Yearly Archives: 2008

Portable Movie Super Player

I still read the IMDb Studio Briefing everyday, though it gets a little discouraging. I sometimes wonder if there will ever be anymore interesting multimedia tech news. I should have more faith: New Movie Media Devices Predicted. Really, the story here is that IBM has developed a new, giant capacity yet very small storage method. This is one of those curious situations where they don’t mention how large capacities can possibly reach but instead express the capability in terms of how much media the thing might theoretically hold. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to decide what the average size of a ‘song’ or ‘movie’ might be and compute from there.

Remember the days when CD-ROM storage capacities were expressed in terms of how many printed documents it could hold? Later, the benchmark was number of pictures, then songs. Now it’s movies. This article cites that a device built around the memory could hold the 3500 movies or 1/2 million songs. Thus, the average movie is ~140 times larger than the average song.

The weirdest aspect of the articles floating around is that the hypothetical device would come with 3500 movies prepackaged and the consumer would purchase codes to activate individual movies.

Given recent media consumption trends, there’s little reason to doubt this strategy.

Sun’s Multimedia Rumblings

I’m reading fluffy press releases today about how Sun is going to work towards developing an open video codec: Sun Tackles Video Codec. The article is short on substance which is generally what earns this article a spot the Multimedia PressWatch category of this blog. Something about an Open Media Stack (OMS), perhaps correlated somehow to Open Media Commons (not to be confused with Open Media Now!).

It’s hard to find anything about this initiative that’s not a rehashed press release. But this Sun blog seems to have the most authoritative information, abstract though it may be. They present a fascinating design approach: Rather than evaluate algorithmic techniques based on their performance, evaluate them based on their legal status.

Good luck to them. Here’s a Wiki page to track it.

Zero Hour

Just a reminder that the (revised) Summer of Code application submission deadline is tomorrow, Monday, April 7. If you are a student and want to be considered for an FFmpeg Summer of Code project slot, you need to enter an application (one or more) into Google’s system by the end of the day on Monday. That is not, however, the deadline for qualification tasks. That comes next week.

PDP-1 Multimedia

I got to see a demonstration of a restored, 45 year old DEC PDP-1 computer today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, USA. Does that sound interesting in the context of multimedia hacking? The thing could be hooked up to some kind of dot-plotting video device, and it didn’t feature any sound audio. At least, no sound hardware out of the box. Thing is, the unit was highly mod-able.

The PDP-1 hosted what is widely believed to be the first video game ever– Spacewar!. I have already written up that aspect of the experience in my Gaming Pathology blog.

Sound, however, was possible through a hardware mod. The computer had an array of LEDs and one clever hacker thought to wire 4 of these up to square wave generators, thus producing 4-channel music. This was originally programmed in the early 1960s and was demoed today. The hacker who had originally written the music engine on a PDP-1 at MIT found himself on the restoration committee many decades later. It seems MIT had donated paper tape sequences that contained musical data that played on his music engine– but the engine code had been lost. Still, he was able to reverse engineer the audio format and reimplement the engine on the original PDP-1 hardware. Sounds familiar. He even made the same point that I like to make in my multimedia technology presentations — data is more important than code.

It almost made me feel young again. Here I am, studying multimedia formats that largely only date back about 15 years to around 1993.