IMDb reports: High-Definition Movies Coming to Hotel Rooms. The story says that the capability will be provided by an outfit named nSTREAMS; they presently produce all kinds of large boxes that provide multimedia entertainment to hotels, hospitals, schools, and karaoke bars. I don’t see any boxes on their website that specifically tout HD support, but they must be coming soon.

I gained a small interest in these hotel-based entertainment solutions just recently when I came across a thorough investigation of something called the Famicombox, apparently a pay-per-play NES solution installed in hotel rooms a long time ago. These systems never made it to the U.S., but there were successors at least in the N64 generation and I believe for the SNES as well. I think PlayStation might have gotten in on the hotel action as well.

Today’s IMDb Studio Briefing reports that when Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is released, it will contain a live-action version of the Liar’s Dice game filmed in high definition. Do you think we can qualify this as an HD interactive movie?

Karim sends word of a new lossless audio codec under development. The codec is wryly and appropriately entitled Yet Another Lossless Audio Codec (YALAC) that was originally named TAK. I had that backwards: YALAC was renamed TAK. Obligatory new MultimediaWiki page.

That’s not the most interesting part of Karim’s email. His email notified me of this post which was the first indication I received that there is a entire weblog devoted to lossless audio coding — The Lossless Audio Blog! And I thought this blog was niche. The blog’s sidebar mentions Sony’s ATRAC as being lossless, which I was unaware of (rather, a different variant called ATRAC Advanced Lossless). Also, DTS-HD and Dolby True-HD are listed as lossless codecs.

It’s amazing how much activity there is in the lossless audio codec field. I’ll be keeping an eye on that blog, as should you, the multimedia tech enthusiast.