeah quick time has a number of other problems actually but
John:
anyway so the fact that apple is not interested in anymore being the the most primary one but anyway but this this exact problems like to be able to pick different codecs to have them be variable bitrate to be but be able to have time codes and other you know multiple streams to tell you how i've come to a point in the file where how far am i in the file and what is the subtitle i should be showing and what is the yeah picked image that i should be displaying on top of the thing anyway
Marco:
yeah one one of the fun challenges about the about the wonderful quicktime file format and its undocumented chapter spec is that in mp3 chapters all the chapter info is right up front in the file so you can read like the first couple hundred kilobytes and have all the information you need to show the entire table of contents and then you can jump to the point you need quicktime predates internet streaming quicktime predates internet
Marco:
yeah but quick time chapters doesn't and they still did it this way so in quick the quick time format important information like the chapter titles are spread throughout the entire file like the title occurs in the file when the music does like at like in the audio at that point the title is interleaved there so in order to display the table of contents you have to have the entire file basically um so that's that's a bad design for for this for this kind of use anyway
Marco:
The main problem with the MP3 format is with seeking and duration estimates and streaming of EBR files is that you need to know what byte position in the file maps to what timestamp.
Marco:
And this, you know, they figured this out early on.
Marco:
This was a problem right from the start.
Marco:
People in the chat are saying, like, they used to have, like, maybe old software or old hardware that would display the wrong duration on VBR files.
Marco:
One of the ways decoders would do this would be to just read the first couple of MP3 frames and figure out, like, you know, the average bit rate of those frames or even just read the very first one and then just look at the file size and say, all right, well, we're going to assume this represents the average bit rate of the file and extrapolate from the file size how long this file is.
Marco:
And that's dumb and doesn't work.
Marco:
So that's why those programs would often display the wrong durations.
Marco:
There is also an ID3 tag value of the duration of the file, but not everything supports that.
Marco:
You know, not every encoder embeds that.
Marco:
And somebody might have edited that, so it might be wrong.
Marco:
early on they figured out a little solution to this problem and it's it's uh do you guys remember back when people would argue about mp3 encoders do you remember the encoder that was uh zing or xing it's xing no anyway they figured this out early on then the current hack to do this is in these mp3 frames which are like you
Marco:
um in these frames the very very first audio frame in the file is called an info frame in for vbr files and they they basically write all zeros of the audio data and then they have a bunch of free space in the frame because they didn't use it all so they they have this special format where they embed really really tiny metadata and one of the things they embed is a 100 byte seek table and
Marco:
That literally just maps percentage points to the unsigned character value.
Marco:
So you have 255 values there of like it maps the duration percentage to the byte percentage of the file.
Casey:
That's fascinating.
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
and i'm sure there'll be no rounding errors in that with that long files with that system yeah also incredibly imprecise right like for a song if the song is more than a minute and a half long you you already don't have second second level precision you already are like less than one second precision for a podcast that's like less than one minute precision that's even worse
Marco:
So that is terrible.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that it turns out that is for the most part what most Apple playback interfaces, you know, most of the APIs, 80 player and everything.
Marco:
That is what most of these things will use.
Marco:
And this again, this info frame with this jump information has been around for a very long time.
Marco:
um so that's what most hardware we will use with vbr files to just be able to tell like all right well this vbr song if you seek ahead to point x and we don't have the whole file we know we can jump to about this byte position and be approximately correct within a couple of seconds for you know a three minute song it doesn't really work for podcasts right so the idea i had i you know i'm making the encoder i make the player and
Marco:
what if I just make, I define a new ID3 tag that gives way more precise, you know, I could do like, you know, second level precision and just have it be as long as it needs to be or something like that.
Marco:
You know, whatever it is, like I come up with a scheme that is the size wouldn't matter for 100 megabyte podcast file or whatever because it could be like, you know, 15K and have all the information I would need.
Marco:
So I figured, you know, I was like, I was drafting this plan in my head of like, what if I just do this?
Marco:
And the main problem with this is,
Marco:
Even if Overcast supports it, nobody else would support it.
Marco:
Because how many people do you think are working on the low-level MP3 decoding libraries at Apple or Google?
Marco:
This is ancient stuff now.
Marco:
It's like so many people have tried to modify and advance the JPEG format.
Marco:
And none of them ever take off because nobody is still working on their JPEG decoders.
Marco:
There is no new version of JPEG that's going to ever matter because we have JPEG already and that's everywhere and nobody wants to touch it because they consider it a solid problem.
Marco:
MP3 is the same way.
Marco:
There are other audio formats and advancements and everything and most of them have really gone effectively nowhere with the exception of AAC because Apple uses it everywhere.
Marco:
But for the most part...
Marco:
Most improvements have gone very, very, very few places because basically, like, nothing implements them and no one cares, right?
John:
So if you fed a VBR file to one of these non-overcast players and they ignore your ID3 tag because they have no idea what it means, would...
John:
what would they do for duration and skipping around like they would just read that little zing thing if it was present and that's it like i don't understand how they could even use that zing thing but like again i jumped to this offset does it just display the exact number of seconds that it should be according to its math with some rounding yes and then just be like that's not the real offset but oh well that's the best we can tell you if we're you know if you're streaming that literally is what happens like if you if you have the whole file
Marco:
The file, you can just scan forward.
Marco:
And scanning forward is incredibly fast because you're dealing with very small data ranges here.
Marco:
And in order to find and read an MP3 header is incredibly simple, like bit shifting.
Marco:
It's very, very simple stuff because this is an old format designed for really slow computers.
Marco:
So if you have the whole file, you can seek back and forth just by reading all the frames and keeping track yourself.
Marco:
and you can have perfect accuracy there it's only an issue with streaming and only an issue if you are and streaming if you're playing from the beginning it isn't a problem but it is a problem if you're trying to jump ahead to a timestamp where you have not downloaded the intermediate part of the file between the beginning and that timestamp that is the only place this is a problem the obvious terrible problem solution that springs to mind for me is all right fine then overcast just uh uh
John:
makes a different request to the server and if it has a vbr version with a special thing it serves it and if it doesn't you know what i mean like yeah put all the smarts in the it's terrible i know but it would totally work because you're like everyone else would get the normal constant bitrate one and then now you'd have to make two versions of adp one special one for one overcast savvy version
John:
that would be vbr and better quality and blah blah but everyone else would get the other version and that's a terrible solution because you haven't changed what anyone else does but you have made your player slightly better but now you have to encode everything twice and if anybody else wanted to do that which i assume you'd want other people to do it too they'd be pissed at you because now you have to encode everything twice and it's dumb
Marco:
Yeah, and there's all sorts of other problems with that.
Marco:
For example, we'd have to leave Squarespace.
Marco:
Because here's the thing.
Marco:
Podcasts have been around for so long that there's all these WordPress plugins and CMSs like Squarespace that have podcast support.
Marco:
But I don't think any of them have the ability to have like, oh, you know, in my feed, actually every entry is now going to have two enclosure tags.
John:
You'd just do a stupid, you'd do a convention over configuration.
John:
.mp3 .marcos weird version.
John:
oh god that's even worse like the rss feed would just say dot mp3 but overcast would know actually make a request for dot mp3 dot mark with weird version first if you get a 404 then make a request for yes i'm telling you this is a terrible like this is the the obvious terrible solution that comes to mind immediately uh that you should probably ever do
John:
uh but like people have done worse things like the other one is the whole embrace and extent thing oh get it added to the id3 spec socialize and something like that's how everything happens and you can make it de facto standard i'm just not sure you have the market share to pull that off at this point yeah and the other problem is like you know if if i actually made just the regular file vbr
Marco:
One of the biggest problems here is my timestamp share links.
Marco:
Because when you open up a timestamp share link that Overcast generates for, you know, share this podcast at this point in time, it's using the HTML5 audio tag.
Marco:
And that's just Apple's decoder.
Marco:
Like, that's just, it's going to load up.
Marco:
It's going to use Apple decoder.
Marco:
And I've tested this with VBR files.
Marco:
And, you know, it's just off.
Marco:
Like, it doesn't work correctly.
Marco:
It does not seek correctly.
Marco:
Yeah, the share link would have to use the .mp3.
John:
Instead of .mb3.marcosweird version.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, basically the only way this works is the Marcos Weird version.
Marco:
But the truly sad part about all this is after doing all this research, after figuring out this crazy info frame and the rest of the VBR file format, now I have this awesome parallel VBR encoder that I basically can't use.
Marco:
Because even if I did the craziness required to make this work with Overcast,
Marco:
atp would probably be the only podcast that ever did it because most podcast producers simply don't care about audio quality very much to them they encoded at like 64k and that's good enough and maybe they're paying per gigabyte and so they maybe they can't afford larger files funny thing there though is like even if you were doing 64k mono i've done tests on that too vbr would save them like 25 30 for most shows
John:
but most people are not interested in causing a possible headache with certain players uh in exchange for a 30 file savings we got to do it it'll be like handcrafted artisanal podcasts where like yeah only you would do it and five other people in brooklyn would do it because like oh everyone knows you have to encode it twice one dot mb3 for the peons and then one dot mb3 dot marcos weird version which by the way is bad branding
John:
If you come up with a clever name for it, instead of .mp3, it would be .mpz, which is probably already taken, or some other .mp3, .something else.
John:
You could brand this in a way that it's like, yeah, nobody does this, but the people who really care about it, people who really care about locally sourced...
John:
handmade you know fair trade podcasts they encode everything twice and and and the one good player that cares about it always makes a request for the .mpz file first and if it 404s it requests the .mp3 but if it doesn't it plays the .mpz and it's better
Marco:
Yeah, so basically I went on this giant expedition.
Marco:
I achieved a lot.
Marco:
I made forecast a lot better by making it write that crazy info frame and understand the format a lot better and be able to do VBR if it ever needs to.
Marco:
But the moral of the story is I ran into a whole bunch of barriers that basically nobody will ever care as much as I do to fix and that make it pretty much impossible to really use for podcasts in a responsible way.
John:
Oh, here's the other angle on it.
John:
Like, remember when Microsoft had secret APIs that only they could use to make their apps faster and everything and people were all angry about it.
John:
So this will you could do this frame this as like, this is a secret overcast API that only ATP, you know, because everyone is always obsessed with the idea that ATP is like a preferential treatment in your podcast app or whatever.
John:
But like that only ATP has access to it and you do it.
John:
And then when someone comes to you, you say, well, actually, it's not a secret API.
John:
Here's a web page that's been up for a year telling you if you want to do this, make it that MPZ file and you can do it.
John:
And then suddenly it's on them to be like, if they come back and say, oh, that's annoying.
John:
It's like, well, you wanted the secret API.
John:
You're wondering, why does Overcast, why does ATP sound so good?
John:
And the file size is so small and the other podcasts don't.
John:
So you got to make them come to you with the anger about like,
John:
ATP is using a secret API and then you could say nope not secret it was just so onerous that we didn't think anyone else could do it but the web page has been there forever and then they're like what can they say then they'd be like oh well I guess we can do it but it seems kind of annoying and so you know anyway I still didn't think you'd get good adoption except in Brooklyn but that's something right
Marco:
Yeah, but even they wouldn't even want it because the headphones and stuff that look really cool, that look cool enough to be in Brooklyn, aren't actually good enough.
Marco:
And the sad part is about all this, the main reason I'd be doing all this is to make our theme song sound better.
Marco:
Our speech, we've already reached the point where our speech is being represented in a way that is pretty much what I'm putting out from Logic.
Marco:
You really can't tell the difference between the Wave and the MP3 for our speech.
Marco:
You can only tell for the theme song.
Marco:
can you do multiple enclosures so the player will play the you know basically have it three mp3s have the for the show the song and then the after show well it has to be one file for podcast clients you could you could technically just have like basically like three constant bitrate sections of the file
Marco:
But then any seeks during streaming to the after show would have the wrong timestamps.
Marco:
And when they're wrong, they're wrong by a lot.
Marco:
Like in my test of trying to seek an VBR file, it's off by like a minute and a half.
Marco:
Like it's a pretty big difference and has the wrong timestamp.
Marco:
And then, yeah, it's a mess when it happens.
Casey:
So can we go back just a little bit?
Casey:
So you had said if you created your own version of this table, you would stuff it in an ID3 tag hypothetically?
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, because it would most likely be too big to fit in a frame, and I wouldn't want to run the risk of a player trying to play the frame as audio and weird things coming out of the speakers.
Marco:
So again, it's no big deal to shove it into ID.3.
Marco:
ID.3 has a max size of 256 megabytes, so there's a lot you can shove in there.
Casey:
So the hypothetical scenario then would be you have Marco's custom jump table in an ID3 tag, but you would still presumably populate the really crummy existing jump table that's in that frame.
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And that would work with no server-side changes.
Casey:
It would just work in Overcast, and it would fall back and degrade gracefully in other clients.
Casey:
But the problem you have with that is that the Overcast jump-to-this-moment feature, which, hand on heart, no sarcasm intended, I think might be the most impressive feature of Overcast, even more so than SmartSpeed.
Casey:
It would break that feature, and that's why you don't want to do it.
Marco:
Basically, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, because I really do think that my shared links are very important for podcasting.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
And not a lot of people use them, but they do get used.
Marco:
And the usage is going up over time.
Marco:
That, to me, is very important.
Marco:
And I want to keep promoting that.
Marco:
I want to keep making them better.
Marco:
I have a lot of crazy ideas for how to make them better.
Marco:
Most of these ideas are terrible and will never happen.
Marco:
Or I will attempt them, realize they're terrible, and then cancel them before I actually release them.
Marco:
But some of these ideas will actually work and will be good.
Marco:
I just don't know which ones yet.
Marco:
That's how this
Marco:
goes uh i really do care a lot about those times and it's like this is one of the reasons why i really get annoyed with um some of the big publishers using dynamic ad insertion platforms because when they do dynamic ad insertion which basically gives you new ads on every download so like if you download like a really old episode of like a storytelling show
Marco:
And you get like a brand new ad in it.
Marco:
And it's like, oh, wow, this company didn't even exist when this episode ran in 2013 or whatever.
Marco:
That's what's happening is like literally every download, they're serving you a new ad.
Marco:
And the idea there is to better monetize their back catalogs because their advertisers paid back in 2013.
Marco:
They're not getting paid anymore.
Marco:
So let's put a new ad so we can charge people again.
Marco:
Fun.
Marco:
Fun.
Marco:
One of the problems with these platforms, one of the many problems with these platforms, is that they don't always have ads that are the same length as the original ads.
Marco:
So basically, timestamps are not persistent between downloads.
Marco:
Because the ads you're inserting in the show vary in length on every download.
Marco:
So it totally breaks timestamp share links, which drives me crazy.
Marco:
Like, I'm trying to make sharing better, and you're throwing it away.
Marco:
Everyone complains, like, podcasts don't share.
Marco:
We need more sharing for podcasts.
Marco:
And then the big podcast producers make sharing more difficult.
John:
Well, if you really want to solve that problem, you know, the QuickTime slash MPEG Consortium solution to that problem is that you need to have a more comprehensive map of the content that also incorporates the maps of the ads.
John:
So when they change the ads, they change the map.
John:
And so you can do, it's like source maps for JavaScript when you minify it, right?
John:
Well, look, you can do that with chapters.
John:
You could just you could store the chapter ID and an offset within that chapter ID.
John:
Right.
John:
But what that would mean is the sharing links can't just contain an offset.
John:
They have to contain an offset in like a version to say in this version of the file is this offset.
John:
And the map has to say, oh, well, I've inserted a new ad since then.
John:
And I can translate your offset exactly like source maps on JavaScript.
John:
This this offset in this file is actually this offset in this other file.
Marco:
yeah no one's gonna do that though because this is the thing like any any advancement you make in podcasting uh you you basically like you have to assume that if it involves anybody any if it involves any producers changing their workflow in any way or changing their especially changing their cms in any way it's never gonna happen no one's gonna do it yeah you need to have one giant proprietary platform that can dictate because they
Marco:
the only thing that they they're what matter and whatever they do is what everyone has to follow and that's how it would work but we don't have that and that's a good thing so you're stuck in the technological backwater that is the mp3 format enjoy honestly i i really enjoy i really do enjoy the format the format is very refreshingly simple and straightforward it just has like this one wart of this stupid 100 byte precision
John:
offset thing for vbr files that and again when you when they're downloaded it's not a problem it's only a problem when they're streaming and you're jumping ahead that's a word on a wart though because the original the original wart is they don't have this information and the secondary wart is we've tried to jam this information and using tiny little bytes and we can only have 100 we can only do percentages
Marco:
yeah well the bigger problem though is that everybody stopped advancing the mp3 format 15 years ago that's technological backwater uh no and i mean i'm gonna hear from all like the the aug and the heaac and the mp3 pro people i'm gonna hear from all these people like all the newer audio formats this is i heaac supposed to be better than mp3 yes i'm aware of all these arguments what about real audio
John:
Oh, God.
Casey:
You are a bad, bad man.
Marco:
I bet they solved this problem.
Marco:
No, I mean, the reality is, like, MP3 encoders are so good and have been so good for quite some time now.
Marco:
But, like, a well-encoded MP3...
Marco:
is already a really fantastic trade-off of size versus quality and it's compatible with everything everywhere and it has been for a very long time and that's why people still use mp3 also um there's like patent issues with some of the newer ones and mp3 did have patents on it but almost all of the mp3 patents have expired and the ones that haven't expired
Marco:
a expire soon and b are are i think entirely or mostly for like obscure variants that you could enable that almost nobody does enable of the format um so mp3 has is almost public domain and it is effectively public domain now because it is so old that is a technological technological backwater thanks john it is so old the patents have expired which makes it way better than everything else in the world
Marco:
wow you know what's even worse about this too what drove me nuts about this i in my analytics and overcast streaming is like 10 of playback really like i did all that work for streaming and now i'm fretting all about streaming i'm glad you did it because now i have overcast on my ipad and i tell it to stream everything and download nothing because i don't want it taking up any space yeah actually like on like an ipad that you listen on sometimes that is the perfect case for streaming like that's it's perfect but man oh
Marco:
It makes me so sad that I did all this work for streaming and almost nobody uses it, basically.