The pitiful state of things.
While I could easily be making reference to life in general, I’m instead referring to Linux and software for authoring DVDs. I guess you can’t always have the best of both worlds, heh… And while the software to encode video is quite superior in Linux than in windows, the technology to actually put that video onto a dvd is so incredibly pathetic. The only way to even burn a data DVD is to use a hacked version of the commandline program ‘cdrecord’ …and you have to ignore all these warnings about disc size! Which of course means if you’re not incredibly careful you’ll pass the 4.3GB limit (which makes perfect sense because the discs say 4.7GB), hahaha, argh! Of course, industry-wide, there’s still the whole controversy over DVD+R or DVD-R… which is very similar to the whole beta/VHS debacle of the 80’s. Since we all know that the inferior technology won out this does not bode well for re/writable DVD discs either. To further complicate matters I need to boot to windows anyway so that I can upgrade the firmware for the dvdwriter drive, I hate how specs change so rapidly that after buying a pack of DVD+R discs I cannot even use them!
Oh, and then there’s this whole PVR insanity. Everything online says that the video4linux interface and technology is fairly mature and works well. Mhmmm… Except that my tv tuner/PVR card is probably one of the most common (these days courtesy of WINXPMCE) and I find absolutely zero reference to it being in use for linux. Oh well, in reality it’s more of a toy anyway, but it’s still annoying to not be able to do what I want in the OS of choice.