Multimedia, AV Archive

In true uber-hype fashion, the RED Company announced today a series of cameras and imaging sensors that will revolutionize the movie (and still image) industry. Some commenters online jokingly said that this is where all the Roswell UFO reverse-engineering went into. RED announced sensors ranging from 10.1x5.35mm (2/3") size all the way to 186x56mm, and resolutions from 3k/120fps to 28k/25fps (that's 261 megapixels). If you have trouble visualizing that size, here's an image that might help. To add to all this, the RED Epic now supports stereoscopic (3D) capturing.

Dirac is an advanced royalty-free video compression format designed for a wide range of uses, from delivering low-resolution web content to broadcasting HD and beyond, to near-lossless studio editing. The v1.0.0 version was released yesterday, and the new VLC version supports playback of .ts/.drc Dirac files.

Geeks.com sent us in a pretty cool computer gadget: a vintage-looking internet radio device, the iMedia100. I have a soft spot about classic-looking devices that have modern features, so this was an interesting experiment for me. Read on for more.

Many of us grew up with the idea of the component audio system. A receiver (or a separate preamplifier and amplifier), tuner (radio), record player, tape deck, and later on a CD player. If you were into more fancy stuff, you had a DAT or MiniDisc deck as well. While some of us cling on to this mindset like there's no tomorrow, the real world seems to favour a different method of consuming music. According to Erica Ogg (what's in a name), the component audio system is on its way out - thanks to the iPod and the commoditisation of music.

Just yesterday Mozilla Europe's Tristan Nitot predicted that Adobe might open source Flash one day if competition from Microsoft's Silverlight got too fierce. It seems as if he can look into the future, as today Adobe has announced the Open Screen Project. While not exactly an open source announcement, it does open the door a little bit more.

Lennart Poettering from Red Hat who develops and maintains PulseAudio has written a detailed explanation about the underlying technical improvements in the upcoming version of PulseAudio. "A while ago I started development of special branch of PulseAudio which is called glitch-free. In a few days I will merge it back to PulseAudio trunk, and eventually release it as 0.9.11. I think it's time to explain a little what all this 'glitch-freeness' is about, what made it so tricky to implement, and why this is totally awesome technology."

A few days ago the news that Pioneer, manufacturer of some of the best TV sets ever made, hit the net that they will cease manufacturing of their plasma panels. The reality is, amidst high prices and misguided customers who think that modern plasmas have limited lifetime, the LCD technology has won the market, even if inferior -- according to many expert A/V reviewers. Because of this, Pioneer will outsource their future plasma panels to Matsushita, who recently came up with a 30000:1 contrast ratio panels -- directly competing with Pioneer's thus far superiority. In a new interview with Gizmodo, Pioneer says that Kuro will continue to live, but LCD panels will also be sold by Pioneer, using Sharp's panels (Sharp LCD panels are known to have banding issues though, but there is not much they can do as Sharp almost owns Pioneer). What all this have to do with OSNews? The Kuro/Elite plasma Pioneer line runs on Linux. I bought for my household recently their 50" 5010FD model, which is indeed as good as reviews around the net and magazines say it is.

"The immense popularity of sites like YouTube has unexpectedly turned Flash Video into one of the de facto standards for Internet video. The proliferation of sites using FLV has been a boon for remix culture, as creators made their own versions of posted videos. And thus far there has been no widespread DRM standard for Flash or Flash Video formats; indeed, most sites that use these formats simply serve standalone, unencrypted files via ordinary web servers. Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software."

Toshiba said Tuesday it will no longer manufacture HD-DVDs, effectively ending the long-running battle with the rival Blu-ray for a dominant high-definition format. Toshiba said it made the decision to cease developing, manufacturing, and marketing HD-DVDs after 'recent major changes in the market'. It promised to continue offering support and service for all 1.3+ million Toshiba HD-DVDs sold so far.

Helios Labs was very kind in sending me their H2000 upscaling multi-function DVD player, which is region free. The device playbacks just about anything you can throw at it, and can upscale standard definition content to high definition - functionality you really want when you have a high-definition ready television.

"4Front Technologies is proud to announce the release of the source code to Open Sound System v4.0 under the BSD license for FreeBSD and other BSD compliant operating systems. OSS is a cross platform API that provides drivers for most consumer and professional audio devices for UNIX and POSIX based operating systems, including Linux. Owing to its open architecture, applications developed on one supporting operating system platform can be easily recompiled on any other platform. Open Sound System is also available for Linux under the GPLv2 license and OpenSolaris under the CDDL license. It is also available for commercial and proprietary operating systems under the 4Front commercial license."

While this might be a bold statement, all things point to this. Blu-Ray was already winning in market share slowly but surely, and today's Warner decision to go BD-only puts the final nails into this HD format war as Warner is the biggest movie distributor. The HD-DVD Group didn't seem to know about Warner's decision and they canceled their CES conference out of the blu tonight, amidst making vague references to possible legal action. My take: I wish Blu-Ray had a region-free policy like HD-DVD does. Living in USA today but one day moving to Europe, it will have an impact in my media library.

We don't publish lots of camera reviews at OSNews, but sometimes something refreshing and interesting comes out, and we feel the need to report on it. Geeks.com sent us for the purposes of this review the Kodak V1253, a 12 megapixel digicam with a 3.1" screen, that can also record 720p MPEG4-SP video at 30fps. At just $220, this must be one of the cheapest 720p solution in the market.

PureMobile sent us in a 16GB iPod Touch for the purposes of this article. This is one of the few times an - essentially - mp3 player comes with a powerful operating system (other examples include the Linux-based Archos and Sandisk offers). Read on for more.