Amazon Kindle – My Ugly Beautiful Girl

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(points to those that get the title reference)

So the Amazon Kindle is official, and it’s pretty amazing. Take a Sony Reader, throw in an EV-DO wireless radio and some text input, then pair it up with the big name in bookselling, ugly it up a bit, and you’ve got the Kindle.

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Amazon’s product page is live now, with videos and plenty of pictures. Being able to subscribe a newpaper and have it wirelessly pushed to your ebook reader, anywhere in the country, is relatively tempting. Did it have to look like it came from 1982 though?

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In all, I think it’s a great entry in the ebook field. It certainly surpasses my Reader in many areas, and it’s damn tempting to order one right now. Here’s hoping Sony kicks the Connect Store into gear – as per usual, Sony has great hardware being let down by terrible software. Perhaps this will motivate them to change that.

Avid AWOL from Annual Association Activity

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If all of my titles were alliterative … that’d be awesome.

Avid announced yesterday that they’re not going to show up at NAB 2008. No booth, no shouty presenters, no pretentious representatives …

So what’s this all about? Avid has had a bad year (sizable losses) and may see the expense of NAB as not worth the return. That’s one option. Option two is that this could be a signal that NAB is on the decline. Apple hasn’t officially booked a booth yet either. NAB has been growing so much though, it’s hard to imagine that’s the case. I guess we’ll see come April.

Panasonic gone wacky

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Uhh. Panasonic? Dudes? You’re making my eyes bleed.

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Welcome everyone, to the Panasonic AG-HMC70, by far the ugliest camera I have ever seen. Seriously, I hope there’s an aftermarket bodykit for this or something. Maybe with some ground effects and flared wheel arches …

Oh yeah, it’s a three chip, AVCHD camera that records to SD cars with an OIS leica lens. So that’s all pretty neat. You get XLR jacks plus both an LCD and a viewfinder. AVCHD is still a bit of a funny format – I’ve seen very good AVCHD, and very bad AVCHD. Hopefully this tilts towards the former.

No price on this yet, though I’d expect it to come in under the HVX-200. Which really begs the question of why Panasonic, which has thrown all of its weight in the prosumer and professional field behind P2 and DVCProHD/AVC-Intra, would jump into the market with an AVCHD camera recording to SD. So very confusing.

Drobo followup a few months later

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I’ve had my Drobo for about three months now, and I figured it’d be a good time to post some followup thoughts. Here’s the scoop.

The Drobo is the first product from a young company, so I went into it expecting some growing pains. Indeed, there have been a few. But I can happily report that they’ve been resolved and it is now the device I hoped it would be.

The problems have been relatively minor – initially, the disks would never go to sleep (solved by firmware 1.0.2) and there was an occasionally pause when streaming video (fixed by firmware 1.0.3). I also had one scary moment in which I thought I’d lost all of my data – the Drobo refused to mount and OSX threw all sorts of USB errors. After a few hours of churning (and replaying the HFS+ journal) it appeared and all was well.

I’ve used about 810gigs of my available 1.1 terabytes. I’ll need to upgrade drives before too long, which will be a good test of that feature. In the meantime, I’m happy with having a single, redundant, giant drive to dump all of my data onto. It’s allowed me to unify all of my media into a single, giant, iTunes library, which would otherwise have never been possible.

Thumbs up to Drobo then, and onward towards glory.

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MKV to MOV for big files

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For most users, getting a matroska (MKV) file into Quicktime is as simple as installing the Perian codec. It makes things joyously simple. You can even do file->save as to rewrap your video as something else. Great!

It gets problematic when you have a really big (over 2gig) MKV file. QT will just crash! Oh no!

So, here’s my workaround. Not for the faint of heart.

Start by getting the current CVS version of MPEG4IP. You’ll need SDL and libtoolize to build it.

Also get mkvtoolnix and install that.

Extract the video and audio tracks from the mkv file using mkvextract:

mkvextract tracks <mkv filename> 1:part1.h264 2:part1.ac3

This will need to grind for a while, but eventually you’ll have your demuxed tracks.

Next, you need to use mp4creator to wrap the H.264 elementary stream in a proper mp4 box. You’ll probably get a warning about an invalid SEI message. Ignore that.

/usr/local/bin/mp4creator -create=part1.h264 -rate=29.97 “My Video.mp4”

Next, we need to add the audio. Unfortunately, mp4creator can’t handle ac3 audio. You’ll either need to convert the audio to AAC, and then use mp4creator to merge them, or use Quicktime Pro. I prefer the latter – open the ac3 file in QT, select all, copy, then open your mp4 and select add->add to movie.

Now, when you go to save, Quicktime will likely yell at you. You need to mark an in point a second into the video, and an outpoint a second from the end, and then select edit->trim. Then you can do “file->save as” and move on.

What a pain, hu?

Native Apps for Realz

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Steve threw developers some love. Thanks Steve. Native iPhone apps, coming in February.

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Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

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Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,

Google gives monetizing YouTube yet another go

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Maybe I just have a faulty memory, but it sure seems like we’ve heard a handful of stories since Google bought YouTube about their imminent attempts to monetize the service. But anyways, here’s another go, adding non-video ad content around the video content. They’re giving the content producer a cut, which is nice, but I imagine for most regular content producers the numbers will be insignificant compared to traditional advertising placement.