LATEST ADDITIONS

Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 29, 2006  |  0 comments

Panasonic has announced that starting July 1st, it will begin providing authoring services for studios producing Blu-ray titles (BD-ROM) at the Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory (PHL) in Universal City, California. Panasonic began authoring DVD titles for various studios in the U.S. in 1996, and has now installed state-of-the-art equipment to perform similar services for the Blu-ray platform.

Geoffrey Morrison  |  Jun 29, 2006  |  7 comments
There is a lot of misinformation, lies, and myths out there regarding the new HD on a disc formats. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray have their strengths and weaknesses. I’m getting enough emails on the topic that I figured I’d do a post full of truthiness about these new formats.
Mark Fleischmann  |  Jun 29, 2006  |  3 comments
"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," said Kurt Gerecke, a storage expert at IBM's German outpost, in an interview with Computerworld. Closer to two for off-brand cheapies, he added. Other estimates vary. I regularly use a CD-R of test tracks burned in 1999. Whatever their validity may be, these warnings apply only to dye-based recordable CDs. Prerecorded CDs are more durable (if they weren't there'd be riots) though no one really knows how long they will last. More bad news: Hard drives are also vulnerable. Their Achilles heel is the disc bearing, a mechanical part that wears out over time. Magnetic tape can last 30 to 100 years, according to Gerecke, though I recall some audiocassettes that didn't last a decade. Fortunately there's a hot new medium that freezes music forever in unchanging grooves of black plastic. The disc is read with a diamond stylus suspended in a web of magnets and can last a lifetime (or more) if treated carefully. It plays on all devices in the format, completely free of DRM. This format of the future is called VINYL. See tomorrow's blog for more details!
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jun 28, 2006  |  0 comments
Reuters reports that Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida provided this bit of corporate wisdom at an annual shareholders' meeting: "We have not given up on a unified format. We would like to seek ways for unifying the standards if opportunities arise." Mr. Nishida may have brought up (again) the idea of a single, unified format due to the fact that initial consumer response to HD DVD has not been overwhelming. Perhaps he was engaged in a bit of wishful thinking after it became clear that Sony will delay the introduction of its BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player until sometime in late October. Maybe he was acknowledging the fact that most consumers couldn't care less which format becomes a de facto standard as long as there's only one format.
Mark Fleischmann  |  Jun 28, 2006  |  0 comments
As a longtime gizmo critic, I was fascinated by a scathing commentary on my tribe by Mr. Media Coverage (I'm not sure who that is) of GameDaily.com. Working for advertiser-supported specialty media has its limitations. And while many of us do a great job within those limitations, others may recognize themselves in Mr. MC's "7 Reasons Why Questionable Facts Go Unchallenged." The two that caught my fancy are: "We sometimes want to believe the questionable facts." Just like little kids. Still worse: "The lies make better stories." OK, I'll cop to it. At least where this blog is concerned, I'll fix on any idea that makes a pretty paragraph. But I'll have to watch my step!
Steven Stone  |  Jun 27, 2006  |  First Published: Jun 28, 2006  |  0 comments

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Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jun 27, 2006  |  0 comments
Good things come to those who wait, but great video sometimes takes longer to arrive than great audio thanks to the extensive image processing that is typical with high-definition video. The result is a kind of psychic audio ability wherein the viewer is able to hear things before he actually sees them. Although it has nothing to do with Millie Vanillie or Ashlee Simpson, the phenomenon is technically known as "lip-sync error".
Mark Fleischmann  |  Jun 27, 2006  |  2 comments
Do these Sharp MP3/WMA/FM players look ugly to you? That's what the good folks at Engadget said when they picked up this new product announcement from Akihabara News. For my own part, I think the Sharps look pretty spiffy. And where can you find an iPod all in shiny red, huh, huh, huh? Well, all right then. It's clear the Sharp folks were determined to avoid looking like another iPod-wannabe and I'd say they succeeded handsomely. The player is available in three colors and two capacities (512 for the MP-B200 and 1GB for the MP-B300) but only in Japan. Come on, Sharp, let us have 'em.
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jun 26, 2006  |  0 comments
New home buyers with $20,000 to $40,000 to spare for home entertainment can turn to Sony's expandable, installation-ready NHS-3020 system. Sony says the system provides discrete control and support of audio and video content for a 7.1-channel home theater, with the resources to control up to 12 additional rooms of audio and video.
Mark Fleischmann  |  Jun 26, 2006  |  0 comments
Radio pioneer Reginald Aubrey Fessenden should be more widely celebrated for his place in media history, argue the folks at Tivoli Audio in their "100 Years of Broadcast" campaign (complete with free shirt and emblazoned SongBook radio for freeloading members of the press like myself). On Christmas Eve 1906, nearly a century ago, the Canadian became first person to broadcast music and speech over the airwaves. Marconi is often celebrated as the father of radio but telegraphy was his actual innovation. He was not the first to transmit music or even speech—he transmitted the letter S in Morse code. Fessenden's idea was to transmit music and speech as continuous waves. Edison listened to the idea and laughed it off so Fessenden pursued it alone. Since there were no radio receivers then except for ships at sea, the first-ever music broadcast went out from the coast of Massachusetts to ships in the Atlantic, as Fessenden played a Haydn recording and his own violin. Tivoli and a handful of tech historians assert that this broadcast became the basis for radio, television soundtracks and (if one overlooks the later leap from analog to digital) even music downloading. After all, Fessenden was the first guy to move music and speech from point A to point B without using a disc, a cable, or some other physical object. Tivoli's latest new product is the iYiYi, another iPod-docking compact system, and I hope to get one in for review when it becomes available in the fall for $299.

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