Michael Graves

This author has written 1380 articles

Amazon Unboxed Goes HD: Eventually

Just poking around this afternoon I found this which says that Amazon is definitely working on an HD version of their Unbox movie download service. This service is operated in partnership with Tivo. The user interface is very nicely integrated into the Tivo menus. My wife likes it a lot.

They suspect that the new service will be based upon H.264 compression. That’s about the only real option around.

Neither the company nor its customers will have unlimited bandwidth so older compression schemes would be impractical. Newer compression schemes would require that Amazon encode the content themselves. Better that they settle on H.264 which is what Apple’s iTunes uses amongst others.

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ISDN = Integrated Services Digital Notworking? (in the US)

Remember ISDN? It was the 1980s digital connect methodology that was going to bring us everything digitally. In truth, ISDN (a.k.a. BRI) is the “little brother” of T-1 (a.k.a. PRI). PRI is actually the signaling scheme, but the relationship is accurate. Whereas a T-1 is 24 x 64kbps voice channels and signaling an ISDN circuit can be 2 x 64 kbps channels (Bearer or B channels) and signalling (a D channel).

In Europe ISDN is quite common, having been a valid alternative to analog POTS lines for many years. In the US it never caught on the same way. It’s common in certain vertical market niches. For example, just about every significant recording studio used ISDN as a means of transferring audio across country in real-time. It’s a channel with assured bandwidth. The two B channels could be bonded yielding a solid 128 kpbs. Throughout the 1990s voice-over talent working from home studios (Hi Alison!) almost always used this sort of a setup.

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The GSM Gateway: Part 1 Online Soon

The first part of the article about GSM the gateway is off to the publisher at www.smallnetbuilder.com. The first part covers my motivation for adding a cellular trunk. It also describes the differences between ITSPs addressing the broad residential voice-over-broadband…

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