Reason I don’t like most Digital Evidence

osty wrote:

Amanda_O wrote: Okay so exactly HOW does the ghost box work? I heard it was a thing that flips through various am frequencies..

Basically it is a radio that is put on constant scan...it flips through the radio stations quickly with out stopping. Like 1/4 a second on each station. A spirit is then said to be able to collect words from broadcasts or use their own words through this device to speak.

Thats interesting. I'd like to experiment with one of those things...

Steven Matrix wrote: Very well said. Do you think that a lot of the "tuning out" of people has to do with what they perceive from watching the so called professionals on TV?

Not directly. Ghost Hunters and GHI never even bother showing orbs any more. In the early episodes they showed them but dismissed them as dust. The problem is that they never really explained to people the phenomena (orbs are not dust...they are digital artifacts, mistakes if you will, caused by out of focus dust, pollen, water droplets, etc). So when people heard them say "most" orbs are dust, it left the door open for people to say "most orbs are dust...but this one is different". The brevity required of entertainment prevents them from getting too wonky I guess. After all, their target audience is not the serious investigator or researcher any more than the target audience of major league baseball is baseball players.

Ghost Adventures? They are guilty of "most orbs are dust..." But then again they rarely bother with dust orbs but have made a lot of insects TV stars.

The point is that I really don't know who decided to proclaim that the science/technology behind the digital orb phenomena can be dismissed at will.

I do wish they would spend more time explaining (cause I think they know) the weaknesses of different equipment. Flir, full spectrum, EMF, digital IR cams...all these devices have their flaws and limits and produce false positives that look really cool on TV but need to be pointed out. People just need to realize that the shows are entertainment and do the research and THINK a little about what they are seeing and hearing.

Amanda_O wrote: Okay so exactly HOW does the ghost box work? I heard it was a thing that flips through various am frequencies..

Basically it is a radio that is put on constant scan...it flips through the radio stations quickly with out stopping. Like 1/4 a second on each station. A spirit is then said to be able to collect words from broadcasts or use their own words through this device to speak.

crystalcross wrote: Actually MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 use very little compression. They don't use the motion compression and also do not use the shading compressions which MPEG3, MOV, and other formats use. Also MJPEG compression can be set to use very little compression. It uses streams of JPEG images strung together. And JPEG has the ability to limit compression to simple RLE (similar to zip, a loss-less compression).

JPEG compression in lower quality mode loses lots of data, but in high quality mode is very similar to TIFF which is a no-loss encoding scheme.

On the audio side PCM encoding has no loss. Even MPEG3 as long as your sampling rate is high enough the loss is at such a frequency that it does not effect the data integrity. You mainly want to ensure that 20hz to 22khz is lossless. Loss in the 22-40khz range will not effect you hearing anything unless there is clipping due to over-driving which can happen even in the analog world.

I'm probably going to need that..thanks for being willing to help me out here.

Okay so exactly HOW does the ghost box work? I heard it was a thing that flips through various am frequencies..

osty wrote: I don't know if anyone here uses a ghost box and sorry if I offend someone who does but I just find it to be very iffy paranormal activity.

I sometimes use a ghost box but take no offense. If everyone in the field uses only the equipment that is approved by everyone in the field I doubt if we can ever expect much advancement.

I consider it a device "still in research". I have personally recorded my first and last name being spoken reasonably clearly. Was it clear enough for someone who was not listening for my first and last name? Doubtful.

Unless I get a reasonably clear answer in the first few minutes of a session, I turn it off. If you listen to one of these things long enough you can hear ANYTHING you want. At the same time my own experience and the experiences I have heard from some of my peers gives me enough pause to continue using it as a communication device on a limited basis.

If nothing else it is a great way to break of the monotony of sitting in a dark room talking to walls for six hours. At this time I consider the results to be a personal experience along the validity of a documented cold spot. Interesting but nothing sturdy enough to hang my hat on.

I think one of the things that I have the hardest time putting any "faith" of showing evidence in is the Ghost Box. I find it hard to take a device that is suppose to broadcast voices place it on scan and say that the voices that come out are ghostly voices. I don't know if anyone here uses a ghost box and sorry if I offend someone who does but I just find it to be very iffy paranormal activity.

I do agree with the photos of orbs, I rarely have seen a photo of an orb where I have not looked at it and written it off as a reaction of something from the flash.

Actually MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 use very little compression. They don't use the motion compression and also do not use the shading compressions which MPEG3, MOV, and other formats use. Also MJPEG compression can be set to use very little compression. It uses streams of JPEG images strung together. And JPEG has the ability to limit compression to simple RLE (similar to zip, a loss-less compression).

JPEG compression in lower quality mode loses lots of data, but in high quality mode is very similar to TIFF which is a no-loss encoding scheme.

On the audio side PCM encoding has no loss. Even MPEG3 as long as your sampling rate is high enough the loss is at such a frequency that it does not effect the data integrity. You mainly want to ensure that 20hz to 22khz is lossless. Loss in the 22-40khz range will not effect you hearing anything unless there is clipping due to over-driving which can happen even in the analog world.

@ Crystalcross - You're missing one huge piece of information. ALL digital video is compressed! MPEG, JPEG, MP3 ARE compression algorithms.

MPEGs are the worst culprit, your camera in it's highest quality setting compresses MPEG by 15-30 times it's original size by using a lossy compression! Meaning in order to compress the file, it throws data that it sees as "unneeded" away. (You know, areas that it thinks are too dark or too light. Stuff that we would want to keep but the average videographer doesn't care about.) You increase the compression amount and recording time available by lowering the quality and throwing away more data. Unless you have an older camera that saves in the uncompressed DV tape format.

Jpeg is also a lossy compression, most Digital Still cameras use JPEG compression by default. You MAY have a setting to use RAW or TIFF images instead. Those are still both compressed formats, but they use Lossless compression, so the original data is still there, but the images are MUCH larger than JPEG.

MP3 is also a lossy compression (MP3 is short for MPEG Layer 3 Audio, and uses the same compression algorithms as the video). Listen to the difference from an audio CD (RAW WAV format), then listen to the best quality MP3 of the same song. You'll notice that the MP3 is missing the high and low frequencies, stuff that the compression says is not what humans actually listen to, we generally only listen to the mid range of audio.

So, all-in-all yes, compression is evil. But it's there in digital video/audio even if you don't know it.

Amanda_O wrote: okay thanks. The recorder has a built in usb connector. It seems like the program doesn't want to run but I think it's just me and lack of know how

If you want to start a remote support session, I can probably help you with that. I use Audacity myself and for it to work with MP3 files you have to load a lamemp3 library which is not included.

As for the recorders don't use a program they simply appear as a drive on your computer.