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1726

General Software Discussion / Re: BitTorrent Inc. earns $15-20 mn; makes uTorrent Ad-supported to "keep lights on"

« Last post by superboyac on August 16, 2012, 07:41 PM »

Your points about newsgroups isn't really true. There's a fair amount of overhead because of the protocol and encoding (though it helps a lot if yEnc is used), there's a lot less overhead in torrents. You only get "maximum download speed" if you pay for access to one of the (let's be realistic here) warez-oriented news servers, and retention is usually pretty bad.

DC++ is pretty much just a sucky-in-different-ways FTP, and did anybody use it for anything but warez?

FTP (and FTPS) do suck, being an old and broken protocol, but slow? Connections breaking? Not really, no. Perhaps if you're talking about public-access hacked warez dumps, but not a properly set up server. SFTP is actually SSH and pretty different to FTP/FTPS - please don't confuse the two.

BitTorrent works very well for what it is designed for, and I'd hate seeing somebody trying to frankenstein it into something it isn't suited for. Also, I don't really see the point for your two desired features - sounds like what you probably want is a multi-sourced ftp client combined with warez ftp dumps that are synchronized "however".

-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 02:49 PM)

I'll ignore all the judgmental overtones in this one...

Your comments lack a whole lot of facts.  Regarding usenet, you don't need to get a warez server to get max speed.  You get whatever your connection can handle.  If you can't that means it is being limited or blocked.  That's not a problem with usenet, that's an isp issue or whoever the server is issue.

I still don't understand why you guys are so afraid of someone "frankensteining" or whatever the torrent protocol.  I don't get it.  It's just a tool, you can use any which way it works.  Yes, I also hate to see someone use a chainsaw to commit ghastly crimes...but so what?  Why is this such an issue?  Are you saying we should stop trying to improve on torrent or chainsaws?  I don't get it.  Just seems like a bunch of judgmental stuff and nonsense fear.

And furthermore, all of these tools are primarily used for warez.  so what?  It's just a data transferring mechanism.  People will always use whatever is best and convenient.  If it's being used for warez, it's probably because its really effective at transferring data.  So why do you keep mentioning that?  Would it make you feel better if most of the warez stuff was occurring over bbs or ftp?

I can assure you, whatever the next evolution of file transferring protocols is, it will also be primarily used for warez.  People will always be sharing files as long as computers are around, and they are going to naturally use the easiest thing for it.  Nobody is going to say, "Well, I should use ftp because torrents are being used predominantly for warez"  It makes no sense.

1727

Living Room / Re: waiting list at library...for an e-book?

« Last post by superboyac on August 16, 2012, 10:03 AM »

People like me will complain.

-superboyac (August 16, 2012, 09:08 AM)

Good luck with that. Fat lot of good it may do you.

-IainB (August 16, 2012, 09:29 AM)

seriously...

1728

Living Room / Re: waiting list at library...for an e-book?

« Last post by superboyac on August 16, 2012, 09:08 AM »

So the publishers raise the e-book pricing to the libraries to limit the borrowing.
Fewer people get to read the book.
Less access to knowledge than before the price increase.
You can say if a lot of this happens, it leads to artificial inflation.  There was no real reason for the price increase except to prevent use, which in this case is just people who want to read a book from a library.
People like me will complain.
Complaints will have to be dealt with (Time, money).  Worse case scenario, it becomes a legal battle (much more time and money).
New laws are created.  More complications in life. This type of law is usually difficult to understand due to its ridiculous nature.

So in a sense, new technology led to a shittier life.  Great.  Then, the uneducated will blame the technology for this.  Technology is not the problem!  It's the people who won't allow the technology to just do what it does...it's there to be used freely.  It's an idea out in the open.  What now?  When are the restrictions on ideas going to get implemented?

1729

Living Room / waiting list at library...for an e-book?

« Last post by superboyac on August 16, 2012, 09:02 AM »

An e-book is digital.
A public library offers books for free to users.
Why is there a waiting list?  If 10 people want the e-book and the library has it, all ten can get it!  No need for restrictions, it's digital!
http://www.journalga...308059942/1002/local

Since the library can lend out only one copy of an e-book at a time, it would be cost-prohibitive to order multiple copies, Witwer said. That’s why many who go online to borrow an e-book discover there’s a waiting list.

“It’s not the same as with physical books,” she said.

Not to turn it into a debate, it's just silly sounding.  It's like, because before we had the physical limitation that restricted the number of users, for some reason that limitation is actually a desirable feature that needs to be retained throughout all time?  Why don't we use a telegraph while we're at it?  This is stupid, stupid stuff people.  What do I expect...same ol story.

1730

General Software Discussion / Re: BitTorrent Inc. earns $15-20 mn; makes uTorrent Ad-supported to "keep lights on"

« Last post by superboyac on August 15, 2012, 05:50 PM »

^ I get what you mean, but I think the reaction that you're getting is towards the idea of including these things into bittorrent, i.e.

torrent is good stuff, but it can be improved.  my suggestions:
--ability to add/remove files and folders from an existing torrent that is being shared live already.
--ability to add/block users on a per torrent basis

You add those abilities to the torrent thing and you'll have one badass file sharing system.

-superboyac (August 13, 2012, 10:02 AM)

So the replies have been more towards adding these things to torrents, which is sort of homogenizing what torrents are away from what they are currently to make it something less concise.  Now saying something new (X) should be created with decentralized distribution but having these features would be cool... but when people start trying to build on something existing to take it away from what it currently is meant for to add features you end up with sort of a Frankenstein monster... it's happened before, and I'm sure it will happen again.

* wraith808 shrugs

-wraith808 (August 15, 2012, 05:13 PM)

That's true.  And that's fine!  I don't mind the frankenstein monster, I'm a fan!

Seriously though, I'm all for trying out all the options until something works.  If you can add to an existing technology, great!  If not, try a new one!  Don't stop until the goal is accomplished.  i want to push the progress made the last decade with torrents, to a more flexible and powerful system.  Somebody's going to do it and it will be great.

1731

General Software Discussion / Re: BitTorrent Inc. earns $15-20 mn; makes uTorrent Ad-supported to "keep lights on"

« Last post by superboyac on August 15, 2012, 03:56 PM »

Truthfully, I like when a developer knows what they want to do and sticks with it, not adding features to try to make it the be all and end all.  BitTorrent isn't meant for certain types of things- it's meant for a large distributed network that allows people to download largish bits of data by the packet from distributed sources with redundant backup, along with the ability to feed this.  It's not perfect... but it does it well.  The other things- that's why we have other ways of doing things.  Focus on making it better within its space is the recipe for success here... not trying to shoehorn it into other spaces IMO.

-wraith808 (August 15, 2012, 03:53 PM)

I'm puzzled that we are being hung up on the labels here.  I don't think the goal is to shoehorn anything.  If bittorrent doesn't do the requested features, we can look for something that will.  If nothing does, perhaps that's an indication that a new protocol or a new idea can be created.  I mean, that's how bittorrent got started!  It's not like they were saying "Well, ftp just can't deal with decentralized file bits, stop trying to shoehorn it to get it to do that."  They looked around, saw nothing that could do it, so they created a brand new thing to do it.  innovation.

1732

Living Room / Re: Why Linux sucks (and how to fix it) VS. Linux doesn't suck (and I can prove it)

« Last post by superboyac on August 15, 2012, 03:29 PM »

^^nice recap, thanks.

1733

General Software Discussion / Re: BitTorrent Inc. earns $15-20 mn; makes uTorrent Ad-supported to "keep lights on"

« Last post by superboyac on August 15, 2012, 03:24 PM »

--ability to add/remove files and folders from an existing torrent that is being shared live already.

-superboyac (August 13, 2012, 10:02 AM)

Not possible without major protocol changes - and I'm not sure it could be done in a nice way, tbh. There's both performance and security concerns here. One of the nice things about torrents is that the torrents are identified by a cryptographic hash of all the included files (well, technically, blocks) which makes it hard to fake data for a given torrent. And IMHO, the protocol doesn't really need to deal with this anyway, it could be used to deliver changesets instead (but yes, you'd need to grab a new .torrent for the changesets).

--ability to add/block users on a per torrent basis

-superboyac (August 13, 2012, 10:02 AM)

You can ban IPs with the existing system, isn't that good enough? The torrent protocol doesn't have a concept of 'users', and that's a good thing IMHO.

-f0dder (August 15, 2012, 02:59 PM)

I wasn't really trying to discuss it on a technical level, just a conceptual one.  I'm saying the torrent system is really good regarding a couple of characteristics and adding a couple of features to it would push it to the next level.  Whether or not the protocol can do it is not an issue.  Then a new protocol can be created.  Nothing is really that impossible, and nothing I described is really out of this world.  People are already trying to do it, look at Retroshare:
http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
It doesn't work that smoothly, but it totally has the right idea.

Torrent isn't the only option or foundation to build on here.  That's just an example.  There's also DC++ which has its own advantages/disadvantages.  First, it's really great for sharing files with a private group...think irc crossed with emule.  it could use more flexible options for user management and per-user sharing permissions.  Retroshare is trying to do all this, it's just klunky right now.

Here, I'll just post a recent thing I sent to a friend of mine:

Napster:
Napster was great because a centralized server indexed the files of all the users.  The central server didn't store any of the actual files, only the index.  The files were still on other people's computers.  I'm not sure why it was illegal because only the index was under Napster's control, but whatever.  The important feature to take away from Napster is it's indexing.  The index of shared files is stored on the central server...keep this in mind.  Also, the speed at which you can download is restricted by the upload speed of the user you are getting the file from.  Most residential upload speeds are very slow (usually around 20-30 kBps).  The good part of Napster is that you can easily search for ALL the files and the interface was clean and easy to use.  The bad part is that the upload speeds can vary wildly and is usually going to be far slower than what your max download speed is.  Also, things can appear to be available but they really are not, which is frustrating.  This is what I call "reliability".  For file sharing, you want to reliably know if something is available or not, and actually, you also want to know how fast you can get it.  if something is very slow, for all practical purposes it might as well not be available.  If I am downloading a 700MB movie to watch tonight, I don't want it to take two days to download, that is not practical.

kazaa/emule/edonkey/gnutella:
These are all like Napster.  I don't have too much more to say about it.

torrent:
torrent is brilliant because everything is decentralized.  The whole downloading/uploading mechanism is randomly spread out amongst all the users for the files.  So the great benefit here is the reliability.  It is super reliable because you know how many seeds/peers there are.  So psychologically, the end user knows when to expect the file and how easy it is to get.  The more users, the faster you get it.  hardly any issues with broken connections or anything like that.  this is also a limitation, however.  Popularity dictates how fast you get your files.  This is good for public networks like torrent, but it's not good for the type of private (small group) sharing that I'm talking about.  This is also NOT like private torrents, which also have thousands of users.  We're talking just a handful of users, maybe one or two even.  So we don't want speed and availability limited by popularity.
The other difficulty with torrent is that it's hard to dynamically share, say, this entire folder on your hard drive.  Let's say I have a folder where I keep all my movies ("C:\movies\").  You can't just share that in torrent.  You have to make a tracker for each individual movie, etc.  So that's not convenient for something like this.  So there are some great things about torrent to consider, but also some impractical things.

newsgroups (usenet):
Ah!  Newsgroups!  My absolute favorite.  newsgroups are the best at reliability.  If you see something in a newsgroup, you will ALWAYS get it and it will ALWAYS download at the maximum speed your internet connection can handle.  It doesn't matter how popular it is, or how many users are currently downloading it.  None of that is an issue, and it's beautiful.  As far as speed and reliability goes, none of these protocols will top newsgroups.  So what's the problem?  It doesn't really work for private file sharing.  It's very public, and it's sort of quirky.  Again, like torrent, you can't just share a folder easily.  Uploading stuff to newsgroups is a bit of a process (you have to split all the files up, make the proper subject headings, etc.).  So I'm not sure what to learn from newsgroups other than we'd like our speed and reliability to mimic it.

dc++:
This is another favorite of mine.  This one is pretty ideal for what I'm talking about.  You can share entire folders very easily.  It's very similar to napster except for one thing: the indexing.  unlike Napster, the files are not indexed on a central server.  The indexing takes place at the end-user's computer.  For example, if user 1 want to download a file from user 2, user 1 must first download user 2's INDEX.  Then, you can download the file.  So eventually, user 1's computer will have a bunch of index files from all the users he's gotten files from.  It's a cool model and it works really well.  There is one issue in that it's not a secure or encrypted connection.  Fortunately, the newer cousin ADC offers DC++ with a secure connection.  Unfortunately, ADC is difficult to setup and is not widely used or developed right now.  I had and continue to have very high hopes for ADC.

ftp:
ftp and all it's flavor (sftp, ftps, etc.) is the easiest way to access your own private files.  It sucks though.  It's slow, it's totally unreliable.  Connections always break off, you always feel like something might go wrong while downloading a huge multi-gigabyte file.  There's no indexing.  It's ok for managing your html files, but for large scale file sharing it really sucks.  There's nothing to really learn from ftp, it's old hat.  Actually there is one thing which I'll get to later, multi-user support.  With ftp, using the permissions, you can control what each individual has access to.  You can't do that with these other p2p software, but that's a great feature to have.

VPN:
vpn is bullshit.  Too hard to set up easily.  Everything that currently exists is very "corporate".  Usually, you need an IT person managing it.  it's complicated to understand.  If it works well, it's totally bad ass.  It's also much more than just file sharing, so there are complexities that I don't even understand about it.  To me, using vpn for this sort of thing is like making a mountain out of a mole hill.  However, maybe there are some elements that we can learn from.

irc:
This is an interesting one.  Overall, a little too geeky to be considered easy.  It sort of like a mixture between newsgroups and dc++.  It's organized like newsgroups: there are channels and hubs.  DC++ doesn't have channels, but it has hubs.  It's more of a chatroom than DC++, which also has chat but is more focused on file-sharing.  No really good ways to easily set up folders to share.  Everything is done using commands, so that's inconvenient.

1734

Living Room / Re: Why Linux sucks (and how to fix it) VS. Linux doesn't suck (and I can prove it)

« Last post by superboyac on August 15, 2012, 01:10 PM »

I agree with all that ^^.
Question: was there a similar point in history that was so effective in giving power to the common individual as what computers have done the last 20-30 years?

1735

Living Room / Re: It's Official: Many DC'ers Are Psychopaths~! :P

« Last post by superboyac on August 13, 2012, 12:07 PM »

...snipped...
PS: not being on facebook would be being a sociopath, not a psychopath. just sayin...
...snipped...

-iphigenie (August 12, 2012, 09:48 AM)

Officially there is no difference anymore. Both psychopathy and sociopathy have been combined under Anti-Social Personality Disorder (APSD) in the DSM-IV. Many shrinks now consider the terms to be synonymous, though a number of them still separate the two diagnoses.

Jim

-J-Mac (August 13, 2012, 12:56 AM)

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
 

Might be easier to just call it all Thoughtcrime and be done with it.

Besides, lumping undesirable things together under as few words as possible to preclude alternative thinking is one of the more brilliant tactics of Newspeak.

-40hz (August 13, 2012, 08:34 AM)

reminds me of this:

1736

Living Room / Re: Instructables - DIY site with instructions for some uber-cool stuff!

« Last post by superboyac on August 13, 2012, 10:23 AM »

sweet!

1737

General Software Discussion / Re: BitTorrent Inc. earns $15-20 mn; makes uTorrent Ad-supported to "keep lights on"

« Last post by superboyac on August 13, 2012, 10:02 AM »

Of course now that BitTorrent will be making serious money, they've just painted a great big target on their backs. Especially since anybody that has a grudge with torrents in general (i.e. RIA, MPAA, et al) now has a nice juicy bone to toss to their attorneys and bounty hunters.

Wonder too if this shifts the grounds for a legal argument about them 'aiding and abetting for financial gain.' Not that any real laws actually need be broken - or even apply. Look at what happened to Dotcom. 

Should be interesting...

I expect them to first get sued - and then work out one of those cozy Nook/Microsoft deals within a year.

 

-40hz (August 13, 2012, 08:04 AM)

Sounds about right.  Hey!  Why don't we get a head start and create the next p2p protocol?  A DC special.  let's call it...dc++...oh wait...

torrent is good stuff, but it can be improved.  my suggestions:
--ability to add/remove files and folders from an existing torrent that is being shared live already.
--ability to add/block users on a per torrent basis

You add those abilities to the torrent thing and you'll have one badass file sharing system.  We've already seen private torrent sites, so it is possible to have public and private torrents.  But you can't modify torrent files once they are shared.  It would be cool to be able to share a whole folder, or add files to a torrent as you go along.  Like, let's say there's a torrent for all the Wikipedia data and you download it.  But then next month there is more wikipedia data...instead having to download the whole thing again, it would be cool if the old torrent added the new stuff in it and everyone got updated.

1738

Living Room / Re: Typing Speed Competition!

« Last post by superboyac on August 12, 2012, 03:37 AM »

^^^I was trying to see if you had coded a secret message in your input.  Alas, there was none:

against door father noun yet any change sing noun mile while seem if with see pattern area turn during side look press contain say move move now differ country most last hard sentence box black few so lead...

or is there?...

1739

General Software Discussion / Re: programming language for math

« Last post by superboyac on August 12, 2012, 02:50 AM »

I suppose some options are:

R (mostly for stats from what I've heard people talk about - not sure about performance)
C
Fortran (this is a Ferrari for performance)
Matlab (think of this as for prototyping)

The entire class of functional languages are well suited to math:

F#
Erlang
etc. etc.

Lisp is highly performant, and a darling in academia. Might be worth looking at.

But as f0dder said, the lowest level languages are going to take forever to program in. ASM (etc.) probably isn't worth even looking at. You can just buy more computing power, and it will likely be cheaper than your development time.

-Renegade (August 11, 2012, 05:10 PM)

juicy post!  good stuff.

1740

Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC

« Last post by superboyac on August 11, 2012, 10:55 PM »

^^ That is brilliant.

-superboyac (August 11, 2012, 09:18 PM)

Credit goes to the person that designed the Punnet case:

30 seconds to print
30 minutes to cut out
24 hours to make sure the damn glue sets

This will probably be its permanent home since I'm now ordering another RPi to go in a fancier case, (maybe even plastic!)

-4wd (August 11, 2012, 10:16 PM)

Hot dang!  You're making me so jealous!!!  This Raspberry Pi is like geek porn.

1741

Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC

« Last post by superboyac on August 11, 2012, 09:18 PM »

^^ That is brilliant.  This is what I love about real people and what I hate about corporations.  I don't know why that picture made me just say that...

1742

Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC

« Last post by superboyac on August 09, 2012, 05:55 PM »

ok...i need to order one.  I'm not going to be left out of this!

1743

Living Room / Re: Robert Downey Jr credits BK saving his life...

« Last post by superboyac on August 09, 2012, 11:37 AM »

^^ thanks I'll check that out, I love screenwriting books.  Strangely enough, they help me with my music more so than most music books.

1744

Living Room / Re: Robert Downey Jr credits BK saving his life...

« Last post by superboyac on August 08, 2012, 11:05 PM »

regarding the idea of the audience already being there...

My friend pointed this out a couple of years ago and I've noticed that it might be true...it seems as though these superhero movies are predetermined to be successful or failures.  Before they even open, everyone pretty much knows how it's going to go.  Everyone knew Spiderman would be a huge success.  Everyone knew the new Batman would be a huge success.  Superman seemed to suck before it came out.  Same with Thor, Captain America.  Ironman seemed to have been predestined for success as well.  Avengers seemed like it had no momentum going in.

And then there are little gems like Hellboy which was actually quite good, but largely ignored.  I don't get it.  I can't figure out if it's the audience prejudging it or if Hollywood has a hand in it.  I doubt its Hollywood, they have no reason to have a movie fail.  So what's up with people?  It's disturbing if it is indeed true and people won't give a movie a chance to be good without knowing ANYTHING about the story.

And I watched Batman last week.  The audience clapped at the end.  I don't know why they were clapping for that snoozefest.  Maybe they were glad it was over, I don't get it.

Beasts of the Southern Wild came highly recommended to me a few days ago.  I think I've outgrown superhero movies.

1745

Living Room / Re: It's Official: Many DC'ers Are Psychopaths~! :P

« Last post by superboyac on August 08, 2012, 11:27 AM »

And I'm also getting real tired of all the psychological bullying going around these days.

1746

Living Room / Re: It's Official: Many DC'ers Are Psychopaths~! :P

« Last post by superboyac on August 08, 2012, 11:23 AM »

Corporations are people right?  If the people go on FB and reveal a lot of details of their lives, then should corporations use FB the same way?  i want transparency on revenue, how profits are made, daily activities of employees and CEOs, lifestyle revelations, interests, who are their real friends (Congressmen, etc., not the millions of FB users who click the "like" button, i want to know who corporations are spending weekends with, who they play golf with, who they go to lunch with, all that).

Seems like I know a whole lot about my friends around the world, but I don't know jack shit about corporations.  So who's the psycho?

1747

Living Room / Re: Apple's Marketing Mindset

« Last post by superboyac on August 07, 2012, 12:31 PM »

 
Sinofsky looks like such an asshole in that clip, man.
Why do these people talk as if everyone is so stupid?  I don't get this.  Are we that stupid?  Or do people think we're this stupid?  Or do corporations think we're this stupid?  Or are the corporations stupid and they assume we all are as stupid?  It seems like corporations think they are super smart, and the people are super dumb...when really the corporations are kind of smart and somehow have forced everyone who is smart to play dumb.  That's what it feels like to me.  We can't be this dumb.

1748

Living Room / Re: Maximizing problems when docking toolbar on left in Windows 7

« Last post by superboyac on August 06, 2012, 10:29 PM »

I have used LHS docking for the Windows Start toolbar for years, in XP and in Win7-64, and it usually gives no problems. That's probably because it was designed to work that way if a user set it so.
The only times I have seen problems in the Toolbar are generally when a proggy upsets Windows Explorer. If this happens, it is often ineffective to fiddle with the Toolbar properties - the quickest and most effective fix is to restart Windows Explorer.
Right now, my daughter's laptop has a periodically recurring problem with the LHS Toolbar - it keeps shrinking in width and/or refusing to "auto-hide", and I have shown her how to fix it with a restart of Windows Explorer. So far, I have not been able to establish what is causing this recurring problem.

-IainB (August 04, 2012, 10:15 AM)

how do you restart windows explorer?  The only way i know how is to crash it.

1749

Living Room / Re: Hidden Netflix Marathon Gems to Watch Online

« Last post by superboyac on August 06, 2012, 03:00 PM »

I think what they're missing is the bluster and naive arrogance of the Victorian era, when men were men, women were women, and English virtues were the only virtues worth owning. It had an aura of innocence and certainty that you can't recreate in a modern setting. Nor can you duplicate the romance that the imagery of a fog shrouded horse drawn London provided. Setting and the era  are at the heart of Sherlock Holmes appeal. Much like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells needed a less technologically sophisticated world in which to create their wonders and make them believable within that context. Steampunk is trying to get some of that back, but it's still only a pastiche no matter how skillfully it's done.

-40hz (August 06, 2012, 01:57 PM)

This is a beautiful explanation of it, thank you.  This is also a new thing to me.  I'm starting to notice all the British influences in my life, it's interesting.  I'm definitely getting a better sense of what it means to be British specifically as opposed to American.  it's something I never understood before.

And you've now given me many hours of Holmes to look forward to.

1750

Living Room / Re: Getting a video capture card: any comments?

« Last post by superboyac on August 06, 2012, 12:54 PM »

Looks like that AverMedia Game Broadcaster HD is the one to get.

I'm reading a little more and another device I need to consider is whatever is going to play the VHS.  Apparently it can't be a regular vhs player, it needs to be a TBC type:
http://forum.videohe...619-TBC-buying-guide

Note: I wrote an updated/expanded guide at: What is a TBC? Time Base Correction for Videotapes
__________

A TBC is usually what people start looking to buy when they decide to improve the quality of their recordings, not just accept whatever the tape, VCR and capture card/DVD recorder decide to do on their own. And it is a good first step towards hardware restoration, though often misunderstood...

There's really not much to this.
Here's the quickie, all you really need to know:

    Price. Under $50? Good luck, shop eBay, and cross your fingers. Expect to pay $225-450 for a new TBC, prosumer grade full-frame. Maybe half price used. Maybe. DataVideo TBC-1000 and AVToolbox AVT-8710 are the two most popular models.
    Improve quality? An external TBC corrects the signal. It is not there to "improve quality". It may improve quality, usually seen to remove jitter or odd movements. The visual improvements are often small, but very valuable. Many people observe that it works best to remove slight vertical jitter.
    Line? Full frame? Do not confuse a "line" TBC (mostly worthless, for the purpose of stabilizing) with a "full frame" TBC. DVD recorders have worthless line TBCs, do almost nothing. Those line TBCs are better off in cameras, can actually make a difference there.
    Passthrough TBC? Camera TBCs are not why passthrough "removes" MV. It just digitizes a signal and has no way to interpret MV in the hardware. Simple as that. TBC has zero effect.
    JVC TBC? The JVC series S-VHS VCRs have DigiPure DNR (digital noise reduction) circuits integrated into the TBC. It is a special kind of TBC, and is why this one can "clean the picture quality". It is NOT only a TBC at work here.
    Audio TBC? TBCs with audio connections merely passthrough the audio, nothing more.
    TBC makes my tape worse? No TBC is perfect, so about 1% of the time, it's known to make a tape worse. (Or more often if all of your tapes have the same flaw.)