Got refurb iPod nanos from Apple for the kids. $99. Tooble is a somewhat buggy but overal working application that will get youtube videos and put them into iTunes and therefor the nanos. Handbrake takes care of DVDs and works actually much better. Overall it is pretty impressive with how little effort, config and engineering I was able to give my kids all the music videos that I thought would be interesting. Quality is dismal, but I heard no complaints.
Probably the only music video that starts out in OS X 10.4 and ends in 10.5:
Or -to say it better- the only one where it’s that apparent.
We have indeed come a long since theCMX 600
It turns out that I was wrong then I thought I was wrong about the Next-Gen of movies on a disc: Blu-Ray sales declined. Bluray might become the first class of enteraintment: Coach has many more seats that 1st. Specially on inner american flights.
The part of the world that cares about Apple computers is holding it’s breath. Real Christmas will come around in a couple of hours. It is a big deal. I would carefully estimate that a hundred thousand people are pretty interesting in what will be revealed in the next hours.
It also is in Apples interest to provide people with the information directly the way they intended it. Having people transcribe it is what happens. But not necessarily what Apple would want.
Let’s make no mistake: the Keynote is as brilliant of a piece of Propaganda as it is possible for the audience of 2008. It is surprising that Apple does not broadcast it over the radio. I am serious. It can not cost that much to get this going. No need for quality. The geeks that care for this would run out and even buy a short wave resceiver just to listen to Steves voice live. All internet attempts to do live audio streaming seem not to work. They didn’t in the last years, since those 100,000 people would have to high bandwidth demands. Apple used to stream it, but stopped.
Kinda lame.
If there would be a god, then studio bosses would need to remove the packaging from all the DVDs that were pressed under their reign before they could go to hell.
post format war
It is hard to imagine that HD DVD would come back from the blow that Warners BluRay decision delivered. The internet was busy speculating about half a billion dollars in bribes that supposedly that came down rolling Barham Blvd. I think that the sales performance of DVD makes the Studios very nervous. All too quickly they got used to the huge volume of DVD revenue and a steady increase for that matter. The average american bought DVDs for $53, rented them for $25 in 2007. And he/she paid $32 at the Cinema Box office. For both HD formats combined a single dollar left peoples purses in the last year.
In total billions these numbers look like:
16 DVD sales
7.5 DVD rentals
0.3 nextgen DVD formats (both)
9.6 Box office
The troubling point for the studios seems to be that DVD sales are declining. Already in 2005 DVD set top box sales had gone done for the first time in history. Back then it probably was the fanfare about the ‘next thing’. People don’t like to buy yesterdays gadget. The studios felt they needed to get HD via DVD going. And Sony did the better show and number exercises.
Both formats encoding technology, bandwidth and other core parameters are pretty similar. As Mike Curis eludes to, the scripting technology in HD DVD seems to be more open, developer friendly and thefor hugely favorable over the bloated Java based BluRay implementation. But what’s to expect from Sony.
Flat panel displays sales have taken off, and about a year analog TV will be turned off. With the format war being over the Bluray sales should surge. And, I think, they will. Initially. Many bluray players will be PS3s. After correcting the outrageous price Sony’s next gen box had finally some sales worth mentioning. How many people bought the black box because they could not get the cute white one is a different story.
I wouldn’t be surprised if DVD+BluRay Sales volumes would come out flat in 2008 and from there on further decline. There are three reasons for this future disappointment:
* It’s the internet stupid.
Not only the net alone. Technology progresses everywhere. Hell, my toaster wants more attention than it’s great grandfather did 20 years ago. Media is omnipresent. VHS had to compete with, well, Books and TV. Maybe radio, cinema and newspapers. That’s about it. Bluray faces a vastly different world. None of the existing media emanations will just fade away. And new ones get created with an increasing pace. There is simply not enough time to watch all those movies.
* we don’t care since you don’t care
The Studios have failed to understand their own product. There is a history to this. And others failed similarly: The music industry would be in much better shape, would they have not confused the means of peddling circular things with the end of enabling people to enjoy music. Both HD formats allow for better visible quality compared to DVD. Better bandwidth and modern codecs could make for a great experience. Despite this potential most early Discs that were available have been widely criticized for their poor transfers. Some people felt that they would be better off with a decent upscale of a good quality DVD. People love movies. A considerable slice of the population, and almost certainly the majority of early (media) tech adopters care for a good experience. The Studios should have put the utmost emphasis on quality. And that starts with the film transfer. Even though the studios are not keen to involve creative people more than absolutely necessary, they should have gotten them on board for the launch of the new media. Imagine Steven Spielberg approving a 5 movie disk set claiming “this is how I want my movies to be seen”. People would spend allot of money for this. They would get players, lay cable. The whole thing. Maybe the studios should have gotten together with the ACE and directors guild to develop a approval system. Pay directors and DPs to sign off on a DVD transfer. I would pay happily knowing that the creative vision was intact. OK, in some cases I would simply paying for the drug habit of that one hit wonder boy. But I do that anyway, one way or another.
* it’s complicated
HDMI 1.3 is really exciting, since it not only features greater than bitdepths but also could carry the extended xvYCC color space. While being true, not many people know what this means. And neither should they. DVD succeeded because it was ‘as simple as CD’. No more rewind. That made Hollywood billions. Simple is key. The HD formats are not exactly known for simplicity. And the studios are not helping. Neither do the hardware makers. I find my way around these matters. But it’s my job to understand all this. And if it wouldn’t, then I would really watch another movie than to worry about downsampled movies that were escaping DRM through the analog otherwise. Having two formats was of course a big problem. But even with BluRay remaining it’s not as easy as it should be. Different disc sizes. Flat panel resolutions. Frame rates.
Image processing. And an interface written in Java simply scares me: There are just too many ways developers mess up. Hardware makers and studios alike fall in love with features that have nothing to do with their product. Multi Angle was one of these technical possibilities that DVD had. Studios were all excited about it. Since they didn’t understand what their product is: A movie is one view. One perspective. Everything else is a cute vaudeville attraction or plain and simple porn that desperately tries to stand out (no pun intended).
The Rolling Stone writes about audio technology and music and how things have changed in recent years.
Technology and Art influencing each other is a very interesting topic for me. This article touches on a couple of interesting points. Not more though. Without any respect for the matter it tries to discuss it merely assembles unrelated facts and sound bytes along one imaginary audio/digital axies. From production to consumption it bounces back and forth. Emitting half educated statements along the way.
A couple of articles, better researched would have been much better.
The bigger question is how I get my wife to approve the move of the Stereo from the attic into the living room.
750,000 HD DVD players and 2.7 million Bluray players have been sold in the last 18 months that the formats have been available. In those BluRay numbers are about 2 Million PS3 consoles included. 4 Million Bluray discs have been sold, 2.6 Million HD-DVD ones. Which comes down to 1.5 Bluray and 3.5 HD-DVDs per device.
The DVD of “Knocked up” alone sold more often than all HD-DVD and Bluray formats combined. I wonder how the marketing budgets would compare.
In 1998 9.8 Million DVD Discs had been sold. Almost ten discs for each player that was out there. People loved DVD. They still do. As for the two replacement formats they could care less it seems. And that’s only partly a problem of the rivaling formats. I think that DVD is good enough for people. Most simply have neither the hardware setup nor the desire to spend allot of money for the extra resolution that the new formats provide.
Here the DVD hardware sales:
315,136 1997 (April-December)
1,089,261 1998
4,019,389 1999
8,498,545 2000
12,706,584 2001
17,089,823 2002
21,994,389 2003
19,999,913 2004
16,147,823 2005
19,788,279 2006
10,252,893 2007 (January - July)
sources: current HD numbers past DVD device numbers, reversed via the linux ‘tac’ command. I had no idea it did exist. DVD disc numbers Warner DVD sales in 1998 DVD sales in 1998 and 1999
Almost a year ago 0.02% of all Americans bought a specific record. And it became the number #1 of the Album charts. One in 5,000!
fourty some years ago one in 200 US Americans went to buy a specific Beatles record the day it came out.
Even six years ago the Beatles convinced one in 600 people to buy a record in the week it became available.
what could go wrong if Siemens and the BBC team up? everything
I am sure there are lots of projects where people try really hard to push a rope. Instead of pulling on it. If the structures involved are big enough they will try. What a waste of everybodies time!
Annie Leonard talks about stuff Whoever she is.
I am with her. To a point. The breastmilk part is a bit much, and on technology she is just plain wrong. Which discredits the whole piece somewhat. And that is a real shame. Since the whole consumerism / consumption stuff weighted against diminishing returns in respect to happyness is a very important point. And there are others in this presentation that are pretty obvious and get equally ignored. Still worth the link, and maybe even worth watching.
Matt Cutts , the google quality czsar, explains why they reduced the importance of weblogs participating in pay per post programs. I feel the same way and block them since May in BlogsNow.
Interestingly, and extremely simplified, I admit, it seems to be the business model of Google to sell the truth. Which makes it valuable. They steer most of the internet traffic. But if they would fail, people would notice. As long as Yahoo and MSN still exist and could in theory kinda half ass a hypothetical un-ethical google if it came to it, it’s good busyness for for Google to stick to the truth.
Which is not what usually is going on:
A question asked, and no answer:
Same pattern here:
So, my simple reaction is, if people like politicians and Apple-PR are not answering questions, then I will not listen to what they are trying to say. Why should I?
17 years ago Germany got reunited. Yet, CNN did not get around to reflect this change on the maps they use for their weather. Actually, that map was acurate before 1990. What kind of computers that can deal with map images did people have back then? I would guess you would have actually real trouble to find a file from back then.
No wonder some people have strange ideas about Europe:
Sony supports Divx on their PS3
When DVD came out there was a format war as well. Between what we know as DVD and something also called Divx. Not related to the format that Sony now supports. Or maybe just related in that they represent the opposite corners of the media/business spectrum: The old Divx was a system that would only play discs after they had been enabled via the phone (it’s that old). You would buy cheaper movies (around 5-8 US) and could watch them for 48 hours after the purchase. After that you would need to pay if you like to watch them again. Studois like Dreamworks held out of for years betting on this format. It folded. But it was a reality. Hard to believe these days.
According to Sony’s CEO the format war between HD-DVD and Bluray got into a stalemate. Great thing for a format to go with this concept into the shopping season. Some big shopping mall sold HD-DVD players for 100 US$. If there would be HD-DVD and Bluray players for a 100$ each then the format war would be over. Peaceful coexistense. Not the margins that the hardware vendors had hoped for. But the luckier ones of them, if not most, make flat screen panels anyway. Those run well above one thousand dollars. And each HD-DVD and bluray playe would be an argument for a 1920×1080 panel. If those companies would be able to explain this to their clients.
Having two players may sound annoying, but most people have heaps of devices around their TVs anyway: Game consoles, Set Top Boxes, Tivo & Co, DVD players, VHS deck, another two devices might not matter. Of course all this crap looks pretty hideous once piled up. And then there is the remote control debacle. And connecting the stuff is an interesting challenge.
Americans spend more than a billion hours a day in front of their entertainment centers. And -boy- do they spend money on hard- and software. Yet, the average ‘media temple’ they pay service to each day is not much more than pile of crap.
So what about PS3 and the new-Divx? Hm. I have no idea. All I know is that the PS2 will outsell the PS3 this Christmas again, and I doubt that will change next year.
Since a while I am using Callwave. And I must say that I am very very happy with it. It’s really great to get your voicemails transcribed as an email. I am amazed how far voice to text technology has gotten so far. It’s sometimes humorous. But more importantly, it’s usually possible to ‘get’ the general direction of the voice mail. I know who called, what it was about, and the phone numbers people leave have been without any errors so far. Which is really really helpful.
I also like to have one list of incoming messages. It makes staying on top of things much easier and less stressful. Which is allowing me to spend time with actually doing things instead of reacting to it and managing my message stack and todo lists.
Somebody should sponsor 1 z-year. It’s probably less than car makers spend on crafts services of their commercial shoots in any given week.
No joke.
Suddenly the NYTimes regained her relevance again. They could have done it all the, and become really great, but the very same corpo-idiots that tried to charge for the normal page think that there is subscription revenue in the years 1922-1986. Idiots. Idiots at the NYTimes. What a funny thought.
All good ideas are simple. Like this one. You create a page or a site. Right there. Just write some text, maybe or maybe not add formating. And that’s that. Very nicely done. Now go and play with Jottit.
I have no idea how I came about to find this site devoted to the Scanimate System. I did order both DVDs and am very happy to have done so: They give a very interesting peek into the technology, art etc of those times. Who knew that I would find out eventually how all those apparently not hand drawn animations I saw on Sesame Street were done.
This ‘news’ about generating energy from burning saltwater is ridicolous bullshit.
Here we are, using those internets, which are run on computers (just ask Homer) and other products of science to mock it’s very contents and basic laws.
Of course it is an extreme example. But the same principle seem to apply frequently: Those creationists should be consequent and stop using the products and merits of science. All of them. If they don’t like what science has discovered.
Two hundred years ago when people even in the more developed countries were dying left right and center on odd diseases and epidemics there simply was no question: Science was good. Now, that we are reaping all those benefits and so many of us have these careless existences some people think, that the current state of society and wellfare would just be ‘normal’, or god given.Well, it is not. The default is much much more grim. Over the last four hundred years people worked really really hard to make all this possible. It was not easy to harvest all this knowledge our econimies and factories run on. All these efforts were based on the absence of stupity. Now it seems as if some people start to take stupid stuff serious. Since it seems that they can afford to. People living in Rome two thousand years ago were in a similar position. Why would they care? Of all Shakespear plays I liked Coriolanus the least. Now that’s starting to change. Somehow I think that it’s message is not that off after all.
Over here everything is high tech. Pointless or not. Of course there are ads on the paper towels. Not real time printed blog content (yet). Missing urinal feature: real time analysis of blood alcohol. Bonus for womens restrooms: instant pregnancy test. Imagine the possibilities: Google could place ads for abortion options and/or pregnancy products on the paper towels. Right now health insurance companies could track your lifestyle a little bit via your credit card trace. Technically they could. Not sure if that is legal, and if they are smart enough to do so. But with personalised mini lab in every toilet you would get an interesting trace of activities. Of course lab technology does not follow the trend of hard drives of other micro electronics and computer related stuff. So this brave new world option will remain scifi for quiet some time. Possibly forever, since we just might run out of cheap energy -that is the basis for all of your lifestyle after all- before high tech might become that sophisticated.
Update:
Like with any sci-fi story there is a google angle popping up minutes after I ramble about it. Coincidency? Of course. Almost everything is. Actually. Get used to it.
A nice list of visualsation approaches. Starts boring with known contenders but then had some nice and interesting and new to me links.
Naomi Wolf writes about Porn and the influence it has on people’s view of sexuality. While I think that some of her conclusions are a bit simplifying her essays is truly an exception. Compared to the booming multi billion dollar porn industry there is virtually no public discurse about the matter. Many views and discussions get stuck and some moral questions that originate in a world that seized to exist a very long time ago. Arguments that first were heard in the 70s, and that made sense then, can still be heard when the matter gets attention. Which is similar misplaced as if Pfizer would try to use 500 year old alchemists notes to create medication. The world, specificially the world of media consumption, and precisly the ubiquitousness of porn have changed. Changed in matters that are breath taking. Much of the problems in the middle east for instance originate from the clash of the availability of the entire internet with the moral framework from a couple of hundred years ago. Porn, like it or not, is a reality of the media landscape. It grew radically while nobody was looking. It’s high time that we pay attention and figure out how society can exist with it.
The nice people at Brand New School released their New Balance spot “Zip” online. They are a great company to work with. Very creative and still hands down and respectful to the matter. It was a pleasure to work on this job. A truly amazing team! Not sure why they wrote something about me in their copy for the spot: Everybody else deserves the praise that I got there.
youTube player on iPhone
This was the 12th icon, missing so far.
While on wifi through connect via local internet connection the iPhone might be a cute little viewer. Much like the Sony PSP was back in the day: 480 x 272 is the resolution on Sony’s device, while it is 480 x 320 on the iPhone. Somewhat tragic, that the actual hardware path (internet->wifi->device) was already available on the PSP. Two year head start. Wasted. Well, they sold 10 million PSPs in the US.
The real innovation would have been GPS. I think that devices should be fucking aware where they are. I would like the next MacBook Pro have EVDO
built in. Including GPS support. I am sure there are ample applications one could think of, once devices are location aware. It takes only 2 floats to store this precisly. Without any compression applied it would take a mere 10GB to store my location since I was born. One record for each second that I was alive.
From what I read (cursory) the tchech artist Roman Tyc replaced the usual live landscape images to been at this time of day with this recording. This seems to be a rare case that the local german paper reported such mixed / pseudo news before BlogsNow. Usually it’s the other round.
Roman Tyc did replace some traffic signs in April in Praque
I don’t agee with all its points. But it has been a while since there was a ‘Barry says’ like piece.
via strangemaps via BlogsNow (of course)
Some days I like the internet. Does it not only have sites for strange maps but also for the history of the button
and -I am sure- all sorts of other ones.
It’s been 50 years since Mao said “Let 100 flowers blossom”.
Of course there are all sorts of flowers.
Somehow there is this long history of really small screens. And most of them were failures. OK, Sony became known by shipping a load of portable TVs via one of the first 747s to NYC. But apart from that, the watchman wasn’t really that sucessful. Neither was the iPod with video capabilities. There are actually much better devices in terms of screen size or price. But none of them really caught on. I think the problem is, that there is no real content and need for such a device. It’s technical feasibility seems to lure people into thinking otherwise. But how often do you find yourself wishing to watch a couple of quare inch screen? When? As much as the original walkman concept of having a mobile music source with headphones was a hit the mobile visual pendant is a miss. It’s not flying. And I honestly doubt that the iPhone will change that. Nothing will. How many of your chat sessions are video chats? Exactly. Yet, the picture-phone had the same feasibility driven shadow life for a while. Lateral progress I would call these things: Something is a hit. And then people just extend the concept to the side. Cinemas add first sound and then color. Both times it’s been well perceived. Smelling is another sense! Just that it did not work. Walkman -> Watchman. Same deal. Ears are happy with a walkman on, let’s feed the eyes now. It’s probably easy to pitch. Stupid board member can ’see’ this simple lateral extensions. As Homer Simpson said “They have the internet on computers now”
morphing had been around for a while.
All of these images as well. Still needed youTube to get this out:
I am not a fan of this implementation. The idea itself is great. A bit more understand of art history would have been helpful. The track I can mute, the jumps in time and obvious omissions are harder to fade out. Maybe this time the rip-off in a commercial (bank, insurance, dove soap?) will be better than the you-tube-inspiration?