Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Mpeg 2’

New Sony NXCAM is more camcorder than you ever need, but still you covet

Sony’s latest professional-grade camcorder probably meets your needs and then some by quite a stretch, recording AVCHD up to 24Mbps and SD quality in MPEG-2 / 9Mbps. We’re also looking at a 20x zoom lens, 3 x 1/3-inch Exmor CMOS sensor, and storage options including Memory Stick Pro Duo and an optional 128GB flash memory drive. Don’t lie, you want this beast, even if it clearly falls in the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” category. Look for more temptation sometime closer to its expected early 2010 launch.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

New Sony NXCAM is more camcorder than you ever need, but still you covet originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Sony, Akihabara News  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL boost video encoding app by 50 percent

It’ll take some time before we see the true impact of OpenCL and the newly-open-sourced Grand Central Dispatch on OS X, but we’re definitely intrigued by this early report from Christophe Ducommun, developer of MovieGate, who says that shifting his app to use the new tech has increased performance by around 50 percent on the same hardware. Testing on a 2007 2.66GHz quad-core Mac Pro with a GeForce 800GT, MovieGate MPEG-2 encode speeds went from 104fps under Leopard to 150fps under Snow Leopard, and decoding CPU usage dropped from 165 percent to 70 percent. Now, yes, that’s just one app, and most users don’t have four cores to play with, but it’s still an eye-opening result, and we’re definitely hoping it’s the start of a trend.

[Via MacRumors]

Filed under: Software

Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL boost video encoding app by 50 percent originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

VIA unveils its 1080p-playing SurfBoard NetNote, we’ll still call it a netbook

The world needs more tiny notebooks able to fling out high-definition video without flinching. However, the world doesn’t need more arbitrarily named categories of devices. So, it’s with mixed feelings that we bring news of the finalization of the SurfBoard platform from VIA, pledging to bring 1080p playback to the netbook category — or rather to the NetNote category, which is what VIA would like us to call it. We won’t, but we will be happy to see the VX855 media processor start showing up in little laptops soon, as its support for H.265, MPEG-2/4, VC-1, and WMV9 sounds quite a bit more inclusive than we’ve found NVIDIA’s ION to be. We’re not particularly fond of the burnt umber hue applied to the initial recipient above (we liked the looks of the clear prototype much better), but if it means watching high def content in coach class without breaking our backs, killing our batteries, or melting our CPUs, we’d rock it. It certainly would go with the fall fashions. Full press release is below.

Continue reading VIA unveils its 1080p-playing SurfBoard NetNote, we’ll still call it a netbook

Filed under: Laptops

VIA unveils its 1080p-playing SurfBoard NetNote, we’ll still call it a netbook originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Zune 4.0 software won’t play nice with HDTV Media Center recordings

With the launch of the Zune HD and the CEDIA show just around the corner, we’ve been hoping this could mean an all new integrated future for Windows Media Center and other Microsoft platforms — until now. As a few commenters pointed out yesterday, the corrected spec sheet received from Microsoft indicated HDTV and protected Windows Media Center DVR-MS (the files used by Vista Media center) recordings were not supported. We reached out for clarification and received the following:

“Zune HD, and the forthcoming Zune 4.0 PC software, will support and transcode Windows Media Center recorded TV file formats from Windows Vista or Windows 7 that contain MPEG-2 video, in either the DVR-MS or WTV formats. Support is limited to unencrypted SD and HD recordings. HD Files with AC3 audio are not supported by Zune.“

As you may or may not be aware, at least in the U.S. , and most other countries, any high definition broadcasts you snag from antenna, ClearQAM or otherwise use Dolby Digital AC-3 audio, meaning the Zune software won’t be able to convert them. Current workarounds for bringing Media Center recordings on the go should still be a go, but all we can see is the missed opportunity to tie the two platforms together with easy one click transcoding support. Hopefully Microsoft still has something up its sleeve to pull together Zune and Windows 7 Media Center, but portable DVR recordings ain’t it.

Filed under: Handhelds, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Portable Video

Zune 4.0 software won’t play nice with HDTV Media Center recordings originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…