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 »

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…

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 »

Free Video Capture Makes its Debut

If it moves and it appears on your PC screen then you can capture it with this freeware application, called Debut. Now don’t get too excited, it can record streamed video (and audio), like You Tube and iPlayer, but the unless you have a blisteringly fast PC the frame rate will probably be quite slow if you don’t want to sacrifice too much picture quality, but it’s definitely worth experimenting and its certainly good enough for a quick and dirty archive. It’s just the job for making tutorial videos, showing someone how to do something on a PC, by recording everything that happens on the screen. It also has a built in timer and it can be set to email or upload your movie by FTP. You can even get it to burn directly to DVD with an optional add-on and there’s a facility to record from external sources like web-cams and USB capture devices.

DivX Goes Mobile

DivX, the super-efficient compression technology and codec that brings high quality video to your PC and DVD player is about to make an appearance on your mobile phone. For phones that are not DivX certified (there’s a list of certified phones on the website) simply download the DivX Mobile Player onto your Windows mobile device, Windows PC or Symbian phone and use it to convert videos to DivX format and transfer and play movies on your phone. There’s a simple to follow installation guide covering a range of devices and systems. It’s still in beta form but by all accounts it is stable and works well. While you are at it you can browse a beta version of a video content website on your phone at mm.divx.com.