Category: Tech

This announcement from Adobe about Flash has implications for this blog. Very good ones! Video quality will go way up, and I should be able to save videos directly to a Flash-ready format, instead of having to go through a two-step process of saving as an AVI and converting to FLV. You can count on me jumping on this right away!

NPR has a short feature (a featurette?) on the 25th anniversary of the completion of the development of Compact Disc. The CD format was introduced in America in 1983. Here is a brief audio snippet from the NPR featurette.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/AUG07/LDCD.mp3]

They characterize LaserDisc as having been a flop, and they call it a digital video disc. The first point is debatable and the second is simply incorrect.

LD was never a big success, but after the LaserDisc format was bought from Philips by Pioneer it found its place as a high-end niche product, and it remained in production until after DVD got going in 1998. So LD lasted for roughly 20 years, and its supplementary material, alternate audio tracks and chapter stops were a model for the DVD format.

Digital sound was added to LD around 1985, but at no time did it have digital video. It was FM analog, just like VHS, but with much higher quality. The video in yesterday’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers post was taken from a 20-year-old LaserDisc.

I’m in Remote Desktop, accessing a Windows 2003 server at work, using the “shadow 0” command to run as the console (having made the necessary gpedit.msc edit), and all of a sudden — BOOM! Session gone. Connection lost. So I jump on the digital KVM and start a session there to check the console, and whaddaya think I see? I see this!

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a parity error on a machine with ECC memory. I’d just finished installing Windows Server 2003 and all of the updates, and was preparing to set up Clustering, with the quorum resource on the SAN, when the error hit. Annoying. The machine is running again, but for how long… ?

Now aren’t you glad I rarely mention work stuff?

FiOS TV 2.0 has added the ability to DVR the Music Choice channels like any other station. Yay! As I said yesterday, the functional enhancements are nice. Two more I would like to see are enabling the A/V inputs — I want to route my LD player through the DVR — and turning on the USB ports so users can add storage.

I continue to be down on the new user interface. I much prefer the old one. Especially annoying is the Favorites function. It always starts at the same spot in the channel list, instead of the station you’re on, and it no longer wraps around from the end to the beginning. Extremely annoying!

I am using a new method to create FLV video for embedding. Side-by-side comparisons show that the results are better than the method I was using, but I honestly don’t think you’ll see the difference.

A couple of weeks ago Verizon sent a flyer promoting the long-anticipated update to the FiOS TV 2.0 Interactive Media Guide. Sometime between last night and this evening the update was installed on my DVR.

I like having the ability to program the duration of the skip-ahead button on the DVR, and having a 60 minute playback buffer, but I prefer the old user interface. It was clear and bright with easy to read lettering. The characters are too small on the new display, with a color scheme that’s too gray, and a few layers deep into the menus the screen looks rather cluttered. Here’s a video sample of what it looks like.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/NewFiOSGUI.flv 400 300]

(Note to my friend Sam: Watch this and you will see a bit of your crazy cousin making a guest appearance.)