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January 16, 2008
HD-DVD is nearly dead and it's quite possible that BluRay may soon see the same fate. At MacWorld San Francisco 2008 Steve Jobs announced the all new Apple TV Take 2 which now allows usage of the device without a...
January 8, 2008
Panasonic once again claims the title for the largest plasma monitor in the world, sizing in at 150". This thing is HUGE in both size and resolution. Supporting up to 4k resolutions (that's film resolution) it looks stunning as long...
September 26, 2007
According to the Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal, Best Buy conducted a survey that found that 90 of Americans don't understand HDTVs. Electronics retailer, Richfield-based Best Buy said that it polled 1,012 consumers from Aug. 3 to Aug. 5,...
January 9, 2007
Samsung has a new plasma mount. Now we know that plasma mounts are not very exciting and how much innovation can you have in a plasma mount. Well this one is both motorized and remote controlled. There are a number...
Continue reading "CES - Samsung Plasma Mount" »
January 8, 2007
Wow, that's one big TV. How big of a family room do you need to put one of these in your home? Ben thinks the picture quality starts to degrade at this size, but, as you can see, he's...
January 2, 2007
It's New Years eve. My wife and I are snuggled up on the couch watching the ball drop. 10! 9! 8! 7! KABLAM!!! Our micro-projection HD set turns off with a loud popping noise. Immediately I fear the lamp has...
November 8, 2006
I was sitting at home a couple nights ago watching television with my new Series 3 HD TiVo recorder. Unfortunately the wife was watching Desperate Housewives live so there was no ability to fast forward through commercials. I was sitting next to her working on my MacBook, not really paying attention when all of a sudden the 5.1 surround kicked in.
May 3, 2006
We are trying to build the ultimate HDTV media center. Part of this process involves getting live HDTV content, meaning over-the-air, cable or satellite. About a week ago we got digital cable and tonight we just finished deploying DirectTV satellite. So how do they compare? One word: MAH!
May 2, 2006
The Macintosh rumor site MacOSRumors.com is reporting that the next version of Mac OS X will employ a BitTorrent driven iTunes. The story is probably buried under online advertising, so you’ll have to work to read it… You know, close the pop-up window, now close the hover window, and it’s next to the 10 Google ads. Hmmm, knowing them it’s probably under 3 more pop up advertisements.
This is just a rumor and Apple rumors are rarely correct, but this particular item is very interesting and near and dear to me. At Technology Evangelist we have dabbled in distributing high definition videos online via bit torrent and have even highlighted a key application called Democracy Player. Lets make the assumption that this rumor is true (just go with it for now) and that Apple will be releasing a torrent engine in the Mac OS X 10.5 version of iTunes. What does this mean and why?
April 23, 2006
The National Association of Broadcasters convention officially kicks off Monday and the press releases have already started flowing. For those not in the know, the big, big media guns are not shown at CES, nay, they are shown at NAB.
March 24, 2006
The latest HDTV podcast from the HT Guys (#76) mentions Technology Evangelist's syndicated HD videos content available through iTunes.
March 16, 2006
Yesterday I posted on Democracy player, and right now it's Technology Evangelist's preferred player for techies. As we stated, it's a wee bit buggy and not for everyone yet, so how can you watch our HDTV content if you're not an uber-geek?
March 15, 2006
I ran across an application recently that will change the world. I see massive media networks like NBC, CBC, BBC and others all stand by and watch as their business models are blown to bits. Everything we know about television, radio and media in general will be re-imagined. As Jeff Jarvis recently posted quoting Rupert Murdoch, "A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it." I'm throwing my hat in the ring and screaming to the world "it’s time, the revolution is here!" So what is this hot app? What will change the world?? What could make such a huge dent in the traditional media universe??? It’s simple -- Democracy.
March 14, 2006
Up until now most video on the Internet has been postage stamped sized. A small 320x240 or 240x180 window at 15 frames per second. We had to do this because we simply had no good CODEC to compress with and no good way to distribute larger files. With the advent of h.264 we’re able to distribute full 1080p HD resolutions online. The problem is that these files are HUGE! One 25 minute show can be around 2GB. If there were 10,000 downloads of that show, it would be 20,000GB of information transferred. That’s a lot of information for one server to deal with. By using BitTorrent we’re able to distribute that load among everyone interested in the video, reduce the strain on the server, drastically reduce costs, and improve the user experience. In my mind this will end up being the standard way of delivering HD content online.
March 11, 2006
For those of you who remember Charbax from our CES HD coverage, he's back! This time Charbax was able to make it to the CeBit 2006 and record come great segments in Divx HD. Go grab the Divx player and head on over to http://www.cebitvideo.com to see the latest from the CeBIT show in beautiful HD!
March 4, 2006
As I complete the editing of our next episode of "The Innovators" I thought it would be fun to mention some of the nifty little things that we do inside of each video as it's posted. Since the next video will have a lot of URLs in it, I think you'll find these tips handy. Please note that the following applies to our "Watch Now" clip only and not to the clips you would download via iTunes or any other RSS feed we may have.
Progressive Start
Our Watch Now clip is authored in such a way that it should start playing immediately if you have a 1Mbps or greater connection to our server. This means no buffering time, no waiting, nothing. If you only have a 56k connection or slower broadband connection to the net, that's OK, you'll just have to wait a bit longer. Unlike traditional streaming media, you'll still be able to watch in full quality no matter what your connection speed.
Chapter Marks
In the lower right hand corner of the player you'll see a nifty drop down with a title in it. This drop down lists the chapters that are available for playback. If you have not yet downloaded a chapter yet, it will not show up in this list, only items you're able to view will be in here. This is nice if you want to jump to a specific point in the video.
URL banners
You may have noticed that we place the URL of different web sites in the video feed. Not only are they handy to reference, but they are clickable too. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Apple decided to not change your cursor to a pointing hand when you're hovering over a link, so the only way to know that you can click on it is if I tell you. Well, any time you see a black bar with a URL in it, you can click on it (and sometimes you can click on the name banners too).
Full Screen
I'll be posting an experimental full-screen mode for users that don't have QuickTime Pro. Once again Apple baffles the mind and decided to not allow full-screen playback unless the viewer purchases QuickTime Pro, or if the author puts special tags in their media to force the player full screen. Needless to say, we'll have the special tags. I'll be doing this with the 480p content, so make sure your box is able to play 480p h.264 video, otherwise it may stutter a bit.
Syndication
You can view any of our HD feeds right inside of your favorite video syndication software, such as Apple iTunes. Simply browse for our feeds directly in iTunes, or subscribe to our feed manually from this page. We offer feeds in 480p, 720p, 1080p, Video iPod, Sony PSP, MP3 and AAC formats. We'll even be posting torrent feeds soon giving you access to the all new Democracy Player.
I'm about done editing our next episode, but as I have mentioned before it takes a very long time to compress the content. As soon as I have a majority of the video ready, I'll post her online to help curb your HD addiction. Hope everyone enjoys these nifty tips!
March 3, 2006
We have covered distributing HD on the Internet and some of the challenges there, now lets cover actually acquiring HD for online distribution. The following is a list of equipment I am proposing for purchase by Technology Evangelist. Nothing is set in stone, so we may go down a completely different path, but the list below seems pretty darn good if you're in the market to acquire content in HD.
March 2, 2006
I have had MANY comments asking why we chose QuickTime to distribute "The Innovators" when we could have used Flash, Windows Media, etc. I have also had a few questions on why we chose HDV to shoot in as opposed to DVCPRO HD and whatnot. Lets start first with the equipment.
March 1, 2006
Posting the first episode of The Innovators with Derek Franklin proved to be nothing short of a huge challenge... Let me start at the beginning and go from there
February 22, 2006
Being a
technoholic,
I had to have the Xbox 360 when it came out. After
weeks and weeks and weeks of hunting around trying to find an Xbox 360, I
finally found one. Hooray! I wanted an Xbox 360 Premium, but all I
could find was a core system. The big difference between the two is that
the premium includes a 20GB hard drive, a wireless controller, and the analog
component HD cables.
February 16, 2006
Microsoft?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Xbox 360 and Sony?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Playstation 3 are about more than just games. A lot more. I just recently got my Xbox 360 and have been playing around with some fun stuff involving media downloads. This whole experience makes me think about the future of television.
February 10, 2006
Time to evangelize a bit and correct some mistakes from the original Panasonic HVX200 review.
February 8, 2006
We at Technology Evangelist have been trying to decide on what HD camera to buy. Do we go with a pro grade format such as DVCPRO HD, HDCam or D5 HD (uh, probably not D5 HD), do we go with a consumer grade format such as HDV or one of those nifty cameras that records direct to MPEG 4 HD?
February 1, 2006
Rocketboom, the tremendously popular daily videoblog starring Amanda Congdon, has decided to accept advertising within their daily news stories. They report on a wide range of topics, from news to culture. They are conducting an Ebay auction for their first week's commercials -- bids have already exceeded $10,000 with more than seven days to go!
January 7, 2006
The show keeps getting better and better. This is the second day of the 2006 Consumer Electronics show, and with it our second video update is now available. We have interesting conversations with Sanyo on their 720p handheld cameracorder, talk...
January 6, 2006
It's the first day of CES and we have a roundup of three really cool technologies: Palm Treo 700, Wireless USB and Wireless XGA. There are thousands of products on the CES show floor, and we have many, many interviews...
Looking for an easy way to keep up track some of the coolest products on the show floor at CES this year? Subscribe for free to the Technology Evangelist HDTV feed through iTunes in a few easy steps.
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