Category Archives: Multimedia PressWatch

Random articles relating to multimedia technology.

First HD-DVD Hardware

This slipped by me for the first 2 months: Toshiba plans to release the first HD-DVD-capable hardware in the form of a laptop– the Qosmio laptop to be precise. Somewhere along the line the committee even came up with the following inspired logo:


HD-DVD ROM logo

The laptop sounds quite impressive, though. It can display a resolution 1440×900 on its 17″ screen. More interesting, though, is that the laptop functions as a portable entertainment center and is ready to be hooked up to an entertainment center with an HDTV and 5.1 channel sound. No price tag is listed yet. Who wants to be the first to bite, sparing no cost?

Then the tasks:

  1. get Linux installed on the laptop– how is Linux support on Toshiba laptops? I understand that Qosmio is a line of Toshiba laptops so there is probably some history of support or lack thereof
  2. get a commercial HD-DVD movie
  3. make sure Linux can access the raw sectors of the HD-DVD (via ATAPI?), maybe even mount the filesystems (ISO-9660? UDF?)
  4. figure out the AACS encryption scheme using the Windows player; find where the key lives and how to use it to get the plaintext content
  5. figure out all the weird and wonderful video codecs, audio codecs, subtitle formats, and navigation technologies employed on the disc
  6. … ??? …
  7. profit!, or achieve international notoriety

It feels good to have a plan, I know.

New Anti-Piracy PSA

According to an IMDb Studio Briefing news item last week, the Video Software Dealers Association has chosen a winner. To wit:

VSDN Picks Student Anti-Piracy Film As Winner of Its Contest
“… has named ‘Taken Away,’ a short film by Joshua Smith … as the winning entry … for an anti-piracy public service announcement.”

I can not even find a website for this VSDN group. I only mention this because I hope the new PSA is as entertaining as Caught In The Act. If you have not yet seen Caught In The Act, a mainstay in my Trash Multimedia presentations, I certainly encourage you to take in all its campy glory.


Caught In The Act

Xbox 360 On The Horizon

Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox 360 video game console has received a fair amount of press recently. Of course, the only thing I could possibly care about is the multimedia (specifically, full motion video) capabilities.

The media is supposed to be standard DVD. That means that standard DVD-ROM drives should be able to read the raw sectors. Though some kind of DRM is a distinct possibility, and plausible given how centrally-controlled the whole system is. Things such as DRM should be field-upgradable since online support comes with the unit.

Microsoft makes much of the fact that the console and all games will support HD resolutions. Since I doubt that FMV will go away anytime soon– regardless of the capacity to render real-time 3D cutscene animations– I wonder what video codecs will be used? Bink? According to RadGameTools’ site, Bink already supports the Xbox 360. I did not know Bink was already designed to handle HD material. Microsoft’s own WMV3/WMV9/VC-1/VC-9 should be an obvious contender as well.

According to the Xbox 360 spec sheet, it is also supposed to be able to serve as a basic entertainment center at least by allowing the user to rip music onto the internal hard drive.