A look at consumer video

I’ve been thinking about the consumer video market a lot recently. I figured I’d take some time to sum up my thoughts about where we’re at and where we’re going.

First off, lets just all agree that for consumers, tape is dead. While HDV and DV will hang around for a while, coughing up blood, consumers should never again see a linear format for video. The optical formats (mini-DVD) may hang around for a bit, but they too should die off before too long.

Why? Because I think most folks who have shot home movies agree that the linear nature of tape is a huge disincentive to repeat viewing. Because tapes give you 60 minutes of continuous video, you’re inclined to shoot far more than makes sense, which makes it that much less fun to go back and find the good parts. Similarly, bringing it into a computer is too hard and takes too long to make it worthwhile for most consumers.

The DVD formats are a bit better than tape, but come with their own negatives in terms of form factor and robustness.

That brings us to solid state. Most cell phone video is truly terrible right now, but another few months and we’ll start seeing more VGA-quality recording. For a lot of people, it’ll be good enough to capture Jimmy blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, etc, just like for many folks, the stills produced by a cell phone camera are “good enough” for day-to-day events.

The next step up from cell phones is still cameras with video capabilities. These vary widely right now – some cameras don’t do video at all, some do video with no audio, and some do proper all singing, all dancing video. The Casio Exilim line, with its “youtube mode” is a good example. Quality takes a step up for a cell phone, but the form factor is oriented towards stills (obviously) and audio, if present at all, is bound to be subpar.

 Tech  Photos 2007 07 19 Casiox-Large

Moving beyond still cameras (incidentally, the Exilim retails for well under $250) you get into a murky world of old-line camcorder manufacturers and new companies you’ve never heard of.

To start out with, you’ve got the Pure Digital Flip Video Ultra. For under $200, you get a camera that will record between 30 and 60 minutes of video (depending on the model) with a not-all-that-horrible microphone, 640×480 30fps video and a rather neat built in USB plug. Aimed squarely at YouTube users, the Flip may be a good choice to give to the kids for recording their hijinks, but the lack of a still-frame mode means you’re going to be carrying the Flip in addition to your digital still camera. Who wants that?

 I Bto 20070912 Flip Ultra Orange



If you’re looking for a decent still camera with good video capabilities and a nice form factor, you really need to investigate the Sanyo Xacti line. Whether you’d like a waterproof SD camera, or a full 1080i monster, they’ve got you covered. The Xacti line differentiates itself by providing a proper lens, and on many models, a microphone input. That’s a feature that really sets the Xacti line apart for folks who want to do slightly more professional recordings. Quality isn’t quite at the level of an HDV camera, but it’s not bad either. If I had to spend my own money, I’d probably get their HD2, which shoots 720p video and 7.1 megapixel stills. I love the form factor – it feels great in your hand, and the “one button for video, one button for stills” layout makes it incredibly easy to use.

Downsides? The video isn’t optically stabilized. The digital stabilizer is slightly better than absolute crap. No problem on wide shots, but doing a 10x zoom handheld is going to be pretty jumpy, especially after that second cup of coffee.

Expect to pay around $350 for the lesser Xacti models, on up through $600 for the HD2 and $800 for the HD1000.

 Prodimages Hd10001

Sanyo HD1000 1080i model

From there, things start to get really serious, as we start to find the old guard of camcorder makers. Sony enters with a variety of Memory Stick and HardDrive based models. I’m not a fan of harddisk recorders – you’ve got moving parts, you’re limited to the built in capacity and battery life takes a hit. The HDR-CX7 meets all the right criteria though – direct to memory stick recording, AVCHD recording, and all the features you’d expect on a consumer camcorder (no mic in though!). 6.1 megapixel stills round out the feature set, and you can find it for around $900.

That said, the real bargain in this space is the Panasonic HDC-SD5. You get 3 1920×1080 imagers, optical image stabilization, and direct-to-SD card recording. The fact that it’s 3CCD really sets this model apart. It records in the same AVC-HD as the Sony, so you can expect compression quality that is only slightly inferior to similar HDV cameras like the Canon HV20. The Panasonic will run you a bit under $900.

Downsides? Form factor. You won’t slip either the Panasonic or the Sony into your pocket. You’ll look like more a tourist with your fancy camcorder. It’s not huge by any means, but it can’t be an after-thought in packing either. For me, the lack of proper audio inputs is a disappointment as well. I think that the higher-end consumer cameras really need to get features like audio inputs if they want to differentiate themselves in the minds of savvy consumers.

 Data News Images 2821 Hdc-Sd5

So that’s where we’re at right now. Most of these cameras include basic editing software in the box, but keep in mind that iMovie ’08 should manage and edit the video produced by any of these models. Nifty!

The brilliance of iPhoneSimFree

So, say you’re a company that intends to market a software product whose primary audience is the hacker set. You know that your product will be instantly reverse engineered, recoded and rereleased. But you’d still like to make a buck. How do you do it?

Generate huge buzz (and it doesn’t get much bigger than “software iPhone unlock!”), stall for 6 weeks, while leaking out more and more proof that you really did what you said you did, and then require prepayment before releasing the software. Churn out a few thousand presales at $50+ per copy. Release the software to much joy. Gather up the money for 24 hours.

Then the hackers release their version, and you go on an extended, well earned vacation.

Brilliant.

WWDC Bummer Roundup

So yesterday was a SteveNote out in San Fran. Here’s the gist – Leopard still looks pretty cool, but it won’t blow your mind. There still isn’t a way to develop for the iPhone (though they’re very proud of the fact that you can make webpages for it), and that’s about it.

Safari 3 beta is pretty slick, though I don’t fully understand the logic behind the Windows release – perhaps as an iPhone development environment? It is a hell of a lot faster though, especially in pages that are obscenely heavy in javascript and dhtml stuff. The Media Mill “custom” layout is far more usable, even on slower machines.

MacRumors has confirmation that the iPhone won’t ship with Flash support, which is quite a bummer. One hopes they’ll still move this direction, particularly if there is user outcry. The web is a lot more useful when you can load Flash content.

MacRumors is also saying that ZFS won’t ship in Leopard, and certainly not as “the filesystem.” Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz said last week that ZFS was going to be the future of OSX. One hopes that this isn’t a case of a major project being “Steved” …

Hopefully more good comes out of WWDC for the developers that are out there. For those of us watching from the sidelines though, it’s been a bit of a disappointment.

Why I hate Flash (and why CS3 is a blessing and a curse)

Since Carla asked …

I don’t hate Flash the concept, or Flash the delivery platform, I just hate authoring Flash. Flash is hands down the best way to deliver video on the web, and I’m really exciting about Apollo and AMP.

However …

I just got Adobe Creative Suite 3, which includes Flash CS3. There’s just so much about Flash (the application) that drives me insane – the way the workspace seems to always need more desktop real-estate than you’ve got, the way palettes fade out, and a million other minor nit-picky things that make it unpleasant to work with.

That said, that’s not the reason for my comment yesterday. That was out of the frustration of learning that using their new FLVPlaybackCaptioning component (which lets you really easily add captioning to any FLVPlayback component) requires you to port the application to Actionscript 3. Realistically, it’s probably a good thing to port to AS3, because it’s actually a decent language, but I had hoped with something as important as closed captioning, they’d allow easy integration into existing applications.

Beyond that, they’ve changed the way FLVPlayback works such that it no longer loads FLV files from a URL if that URL includes a query string (download.php?video=1234). That makes dynamic video playback a bit of a pain – you need to move to a mod_rewrite solution (download.php/video/1234/.flv) on the server side to trick Flash into loading the video. Furthermore, they haven’t fixed the crashing-bug related to loading large (>200meg) FLV videos on Windows using FLVPlayback.

Anyways, to sum it up, I love the delivery side of Flash, hate the authoring side. That’s how it goes though.

NAB thoughts

I’ll post some more product-specific stuff as I get time, but I wanted to post my general thoughts on this year’s show, now that I’m safely out of Las Vegas.

The show seemed even more massive than in the past, with the north hall almost entirely taken over by video folks. It’s really a hard show to get anything useful out of, unless you go in with specific needs. It’s fun to wander around to the 16 different jib companies, but unless you’re going to put the time in to really evaluate the differences between each, it’s a bit silly.

I’m also feeling a bit turned off by the whole scene. The show consists of far to many middle aged men looking for a free trip to vegas on the company’s dime, rather than folks actually there to evaluate technology. It’s just too much of a “good old boys” club. Sitting in the Scopebox booth, I had more than a few of them do a “you buys enjoying vegas seen any good wink wink shows? you should really go to XYZ strip club” … bleh. Not only is it obnoxious, it’s slightly creepy.

The flip side of that is that the same sort of middle aged men with suspenders tend to be representatives in the booths of the major vendors. And they tend to think that nobody under 30 could possibly have any reason to purchase their product. Reps from Sony and Grass Valley literally turned and walked away from me when it was my chance to ask a question. Panasonic was nice however, and that will weigh on my mind as I’m evaluating who to purchase three HD studio cameras from.

On the plus side, folks from outside of the US are consistently friendly and helpful. Props to Telestream in particular.

I’m so Web2.0 that I bleed rounded corners

Sorry for the slow updates lately. We’ve started our semester here at the University of Minnesota, so much of my time is being spent getting the young folk excited about production. Woo.

The other major time sink lately has been a major set of new features for Media Mill, including project management, locking and tagging, and drag and drop clip organization. An unfortunate side effect of all this goodness has been growth in page load times. In my case, loading the “my videos” page results in 250K of html, in addition to the included javascript libraries. So, rather than follow the advice of my namesake to “simplify and add lightness,” I’ve instead focused on complicating and adding ajax. Thus the title of this post. You’re going to love it.

Anyways, the video industry is in a post-CES, pre-NAB lull right now. Everyone is off drinking at Sundance,and frankly I don’t really care about Sundance…

AACS cracking – here’s the deal

Earlier this week, news broke that someone had “cracked” the AACS DRM system used by both HD-DVD and BluRay. At this point, there hasn’t been independent verification of any of this, but here’s the deal as best as I understand.

A guy named muslix64 on the Doom9 forums figured out a way to extract title keys from HD-DVD discs, very likely using a vulnerability in Power DVD 6.5. He then wrote a decryption tool based on the publicly available AACS specifications. He released the software, including source, but did not release any title keys. He made hints that there is a fundamental flaw in the way title keys are handled, and that player revocation is unimportant. With player revocation, a flawed player (such as Power DVD, if indeed it is vulnerable) can be disabled from playing future discs.

It’s interesting, if indeed it’s true. There is no evidence that the AACS encryption itself is flawed, and indeed, that seems unlikely as it’s essentially an implementation of AES. However, we know that using encryption for DRM on untrusted hardware is likely to have some vulnerability, if you’re willing to dig deep enough. That is apparently what’s happened here.

What does it mean? Not much right now. Muslix64 has disappeared, and nobody has been able to discover the relevant title keys at this point. If someone does recreate a title key extraction method, it would be an interesting alternative to the world of DVD cracking. Instead of having a DMCA-violating circumvention device in the form of DeCSS or any of the later decryption programs, you could instead have a totally legitimate decoder tool paired with some title keys. The legality of the title keys would be questionable – the court case would be very interesting. In any case, it’s likely that you’d get your HD-DVD, check online to get the title key, paste it into your ripper and be done.

Give it 6 weeks and check again. This could be a blip, this could be the death of BluRay and HD-DVD. We’ll see.

The truth of depth of field

A number of sites have linked to this article about depth of field, which looks at the commonly held belief that zooming in creates a shallower depth of field.

The article isn’t super clear, but the essential fact is that zooming in doesn’t actually change depth of field, it just makes the stuff in the background bigger. The stuff is no more blurry, it’s just easier to see the blurriness.

He’s absolutely right of course, but it’s really splitting hairs. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.