Category: Tech

If Hillary Can Make A Comeback…

The big upset last week was Hillary getting whupped in Iowa by Barack. Well, New Hampshire has put Hillary back in the running!

Another big upset last week was Warner Bros. pictures abandoning Toshiba’s HD-DVD format in favor of Sony’s Blu-Ray. Yet last night, and again tonight, Toshiba advertised HD-DVD on The Colbert Report.

I don’t know if there’s any hope for my favored format (no, I don’t own an HD player), but at least there’s still some fight left in ’em at Toshiba! Or maybe they were just too depressed to remember to cancel this week’s ad campaign. 😉

[flv:/Video/2008/JAN/HDDVD.flv 400 300]

GOOD BAD AND LOUD

Dennis Rogers has pointed out that Rolling Stone magazine has an article called The Death of High Fidelity, about one of the negative effects that the influence of MP3 audio has had on the audio quality of recorded music. I featured something about this last summer at this link.

Not to get too nerdy-techie, but there are two forms of compression involved here. There’s the compression of the audio signal, that makes everything have the same loudness, and there’s the digital compression that is used by MP3 and other audio formats to reduce file size. They are two very different things.

Matt Mayfield, who I’m assuming is the guitarist in the recently-disbanded band Moses Mayfield, has a video that I’ve grabbed from YouTube, with an excellent explanation of what audio compression and loudness are all about.

[flv:/Video/2008/JAN/LoudnessWar.flv 400 300]

More Video Options

After mentioning the possibility of Netflix’s Watch Instantly service being available on Xbox Live, I got curious about watching it as it exists on Internet Explorer 7, but on the video projector. So I hooked up Carol’s laptop computer to the projector with a VGA cable, connected to Netflix over Wi-Fi, and started playing Manhattan Murder Mystery. It would be much more convenient if the service becomes available through the Xbox, but the laptop test worked. Are you tired yet of these photos of the projector screen?

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Xbox 360 Reality and Rumor

Eric and I have successfully struggled through setting up streaming media integration between the Xbox 360 and Windows Media Player 11. Very cool! With all of the various dedicated streaming media set top boxes out there, it’s nice to have it work out-of-the-(X)box at no additional cost. With this, I don’t need to bother with Verizon’s FiOS media manager.

Way back last February I featured Star Trek: New Voyages, a continuation of the original TV series, created by devoted fans. Here’s how a low-res copy of one of the shows looks, taken from my PC over the home network and scaled up to 720p by the Xbox.

Xbox Streaming Video

Fun! Now the question is, where is this technology going? Well, the exciting rumor is that the Watch Instantly service on Netflix will be available through the Xbox Live site. That would be great! Even better if the entire Netflix catalog were available, especially with HD offerings. Ideally, I would like to forget not only the red Netflix envelopes, but the format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD; which at the moment appears to be favoring Blu-Ray, because Warner Bros. is dropping HD-DVD.

Zooming In

Why have a 4:3 screen for a 16:9 front video projector? Because you can zoom in to make 4:3 material B-I-G, that’s why. Here are a couple of photos of the Panasonic PT-AX200U picture, zoomed in to fill the screen, taken from the couch. The image is about 75 inches diagonal. This Superman TV show is on DVD…

The Adventures of Superman

… and this spectacular image of Paulette Goddard’s breathtaking face is from a FiOS recording of “Modern Times.”

Paulette Goddard