Category Archives: Multimedia PressWatch

Random articles relating to multimedia technology.

PlayStation 3 HackWatch

Now that the Sony PlayStation 3 has hit the ground running — at least in the U.S. and Japan, and in fairly measured quantities — we might finally piece together some more solid information about running Linux on this little box and the exposed programming capabilities


Sony PlayStation 3 controller

Based on earlier blog and forum hearsay, I got the impression that there was some hackish method for getting Linux onto a PS3. It turns out that it’s not a hack, it’s a menu option. The user can install an “other OS” from basically any media format that the PS3 supports (a huge array of optical discs, compact flash, USB media device, and some others).

I’m still searching for actual programming information. Hearsay indicates that X11 will work by rendering to a framebuffer. No word of graphical capabilities beyond that. Still wondering about audio output, controller input, network I/O, and programming multiple Cell SPEs.

Meanwhile, the online user manual contains lists of video and audio formats that the PS3 already knows how to play (and here are the still image formats).

Since I am fascinated with the idea of programming game consoles (even modern ones that increasingly resemble boring, regular PCs), I will be keeping an eye on what people are doing with Linux on PS3. I won’t lose my mind trying to be an early, early adopter of this latest console. I’ll consider purchasing one only when I can walk into a typical store and pick one up off the shelf like a normal consumer; no sooner.

Superfluous Source

There is some news today about how Real will be releasing a Linux player with support for Microsoft’s Windows Media formats. For example:

Not mentioned: The fact that Linux multimedia players have already supported these formats for years, sometimes through closed source x86-only binary modules, but increasingly with portable, open source modules. I know, the difference is that Real’s player will have more licensed legitimacy. These news article make it sound as though there will be open source code to decode the Windows Media formats. I sincerely doubt that that’s the case (though if it is true, anyone who is still working to figure out Windows Media Video v8 J-frame coding or Windows Media Audio v3: you can stop now).

I’m still frustrated at Real for a plethora of reasons. One of the most obnoxious things they ever did was send out press releases mentioning something about doing something with open source. This would later manifest as the Helix Player (which, the one time I tried it on an out-of-the-box Fedora Core distro, couldn’t even play a PCM WAV file). But the announcements caused the mailing lists of open source multimedia projects to become inundated with impatient queries about why we didn’t have full Real support since “Real open sourced everything.”

A Reason To Subscribe To The Sunday Paper

Finally, a useful reason to subscribe to the newspaper again– at least the Sunday newspaper: Movie Previews on CD-Rom To Come with Sunday Papers. This reminds me of when Sony was experimenting with alternative methods for distributing promotional material. I went into a Best Buy store one day to find a large display with FREE Hellboy promotional DVDs. I took one home, checked it out, and found that it just contained proper DVD versions of all of the same teasers, trailers, and featurettes that were already available online. I’m not sure if Sony ever tried the same thing with any other movies.


CD-ROM

Naturally, if anyone gets one of these CD-ROMs in their Sunday paper, let me know what kind of multimedia is on them. Also, it will be interesting to know what format they choose– 80mm or 120mm. The smaller size, with over 200 MB available, should be plenty of space to get the message across.

CinemaNow DVDs

Sometime last week, IMDb’s Studio Briefing notified me that there was an online service for paying for officially licensed DVD images that can be burned (just once, officially): New Movie Download Service Launches Today. The service is CinemaNow.

So, I actually decided to boot into Windows XP and try it out. First, I had to find a movie that I actually wanted. Last Wednesday night, they had 101 titles to choose from, not too many that might be termed “mainstream”. I settled on In Good Company that I saw in the theater and somewhat enjoyed. The price was $3 less than what Amazon charges, as a basic value comparison.

I thought it best to go with all the recommended software. I bit the proverbial bullet and upgraded to the beta of Windows Media Player 11, which is the first I have heard of it. I wonder what new multimedia support challenges it will cause for Linux multimedia? The experience also requires a piece of 3rd party, .NET-based software called FluxDVD.

The whole thing goes fairly seemlessly and takes about 4 hours as promised:


CinemaNow FluxDVD app

The DVD plays in a standalone player as promised. I wonder if the DVD itself features the standard CSS encryption? Probably does but I haven’t checked empirically yet. The source file remains on my hard drive after download. It has a .fluxdvd extension, as seen in the screenshot, and contains some DRM-looking stuff at the front. Double-clicking launches the WMP 11 beta which performs some network activity before playing the file.

The disc image is 1.9 GB. I was wondering if the file was a Windows Media file that got converted to MPEG-2 on the fly by the above program (the “Convert and Burn” was my first clue). Colin Hill points out for me that the actual In Good Company DVD is a dual layer affair.

In other DRM news, I finally got a TV show off of iTunes. It was free. I was sorely disappointed, both with the content and the presentation. Content, because the Blade movie (at least the first one) was so awesome; but the pilot of the spinoff TV series is so bad that they have to give it away for free. Presentation, because the best that iTunes can do is display the 320-width window doublesized to 640. This doesn’t look so great on a 1280-width display. Is it really that tough to do full screen? I think not, especially if iTunes renders the video directly as YUV. I suspect that iTunes probably holds back the full screen feature for a premium version of the program, just as Apple’s QuickTime Player does.