Multimedia, AV Archive

Hollywood (and RIAA) seem to be behind the times when it comes to technology and potential new business opportunities. For years now PocketPCs are able to decode mpeg, divx and wmv videos full speed and yet we can't buy movies in SD/CF format to watch while we waiting on that bus stop.

The X-Fi is poised to bring huge tracts of audio processing horsepower to the PC, delivering new levels of audio effects in games, and enabling very versatile digital audio workstations.

Chesky records, a small record label, produces what is called audiophile friendly music. To learn how to create music with this high detail and how to play it right, just read some of their articles. There is a lot of talk there on tube amps and stereo mics and horn speakers etc. Forget the high-end gear, there is one complete article on how to set up your power supply for best audio experience. But mere mortals like us listen to the music on our PCs. Though it does not even begin to compare with all that exotic gear out there, it can be set up to deliver a surprisinlgy good quality sound.

While DVD technology was initially much-needed and impressive, it quickly showed its limitations, as demand for higher-resolution movies and more bonus features (and, of course, the use of DVD for data storage) quickly outstripped DVD's data capacity. Some new technologies are on the horizon, and in true tech industry fashion, there is more than one incompatible contender for the spot.

You know how it is in the Windows platform: the majority of its popular media players use confusing custom UIs & widgets and so they feel heavy. Enter MusikCube: a no-nonsense clean interface app that simply delivers the music without the extra cruft. The application supports CD ripping & tag editing but it could do with some clean up on its song contextual menu. It is released under the BSD license.

OSS 3.99.2a has been announced - it's shipping a new ALSA compatibility library that allows you to run most popular ALSA apps (most apps have OSS API support as well). OSS is now free for home/personal use - you just need to reinstall the new software every 4 months but all features and drivers like Virtual Mixer PRO and IMUX and PRO audio devices are available for free. Announcements regarding the company's latest OSS/3D for iTunes are imminent too.

Wired aims to be a professional music production and composition software running on Linux.

Behind the scenes, painstaking effort and computing power has gone into cleaning up George Lucas's original Star Wars trilogy for its recent DVD release. 600 Mac G5s. And btw, the Star Wars III teaser will be released in less than 15 days.

After years as the unrivaled king of the digital-media world, the venerable MP3 music format is losing ground to rival technologies from Microsoft and Apple Computer.

Among the many wonders of director Kerry Conran’s debut feature movie, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” none is more remarkable than how he tried to make it — on a single desktop computer, in 1994, before desktop computers were ready to fully cooperate. Conran used a Mac IIsi and later a Mac Quadra 840AV which was point he realized that he needed hardware and special software to help him realize the dream, as the available resources back then were less than satisfiable.

Every operating system has different sound systems and APIs to access the sound card, so that no low-level coding is required to use the sound device. Programmers have many different choices concerning which system to use, especially under Linux -- and maybe that's the problem. This article illustrates free sound architectures on Linux, as well as the different interfaces a programmer can use.

In my first article I tried out various audio/video apps to see what Linux had to offer for video production. For the most part I was pretty disappointed with the whole experiment. Several months have passed so I decided to take another look to what has progressed since then. There were two programs that I left out because they were either not realized or it was to soon to try it out.

Here is a nice utility helping you catalog your VHS or DVD video disks, DVDpedia. The application is written for Mac OS X and it sports a metal interface. Let's dive in for some more info on it.

Real will be distributing its RealPlayer 10 for Linux with both Red Hat and Novell/SuSE desktop Linux distributions. In other news, RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X will be out this week.