There are now more then one 3D Digital Cinema technology out there.
This ain't your old 1950's horror movies in 3D with the Red and Blue filter glasses.
Mann Theatres based in Encino California announced that it had selected Real D as its exclusive delivery system for digital 3D entertainment. Mann is the operator of 22 theaters with 178 screens in Southern California.
Mann who also owns the world-famous Grauman's Chinese theater on Hollywood Boulevard, will host the Real D flagship theater there, which will open to the public in May 2005.
The Real D system uses a single digital projector and lightweight polarized "sunglasses", not the heavier battery powered LCD shutterglasses.
Real D also just aquired StereoGraphics corp, the maker of 3D computer graphics systems for high end workstations for SGI and SUN.
The IMAX Corp. also unveiled at ShoWest its new 3D live-action technology, which the company said could convert virtually any 2D, 35 mm movie into a 3D experience.
Its 3D version of the animated hit "The Polar Express" earned $46 million worldwide and IMAX is in talks with Warner Bros. to use its 3D process on 2006 releases "The Poseidon Adventure" and the new version of "Superman."
A 3D movie format could help in the fight against movie piracy because it is more difficult to replicate 3D movies.
"We're making these movies, and we believe in the technology," James Cameron said at a recent convention of theater owners in Las Vegas called ShoWest. "People are seeking out that premium 3D experience."
Filmmakers Lucas, Cameron tout new 3D films
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DG2L Wins Contract for World's Largest DCinema Deployment
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DG2L Technologies has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract for the world's largest digital cinema deployment, which encompasses 2000 theaters in India for UFO (United Film Organizers), a subsidiary of the Valuable Media Group.
The DG2L solution produces near 2K resolution, and uses MPEG-4 with 192 bit encryption and Digital Watermarking.
DG2L aquired Morai Media Solutions Inc. that had aquired iVast International of Santa Clara, California. For those of you who don't remember iVast Here is a presentation they gave in 2/2002
More infomation is available from BUSINESS WIRE
iVast sale highlights MPEG-4 woes February 20, 2004
USB OTG, a supplement to the USB 2.0 specification, eliminates the current limitation in the USB that requires a PC to act as host and exchange data for its connected devices.
Today, more than 1.1 billion products are designed with USB ports, making USB the dominant I/O connectivity standard in the market.
However, the greatest limitation of USB today is the fact that it does not allow point-to-point communication between devices and therefore has not been widely adopted by consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones and PDA applications.
As these devices are gaining in popularity and intelligence, the requirement for a direct connection to each other is also growing.
The answer to this requirement is the standard called USB On-The-GO.
Companies like Micron, STMicroelectronics and Ali are rolling our chips for USB OTG. This will enable OTG Video Cameras, Flash Storage and other devices, making USB the defecto standard for low end video devices to communicate with each other.
VideoLAN one of the best OpenSource DVD and all around video player, is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened are the many libraries and projects which VLC is built upon, like FFmpeg, and the other free And Open Source software multimedia players, which include
MPlayer,
xine,
Freevo,
MythTV,
gstreamer.
See SlashDot Thread
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IPTV Revolution Put on Hold
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Business Week says the IPTV revolution might be postponed. As telecoms are launching the new service, they are facing the problem of lack of content: "But improvements like these can happen only if content providers - media companies and movie studios like Disney - play along. So far, it seems, they're not. Disney didn't return calls from BusinessWeek Online seeking comment, and it hasn't signed with any outside distributor to provide its movies for video-on-demand. Most studios have agreed to only limited video-on-demand distribution, fearing it could cut into revenues from rentals and DVD sales - now generating bigger income streams than the box office itself." The solution just might be buying out content companies, like Mark Cuban does. In the retrospect the Comcast bid for Disney and AOL buying Time Warner start making sense.
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Al Gore's new Internet TV
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From an article in the San Francisco Cronicle Gore's new media venture seeks to blend TV, Internet
Former VP says his Current network gives viewers a voice
From the article: "Current, the name of Gore's enterprise, hopes to do that by airing a shuffle of short news features, some produced by the network but many submitted online by viewers. Current will also air segments every half hour showing TV viewers what Google searchers are tapping into at that moment -- everything from current events to tourist destinations. It's all directed at a generation that thinks nothing of plugging into more than one media outlet at once."
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Logitech MSN Webcam Codec Reverse-Engineered
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Ole André Vadla Ravnås of the Farsight project (LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencing framework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the GNU Linux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for Mimic V2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSN Messenger
for webcam conversations.' Ole, on the libmimic site, remarks that 'It should be noted that reverse-engineering for interoperability is 100%
legal here in Norway (and in most European countries).' Looks like the Free/Open Source Software movement is very close to closing up one of the most noticeable software gaps remaining from its glorious efforts.
See: SlashDot Thread
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Aussie TV Networks Fight BitTorrent
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It seems impatient TV viewers have discovered BitTorrent in Australia mainly because the networks there are so slow; programs are at times behind by up to 8 months! According to an independent study, it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives. There are now calls for TV networks to consider offering episodes for download at a small cost.
See: SlashDot
Thread
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Google Experiments with Video Blogging
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TechWeb has an article about Google's plans to start a video service that sounds similar to Picasa. Excerpt: 'While there's no formal announcement yet, Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google's servers, partly in an effort to learn more about how to more efficiently search and display information about video-based data.
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Philip's Trimedia processors for Sale
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Sun 4/10/2005
Hi John
We spoke some time back.
We have inventory of TM1300 143Mhz that we need to find a home. Can you find an application or customer.
We are also open to suggestions. If we can build modules and sell, we will consider.
Appreciate any feedback.
Thanks
Regards
Chin
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Part Description
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Quantity
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Price
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Term
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TM1300-143Mhz
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11,500
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USD10
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FOB Singapore
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For more info contact: Jimmy Kang
E-mail:
Voom will cease to provide service to existing customers on April 30, 2005.
VOOM is a satellite television service, provided by Rainbow DBS, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC).
Voom had 3 times as many HiDef channels than any other competitor with
up to 40 HDTV channels in addition to up to 88 standard definition channels. In excess of 20 channels of Voom's HDTV content will be created for Voom's exclusive use by its parent company.
They may have died from lack of HD-PVR capablity to compete with DirecTV. Most Hi-Def users are early adopters and they want the technology.
Of course, with all the mess swirling around DirecTV's move to Mpeg4 AVC (AKA. H.264) and the impending obsolesence of the HD-Tivo,( the new DirecTV HD-TIVO's will be obsolete in about 6 months because Direct Tv is going to MPEG-4 compression. ) it will be interesting to see what happens next.
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MTV launches online video channel
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MTV Overdrive, a new internet video server from MTV, will offer music videos, previously aired programs and trailers for upcoming films. Viewers will also receive four-times-daily news updates from MTV's News operation.
Article here
Lost Remote, More details on MTV OVERDRIVE
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Siemens buys Internet video software company Myrio
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Myrio
offers software and hardware components for delivering television signals over Internet protocol (IP) networks. The company's products also allow network operators to offer video-on-demand and other personalized services.
Seems that thay have some sort of set-top box (STB) software solution. With much of thier solution based on Java and J2EE.
Reuters Article Here
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The Rocky TiVo-DirecTV Relationship
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Phillip Swann's TV Predictions is out this morning alleging that before dumping their TiVo stock last year, Rupert Murdoch's DirecTV had made a pass at buying a controlling stake in TiVo. According to Swann, 'TiVo's top management did not like Murdoch's offer,' and Swann alleges that this is why you had a fallout between the two companies. As an interesting aside, Rob Pegoraro over at the Washington Post was out yesterday warning people to not buy an HDTV TiVo, as DirecTV will be changing their high-def signal later this year and that if you bought the HDTV TiVo that you might not be able to watch network TV in high def.
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Sony to Make an "iTunes for Movies"
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After years of complaining that the RIAA and MPAA were missing the boat, and should have embraced things like Napster instead of supressing them, we got iTunes and the like. Now, Sony has announced it will 'make its top 500 films available digitally in the next year' according to a report on the BBC, with Sony's iPod replacement being the PSP
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MS Launches Video Download Service
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According to ZDNet and many other sources, Microsoft has launched a new video download service for playing back television content on Windows Mobile devices. Partners include CinemaNow, MSNBC.com, and TiVo. According to another article from ployer.com, the service will require Windows XP, Internet Explorer 5 or higher, and Windows Media Player 10 or higher.
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Local Internet TV Takes Off In Austria
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The BBC reports on an Austrian village that is testing technology which could represent the future of television. The pilot has been so successful that Telekom Austria is now considering setting up other projects elsewhere." From the article: "The hardware and software to turn video footage into edited programmes has been provided by Telekom Austria but this equipment, following training, has been turned over to the villagers. Any video programme created by the villagers is uploaded to a Buntes Fernsehen portal that lets people browse and download what they want to watch.
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