Enjoy!
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
iPhone SDK: Next iPhone will be 3.5G HSDPA
According to ZiPhone's Blog, the latest beta iPhone software development kit makes reference to Infineon's S-GOLD3H PMB 8878. This is a 3.5G HSDPA chip, which maintains backwards compatibility with GSM EDGE and GPRS networks.
Now that we know "what", we just need to know "when".
Now that we know "what", we just need to know "when".
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Apple number 1 music vendor in the US
For the first month of 2008, Apple took the crown of #1 music vendor in the US, from Wal-Mart. NPD notes that Apple had 19% of the market, noticeably ahead of Wal-Mart's 15% and Best Buy's 13%. Amazon and Target rounded out the top five at 6% each.
Everyone knew that legal digital music downloads would eventually become dominant in the market, but some of us (ie. me) are surprised at just how fast the adoption of this technology has been.
It has been a good week for Apple, with analyst estimates just two days ago indicating that Apple's US consumer computer market share was a whopping 21%.
AAPL closed over $150 today for the first time in months, up $4.12 to $151.61.
Everyone knew that legal digital music downloads would eventually become dominant in the market, but some of us (ie. me) are surprised at just how fast the adoption of this technology has been.
It has been a good week for Apple, with analyst estimates just two days ago indicating that Apple's US consumer computer market share was a whopping 21%.
AAPL closed over $150 today for the first time in months, up $4.12 to $151.61.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Hi-def disc creation improved in Toast 9.0.2
Just in time to mark the dissolution of the HD DVD Promotion Group, Roxio has released Toast Titanium v9.0.2. With this new update, my HD DVD creation problems are now partially fixed.
I was able to create an HD DVD using the default "Best Automatic" setting using some of the clips that were problematic before, and the disc plays in both a Toshiba standalone HD DVD player and in Apple's DVD Player application. However, I was still unable to create the same disc using a custom 20 Mbps H.264 encoding setting. With this setting, the disc creation fails with a -50 Error. The discs that do work still don't work in my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, as I cannot navigate beyond the menu on that player. However, as I mentioned before, this may in part be due to the player itself.
Apparently some of the Blu-ray problems have been fixed too. Roxio states that Toast 9.0.2:
I was able to create an HD DVD using the default "Best Automatic" setting using some of the clips that were problematic before, and the disc plays in both a Toshiba standalone HD DVD player and in Apple's DVD Player application. However, I was still unable to create the same disc using a custom 20 Mbps H.264 encoding setting. With this setting, the disc creation fails with a -50 Error. The discs that do work still don't work in my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, as I cannot navigate beyond the menu on that player. However, as I mentioned before, this may in part be due to the player itself.
Apparently some of the Blu-ray problems have been fixed too. Roxio states that Toast 9.0.2:
* Resolves a number of encoding issues related to high-definition source content and creation of Blu-ray video discsHowever, I have not yet tested Blu-ray creation as I do not own a Blu-ray player, and Apple's DVD Player does not support Blu-ray.
* Resolves situation where high-definition DVDs would not play back on PlayStation 3
Friday, March 21, 2008
Further Roxio Toast 9 HD DVD testing: Incompatibilities
I've been doing some more testing of Toast 9's HD DVD creation and have run into a few more issues:
1) I mentioned before that H.264 encoding doesn't work. This continues to be the case.
2) Even with MPEG2 sources, Toast 9 sometimes crashes when making an HD DVD, albeit infrequently. The good news is that Toast 9.0 is more stable than Toast 8.0 was.
3) With MPEG2 sources, even if Toast 9 finishes the burn process, the disc may lock up in certain parts of the video. This is not a media problem, because even if I save the image to the hard disk, playback will lock up in the exact same spot. If I do burn the image to disc, playback will stop in the same spot on both my Toshiba standalone as well as in DVD Player.app on my iMac. However, if I start over and make a different encode with same source material, the resultant HD DVD may work fine.
4) My Xbox 360 HD DVD does not like these discs. The disc will load and go to the menu, but I cannot navigate out of the menu to play the content. I tried using both my Logitech Harmony Xbox 360 remote as well as the Xbox 360 controller.
I have not tested Blu-ray because I do not have any Blu-ray playback device at my disposal, and DVD Player.app does not work with Blu-ray. I will likely buy a Blu-ray player once there is a Profile 1.1/2.0 player below about $200-250, but I fear that may not be until 2009.
1) I mentioned before that H.264 encoding doesn't work. This continues to be the case.
2) Even with MPEG2 sources, Toast 9 sometimes crashes when making an HD DVD, albeit infrequently. The good news is that Toast 9.0 is more stable than Toast 8.0 was.
3) With MPEG2 sources, even if Toast 9 finishes the burn process, the disc may lock up in certain parts of the video. This is not a media problem, because even if I save the image to the hard disk, playback will lock up in the exact same spot. If I do burn the image to disc, playback will stop in the same spot on both my Toshiba standalone as well as in DVD Player.app on my iMac. However, if I start over and make a different encode with same source material, the resultant HD DVD may work fine.
4) My Xbox 360 HD DVD does not like these discs. The disc will load and go to the menu, but I cannot navigate out of the menu to play the content. I tried using both my Logitech Harmony Xbox 360 remote as well as the Xbox 360 controller.
I have not tested Blu-ray because I do not have any Blu-ray playback device at my disposal, and DVD Player.app does not work with Blu-ray. I will likely buy a Blu-ray player once there is a Profile 1.1/2.0 player below about $200-250, but I fear that may not be until 2009.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Roxio Toast 9's H.264 encoding doesn't work
I've now installed Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (with the HD/BD Plug-in) and have burned a few HD DVDs on DVD-R. It does work, but with some serious caveats.
1) With the default encoding settings and with the advanced H.264 setting, it doesn't work at all with any of my files. Toast claims there are problems with the source material, but all of them encode to MPEG2 just fine in Toast. Obviously Toast has no problems reading the files. It just can't re-encode them to H.264 for some reason. (All the clips I tested are QuickTime HD files downloaded off Apple's website.)
2) I made my first MPEG2 HD DVD disc on DVD media with the video bitrate set to Toast's maximum of 26 Mbps. It starts to play on both my iMac and my Toshiba HD-A2, but skips on both. It seems to be a problem with the bitrate, in that the iMac's laptop drive and the Toshiba likely can't read the data fast enough off DVD media. If I put the disc into an external Firewire desktop DVD drive, the iMac handles the disc perfectly and playback is smooth. I also tried an 18 Mbps MPEG2 disc, and it still skips on the iMac if I use the internal laptop drive.
What this means for us is that we need to severely limit the bitrate on HD DVDs when using DVD media, for maximum compatibility with some DVD readers. I suspect a reasonable bitrate would be approximately 10-11 Mbps, but unfortunately, this is too low for MPEG2. MPEG2 is too inefficient a codec for good quality hi-definition material at that bitrate. At 10-11 Mbps, H.264 would be greatly preferred, but that is also not an option, since H.264 encoding in Toast does not work properly.
In short, Toast's hi-def disc support is problematic with DVD media at this time. Hopefully these issues will be corrected soon in a software update.
[Update 2008-03-20]
The skipping issue appears to be related to the DVD media type.
My iMac's Pioneer DVR-K06 and my Toshiba HD-A2 do not like Sony +R media (SONYD21). (These were burned as the +R booktype, not -ROM.) At 18 Mbps, both still skip. At 15 Mbps it plays smoothly on the Pioneer, but it still skips on the Toshiba. However, if I use Maxell DVD-R (RITEKF1) it plays perfectly with both machines, even at 26 Mbps.
Unfortunately, MPEG2 uses up too much space, and H.264 encoding still doesn't work properly.
The good news is Roxio is aware of the problem:
1) With the default encoding settings and with the advanced H.264 setting, it doesn't work at all with any of my files. Toast claims there are problems with the source material, but all of them encode to MPEG2 just fine in Toast. Obviously Toast has no problems reading the files. It just can't re-encode them to H.264 for some reason. (All the clips I tested are QuickTime HD files downloaded off Apple's website.)
2) I made my first MPEG2 HD DVD disc on DVD media with the video bitrate set to Toast's maximum of 26 Mbps. It starts to play on both my iMac and my Toshiba HD-A2, but skips on both. It seems to be a problem with the bitrate, in that the iMac's laptop drive and the Toshiba likely can't read the data fast enough off DVD media. If I put the disc into an external Firewire desktop DVD drive, the iMac handles the disc perfectly and playback is smooth. I also tried an 18 Mbps MPEG2 disc, and it still skips on the iMac if I use the internal laptop drive.
What this means for us is that we need to severely limit the bitrate on HD DVDs when using DVD media, for maximum compatibility with some DVD readers. I suspect a reasonable bitrate would be approximately 10-11 Mbps, but unfortunately, this is too low for MPEG2. MPEG2 is too inefficient a codec for good quality hi-definition material at that bitrate. At 10-11 Mbps, H.264 would be greatly preferred, but that is also not an option, since H.264 encoding in Toast does not work properly.
In short, Toast's hi-def disc support is problematic with DVD media at this time. Hopefully these issues will be corrected soon in a software update.
[Update 2008-03-20]
The skipping issue appears to be related to the DVD media type.
My iMac's Pioneer DVR-K06 and my Toshiba HD-A2 do not like Sony +R media (SONYD21). (These were burned as the +R booktype, not -ROM.) At 18 Mbps, both still skip. At 15 Mbps it plays smoothly on the Pioneer, but it still skips on the Toshiba. However, if I use Maxell DVD-R (RITEKF1) it plays perfectly with both machines, even at 26 Mbps.
Unfortunately, MPEG2 uses up too much space, and H.264 encoding still doesn't work properly.
The good news is Roxio is aware of the problem:
We're working on this... but I have authored AVC discs on DVD media.
I'll post an update when we have more information to share, right now we're gathering test files and working on a solution.
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