Multimedia, AV Archive

Ex-Amiga hacker and ex-BeOS engineer Tinic Uro, now at Macromedia, blogged about the next version of Flash Player for Linux. Apparently version 8 will be skipped and the Linux version will see some extra love on upcoming version 8.5.

The Fluendo people have fully licensed the mp3 audio codec with redistribution rights in place, meaning that future versions of Fedora or Ubuntu will be able to support mp3 out of the box. "In order to improve the GNU/Linux and Unix multimedia experience Fluendo announced today the immediate availability of their MP3 plug-in for the GStreamer multimedia framework. The MP3 decoder is available free of charge both for individual end users and GNU/Linux and Unix distribution makers. In addition to making their licensed binary plug-in available to the public Fluendo also released the source code to this MP3 plug-in under the very permissive MIT license allowing all kind of developers and companies access to it."

The Sony PSP is a very popular gadget this year. Coupling not only 3D gaming but also web, podcast support, mp3, photo and video viewer makes it not only a formidable multimedia device but also a great Christmas present. Geeks.com sent us in a PSP for multimedia testing and we also got the newly-released Neuros Recorder II to test the full capabilities of the device as a multimedia one.

This PDF compares the quality of various audio compression codecs run with various parameters. Overall, of all the audio encodings attempted which produced output at the same sample rate as the input, constant bitrate MP3's produced the highest quality files, exceeded only by variable bitrate MP3's at bitrates above 224kbps. In all cases AAC produced inferior quality results.

When Lerone Wilson saw the ad for a director interested in doing a film on software development, he was skeptical, to say the least. Wilson's resulting "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks," the story of intern programmers at New York-based Fog Creek Software creating a product from scratch to shipping, is now finished, one of the first films to delve wholly into the life and culture of coding.

Geeks.com sent us for a review an external hard drive enclosure case, the "TVisto Series 3.5" Multimedia HDD Enclosure" (2.5" series also available). But this is not just another hard drive enclosure, but also a multimedia jukebox. And it's running uCLinux, an embedded version of Linux.

We were pleasantly surprised when we discovered (by snooping on its firmware files) that the Pontis MX2020 multimedia device that Geeks.com sent us for a review actually uses Linux (embedded distribution uCLinux, kernel 2.4.19). If it's video, audio, pictures, recording or even basic PDA functionality via its touch screen, the Pontis MX2020 can do it all. And for very cheap too.

This is part two of a head-to-head comparison of the Sony PSP and the iPod with video. The first installment was a hands-on comparison of the technical specifications.

Microsoft and Intel last week tried to swing the computing, consumer electronics and entertainment industry toward HD DVD in a format war to establish a higher-capacity successor to today's DVD. It didn't work.

There have been many rumors lately about a potential video iPod that's around the corner... However, what about the existing mobile A/V solutions? We took the RCA Lyra RD2780 for a spin, the audio/video recorder/playback jukebox that's currently selling for only $219 at Geeks.com.

The iPod, more than any other single product from Apple, has changed the company and the world. Before its introduction MP3 players were the realm of small companies with limited budgets and no content. After the iPod the entire industry has evolved and grown to the point where the largest computer companies in the world have major interests in the digital music industry. Read the history of the iPod at Braeburn.

The guide to podcasting for Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X users describes what podcasting is, what a podcasting client does, lists some available clients, and provides information on how to create a podcast under Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X. The guide also discusses what content is available as podcasts and gives some suggestions on finding feeds.

Are you looking at buying a truly affordable & expandable mp3 player with an LCD screen & FM radio that just works? SanDisk's newest mp3 player Sansa might just be what you were looking for!

You know what's really laughable? When you visit launch.yahoo.com with Firefox and tells you that you need Netscape 4.7 to view its music videos, even if Firefox is perfectly capable of doing so! And when you open a bug report ticket with them, you get canned messages how to make your IE work with their service! It stinks! Therefore, here is a quick how-to on how to rip down their music wmv/asf videos and save them on your hard disk to view with the player of your choice. In fact, their videos are streamed in QVGA, making them an excellent choice for Pocket PCs that are used as multimedia devices too.