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S2 IPTV Conference April 26, 2005, At the Double Tree Hotel in San Jose, Ca.
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Burst.com and Microsoft Settle
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Microsoft and Burst.com announced a tentative settlement, where Microsoft will pay Californian company $60 Million for allegedly stolen multimedia streaming software. Robert X. Cringely provided the recap of the court case back in 2003 . According to Burst claims, Microsoft entered a non-disclosure agreement with the company to learn about Burst's multimedia streaming technology. Later the technology, for which Burst has 37 patents, has been found in Windows Media Player. When aksed to present the archives of the e-mails and all communications within the company for the trial, Microsoft somehow presented all the documents that preceded before the deal and the documents that followed it. The e-mails during the 35 weeks that negotiations were held mysteriously disappeared. In court Microsoft claimed the e-mails were erased from employee's desktops, e-mail servers and server backups. The technology was not interesting to Microsoft, lawyers insisted, so the electronic trail of communications was erased.
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Samsung Unveils 82 Inch LCD
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Physorg is reporting that Samsung Electronics has developed the world's largest liquid crystal display panel. This 82-inch TFT-LCD is 17 inches larger than LCD flat panel previously developed by Sharp. This development challenges plasma display panels in this market area. This full HD image quality (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) TFT-LCD panel was developed at the company's new production complex in Tangjeong, Korea. The soon-to-be operational 7th-generation production facility uses glass substrates that measure 1.87m x 2.20m.
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Streaming Media East 2005
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Streaming Media East trade show is comming to New York May 17th and 18th at the
New York Hilton Hotel, 1335 Avenue of the Americas.
for
More information
NAB 2005
Sat., April 16-Mon., April 25
Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas.
(202) 595-2052
www.nap.org/conventions
CeBIT 2005, also opens in Hannover, Germany on March 10.
VSDA Conference: Home Entertainment Show East
Thurs., April 28-Sun., May 1
Hilton New York., New York.
(410) 769-8223
www.homeentertainment-expo.com
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Microwires Can Replace The DVD-ROM
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A former Soviet Union military development finds its use in modern technology and still remains fascinating." The development comes in the form of a flexible microwire, 10 micrometers thick and 10cm long, with a metal body and a glass coating, which the linked article says "can store 10 Gigabytes of information. It is possible thanks to their magnetic properties. Anyway, it's not that easy. Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information.
Ecoustics.com has an article on how to convert SVHS tapes to work in DVHS recorders which is similar to modifying a floppy drive (like we did years ago) to double the storage. There's two holes on a DVHS cassette and a single hole on the SVHS tape. The hole common to both permits DVHS tapes to handle SVHS signals; the hole unique to DVHS is what we want to focus on. Just cut off the top four to five millimeters of the pin within the recorder itself.
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Ask Slashdot: Pay-Per-View Downloads of TV Shows?
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Slashdot
An Extremely Anonymous Coward asks: "I've been thinking about the mass downloading of TV episodes. The TV companies appear to not be so desperate to sue people into bankruptcy for watching an illicit episode of _Friends_ or _The OC_. Does this mean they really are wondering about using this new media, rather then foaming at the mouth and suing twelve year olds? Will TV show production companies be the first to show some sense and offer their own downloads on a pay per view basis?"
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TiVo vs Microsoft vs HDTV Cable
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Thomas Hawk writes "Technology writer Ed Bott is out today with a great comparison piece where he compares the various feature sets of his TiVo, his Microsoft Media Center PC and his current HDTV cable DVR. It seems like all three have various nice features but all three also have negatives that you have to suffer through. A great read and strong comparison piece for anyone interested in DVR technology. Would love to see Ed or someone else expand on this piece and incorporate the current HDTV DirecTV TiVo, Comcast's Foundation box being rolled out in a pilot program in Washington State and MythTV."
Slashdot
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Old Film to DVD Transfers Examined
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Slate is running an interesting article on the process involved in
Warner Brothers remastering films, the quality of the films being compared to the Criterion Collection discs.
Going back to the original
technicolor
negatives, preserved in temperature-controlled
rooms, the transfer begins with a 4,000
line scan, followed by digital alignment of
each color." From the article: "In some ways, these DVDs have finer color and detail than even the original film prints. In the old days, it was difficult to align those three strips perfectly. The task became still harder years later, when the films were reissued, because the negatives had stretched or shrunk over time. If you need all three strips to get the right color, and you can't line the strips up precisely, then the colors and the sharpness are going to be a bit off.
Slashdot
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Build Your Own TV Without Broadcast Flags
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An account of an event sponsored by the EFF, a "roll your own television" build-in. The San Francisco Bay Guardian has coverage in an article entitled Build Your TV!". From the article: "According to the FCC, the flag is going to ease the nation's transition from today's analog televisions to tomorrow's high-definition televisions. What exactly does it mean for a government agency to "ease" the transition from one kind of TV signal to another? In this case, it seems to mean making the entertainment industry feel very warm and fuzzy inside." The EFF's efforts against the flag have been covered before on Slashdot.
ShashDot
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LiveCD Lets You Try Out Project Looking Glass
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Sun created Project Looking Glass (LG3D) as a 'proof of concept' not long ago. It is an environment for Linux, like KDE or Gnome, but with some really great 3D functionality. More than just eye-candy, LG3D provides functional use of an extra spatial dimension on your desktop. Now there is a LiveCD for us all to try it out.
Here is a link to the video:
http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.xml
SlashDot
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UK to Build Network of 150 Digital Cinemas
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According to this article at the BBC, a network of 250 digital screens in 150 cinemas across the country is being planned. Each film is losslessly compressed from 1 Terabyte down to 100 Gigabytes and encrypted onto a portable hard disk drive with a key unique to each cinema, which is then delivered to the cinema. Each cinema projector will be capable of showing films at resolutions of 2048 x 1080 pixels. "The key benefit is the distribution and screening of documentaries, British and foreign language films, as making a digital copy is considerably cheaper than spending over £1500 pounds to make a copy of a single film". Other benefits include better picture quality and the ability to show more films each day." The UK Film Council has a brief overview of the project as well.
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Apple Backing Away From FireWire
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Apple backing away from FireWire. The latest generation of iPods no longer ship with FireWire cables, but instead use USB 2... although FireWire can still be purchased seperately.
Reuters is reporting that Apple may be interested in buying TiVo. Seems like a good fit to me. Both companies stock price is up on the rumor.
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Dan Glickman addressed theater owners at the ShoWest Convention 3/14, it will mark the first time the group hears about the state of the movie industry from anyone but Jack Valenti, the only other person ever to head of the Motion Picture Association of America. Glickman took over from Valenti about 6 months ago.
The MPAA estimates that Internet piracy takes an annual bite of about $3.5 billion out of movie industry revenues.
They want to be more agresive against priacy.
Film world to see, hear Glickmani
Another Blurb about Digital Cinema from Showest
Home Theater Hacks (Hacks)
by Brett McLaughlin
ISBN: 0596007043
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates
Publication Date: 11/2004
404 pages
I give it a thumbs up. ( I don't make any money off that link either )
Dedicated Devices, Inc. (DDi) , founded in 2003 by former Micron Electronics, Inc. executives out in Boise, Idaho. Without seeing there product first hand, It looks exactly like several other product I have seen based on the Sigma Designs Chip out of Asia. See EM8551
They make a media server and play and have partnered with Leviton
DDi Digital Player
Leviton Manufacturing and Dedicated Devices, Inc. Introduce Leviton Entertainment & Applications Platform
Leviton is well know for making home light switches and wall power outlets
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Privacy Filters for LCD's
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3M's Vikuiti privacy filter technology narrows the viewing area so that screen data is visible only to persons directly in front of the monitor
3M Filters 1-800-553-9215
Ahusoft
World Online TV
Provides a directory interface to 800+ live streaming television channels and 1000+ online streaming radio stations from 100+ countries.
CYBERSKY-TV, CYBERTELLY AND BYTE-TORNADO
cybertelly.com
Instead sending satellites into space or laying a cable into household, we use the internet for signal transmission.
The difference to other technologies like IPTV or TVoIP or TVoverIP is, that we do not use Client-Server technology.
From: Telecontrol [mailto:telecontrol at t-online.de]
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 9:26 AM
To: sokol at videotechnology.com
Subject: Would you like to join our coding team at www.cybertelly.com (P2P TV)
Regards Guido
It's funny because I kept hearing about this project from several people before I got to checking over there site. (I replyed YES to the E-mail BTW)
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CAMit & i-Cam phoneline camera
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Kador Ltd. of the UK and NY, USA has 3 models of Modem based security cameras
CAMit $349.95 US
i-Cam $289.95 US
i-Cam II $489.95 US
CAMit can go "wireless" by using an optional external GSM modem , they also have a infrared for night vision version of CAMit
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