Multimedia, AV Archive

Sometimes, as you're walking through a crowded street, or as you brush by people, you catch a glimpse of the conversations they're having - a few words, a single sentence at most. Whenever this happens, I can't help but extrapolate the rest of the conversation, the subject, what the people in it are like. It seems like I'm not the only one, as two Dutch film makers have used the accidentally leaked search query records of 2006 as inspiration for a series of short films. Tantalising voyeurism.

With every major online digital music vendor slowly but surely abolishing digital rights management, you might wonder how much sense it makes to launch a music service that locks tracks to the devices they're downloaded to. Still, this is exactly what Microsoft has done with its recent launch of its UK Mobile Music store. To make matters worse, there's a whole boatload of other weird decisions regarding this new service that makes you wonder if Microsoft UK has been in contact with anyone outside of its own main office building for, say, the past 5 years.

Adobe recently released their 11th major version of Photoshop, along with the rest of the gang: Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Premiere, After Effects and more. Here's a peek at CS4's video-related tools, which are closer to the technologies I use for my Creative Commons videography work.

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.

Graphics and photography have been Apple's chasse gardee for years but for quite some time, MS Windows is on par with the Mac and the system of choice for photographers boils down to personal preferences more than anything else. But what about Linux? "My goal with this entry is to brush a big picture of where Linux stands as far as photography is concerned," Joel Cornuz explains, "What are the achievements, where improvements are needed and being worked on, and which pieces are still missing."

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.

For those who follow my latest activities since I scaled down my OSNews participation, they know that videography has been it. Recently I tried to get more serious about it and so last week I shot a music video clip for a local Bay Area indie band, the HIJK (song is available for free download on their site). Should not be a surprise either that two out of the three band members are actually software engineers, this is the Silicon Valley after all. The following is an account of how I did everything and I also give some pointers on how to help your own favorite local indie bands with some video promotion. I find it to be one of the many ways to stick it to the RIAA and their status quo in the market. Update: Added a small making-of video.

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.

Since there is absolutely nothing going on in the tech world today (really, we checked the internet), we figured some off-topic lightness might be a good idea for this Saturday night (it's night already in The Netherlands). The question we pose to you today has absolutely nothing to do with operating systems, computers, or technology: what albums are you most looking forward to in the coming one, two years? I blogged about my five most-awaited albums for 2008/2009, and this is my list (all albums are yet to be named): Fiona Apple's 4th album (I kind of really like Fiona Apple), the 7th studio album by The Cardigans, Garbage's successor to "Bleed Like Me", A Camp's coming second album, and Garbage front-woman Shirley Manson's first solo album. Post your favourites in the comments!

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 time may come where you will have to burn both a Blu-Ray disc for your family, and an HD-DVD disc for your boss who got hurried out and bought that HD-DVD player just so he can show off to all of you who waited for the format war outcome. Besides, while the HD format war is over, there are still over 1.3 million HD-DVD devices out there. I have modified some HD authoring methods found on the net in a way that 80% of the work to be done is the same for both formats, and with the rest 20% of the work only taking an additional 10 minutes for each format to be muxed and burned. Blu-Ray method is here, and the HD-DVD method is here (methods are identical up to step #7). Not only that, but you won't even need an HD burner, as these methods exercise plain DVD-R discs and they are using freeware tools.

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.

Thin TVs made with organic light-emitting diodes could become a big hit with consumers, but not any time soon, according to Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of the Panasonic AVC Networks company. "It will start to grow as a market in 2015," he said during an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place here this week. "You won't be able to beat the cost and price performance of LCD and plasma for a long time."

"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."