All posts by James Clay

Blu-ray “wins” the HD format war

Well if you read the BBC technology blog you will see that they are seeing the end of the HD (High Definition) format war and Blu-ray has won!

The HD DVD camp turned a crisis into a disaster when it cancelled its scheduled press conference at the show and then – perhaps unsurprisingly – cancelled all media interviews at the show. It’s left observers with the impression that the HD DVD group is in disarray and on the verge of collapse.

Where as Blu-ray

Blu-ray, on the other hand, is only to eager to parade spokespeople talking up its own format.

The BBC blog seems to indicate that the reason for the victory was the Sony PS3.

Blu-ray “wins” the HD format war

The PS3 comes with a Blu-ray player as standard unlike the xBox whose HD DVD drive was an additional extra and it was getting that Blu-ray player into people’s homes via the PS3 which has allowed Blu-ray to if not win the war certainly make that last march to victory.

I suspect if Apple release new Macs at MacWorld Expo with Blu-ray drives then this will be the final blow to HD DVD and Blu-ray will be declared the victor of the HD format war.

Then us consumers (and therefore our learners) can go out and buy the Blu-ray player knowing we are not buying the HD Betamax or MiniDisc.

It might be worthwhile looking at your institution, what is its plans for HD? Think about your institutional policy in relation to VHS video tapes and DVDs.

HD does allow for amazingly high quality video and also makes it much easier to watch video on a computer down to the fact that (LCD) computer monitors are generally a much higher resolution than your standard television or DVD resolution.

Photo source.

“Mobile devices will deliver a more personal internet” says Intel

The BBC reports from CES that Intel see mobile devices as core to the future use of the internet.

Mobile devices will deliver a more personal internet within five years, using chips with the power of today’s desktop PCs, Intel’s head has said.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Paul Otellini predicted mobile devices could soon “augment reality” by pulling data from the net in real time.

He said the industry was on the verge of creating a “new level of capability and usefulness to the internet”

An open source rival to Google?

Today sees the launch of Wikia Search.

An open source rival to Google?

Wikia is a new search engine and unlike the closed Google system, the results are “created” by a community of users.

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

As Wikia comes from Jimmy Wales (one of the names behind Wikipedia) you will have an understanding of the philosophy behind this new search engine.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

I just want to do my stuff…

So there I was looking at my new Samsung Q1 Ultra and seeing how the graphics were working, working on a document and looking at a few things online, when I got called away. Knew I was only going to be a few minutes to just placed the Q1 on the desk and left.

I just want to do my stuff…

I came back to find that Windows Vista had decided (in my absence) to update Windows, restart, lose my wireless connection and then admit that it had lost the document I was working on and would I like to create a new one!

I do find this very frustrating, if I wanted the Q1 to run itself I would leave it switched on and never use it, however I want to use the Q1 to do stuff, create stuff, read stuff, reflect on stuff. I don’t want the Q1 to try and be nice and update itself in the middle of me doing stuff. I want to retain my wireless connection so I don’t lose my blog entry, or lose the thread of the online discussion I am involved in.

I don’t want software to continually nag me that I haven’t either set it up or registered it, or run it for a while, and I don’t want the software to do it in the middle of me doing stuff.

I don’t want the Q1 to download huge updates whilst I am trying to do stuff online, downloading will slow my internet connection, download updates while I am doing other non-online stuff such as making a cup of tea.

Please just let me do my stuff, don’t do your stuff and pretend mine isn’t important!

I just want to do my stuff…

Doesn’t surprise me…

What with HMRC losing personal data, along with others, it doesn’t surprise me that next to be looked at is education.

Doesn’t surprise me…

The BBC is reporting how an IT firm believes that:

Sensitive information on school pupils is being put at risk by staff who take it home with them.

How often are teaching staff in your institution given proper training on how to deal with sensitive data?

This is an issue which doesn’t just affect schools, colleges and universities also have data protection policies, though a policy is only a statement, practice is another matter entirely.

If you take a computer from work home, you have to ask yourself is the data secure?

Innovating e-Learning Conference e-Books

One of the problems with being off work for a while is you do miss a few things, so catching up on the JISC website I was pleased to see that the e-Books from the 2007 Innovating e-Learning Conference had been published online.

‘Institutional transformation’ and ‘supporting lifelong learning’ were the themes of the JISC online conference held earlier this year and two conference e-books have been published today to reflect both of these themes.

You can download the books from this page (scroll down).

You can read the outcomes of the joint presentation I delivered and the discussion  that followed on Personal technologies and the future of learning in chapter five of book one.

Innovating e-Learning Conference e-Books

The books make for interesting reading if you missed (or even just missed parts of) the conference and are a useful reminder of what was discussed for those that took part.

Full Resolution Video on the PSP

If you have a PSP with firmware 3.30 or later you can now (much more easily) play full screen h.264 video.

Prior to firmware 3.30 adding video to a PSP was a bit hit and miss.

Full Resolution Video on the PSP

When I first got a PSP I was very disappointed with the quality of the video I encoded for it using either EyeTV or Toast, more so when I compared it to the demo video I had on the demo UMD disk which came with it.

It wasn’t for some time that I didn’t realise that the PSP did not support full resolution video from a Memory Stick.

You also had to convert the video to a specific MP4 format and importantly change the name to something unfamiliar like M4V01011 and then find the obscure \MP_ROOT\100MNV01\ folder. You were restricted to a 368 x 208 resolution. If you wanted a thumbnail you had to create a jpg file and then rename it as .thm all quite complicated though there were quite a few tools that allowed you to do this quickly and easily (I used Toast quite a bit). One problem was working out what video files  were what (easy on the PSP, more complex on a computer).

With the release of firmware 3.30 this changed.

Encoding full resolution h.264 video for the PSP is now possible, this means that you can use the full 480 x 272 resolution and the excellent quality and compression of h.264.

However when I started to encode video for a PSP with firmware 3.30 I did initially have a few problems.

I tried to encode some full resolution video using VisualHub and the in-built settings and then some settings from a forum. However in both instances the video would not play on the PSP.

I initially thought it was maybe because at the time I was using the trial version of VisualHub (which has a two minute limit). However using the default low res settings it encoded and played fine.

I even formatted the Memory Stick wondering if that would solve it, it didn’t.

So I encoded the video in the original pre 3.30 firmware specificiations. As I copied over the video to the \MP_ROOT\100MNV01\ folder when I noticed a Video folder in the root of the Memory Stick.

So I copied the full resolution video over to this video folder, and guess what, yes full resolution h.264 video on my PSP.

Really impressed with the quality.

Really impressed with VisualHub.

So if you have firmware 3.30 or later ensure that you use the PSP to format the memory stick and then you will have a video folder into which you can copy the video files without having to worry about any naming conventions and be able to have full resolution high quality video.