While raiding Wikipedia for scant pieces of multimedia information they might have that are not yet in the MultimediaWiki, I learned of 2 new lossless video codecs– Lagarith and MSU Lossless Video. I’ve heard people grumble about how lossless video codecs just don’t perform. I know of one grumbler in particular — you know who you are — who claims that FLAC actually outperforms the nominal special-purpose lossless video codec. I am expecting a full report from you on how these new codecs stack up. The MSU technology is proprietary but I have started to document the GPL’d Lagarith codec in the Wiki. The author contributed a write-up of the surface details. I am trying to plod through the control flow. It’s a bit slow-going though since many of the crucial functions are written in MMX-optimized ASM.

In other Wiki news, I finally found a logo:

It is the same one seen on Wikipedia’s multimedia entry and apparently comes from a set of KDE icons made here. I like it.

Aurel Jacobs would like to share his FMV laptop with the group: http://gnuage.free.fr/t70r/. Apparently, it’s a real brand of laptop from Fujitsu.

People keep asking me which format I think will win the HD war, as if I’m some kind of authority on the matter. My answer: I don’t really care. I’m just interested in sitting ringside and observing the action like a drunken boxing fan.

vs.

Seriously, from my perspective, it has never mattered which format I actually like. The mission of a multimedia hacker is to understand and support as many diverse formats as various factions can possibly develop.

The IMDb Studio Briefing reported today that “HD DVD To Debut Today”. So I ran over to Best Buy and picked one up. Seriously. Here it is:

No, I don’t have a player yet. That never stopped me from buying PlayStation or Xbox games just for studying the multimedia (that was different because I still have computer hardware that can read the raw sectors). Best Buy also had players available but I do not intend to get any hardware until an HD-DVD ROM drive becomes available. Ah, the burden of early adoption.

Best Buy had the HD-DVD material in the high-end home theater department. I asked if they had any HD-DVDs in yet. The employee said the titles were behind the counter but then eyed me suspiciously and asked if I was from Toshiba. I’m not sure what that exchange was about but after I assured him that I was sincerely interested in a purchase he brought out the 3 launch titles– Serenity, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Last Samurai. I certainly wasn’t the only early adopter. At this same time, there were other customers entering the same department asking for the HD-DVD player and all 3 launch titles. Take another look at those 3 launch titles. Do you think that anyone would actually like all 3 of those movies? My guess is that these people were really interested in the purchase simply for the sake of having the latest technology.

Their demo HD-DVD players were doing duty with some sort of demo material with a split screen that contrasted high definition vs. standard definition. The demo struck me as — what’s the word — bogus. Come on– standard definition can’t possibly look that bad. Can you say “blur filter”?

Click [more] to see scans of everything in the case so you know what the next generation looks like.

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