Polycom White Paper On Wideband Voice Codecs
As I prepared for my travels this week I stuffed a bunch of papers into my bag not really noticing what was in the stack. As I am presently on an airplane en route from San Francisco to Seattle I…
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.
HD-DVD: Life After Death
OK, so Toshiba officially put HD-DVD to sleep a couple of months back. It's a pity but it's a fact. Yet today The Register has a piece on how HD-DVD disk sales remain solid since that time. It's also a…
Turning The Collapse Of HD-DVD Into An Opportunity
I spent much of this past week in Austin, TX. One evening while on the way back to my hotel I happened past a Circuit City store, so I decided to have a look around. I found something that surprised…
Did Toshiba Drop HD-DVD Too Early?
Alec Saunders (a fellow Canuck) has an interesting observation about Toshiba and HD-DVD. IMHO, Toshiba’s comment doesn’t take into consideration Blu-Ray. Not making that statement is political face-saving on their part. Alec argues that they need to move the entire…
HD-DVD: The End Is Near
We all knew if was coming after the CES debacle earlier this year. The Hollywood Reporter is today reporting that Toshiba will finally kill off HD-DVD some time in the coming few weeks. How things have changed in just a…