Stan's List

This New York Times article realizes that present market has influenced sale of Blu-ray devices. Since the victory by Sony, their sales, which were expect to take off, have been rather poor. As to be expected by the victor. prices will remain above the seller /buyer midpoint. Discretionary spending has been trimmed back to cover more necessities Blu-ray is far from a necessity.

The number of players has stayed limited, with Panasonic, Sharp, Marantz, Sylvania and Philips the only ones to have a player available. Pioneer and Sony are still in development. The PC drive are now under $200, even those from Sony and Pioneer, even though I admit I initially look for those DVD brands who represented quality. The burners are still $500 and above.

The top of line video card has been a built-to-order option since the January availability of the newest Mac Pro. Those that chose to order it, would have been disappointed to learn there was no specific driver. At the very beginning nVidia promised a driver, but now it is April and no driver. MacRumors has the following quote reported from Steve Jobs:

nVidia didn’t come through, so we’re having to do it. Should be ready in about a month.

Lets hope the video card is still reasonably current when it becomes useful.

VideoLAN has this to say about the latest VLC release

We are pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.8.6f. This is a bugfix release. VLC media player 0.8.6e and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the Subtitle demuxer, Real RTSP demuxer, MP4 demuxer and Cinepak codec.
This release also includes improved video output on multi-screen setups running Mac OS X and compatibility with Windows 9x/ME has been restored. We strongly recommend all users to update to this new version.

Download

VLC media player is free and supports a large number of multimedia formats. Even with Quicktime Pro,with the MPEG-2 codec, can not play most avi files. As mentioned before, do not be dissuaded by the version number, this software has performed as a final release for a number of years.

VLC, the most renowned media player (yes more than QuickTime), supports a lengthening list of video formats. What I find interesting is the VLC has been a 1.0 or a 5.0 release for a long time. In the past I felt it necessary to convince you that VLC was not a beta program. The current version is for 10.3.9, 10.4 and 10.5

TIVO HD

The US is moving to HDTV, slower than I thought, yet with the continued drop in the price of the LCD HDTVs the conversion is picking up speed. Those that have HD quality TV probably wonder how they got along without it. Almost all channels have an HD version of that channel, including the PBS channels. PBS KQED, in the bay area, has at least 4 HD channels that I know of. It makes sense for TIVO to be HD capable. Being able to control when and what you watch began with the VHS recorder, but by all reports has been surpassed by technology. Actually, TIVO has been around quite a while, and digital has it all over tape. In this version TIVO does HD, but at a resolution limit of 1080i, and further does not work with Direct TV. Below I have referred you to an article about HDTV resolutions. Read more about TIVO, including the FAQ linked on their TIVO HD web page.

See this about.com article explaining the display differences between 1980i and 1080p. It all comes down to a matter of personal tastes.

Toast 8

While this version is not new (Macworld best of show 2007), Toast has had the ability to convert video files to a DVD, with a menus, since Toast 5, much like iDVD in iLife. If the TIVO is connected to your network, Toast 8 has the ability to import TIVO data and make a DVD.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats. For Mac OS X 10.4 and above.

What’s new in VLC media player - 0.8.6d:

* Mozilla plugin: supports a reasonable amount of MIME types on Windows
* Automatic recovery on unexpected stream discontinuity (clock gap) occurrences in input
* Use field order (top/bottom) for correct bob/linear deinterlacing
* Fix invalid free in bookmarks loading code
* FLAC Security Update (CVE-2007-4619) to prevent multiple integer overflows
* Security update (VideoLAN-SA-0703)
* Apple Remote support on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with enhanced functionality
* Improved Video Output compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
* Improved behavior of the Fullscreen Controller and mode changes between Fullscreen and Windowed Video Output
* Softened the white flash artifacts that may appear during the transition of two different movies
* Support for current Ogg file formats NOTE: This release requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. Mac OS X 10.3.9 is not supported anymore.
* Improved H.264 encoding speed on Mac OS X
* The automatic updating facility was removed
* You now need to append –m3u-extvlcopt to your command line to enable EXTVLCOPT options parsing in m3u playlists.

The new standard promises to deliver up to 4.8Gb/s, as Techworld reports. USB 3.0 would be ten times faster than 480Mb/ per second USB 2.0. That would make USB 3.0  on paper, considerably faster than FireWire 400 and 800. FireWire 1600 and 3200 standards, that have been in the works for some time, are stalled. Even though USB 3.0 is to have a speed advantage, the present and next generations of FireWire would still have an advantage of peer to peer networking, as well as its ability to communicate to digital video camera. USB 3.0 has no such abilities. More …

As USB 2.0 stated 480 Mb/s is considerably slower than FireWire 400, it would not be a surprise that FireWire 3200 (assuming 3.2 Gb/s) is equal to or faster than USB 3.0. Any possibility of testing this idea is much in doubt.

• Vastly improved playlist support
• Flash Screen Video support
• User definable Lua playlist scripts
• New video output filters

Additionally, VLC media player 0.8.6c supports the playback of the following video formats: MPEG-1/2, DIVX (1/2/3), MPEG-4, DivX 5, XviD, 3ivX D4, H.264, Sorenson 1/3 (Quicktime), DV, Cinepak, Theora (alpha 3), H.263 / H.263i, MJPEG (A/B), WMV 1/2, WMV 3 / WMV-9 / VC-1, Indeo Video v3 (IV32), Indeo Video 4/5 (IV41, IV51), Real Video Download

USA version is now available. It had previously been removed due to reports of instability.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

What’s new in this version:

Various bugfixes, notably:

* Out-of-bound read in demuxers
* Demuxers crashes (incl. CVE-2007-0256)
* Mac OS X Interface crashes
* VP31 decoding on Windows platforms
* Direct3D Video Output modifications for Vista compatibility
* Correct behaviour for feeding streams to Icecast or Shoutcast servers

Decoders:
* Enhanced Flash Video support incl. VP61 and VP60
* Teletext subtitles (telx) support

Webbrowser plugins:
* Rectified behaviour and improved usability

Mac OS X Interface & Port:
* Diverse usability improvements
* New wizard option to embed subtitles
* Screensaver/automatic sleep mode is enabled when a video is paused
* Improved Delete-Preferences-Script

Product Requirements:
* Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher

Digitimes reports that $499 and below will appear in the second half of the year. Already Toshiba is offering the second generation, but lower end HD-A2 at $399. Amazon.com has it listed for $348. Prices are coming down.

More …

The name brand higher end XA2 are still above $600, but internal drives are difficult to find. Most come as a player. Media is $20 for a single -R and $23 for RW.