DivX Goes Mobile

If you thought the highly compressed DivX multimedia format was only for PCs and DVD players then you might be interested to know that it has now made its way onto mobile phones and one of the first outings is on the new shiny, slidy LG Secret. Video on titchy screens tends to be a bit jerky and blurry and quite frankly a pain to watch for more than 30 seconds but on this very neat and well-featured 3G phone it is truly immaculate. The picture is clean and crisp with vibrant coilours and fluid movement. The Secret has a neat iPhone-like trick and when you turn it on its side the image automatically rotates, so you get the full benefit of the phones’ 640 x 480 widescreen display. Getting video onto the Secret is pretty straightforward too. DivX files can be uploaded by a USB cable from a PC or copied to a Micro SD card, (conversion software is included with the phone) or there’s the DIY method as the Secret has a built-in encoder, and you can shoot DivX videos on the phone’s camera. Read More »

Make YouTube YourTube

YouTube is great, well, some of it anyway, and even occasional visitors will see a video that they would like to download to watch again or send to someone else. There are lots of recording utilities on the web but this one, called Better YouTube has to be one of the easiest to use. It’s a Firefox add-on and it only takes a few seconds to install. Thereafter, if you see something you fancy simply click the ‘download this video’ link that appears just below the player screen and the download of the chosen video, as an .flv file, starts automatically. Incidentally, if you haven’t got a .flv player on your PC then I can thoroughly recommend the subject of a previous Top Tip, called VLC, which plays just about anything.

NBC Olympics Coverage on Windows Media Center

The 2008 Summer Olympics takes place in Beijing, China, from August 8 to August 24. With a free download service1 called NBC Olympics On The Go,2 you can catch up on TV coverage from NBC Sports. Select your favorite sports and NBC Olympics On The Go will automatically download the right events to your Windows Media Center-based PC. You can watch your selected events in up to HD quality, even when offline, and you can pause, rewind, or fast-forward the video.

Download NBC Olympics On The Go

To get NBC Olympics On The Go, start Windows Media Center and scroll to the Online Media menu. You’ll see an NBC Olympics graphic. Read More »

Jing’s The Thing…

You probably can’t see it in the photograph but at the top of the screen there’s a yellow dot. That’s Jing, an ingenious ‘always-on’ capture program that does just that. Click the dot and Jing starts to record anything you can see on the screen, be it a still image or a video, and if there is any sound that goes with it, it’ll capture that as well. It’s optimised for uploading to the web but you decide where your capture files go and the options include a local folder on your hard drive, a network folder, the clipboard or sharing sites such as Screencast.com and Flikr. Images are stored in .png format whilst videos are .swf files. Read More »

Nokia Presents Reset Generation for N-Gage and PC

Nokia has announced today that Reset Generation, the “game about video games”, is available on its N-Gage platform and can be downloaded by users who own the following handsets: Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N82, Nokia N81 and Nokia N81 8GB.

To play the game you have to choose from one of the ten heroes available, all of which are representative for the history of video games and have different superpowers. The objective of Reset Generation is to “rescue the princess” – you can do that either in the single player mode (where 18 missions are awaiting to be completed), or in an online multi-player mode, with up to other three players. Read More »

Century Old Idea for Memory Cards

Don’t ask us how they know, but SanDisk claims that its new 128Mb Write Once, Read Many times (WORM) SD memory card will store data for up to 100 years. If true and they’re on pretty safe ground from warranty claims — that’s a definite improvement on current technology. Data on rewritable cards and drives can start to deteriorate in as little as 5 years, though most manufacturers reckon they’re good for between 10 to 25 years.

Potential applications for the new WORM card includes storing evidential data used in police investigations, medical data, company records and so on. WORM cards can also be used for archiving photographs and home videos, in fact anything that you would like still to be around in 100 years time, though the big question with all these things is, will there be anything that can read SD cards in just 10 years, let alone in 2108…

Live Your Life with PlayStation

This is certainly the day for announcements made by Sony. In addition to revealing a video rental service designed for the PlayStation 3, the company is also launching a few other initiatives that are designed to make its gaming console more attractive to other demographics than the “hardcore” gamer. The social aspect of the PlayStation Network is brought into focus in an effort to compete with the Xbox Live service from Microsoft.

While mentioning that the PlayStation 3 has so far shipped more than 12 million units all over the world, Kaz Hirai, President of Sony Computer Entertainment, revealed that this number is past the critical stage at which the company begins to focus on providing more content to its users rather than on extending the installed base at an accelerated rate. Additional content is intended to create loyalty amongst the player base. Read More »

Find Your Loved Ones with Intel’s Technology

Undoubtedly, we are heading towards a future that resembles what you might have seen in countless Sci-Fi movies. It’s clear that this is happening because technology tends to advance at a very high paced rate. Speaking of which, Intel, the leading manufacturer of computer processors, is working on a video search technology that it hopes will improve the quality of our video search. The company also intends to bring it to its future multimedia platforms.

The technology is being developed at Intel labs in the US and China and is said to cut down videos frame-by-frame, and then use image and face recognition applications in order to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. According to Intel, the frames are aftwerwards patched together in order to allow video search. Read More »

Is My LCD OK? Well, Is it?

Here’s one way to find out, a small freeware program called, you guessed it, IsMylcdOK. It’s a simple LCD monitor checker program that displays a series of solid colours, gradients and horizontal and vertical lines that will show up most of the common faults on flat screen monitors. These include dead or ‘hot’ (always on) pixels, faulty backlights and incorrect video phase setting. The program download is tiny, around 15kb, and it doesn’t even need to be installed, it runs from the zip/exe file, or from a pen drive. It is really easy to use; though watch out for the intro screen, it’s in German, so click the English button to continue (unless you are, or speak German, of course). Read More »

Flippin Good Camcorder?

Here’s a quick heads-up on the next craze, probably… It’s called Flip Video, from Pure Digital and on the other side of the pond they’ve sold a million of them in the past few weeks. It’s a tiny pocket camcorder, around the size of a cellphone, so far so ordinary, but it has a couple of tricks up its sleeve. First it’s cheap, prices in the US start at around $99 or roughly £50. It has a built-in USB connector, so there’s no faffing around with cables, when you want to watch and download your videos to your Windows or Mac PC. Flip Video stores around an hour’s worth of video at quite reasonable quality, and you can upload directly to You Tube or edit the movie. Power comes from a couple of AA batteries and it has a built-in 1.5-inch display screen. Read More »