Multimedia, AV Archive

Apple released the iSight, a $149 firewire camera, a few days ago. I've been using it the last few days with iChat AV (I was one of the lucky ones to receive an iSight for free at WWDC) and I must say that the quality is great, much better than my other $40 Creative WebCam Pro camera I have on my PC (using it with MSN & Y! on Windows and with GnomeMeeting under Linux). Just tonight though, I found a quite funny bug in it (in my opinion) and I thought I share this with you and hoping that engineers at Apple will read this (lacking a bugzilla at Apple's site).

At last year's meeting of Apple shareholders, Steve Jobs was asked about videoconferencing and what it meant to Apple. "Stay tuned," he said. Sources now say that Apple is on the verge of offering videoconferencing functionality to users with an upgrade to its iChat software. Sources confirmed to Think Secret that the next version of iChat, code-named "Viceroy," will feature videoconferencing built-in. Additionally, the new iChat will reportedly boast support for a number of other IM protocols. Our Take: I hope that Apple will also feature support for my Creative WebCam PRO, a $40 camera, which is an extremely popular buy (well supported on Linux as well) but has no drivers for OSX so far.

Apple is readying to launch an online service that will cut straight to the core of digital music distribution, winning the praise of some record executives who see it is as a weapon against online piracy. Apple's new service will feature songs from all five major record labels, link with its iTunes music software and allow for easy downloading to the iPod, Apples popular digital music player, people familiar with the matter said.

Jamie Zawinski wrote an editorial regarding the status of video playback under Linux (note: strong language is used). My take: The guy is my hero (he could use better language though). This is exactly the status of usability on Linux, and not just with video players...

You can download the recently released DirectX Media 6 SDK here (93 MB). The SDK can be installed on any recent version of Windows.

Recently I decided that it would be a good idea for me to convert several old home videos from VCR tape to a digital format. I knew enough about video capturing/editing to have a basic idea of the hardware requirements, but regarding software (editing/converting), I didn’t really know where to start. This article is for anyone who is interested in working with digital video, but isn’t sure how to get started.

Browsing Freshmeat tonight, the premier online Linux software repository, I came across to these two great (and brand new) applications, ReBorn and ReZound. Reborn, a Rebirth clone that will soon become open source according to the developer, provides a software emulation of three of Roland's most famous electronic musical instruments. It got me thinking as to how much more viable Linux is today as a professional (or semi-professional) audio platform than it used to be two years ago. Update: On a related multimedia notice, WinAMP 3.0 for Windows was released yesterday.

The technical effects studio has switched from using RISC-Unix workstations from SGI to using Intel-based Dell systems running Linux for the bulk of its animation and special effects work, said Cliff Plumer, ILM's chief technology officer. As part of the conversion, ILM recently deployed 600 Pentium 4 workstations. "The Intel workstations that were deployed were probably 20 percent of the price of SGI workstations we bought a few years ago," Plumer said. "Performance-wise, they are about three times as fast." Read the report at News.com.

Friends of Sci-fi and CGI should be pleased this month, first with the release of the (pretty good, I might add) Spider-Man movie, the Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions teaser last night and of course, today, the opening of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. Have fun everyone!

The surprising truth about Disney's 1982 computer-game sci-fi film, Tron, is that it's still visually impressive (though technologically quaint by later high-definition standards) and a lot of fun. Tron was the first movie to use CGI (computer generated graphics & special effects) incorporated into the normal film. To celebrate 20 years of the breakthrough in both Hollywood's and computer's standards, Disney has released the "Tron - 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition" DVD with 5 hours of extra material on the making of the classic movie.

From Tom's Hardware: "Creative Labs is bringing out a new range of sound cards based on a new DSP by E-Mu assisted by 24-bit converters. Linked with a new games library, the Advanced HD, the Audigy card is aimed at both game players and musicians who will benefit from the ASIO drivers. And as a bonus, Creative provides a FireWire port. Here is the low-down on a multimedia card that approaches professional standards. The article is great, and apart from the good price for the OEM basic model ($80 street price) it also comes with the notion to kill the ancient protocol of the Joystick port (the Joystick port on the Audigy only comes as an add-on card). Firstly because the USB Joysticks are the future, second because the actual joystick-port protocol is an extremely old, legacy problem and third because use of a joystick with most of the new PCI sound cards kill the overall OS latency. And this is exactly why the newer linux kernels do not turn on by default the joystick on the SBLive driver module and also why the BeOS (an extremely low latency/multimedia OS) never managed to properly support joysticks on the SBLive! driver.

Here`s an interview with one of the members of Maturefurk, the winners of the largest demo-party ever! A record breaking figure of 5,000 people attended this year`s Assembly party and they voted the Lapsuus demo (DivX video) for the Amiga as the best of all. This is quite remarkable since they only used a 50 mhz 68k Amiga with an AGA chipset (released in 1992) for this demo. It`s a great demonstration of the 3D capabilities which existed on Amigas since a decade ago. Read more for more information regarding the origin of the Demo Scene and other relating info written by Mike Bouma, a long standing Amiga user.