FLASH 10

Adobe released Flash Player 10, a new version of its ubiquitous software for displaying video clips and special effects in a web browser. You're using Flash every time you watch a YouTube video. There's a long list of new features on the Adobe web site, although really all that matters is whether it will stream higher-quality video without stuttering. Supposedly the new version will do better at that.

So I scurried off to install Flash 10, since I live for things like this - went to the web site and clicked on the "Get Flash Player 10" button and watched in excitement as a setup dialog appeared, followed by a couple of quick glimpses of setup windows coming and going, followed by the thrilling conclusion!

Hmm. Now Flash is broken.

I'm not discouraged! Back to the web site, click the setup button again! The computer whirs and belches and eventually the animation appears and I get the confirmation that installation was successful!

Version 9? Not quite what I was expecting.

Okay, fine. Let's get tough.

Off to Control Panel to uninstall Flash. There are two Flash programs listed, one of them for Flash 10 plus another one that probably was supposed to have been removed by the Flash 10 setup program. Uninstall them both.

Then back to the Flash web site, click the setup button, computer clanks and beeps, and wow, I've got Flash 10! Great!

I have no idea what difference that makes but perhaps it will be clearer after developers and web sites with video begin taking advantage of the new features.

Our experience with online video will steadily improve and this is one of the incremental steps forward. Microsoft just released Silverlight 2, Microsoft's competing technology for online video, which Microsoft hopes will chip away at Flash's commanding lead in the market. I don't care much who wins, but wouldn't it be nice if you could install useful tools without this kind of exercise?

Labels: IE, software, video

posted by bruceb at 10/17/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

WHY PEOPLE HATE BUYING PCs, PART 37

From Paul Thurrott's blog today.

Unbelievable.

I love Dell, I really do. I recently bought that Optiplex, which has been great. So when my dad called this morning and asked about buying a new PC, I told him I could probably get something at Dell for under $500. I headed over to Dell, went back and forth between the Inspiron and Studio desktops and then started configuring an Inspiron 518.

If you've spent any time on Dell.com, you know how this works. They have this nice configurator wizard that walks you through all of the components you can change on the system you're browsing, like the microprocessor, the graphics card, the hard drive, and so on. It's all standard stuff and it works well.

And then I got to this step. Honest to God, Dell.

Select my ... Iron Man Movie??? And it's between the steps for "Printers" and "Speakers." I kid you not.

But seriously. Crapware in the configurator?

People have been doomed to hell for eternity for less than this, Dell. Wake up.

I like the note that you'll be able to play the movie on your TV "through windows media extenders," as if that's something a lot of people will casually take advantage of.

That's not the only merchandising madness going on for this movie, by the way. There are eight different versions of the movie going on sale - every major retailer has a different package, one with bobbleheads, another with a comic book or a steel case or a stained glass window or something else. It's an odd world, isn't it?

Labels: business, computers, hardware, video

posted by bruceb at 10/09/2008 12:29:00 AM | permalink

AUDIO & VIDEO MYSTERIES

A few final thoughts about file formats for audio and video and how that affects a Vista Media Center Extender. This is the place where strong people are humbled and the whole project can be brought down with screams of frustration. I can only touch on a few of the myriad details.

There is a single overriding principle that you can put to use right away: make a conscious effort to avoid any file format that is locked up with any DRM (digital rights management, the schemes used with "licensed" content to prevent you from making full use of it), or that is even capable of a DRM layer. Don't buy songs from iTunes in Apple's proprietary AAC format, which can't be played in many places; instead, buy MP3 files from Amazon, which can be played absolutely everywhere. Set your audio software to rip CDs in MP3 format and throw away files in other formats from well-meaning friends. Here's a recent article that describe's one person's frustrating encounters with DRM-laden media files.

You can get a sense of how quickly this area gets ugly if you look into how many different formats there are for music, and how strongly people hold opinions about them. There are uncompressed formats that are more or less well supported (WAV, FLAC, OGG VORBIS), there are many competing formats for compressed audio (with and without DRM), and there are ways to compress MP3 files that result in terrible sound quality. I wrote some notes about music files here and I've worked hard to be sure that my library is 100% high-bitrate MP3s. If you have other formats in your music library (especially songs from the iTunes store), assume that you will have trouble playing them in Vista Media Center, much less an Extender in the living room.

Working with video is exponentially worse than audio. There is no accepted standard, no format that is a safe guarantee. Your camcorder will record files in a format that you likely didn't think about when you bought it and you have no way to be sure what will be required to play it on your own computer, much less in the living room. I'll throw out a few of the details that I ran into, but it's just a taste of what lies ahead.

There are several programs that rip DVDs to your hard drive in their native format, with all the files in the VIDEO_TS folder. Most of them will compress a dual-layer DVD into 4.7Gb, the size of a single-layer DVD. In this age of huge, cheap hard drives, it makes sense to create a library of entire DVDs on a big hard drive to have the best video quality when movies are played back, plus continued access to menus, special features, and chapters. Oddly, Vista Media Center won't display those DVDs ("folder is empty") until the registry is hacked per these instructions, at which point it displays a lovely DVD Gallery.

I put a 750Gb hard drive in my new Dell Inspiron and started ripping DVDs, using Nero Recode (and AnyDVD, which is required to unlock commercial DVDs). I brought the Vista Media Center DVD Gallery to life and looked at blank spaces where thumbnails ought to be until I manually found the cover art for each DVD online and copied the file as folder.jpg into the parent folder for each DVD. (J River Media Center will display a thumbnail for the DVDs if the folder.jpg file is in the VIDEO_TS folder, not the parent. Sigh.) I still think that's a good choice for assembling a movie collection that will be played back on a computer.

But then I got the Extender and - no DVDs! The Vista Media Center interface didn't have the DVD Gallery icon and the Extender claimed the folders were empty when I browsed to them. J River Media Center displayed the names but greyed them out as if they were inaccessible.

Much research ensued before I learned that Vista Media Center Extenders have been crippled so they cannot play DVDs in their native format under any conditions, presumably the result of a compromise to satisfy the dark lords in the movie studios. A separate DVD player is required in the living room to play a disc and there just isn't any way to stream a DVD from a computer through an Extender.

Converting movies is a science and a black art. A comparatively new format, H.264, is gaining acceptance as the "one true format," in Paul Thurrott's words, for high quality in a reasonable file size - roughly 1.5Gb for a two-hour movie. I had already found out that Nero's version of MPEG-4 (which is but isn't the same as H.264) has some funky proprietary issues, so I did more research and bought a copy of DVDFab to convert DVDs to a generic H.264 format, creating files with AVI extensions. I merrily proceeded down that path for a week or so, ripping movies right and left, before I realized that Vista Media Center Extenders can't play H.264 files either. Oh, I'm still not sure of the details of that - they don't play in the Vista Media Center interface or in the J River Media Center interface, but they sometimes play in the HP Videos section of the Extender, probably just to be malicious and mess with me. But clearly it isn't a universal format, at least not yet.

At the moment, I'm using DVDFab to rip DVDs to XVid format, which also results in files with AVI extensions because this wasn't confusing enough already. If you're trying this at home, these settings produce high-quality XVid videos that can be played on a Vista Media Center Extender: Mobile setting generic.avi.xvid.audiocopy; high quality encoding (2-pass); fixed bitrate 1200kbps; frame resolution roughly 768 x something.

Thanks for coming along with me into the living room! I'll return to your office now, where I belong. Good luck with your home theater!

Labels: audio, computers, DRM, video

posted by bruceb at 9/23/2008 12:11:00 AM | permalink

THE MEDIA CENTER COMPUTER

Running a Vista Media Center Extender in the living room requires a computer in the house running Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate. Your home computer can send your photos and music to the living room without working very hard, so it's quite possible to use the same computer that you're using at your desk.

There is a caveat, though. The most important trick for a Vista Media Center Extender is delivering TV shows to the TV, and your home computer probably isn't ready to do that without an extra bit of hardware to plug in the Comcast cable and act as a TV tuner. Once the hardware is set up, the Vista Media Center software is easy to set up - it automatically identifies your cable provider and channel selection, downloads a program guide, and handles program recording.

There are inexpensive USB devices that add TV tuner functions and are reported to work quite well, but I got an ATI TV Wonder HD-650 for a hundred bucks to put inside the PC, since it seemed to have the fewest trouble reports. In this category, as with so many others, there are always reports of horrible problems on Amazon and the online forums, requiring an intuitive weighing to decide which ones can be discarded because you're luckier or smarter than those people.

When shows are recording and being streamed into the living room, the computer is working a bit harder, enough that it might slow down your work on the computer occasionally. I also wanted to set up the Media Center computer to do some time-consuming, processor-intensive jobs - converting DVDs into files that could be stored on the computer's hard drive and played on the Extender. My desktop computer gets restarted pretty regularly as a side effect of testing too much software, which would play havoc with recording a show and might interrupt somebody's experience in the living room.

That's why a lot of people set up a separate computer that is dedicated to doing the Media Center chores. It can be a home-built PC, if you want to save some money. I opted to buy a Dell Inspiron 530 with a lot of memory, since basic computers are so absurdly cheap. I got a good video card but that's optional - I don't plan to ever have it hooked up to a monitor. It's sitting off in the corner and my interaction with it is all done from my desk using Remote Desktop.

A new dedicated computer and the HP Extender gives me a rock solid foundation for more living room entertainment than I have time for. It looks and sounds fabulous.

One more part of the story before we're done - a few scary notes about audio and video formats tomorrow.

Labels: audio, computers, hardware, photos, video, Vista

posted by bruceb at 9/22/2008 01:39:00 AM | permalink

HP MEDIASMART CONNECT

HP has been creating devices for years to bring Windows Media Center to the living room. There are two new Vista Media Center Extenders being marketed under the "MediaSmart" name that have some very interesting features. The HP MediaSmart Connect is sitting in my living room doing exactly what I was hoping.

The previous living room occupant was HP's Z558 Digital Entertainment Center, a computer running Windows XP Media Center in a box with a full complement of inputs and outputs for audio and video. It was fairly quirky to set up - getting the display to fill the screen took long experimentation, for example, and it wasn't very good at finding media stored on a different computer. It worked for several years but it always ran hot, which eventually doomed it - the proprietary video card died once from overheating and was almost impossible to replace, and the fans have lately been getting louder and louder until they became an unbearable distraction.

There are several new Vista Extenders on the market which overlap in their primary purpose, to bring Vista Media Center to the TV from another computer in the home. HP has developed an HD TV with the MediaSmart technology built into the guts of the TV - an interesting idea that would make setup much more simple if you need a new TV, but it requires a firm belief that the technology running a Vista Media Center Extender will last as long as the TV. I don't know if I would make that bet.

The HP MediaSmart Connect stood out for me, though, when I read some favorable reviews. It's a small box, 8 1/2 inches square and less than two inches tall, and completely silent. It has the right outputs to connect to my TV and audio receiver - HDMI, component video, and analog and digital audio. It has built-in wireless networking but I have a network cable running to the living room so I never had to find out if the wireless connection would be jerky or slow, a frequent complaint. HP is reportedly going to lower the price in the next week, giving it a list price of $299 and a likely street price of $249. (Gadgets like this require exactly the same calculation as software: if you get the wrong thing, it doesn't matter if it was cheap; if you get the right thing, the price is almost irrelevant in the long run.)

The remote control bristles with buttons, since there are just too many functions for it to be simple, but at least the remote is sturdy and solid in the hand, which is not always true of the competitors.

The Vista Media Center experience is satisfying but it would be more or less the same with any Extender. What sets the MediaSmart Connector apart is the proprietary software added by HP.

HP has built an interface that includes seamless access to Vista Media Center in its entirety - but there's also an attractive, simple interface that provides access to photos, music and videos that runs completely apart from Vista Media Center. HP provides optional software to run on the home computers that delivers the photos, music and videos to the MediaSmart Connect. Browsing photos with Vista Media Center is quite nice, for example - thumbnails, the ability to browse by tag or folder name, etc. - but some people will prefer to browse the same photos with HP's software, shown at left. Both views are available at any time.

HP then gave its box one more ability that was important to me: the HP MediaSmart Connect is able to connect to other software running on a home computer in addition to the program supplied by HP. It can display lists of media from any standard UPNP or DLNA server.

That means the HP MediaConnect can display music, photos or video sent around the network by a wide variety of programs, including some of the ones I mentioned yesterday. In my case, that means it connected immediately to the UPNP server built into J River Media Center, the program I depend on to keep my embarrassingly large music library organized. I've spent hours sorting my music by genre and creating playlists and smartlists, and in just a few minutes, there were those playlists on the TV, ready to be played at the click of a button. I started playing one ("Audio -- Recently Imported -- Two Months -- shuffle") and wiped a tear from my eye, because I had never been able to go back and forth elegantly between Windows Media Center and J River Media Center before.

That probably isn't important to you. There are a hundred reasons why this works for me and might not work for you. Maybe you'd be frustrated that the experience is not troublefree - I can't see cover art for music albums, I've wrestled with video formats (that story comes later), and the interface is sometimes a little slow, for example. You might be fiercely interested in streaming high-definition video or 5.1 surround sound, which I can't tell you about because I don't care.

The good parts far outweigh any negatives in our living room. Vista Media Center has a tremendous program guide for live and recorded television that I can reach with a single click of a button. I can browse through thumbnails and start a slide show of last month's family photos. I can play my video and music collection. All of those things are handled by an interface that's easy to navigate from the couch with a single remote control. That's good stuff!

All of this requires a computer in the house doing the work, and some hard experience to discover which formats work and which don't work. I'll tell you more later about how I'm handling those things.

Labels: audio, hardware, network, photos, software, video, Vista

posted by bruceb at 9/19/2008 12:59:00 AM | permalink

MEDIA CENTER EXTENDERS

Since the market for living room computers never developed, Microsoft decided to focus on "extenders," a different way to deliver media to your television.

Huge numbers of people already have a computer in the house running Windows Vista Home Premium, holding photos and music. An "extender" is a small box for the living room that connects to the computer over a wireless or wired connection to display the photos on the television and play music on the living room speakers. If the computer is set up for it, the extender can also handle all the TV programming and record TV shows like a Tivo. It works exclusively with a remote control - no keyboard or mouse! - and looks great from across the room. Here are some cute animations from Microsoft about how it works.

Extenders are not a new concept, and Microsoft is not the only company offering products that work this way. Apple TV is a box that streams music and video from your computer's copy of iTunes to the living room, hemmed in by Apple's fairly restrictive selection of supported formats and features. There is a rich selection of third party software and hardware that will send streams out onto a home network - Twonky, Tversity, music devices from Roku Soundbridge and Sonos, and much more. Tivo supplies software to send photos and music to the Tivo in the living room. Do-it-yourselfers and gadget freaks and technical types are having a wonderful time squabbling about the pros and cons of various setups.

Microsoft gets more attention in the mainstream because the technology it has chosen is elegant and because, well, because it's Microsoft, I guess. Media Center Extenders are based on a simple concept. The small living room box connects to the computer over the home network and displays the Vista Media Center interface, exactly as if it was running directly on the computer. Under the hood is a specialized version of Remote Desktop, which many businesspeople use to connect to their office computers from home.

All the work is done on the computer, but the computer can stay in the room suited for it. Multiple extenders can be connected to the same computer, and the computer can be used normally while it's sending media to the other rooms. The physical connections to the television for audio and video can be difficult but mating the computer with the extender is pretty straightforward.

Some people already have this technology without knowing it, because an XBox 360 can be a Media Center Extender. Chances are the XBox 360 is already on the home network to get updates and play online, so the only setup involves a bit of fumbling to bring a new blade to life in the XBox dashboard, full of photos and music. Microsoft recently announced that the XBox 360 dashboard would be completely overhauled to make it look like Media Center.

In addition to the XBox 360, there was a first generation of extenders from Linksys and others for Windows XP Media Center Edition, but they were slow and cranky and became obsolete when Microsoft rewrote everything for Vista. A new generation of extenders are now being introduced with some attractive features.

I don't have an XBox 360 - noisy things that fail a lot. (If you're interested, a good article appeared a few days ago about the XBox 360's sad history of hardware problems.) Instead, I'll tell you tomorrow about HP's MediaSmart Connect, which is the best of the extenders on the market now.

Labels: Apple, audio, hardware, Microsoft, network, photos, software, video, Vista, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/18/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

MEDIA IN THE LIVING ROOM

Your photos are on your computer.

Your music is on your computer.

It makes sense that computers should be able to record TV shows - it's kind of a computery thing to do, right?

It's probably occurred to you that it makes sense to store movies on a computer instead of buying them or getting them from Netflix.

Your new HD TV is basically a big computer monitor.

So why don't you have a computer in your living room?

You have no idea how many people have tried to figure that out. Microsoft introduced Windows XP Media Center edition, intended for living rooms, and no one cared, so it built an updated version of the Media Center interface into Vista, and still no one cared. (If you have Vista Home Premium, look around for "Windows Media Center" on the menu and start it up. Never seen it before, have you? The interface is designed to be seen from across the room. It's quite a nice design, just a little pointless on a desktop PC.)

There are lots of manufacturers making living room computers running Vista Media Center - Niveus, Avideus, Alienware, VelocityMicro, and many more. Many of them are very expensive and some of them are only sold through audio/video specialists, because it turns out that getting your media into the living room is frighteningly complicated.

Your needs are different than mine. Nobody will have the same setup, which is part of why this is so difficult. The best I can do is tell my story in the next couple of days and hope that it helps you think things through if you decide to go down this road.

For today, let me just give you a few of the considerations that make this so hard.

• Computers are noisy. A fan that's acceptable under your desk can quickly come to sound like a jet plane when you're watching television.
• Your living room doesn't have room for something that's shaped like a computer. The media center PCs have to be designed like a piece of audio equipment. That makes them too small to have adequate ventilation, so they run hot and need big fans, which gets back to the noise problem.
• Normal people find it virtually impossible to hook up a new television to cable and speakers, which is why Best Buy and the other retailers are getting deeply involved in sending installers to your home. A media center PC adds a new tangle of cables, each with its own quirks and requirements and possible incompatibilities - HDMI, component video, optical audio, S-video, and oh so many more. Your television connection might be analog cable or digital cable, it might require a converter box or a CableCard (a hellishly complex bit of equipment in its own right), it might be DirecTV, you might have an antenna for HD signals, and the setup will different for every one. Trust me - the Best Buy geek isn't going to set up your media center PC.
• You don't have a network cable running into your living room. Sure, all the new stuff claims to work over wireless connections but maybe you've noticed - wireless connections are not the most stable, troublefree items in our tech toolbox, are they?
• There are an endless number of proprietary formats and programs that will become barriers to making everything work. I'll touch on this more later. You'd like to think that someone could give you instructions for how to get a movie from the camcorder and see it in the living room but there is no guarantee that anything will work - and if it works today, it might not work tomorrow.

Pretty depressing, huh? There, there. I feel your pain. But I'm a survivor - I've got pictures running in a slide show, I've got music playing from my library, and I've got a lovely collection of movies to browse through, and it's all down in my living room where it belongs. It took some money and some persistence and things aren't perfect but it can be done! More to come.

Labels: audio, computers, Microsoft, photos, video, Vista, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 9/17/2008 01:35:00 AM | permalink

OLYMPIC TECHNOLOGY

By the close of the 2008 Olympic Games, NBC will have broadcast 2,900 hours of live coverage - more than the total number of US television hours for all previous summer Olympic Games combined.

In addition to the broadcasts on the primary NBC channel, video coverage will be virtually nonstop on NBC's Spanish-language outlet, Telemundo, and on five of seven major NBC Universal-owned cable channels. Huge amounts of video covering every sport will be served up by streamed video on NBC's Olympics Web site, NBCOlympics.com. Here's a good article about the monolithic coverage and the accompanying promotional effort.

This article examines the technical challenge of handling that much video - 11 terabytes of high definition content alone. NBC has spent billions on storage (180TB of available space in Beijing), servers, and creative technology to make it possible for editors around the world to stitch together the coverage from the available shots and create a finished piece without choking up all the bandwidth moving the HD video around.

The NBC Olympics web site will be streaming video using Microsoft's Silverlight technology - you'll have to install "Silverlight v.2 (beta)" to see the video. Microsoft paid large amounts of money to get the opportunity to install Silverlight on computers around the world, and it's putting on a very impressive show - the high quality 720x480 video is quite remarkable after the last couple of years spent enduring miserable low-quality streaming Flash video on YouTube. Check it out - watch the incredible men's swimming 4x100 relay. (When the video starts, click the button to "Enlarge" in the lower right corner.)

You'll get a quick screen to indicate who your television provider is - if you don't claim to have service from one of NBC's "partners" (like, say, Comcast Cable in zip code 95404), you don't get to watch the online video. There's no check on the information you put in. I've seen one unconfirmed report that if you put in Time Warner in zip code 10001, you can see some coverage three hours earlier than it's turned on for the west coast.

There is a link to the NBC Olympics web site on the bruceb.com Favorites page - near the top, under the Amazon search box.

Enjoy the Games!

Labels: business, games, Internet, video

posted by bruceb at 8/12/2008 12:15:00 AM | permalink

WHAT I USE

On the assumption that my choices are endlessly fascinating to an ever-growing number of people - really, really bored people - I've added a page with details about the hardware and software that I use here at the high-tech headquarters of bruceb consulting. I'll try to keep it up to date. Heck, my computers are happy - you could do worse than follow my example in precise detail.

Click here for all the prurient details!

Labels: audio, backup, broadband, bruceb, computers, file_sharing, hardware, mobile, phone, photos, printers, SBS, security, software, video, web_services

posted by bruceb at 7/30/2008 01:02:00 AM | permalink

QUICK TO ANGER

Quicktime has been an annoying bit of software for ten years now. My experience tonight was the final straw. I've spent the better part of an hour cleaning it off my system and I don't intend to let it back. What is it with Apple? Every time I feel like giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, swayed by all the hype, I have an experience where I'm reminded that Apple writes crappy, invasive software.

Quicktime has been around forever, a bit of free software that will play online videos in certain formats. In the last few years YouTube and the other big video sites began using Flash for movies, so Apple shifted its focus to new high definition video formats. Most of you will only run into Quicktime now if you go look for movie trailers - the studios use it a lot.

And Quicktime has been a pain in the neck forever. When I began this news page, one of my first comments was a complaint about Quicktime. (I've got old archives here - I was ranting about Quicktime on 09/27/99. "Is it just me or is Quicktime incredibly annoying?") For years Apple released Quicktime updates that did not remove older conflicting versions; at one point Apple literally hid the free version of the program in an attempt to deceive us into downloading a paid version; recently it used a Quicktime update as a mechanism to deceptively install its unnecessary and insecure browser.

A couple of days ago I installed the Quicktime 7.5 update, supposedly an important update to cure serious security problems.

Quicktime stole my file associations. I hate it when programs steal my file associations.

An easy example: You probably have three or four or five programs on your computer that can open JPG files. One of them is the default - the one Windows will use if you just click on a JPG file. That's the file association - they're the default programs assigned to dozens of different types of files recognized by your computer.

Manufacturers have been trying to steal file associations from each other for years. Each program that you install for photos will try to become the default program for opening JPG files. When you click on a file and the wrong program starts, it's because something else has grabbed that file association.

It's possible to reassign the program of your choice but it's a pain. (Right-click on a file of the type you want to change, click on "Open with / Change default program" and you'll get a list of likely programs, along with a checkbox to "Always use this program to open this type of file." Vista has a well-organized set of controls - click on Start, type "default" and click on "Default Programs." It's not a friendly place to hang out.)

I guard my file associations jealously. When I click on an MP3 file, I want J River Media Center to play it. When I click on a JPG, I want it displayed in Windows Live Photo Gallery; when I click on a PNG, I want Microsoft Digital Image Editor. You might not think of it but you're just like me, looking for continuity and familiarity, not sudden unexplained changes in the programs that pop up.

Quicktime 7.5 has a confusing installation routine and tries to become your default program for dozens of types of files, but if you're careful during installation it's possible to deselect all of the file types so Quicktime is not the default for anything. That's my favorite result - it's a yucky program with terrible controls and insistent advertisements for a paid version. (Remember, always do a custom installation of any software and read all the things with checkboxes!)

I stopped Quicktime from grabbing any file associations and installed the update. No worries, eh?

I clicked a link tonight in Internet Explorer to download and save an MP3 file. The Quicktime logo appeared and the file started playing in Quicktime's stupid player embedded in a big empty white Internet Explorer page.

WTF?

Come to find out that Internet Explorer has its own file associations, separate from the rest of the computer. Without asking, Quicktime had installed an IE addin that took over god knows how many file types in Internet Explorer - movies, PNG files, MP3 files, more.

Research, experiment, more research, more experiments. Once Quicktime steals those Internet Explorer file associations, it's virtually impossible to put them back to the defaults. They are stored completely separately from all the regular file associations, so repairing those doesn't do anything to IE. I tried registry fixes, I tried IE7's tool to reset every browser setting to its default (Tools / Internet Options / Advanced / Reset Internet Explorer Settings). I tried disabling Quicktime's addin (Tools / Manage Add-ons) and discovered that the file associations were hosed - web pages had red Xs where PNG files should display, error messages appeared when links were clicked for some file types. According to what I was reading online, uninstalling Quicktime does not put things back to normal!

In the end, I was saved by a system restore. Once the IE file associations were back to normal I was able to set about to scrub my system of Apple software, including the "Apple Update Utility" that I had specifically told it NOT to install. (Apple: "I'll be darned. How did THAT get there? Little rascal.")

This is obviously not a huge problem - most of you would be mildly inconvenienced and a little confused, nothing more. But I'm watching our interactions with Windows computers become more complex and more confusing and it's the result of a lot of little invasions like this by companies who have only their own corporate interests at heart. So trust me, I'm only thinking of you when something like this makes me furious.

I'm not sure what the conclusion is. Quicktime occasionally comes in handy online and if it's installed then it really should be updated for security reasons. It's not so awful that I'm going to urge you to remove it. But personally, I'm going to swear off movie previews and see if I miss it. I hope not.

Labels: Apple, IE, video, Vista, WinXP

posted by bruceb at 6/23/2008 02:29:00 AM | permalink

RIPPING DVDS

I've tried to figure out how video works on computers, really I have. Maybe you've tried Vista's Windows Movie Maker, or burned a DVD with Windows Photo Gallery, or found a way to upload videos to YouTube. Congratulations! Treasure those moments! Because the instant you raise your expectations, you'll find yourself trapped in a blur of acronyms and techno-whizz-bang stuff that will leave you lying weak and helpless.

I can point you to a couple of things that might help. Let's talk about commercial DVDs and imagine that you want to make a copy of a DVD from your collection as a backup, or to store on a computer.

You'll need a program that will remove the copy protection from commercial DVDs. Buy a copy of Slysoft AnyDVD and that problem is solved. There are other programs, there are other ways to accomplish it, but AnyDVD works and is frequently updated, and appears to be produced by a more or less reputable company instead of a non-English-speaking teenager who might be robotically controlled by the Russian Mafia.

I use the CD and DVD burning suite from Nero, which is a mess of buggy programs, some loosely integrated and others completely superfluous. (With Nero, I do a custom install and only install Nero Burning ROM and Nero Recode.) I've come to like it better than the equally messy suite from Roxio, but as I said, there are a lot of programs out there to do these tasks. I sound critical of Nero but it stands head and shoulders above most of the rest!

The "Nero Recode" program can make a copy of a DVD onto a blank DVD. You'll likely buy 4.7Gb blank DVDs but many commercial DVDs are pressed on 8.5Gb discs; Nero Recode will compress the movie so it fits onto the smaller disc with very little loss of video or sound quality. In theory it's an easy and effective process, although the reality can be just the teensiest bit difficult. When you successfully copy a DVD, be proud even when you discover that many DVD players refuse to play some types of blank discs, or simply choke on any burned DVD.

If you want to store your movie on a hard drive, that's where the fun begins. Most people want to shrink the movie so it takes less hard drive space, but that requires an infinite number of choices about what format to use, how much to compress the movie, and what will be necessary to play it later. If you use a program that appears to make it easy, then the program is making those choices for you, for better or for worse.

Your head will spin. AVI is a container, not a format. The iPod has its own format that may (or more likely may not) play anywhere else. Nero's version of MP4 is unable to be played reliably on anything other than Nero's cruddy Player software. Windows Media Player and Media Center will simply ignore many formats and display empty folders where you know all your movies are. Movies will be silent or voices will be out of sync. You'll eventually find yourself at Doom9.net, "the definitive DVD backup resource," reading helpful descriptions like this from the Newbies forum:

DivX and Xvid are Encoders, they are not video formats and they are not containers!
Both, DivX and Xvid, implement the "MPEG-4 ASP" Video Format, as specified in the MPEG-4 standard.
So the result will be an MPEG-4 ASP bitstream, no matter which Encoder (DivX, Xvid or another one) was used to create it!

In contrast the "x264" Encoder implements the "AVC/H.264" Video Format, so it's not compatible to MEPG-4 ASP (e.g. Xvid or DivX).
AVI, MKV, MP4 and OGM are not Video Formats, they are Containers!
Containers specify how to mux Audio and Video streams together into one file, so they can play synchronously.
MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. DivX or Xvid) Video Streams can be stored in an AVI container as well as in an MP4 or MKV container.
With AVC/H.264 it's a bit more tricky, so AVI might not be the best solution for H.264 streams...

So to sum up, there are three things you have to distinguish:
* Video Format (e.g. MEPG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, AVC/H.264, etc.) - This is specification and documents, general Standards.
* Video Encoder/Decoder aka "Codec" (e.g. DivX, Xvid, x264, etc.) - This is a specific piece software and usually implements a certain Format/Standard.
* Container Format (AVI, MP4, MKV, OGM) - This is a file format, specifying how the Audio/Video streams are stored inside a file.

Dozens of combinations are possible. For Example:
* An "MPEG-4 ASP" Video can be encoded with the "DivX" Software and then the resulting stream can be stored in an "MKV" container.
* Alternatively you could encode your "MPEG-4 ASP" Video using the "Xvid" Software and then store it in an "AVI" container.

There, you see! That helps, right?

With all that in mind, let me point you to a very clear guide by Paul Thurrott about how to rip a DVD. There's good, reliable information there that you could follow exactly. I'm not familiar with Handbrake, the program he recommends, but I trust his judgment and the screen shots look easier and clearer than most of the other programs I've tried. The H.264 format described there is currently the best choice for most people to combine high quality and wide support, as near as I can tell.

Personally, I'm currently using a different method. I bought a huge hard drive when NewEgg.com had a sale - a Seagate 750Gb 7200 SATA drive for $119.99. I'm using Nero Recode to copy DVDs in their native format (with IFO files and VIDEO_TS folders), reducing each one to 4.7Gb. Storage space is cheap! In that format, the DVDs can be streamed to Windows Media Center in the living room and can be played by any of the DVD players on my office computer.

Labels: video

posted by bruceb at 6/10/2008 01:14:00 AM | permalink

THE FUTURE OF GRAPHICS CARDS

Wrestling with a black screen drew my attention to the world of video cards and computer graphics.

Vista's pretty visual effects - translucent borders, 3D flipping through windows, live thumbnail previews of windows from the taskbar and the like - come with a price. Something on the computer has to work hard to deliver all those visual effects to the screen.

Microsoft originally intended the marketing for Vista to be perfectly clear that it would only be satisfying with a video card capable of displaying those effects quickly and clearly. Intel complained that some of its popular motherboards with integrated graphics were not capable of delivering a great Vista experience. Microsoft gave in to Intel, changed its marketing and delivered a hopelessly ambiguous and confusing message about Vista's hardware requirements, which played a significant role in Vista's failed marketing and poor consumer perception.

That's why it's a bit ironic that Intel is giving interviews claiming that any day now people "probably won't" need discrete video cards in their computers, because Intel's motherboards will do such a swell job on graphics. (Gamers will get a kick out of the video demo linked in the article, which is singularly unimpressive to anyone who has played a computer game in the last couple of years.)

I continue to insist that anyone buying a new computer get a 256Mb video card, typically from ATI or Nvidia. There are wide variations in video cards with 256Mb of memory but even the least of them will meet the needs of typical computer users today and for the foreseeable future. Buying anything less means the computer is starting out with a handicap that will slow things down - and these days we need to remove every bottleneck we can find.

ATI and Nvidia have been making video cards for a long time, trading places back and forth for the fastest and biggest and most macho. The latest video cards are frighteningly powerful and new models continue to be introduced at a dizzying pace. There are video cards on the market with a gigabyte of memory and so much hardware that computers need bigger power supplies and special cooling. Systems are being built with two and three and four huge video cards linked together and generating enough heat to warm small buildings.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the hardware outpaces the software drivers, which are updated constantly; each update purports to cure hundreds of bugs but seems to introduce a few more. ATI's drivers were a constant source of irritation in the early days; I can remember waiting impatiently for long-delayed releases of driver updates that invariably disappointed. Ooh, I hated ATI products!

Microsoft released a startling chart in its Vista-related litigation summarizing the causes of logged Vista crashes, grouped by company. Thirty percent of all Vista crashes were caused by Nvidia driver problems! That's remarkable, and awful. There's no additional information to put that in context - the time period, the details of driver and OS versions - so we're left with that hideous pie chart.

I'm so cynical about this imperfect industry that I don't see that as a reason not to buy Nvidia video cards. ATI drivers have their own idiosyncrasies and I'd bet things are already better for Nvidia after a few more months spent updating its drivers and working with Vista Service Pack 1. It's just another reason to sigh and grit our teeth when a system goes down.

Labels: computers, hardware, software, video, Vista

posted by bruceb at 4/07/2008 12:41:00 AM | permalink

BLACK SCREEN (WITH CURSOR)

Spent a few hours chasing down a problem with my office computer last night. It's just remarkable how many ways our computers can go wrong, isn't it? Honest, I would gladly give up much of my job security if it meant our technology would work more reliably.

The symptom: the computer starts up and presents a login screen; when the name and password is entered, the screen goes black and stays black, with nothing except a mouse cursor that moves around quite happily. Lots of hard drive activity as if the system is starting normally.

It wasn't the first time this had happened but it never lasted long before. It happened once or twice while I was working on the problem I described here. I thought I had resolved it. Not!

Shut down, restart. Cross my fingers while restarting. Turn the monitor off and on.

Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and the screen immediately appears with the options to lock the computer/log off/change password and "Start Task Manager." That would be good, eh? Try and start Task Manager but oops - right back to the black screen. If I log off, the login screen appears right away, fully lit up. The screen is only black when I log in.

Log in to other accounts - black screen, moving cursor.

A little Googling and imagine my surprise - people have experienced the same problem, plus variations on the problem, and there's no consensus on what causes it or how to solve it. I don't have all the links - I'll just give you the flavor.

Problems:

• Windows doesn't start; computer displays black screen with blinking cursor
• Windows starts but login screen doesn't appear; mouse cursor moves around.
• Windows starts and login screen appears; screen goes black after logging in on some user accounts but not others; mouse cursor moves around.
• Windows starts and login screen appears; screen goes black after logging in to any user account; mouse cursor moves around.
• Some people have seen this after returning from sleep or hibernation; others after remote desktop sessions; others (like mine) have no connection to anything in particular.

Possible solutions:

• Disable all Cyberlink programs (makers of PowerDVD) from starting automatically.
• Disable LSASS.SYS (deep part of Windows responsible for some networking functions) from starting automatically.
• Disable [fill in the blank] from starting automatically.
• Remove NTUSER.DAT from the user profile after logging into a different administrator account and let it rebuild on the next login.
• Bring up Task Manager and restart Explorer.exe.
• Change video card settings for multiple monitors, or plug single monitor into other video card connector on multi-monitor cards.
• Update (or roll back) video card drivers.
• Install USB Cumulative update in KB941600.
• Blame a virus or adware/spyware.
• Boot from Vista DVD and use Repair function.
• Use System Restore to return to "Last Known Good Configuration."
• Reinstall Vista.
• Reformat the hard drive.

Each "solution" works for some people and not others. I ran across at least one person complaining that their screen was still black after reformatting their hard drive and another continued to have a black screen after replacing his video card.

Of course, this is undoubtedly not a single problem but rather similar symptoms resulting from a lot of different problems.

I used my notebook computer to connect to my office computer using Remote Desktop. My desktop appeared and it was clear that the office computer was starting up completely normally in all respects except sending a signal to the monitor. I tried to change the display resolution and refresh rate, which turns out to be hard to do when the monitor is black. Those settings aren't available in Remote Desktop sessions and there's no obvious command line options.

After three or four hours I had a black screen and a headache, along with a lingering suspicion that it might be a hardware problem with the video card after all. I shut the computer down overnight. This morning when I logged in, my desktop appeared in all its bright glory - no black screen - and everything has been working for five hours straight. Could the video card be overheating? The system was set to put the monitor to sleep - did I overlook that and it won't happen again until the monitor goes to sleep next time?

I've got a new video card on the way. I wonder if it will make any difference?

When I'm cautious with my clients about troubleshooting hardware problems, it's experiences like this that are in my mind. But next time you want to throw a computer through a window, call me so I can help.

Labels: computers, hardware, video, Vista

posted by bruceb at 4/04/2008 01:41:00 PM | permalink

FUN WITH TECHNOLOGY - CHAPTER 84

I wanted to copy a DVD. The copy would go on the airplane and I wouldn't have to worry about damaging or losing the Netflix copy. Simple, eh?

DVDs can't be copied without running software to defeat their copy protection, but programs like Slysoft AnyDVD are readily available. Apparently SlySoft is based somewhere exotic that the movie industry can't reach - Slovenia or Detroit or Mars or something like that. I have AnyDVD running on my computer - the icon down by the clock looks like an animal with a horrible head wound and it's fond of popping up reminders every 48 hours or so that there's an upgrade available (the latest one adds "support for a new type of structural protection as found on "Beste Zeit", R2, Germany," I kid you not). But AnyDVD does its job - when it's running, DVDs can be copied.

I popped in the movie and started Nero 8 Ultra Edition. Like Roxio Easy Media Creator, it's a wildly overstuffed lumbering monster of a suite of badly integrated programs. Some pieces are valuable and work beautifully; some are half-baked and a few are absurdly out of place. ("Nero Scout - Database Technology"? You don't want to know.) I had studied the list of programs for an hour to figure out which pieces should be left out before I pressed "Install."

Can't copy the disc directly. It's a dual-layer disc, more than 7Gb of data. Blank dual-layer discs are expensive and I've never been sure if my DVD recorder can record on them anyway. I've got the more typical 4.7Gb blanks.

Nero Recode lives for these moments. It can take a DVD and recode it so it fits a 4.7Gb disc, with virtually no loss of video quality. Beauty! Let's go!

It takes a long time to work with video. Nero Recode took an hour or so to chew through the movie, then spit open the drawer and asked me to insert a dual layer blank DVD.

Hmm. That kind of missed the point.

I spent a while making arbitrary changes to the manual settings for the size of the disc and the subtitles and the like, then tried it again. Same result an hour later.

Nero releases updates for its suites as often as everybody else but I already had the latest version - heck, it's been an eternity, almost two months since version 8.2.8.0, and by the way, when did software version numbering morph into three decimal places?

Okay, try the option to encode only the main movie, not the menus or special features. An hour later, Nero asks for a plain old DVD+R. Joy! Twenty minutes later the drawer opens and spits out my perfect copy, right up until I read the error message that says the whole operation was a failure because it could not close the disc due to a "PMA update failure." Google google google. Either defective media or outdated firmware in the DVD recorder or bad software, but maybe not any of those things.

Try it again at a slower burn speed. An hour and twenty minutes later, another error message.

If I had spent this much time watching the movie, I wouldn't have needed the copy because I'd have been able to act it out for the kids.

Instead of recording the movie directly, let's park it on the hard drive, one of the options in Nero Recode. An hour later, a lovely VIDEO_TS folder is waiting for me and it's the work of a moment - well, thirty moments or so - to start up Nero Express, add the VIDEO_TS folder, and successfully burn a copy of the movie onto a 4.7Gb disc.

Magic! Grab some art from the web and print the label on the disc. Many of Epson's inkjet printers have a special tray to print on the top of blank CDs and DVDs, as long as you use the "Epson Print CD" software, which is just as quirky as everything else. Printable blank CDs and DVDs are reasonably easy to find if you look for them but of course there are ways for them to be inconsistent. Grab the nearest CD or DVD - is the inner circle around the hole clear or printed? You can buy the blanks either way, and of course you'll have to track down a setting in the software to make that adjustment. I don't know why I always forget that conventional CD/DVDs are 12cm with a 43mm opening, while the ones that allow printing in close to the hole have a 20mm opening. Where is my head some days?

Was it worth it? Sure, it was a lot of effort, but I'm sure parents will appreciate the happiness that filled my heart when my 15-year old took off the headphones on the plane so he could lean over and say, "Dad? The voices in the movie? They're not coming out when the people move their mouths. It's like a badly dubbed Japanese movie. Wow, that's weird - it just skipped a scene. Look, dad, it did it again." It was a special moment.

Labels: video

posted by bruceb at 2/18/2008 12:56:00 AM | permalink

SPEAKING GEEK

The Wall Street Journal's site All Things Digital has a useful article that translates some geek jargon into English. It's a nicely written collection of common-sense explanations of terms used to describe digital cameras, mobile devices, televisions, and more. Sample:

"DIGITAL CAMERAS - Megapixels: This term describes the highest resolution photo a camera can take. Often mistaken as the most important factor in a digital camera, a high megapixel count - such as 10MP or more - isn't necessary for the average user unless he or she plans on heavily editing or enlarging photos. Most new digicams offer between five and eight megapixels, which is usually more than enough."

Labels: audio, mobile, phone, photos, video, wireless

posted by bruceb at 1/10/2008 01:05:00 AM | permalink

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008!

In 2007, we started to work with Windows Vista, bought lots of handheld devices, and started to move things online - our mail, our photos, our movies.

What will 2008 bring? It will start with lots more of the same. Many of you will get your first Windows Vista computer and discover that it's quite a nice operating system. There's a flood of new handheld devices on the way inspired by the iPhone, although my guess is that Apple will stay a step ahead by releasing the iPhone version 2 with better data speeds and support for corporate e-mail systems - making it look very tempting for almost anyone who can stomach an account with AT&T. And the online sites for photos and videos will continually improve their ease of use and security; this should be on your mind every time you hear a story about someone who didn't have a backup of the family photos when the computer crashed.

2008 will bring an update to Microsoft Small Business Server - too early to know what the impact of that will be. I sense virtualization in my future - software that allows multiple computers to run on the same piece of hardware, each one convinced that it has exclusive control of the machine. That allows changes to be tested without risk and might even allow a business to run multiple servers in a more secure, less expensive way. We'll talk about that just as soon as I understand it even a little tiny bit.

With luck we'll talk less in 2008 about the recording industry and confusing DRM restrictions on music and video files. Slowly but surely the entertainment industry is being forced to consider new business models based on trusting consumers instead of suing them. Warner Music just began offering part of its music catalog in MP3 format through Amazon.com, joining EMI and Universal, and leaving Sony as the lonely holdout. My second favorite news item at the end of 2007 is the latest over-the-top assertion by the recording industry, this time in a brief filed by the RIAA last month in one of its acts of litigation terrorism against consumers. The RIAA now asserts that it is illegal for you to rip a CD to your computer, even if you purchased the CD and the computer files are only for your personal use. This is what it looks like when an entire industry dies a horrible self-inflicted death.

But my favorite end-of-year news story should warm all of our hearts. Wal-Mart announced that it has closed its online service for downloading movies. The service was opened in February with the endorsement of all major movie studios and TV networks, offering movies with intense DRM restrictions.

But that's not the good part.

The good part is that when Wal-Mart posted the announcement that the site was closed, no one noticed. In this world where everything is observed and commented on, it took a week for the closure to be mentioned in any blog or news article. It was such a cruddy, overpriced, difficult, restrictive service that literally no one ever looked at it. I love that!

Let's take it to be a good sign for 2008. My wish for you all is that in 2008, cruddy services and software will be ignored and valuable services and software will rise to the top, making you richer and more productive and happier. We can hope, right?

All my best wishes for a happy new year!

Labels: audio, business, DRM, Internet, mobile, phone, photos, SBS, video, web_services

posted by bruceb at 1/02/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

DIGITAL MOVIES & DURABLE DATA

The New York Times has a fascinating article comparing the methods used to preserve 35-millimeter movies and digital master records of movies. Conventional film can be stored in a limestone mine for almost nothing and last for decades. Pure digital storage is far more expensive and is likely to be more ephemeral.

You've likely thought of this when you're storing your digital photos or home videos. Hardware and storage media have a much shorter shelf life than film or paper. Hard drives can freeze up within a couple of years if they're not operated occasionally. CDs and DVDs degrade; their life span is variable but 15 years is a good rule of thumb.

As computer technology advances, file formats change and an archived file may become unreadable. A JPG or Quicktime file may seem permanent today, but are you confident that those formats will still be accessible in 20 years?

For the film industry, that means that digital archiving becomes a dynamic process where stored films must be re-archived periodically - far more labor intensive and expensive than storing traditional film.

It's tempting to believe that our data has achieved more permanence on the computer than when it was on paper, but perhaps the opposite is true.

Labels: business, photos, video

posted by bruceb at 12/26/2007 01:22:00 AM | permalink

THE WIRELESS FUTURE
Wireless technology is a blur of confusing acronyms and frequent frustration, but we are making progress and there continues to be hope that more and more wires will disappear in the future.

Wireless Internet connections for our computers are slowly becoming more comprehensible and easier to manage, although the word "wireless" is still used for too many different things. Wireless keyboards and mouses are far more dependable than they used to be, and battery life has been significantly extended.

One company just announced new technology for setting up wireless connections to speakers and headphones. Previous attempts to beam sound across the room have performed badly and this announcement is just a press release, but we can hope for the best.

Another development: IBM announced a plan to develop ultra high speed chips to transmit wireless high-definition video between computers, televisions and handheld devices. One of many hurdles that stops people from hooking the living room into a home computer network is the difficulty of getting video working smoothly over a wireless connection; this might help get past that bottleneck. (Another difficulty is that most people can't make heads or tails of the technology required; there's nothing on the horizon to change that, despite a flood of announcements of "media center extenders" and the like.)

Labels: audio, network, video, wireless

posted by bruceb at 10/26/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

RIAA SUES USENET.COM
The first rule of Usenet is, you don't talk about Usenet.

Careful observation of that rule has allowed Internet newsgroups to avoid getting involved in the entertainment industry's freakish litigation war on its customers. Now a new lawsuit suggests that the RIAA can't stand it any more.

It's time to talk about Usenet.

Internet newsgroups predate virtually everything on the Internet. Using specialized software, you can display messages posted in "newsgroups," with each newsgroup devoted to a particular subject matter that is more or less observed by the people posting messages. Anyone can read and post messages in any newsgroup; most are unmoderated.

Some newsgroups are very active, with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of messages posted daily. Some were created years ago and remain on the list even though they are completely dormant. There is a rough organization to the groups - the "sci" (science) category contains newsgroups named "sci.math" and "sci.physics," for example. There are newsgroups for every interest, hobby, profession, religion, sport, everything you can think of and oh so many things that would never occur to you.

There are currently over 107,000 newsgroups.

The newsgroups contain text messages, and only text messages. But years ago some clever technology arrived that permits any kind of file to be converted to a text message and posted to the newsgroups; the software at your end then converts it back to a picture or a PDF or a music file or a program.

The architecture of Usenet is unlike anything else. It is global and decentralized. Servers run all over the world; basically, each one holds all the contents of Usenet and forwards new items and changes to all the other servers, in a constant flow of data in all directions.

At one time, virtually every ISP maintained its own Usenet servers and offered free access to Usenet to its subscribers. As the volume of traffic on Usenet grew, many ISPs did not want the burden of maintaining the huge servers, so they began leasing Usenet access from several large global companies - primarily UsenetServer.com, Supernews, Giganews and Usenet.com. From Wikipedia:

"A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer well because of the large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet services such as email and web access), and a disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of missing news articles that are not the ISP's fault). Some ISPs outsource news operation to specialist sites, which will usually appear to a user as though the ISP ran the server itself. Many sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups."

Windows has built-in software for Usenet. You've heard of it; it's Outlook Express (and Windows Mail on Vista). It's terrible, but it works for text messages.

But that's not what Usenet is about.

A flood of music, movies, and pornography is posted to Internet newsgroups every day. The volume is staggering - terabytes of data arrives daily. So, for example, a subscription to Giganews, a license to use Newsleecher and its "Supersearch" service, and a fairly steep learning curve opens up access to a constantly-changing vault bursting with music and movies.

Late last week the RIAA sued Usenet.com, one of the larger Usenet services. Here's another article about the lawsuit.

Usenet.com has some intemperate language on its web site, boasting that its service "gives you access to millions of MP3 files and also enables you to post your own files the same way and share them with the whole world."

The fear is that a victory over a company making overbroad statements will lay the groundwork for pursuing the hundreds of universities, ISPs and global companies offering Usenet access. Newsgroup traffic would be difficult to control and has obvious non-infringing uses, but that doesn't mean the RIAA can't disrupt the established patterns and shut off access through some of the current providers. At this point we hardly need more evidence to realize the RIAA is clinically insane and capable of anything.

The RIAA deeply believes that the battle to protect copyrights is the most important issue facing Western civilization. Make sure you take a moment to watch this anti-piracy video, which dramatizes the depth of their commitment.

Labels: audio, DRM, file_sharing, law, video

posted by bruceb at 10/17/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

ADOBE UPDATES PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS
Adobe released Photoshop Elements 6 and Premiere Elements 4 today, giving a facelift to its programs aimed at consumers for image and video editing. They can be purchased individually but work increasingly well together; there's a discounted update price at the Adobe web site if you own previous versions.

There's no hands-on reviews yet but there's a bit to learn from the screenshots and press releases. Adobe has added features without making huge changes to the interface, so neither program will be noticeably easier to use. Both programs are as easy to use as they can be, given how much they can do, but some people find them daunting. (If you get a new Vista computer, don't overlook the built-in Photo Gallery, which presents an attractive thumbnail view of your photos and simple editing tools for cropping, redeye removal, and lighting changes - it's adequate for many people and far easier to learn than Adobe Photoshop Elements.)

Actually, there is one interesting change in the programs - Adobe has given the programs a dark background, first introduced in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, its toolbox for professional photographers. Here's an idea of what Lightroom looks like. It's a simple change but hey, it makes photos pop out and look fabulous.

Labels: photos, software, video

posted by bruceb at 9/25/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

IT'S AN IPOD WORLD
Apple demonstrated again today that it can run circles around everyone else with its handheld devices. There will be lots of news coverage of the updates to the iPod line - here's one article, here's photos, and here's an exhaustive rundown of all the details.

The updated versions of the existing iPod line are significantly cheaper, include more storage space, and are thinner than the previous generation. The iPod Nano is reshaped to permit video playback. Album cover display is improved for music playback. There is no product on the market that was even remotely as appealing as the old iPods, and these improvements will make most other manufacturers close up and go home.

The new iPod Touch is a thinner version of the iPhone, without phone calls. It makes for a great demo - the touchscreen, scaling of web pages, rotation from portrait to landscape orientation, cover flow for albums, and other features are really extraordinary. It's hard to predict whether many people will use the built-in 802.11g wireless - wireless networks can be hard to come by when you're out and about carrying a handheld device, eh?

There's a dramatic price drop for the iPhone (and the lower capacity 4Gb iPhone is already off the market), at a time when the iPhone is apparently still selling well. Steve Jobs said Apple was still on track to sell 27 gazillion iPhones before the end of the world. Why the price cut?

And finally, the day before Apple's rapturous press event, Microsoft announced a price cut on its competing audio player, the Zune. No one came to the press conference. Microsoft press representatives could be seen off to the side, clutching each other and gently sobbing, before leaving to work on their resumes.

Sony announced yesterday that it is ready to challenge Apple with a new online video store. The Wall Street Journal reported that Sony's effort will offer something or other to the fourteen people that own a PlayStation 3, the PlayStation Portable and a Bravia high-definition television. That sounds promising! Maybe Sony can build on its track record and threaten iTunes!

Maybe not.

It's an iPod world. The volume of accessories designed for iPods is already breathtaking and growing exponentially. By this time you might expect someone to have new ideas for competing products that would chip away at Apple's domination of the market, but there's nothing, nothing at all.

Labels: Apple, audio, hardware, Microsoft, video

posted by bruceb at 9/06/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

MORE COPYRIGHT CRAZINESS
The world of copyright protection is a mess, and each day brings new craziness.

• A Federal District Court judge granted a ruling for summary judgment against a family that had run Kazaa on a computer with copyrighted material in a shared folder - with no evidence that anyone had ever downloaded those files. “It is no defense that a Kazaa user did not directly oversee the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material,” the judge wrote, citing a case concluding that “the mere presence of copyrighted works in a shared folder is enough to trigger liability.” Here's a news item with more details. This is truly breathtaking - a family is potentially going to have a huge judgment entered against them for things they might have done, without any proof that improper acts ever happened. (If you saw Steven Spielberg's movie Minority Report, you'll recognize the reference in the headline to the Department of Pre-Crime.)
• Another federal judge just issued a bizarre discovery order in a motion picture industry lawsuit against TorrentSpy, a Netherlands BitTorrent tracker. (Like all torrent trackers, TorrentSpy does not host any copyrighted material; it helps people search for torrents running on other computers.) TorrentSpy had not been logging any information about computers connecting to it, so recording industry attempts to obtain logs had been unsuccessful. TorrentSpy argued that any information about the IP address of a computer connecting thru the site was transient information in the server's RAM, not subject to a discovery request. The judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all information passing through the server RAM, on the basis that the storage of data in RAM — even if not permanently archived — makes it electronically stored information governed by federal discovery rules. Can you imagine the ramifications if that meant what it said? When you type a letter, change your mind and backspace, then type something different - those first keystrokes were in RAM for a moment and would have to be produced by that definition. That's absurd, of course - but so is this ruling. (TorrentSpy in the meantime turned off access to its site by US residents, so the order is moot for now.) Here's more information about the ruling.
• Russian web site allofmp3.com, which sold high-quality audio files for pennies, was finally forced to close a few months ago after years of heavy US pressure on Russian authorities, courtesy of the well-heeled lobbying arm of the recording and movie industries. Recently, though, a Russian court ruled that the site was not guilty of copyright violations under Russian law and the site will reportedly reappear soon.

The news media tends to report that the recording industry "wins" some of these cases, but that's not true in anything but a technical sense. The recording industry has not won anything but hollow victories for many years. It is despised by almost everyone, its music in increasingly ignored, and its business is caught in a spiraling decline that is entirely its own fault.

My favorite item doesn't involve copyrights but it does concern the difficulty of locking down information. The Australian government proudly unveiled its $84 million porn filter - software to be downloaded and installed by nervous parents. Oops! A 16-year-old defeated the filter in about thirty minutes. In a nice touch, the student was able to leave the icon by the clock as if the filter was still running. The embarrassed government added a second filter to its web site; it took the student almost forty minutes to bypass that one. Here's an article about that debacle.

Labels: audio, DRM, file_sharing, law, video

posted by bruceb at 8/29/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink