Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

Some Starting Multimedia Articles

For years, I have been addicted to reading Internet Movie Database Studio Briefing newslets. They can always be counted on for pithy synopses and fluffy press release rehashes on major multimedia tech announcements. Here are a few from recent weeks:

Coming Next Month: Movies on a Chip:

Opening yet another ancillary revenue stream for Hollywood, a British company called Rok Player is planning to begin selling movies next month on Digital Video Chips that can slip into new-generation cell phones…

Hybrid High-Definition DVD Disc To Be Introduced
Can’t decide whether to be an early adopter of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray when they raid your wallet later this year? You may not have to choose:

…two Japanese electronics companies say they plan to introduce hybrid high-definition DVD discs that will be compatible with both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats.

And from today’s issue: New Chip Will Permit Portable TV Recorders

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) plans to unveil a chip that will allow consumers to download TV programs to a portable video player without having to route them through a personal computer first…

xine Reaches Version 1.0!

Congratulations to my home project, xine for finally reaching its version 1.0 milestone. It has been in various 1.0-alpha, -beta, pre#, and whatever for over 2 years now. I am very pleased that we hit this mark so we can proceed to evolve the program further.

As always, thanks go out to our colleagues on the FFmpeg, MPlayer, VideoLAN, and various other open source multimedia projects among whom we exist in a state of friendly competition.

Who Is This Guy?

Hi! My name is Mike. I do a lot of multimedia technology hacking. I have an entire website dedicated to this pursuit, which is probably how you got to this blog in the first place. I spend a lot of time thinking about multimedia technology and helping to make sure open source software can play all kinds of common and obscure multimedia formats. Strange enough hobby, but it keeps me off the street and out of trouble.

After doing this multimedia stuff long enough, I actually got invited to a technical conference to talk about this stuff. I gave 2 presentations at The 2nd Swiss Unix Conference in Zurich, Switzerland in early September, 2004. The first presentation was entitled “Multimedia On Unix: Past, Present, and Future”. The slides are available here. However, slides never make much sense by themselves. So, if you have a fair amount of download capacity and about an hour to kill, you can watch or listen to this presentation by downloading the .AVI or .MP3 files from here.

The second presentation was entitled “Trash Multimedia And The Evolution Of Full Motion Video”. The slides for this one are available here. There is no video for this one which is probably good because it was 3 hours long. This presentation was not specifically Unix-related but just showcased a lot of different examples, good and bad, of multimedia technology I have encountered during my studies. Eventually, I may do write-ups of some of this multimedia in this blog.

Of Eggs And Omelettes

So I am finally surrendering to the trend and starting my own blog. My goal is to keep better track of developments in multimedia technology, both in the closed/proprietary, and open arenas.

For the curious, this blog’s title, “Breaking Eggs and Making Omelettes” is a reference to the aphorism, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.” This is in reference to software reverse engineering (RE). RE usually has to take place in order to create open source multimedia software that is interoperable with proprietary formats. The mention (and practice) of RE makes a lot of people squeamish. The broken-egg aphorism always comes to my mind in such discussions.