A Few Thoughts…

I didn’t care too much when the VHS/Betamax wars were going on because of my age. Today’s format war has gone into swing – HD-DVD/Blu-Ray (BD) will prove to be an interesting mix. Personally I would like BD to take the title, and not just because Microsoft supports HD-DVD! Both technologies are a step in the right direction of storing more information on a medium that consumers are comfortable with: the 12 cm diameter flat disc. The Blu-Ray folks have approched the problem with a revolution, not just an evolution, of the current media. Both systems use a 405nm blue-violet laser for reading/writing data, but the optics used in the BD system are of a higher quality and can focus the laser to a 0.60µm dot while HD-DVD is at a 0.76µm dot. This allows a single-layer BD disc to hold up to 27GB of data! Meanwhile, a single HD-DVD disc can hold 15GB of data. For movies, this difference won’t mean much – since that much storage isn’t needed for HD versions of movies. For storing data it’s an entirely different matter!

Why haven’t we seend DVD’s with more than two layers? I don’t know for sure, but my guess is because they are working with a legacy environment. The DVD spec was created in the early 1990’s, with the dual-layer option added later. The optics had to work in the 650nm and 780nm wavelength (for DVD’s and CD’s respectively), and the smaller dot size was largely an issue of focusing by moving the lens in closer to the disc (someone correct me if I’m wrong).

Both HD-DVD and BD have 2 lens systems, but because of BD’s superior optics, the focusing can be much more precise. TDK showed a 100GB, four-layer BD disc which, as best I can tell, is possible thanks to the higher quality optics in the Blu-Ray system. I think these kinds of advances will make Blu-Ray a better option for the large consumer base – not just movies, but computing too!

All of this was inspired by this article: ICv2 News – ‘Serenity’ First Universal Title on HD DVD

Of course, I REALLY hope these guys come out with a viable solution soon too.  Imagine 1.6TB with 120MB/s data rates from a 12cm disc! Ahh holography – isn’t physics fun!

A good read on Apple’s iTunes, and how the big recording companies are suffering from greed. If the labels are getting $0.70USD from every song, that leaves Apple with at most $0.19USD. Take out the cost of paying the credit card companies for the transactions (which, let’s say is 4% of the purchase price) of about $0.03USD, that leaves a whopping $0.16USD for Apple to play with. The cost of hardware for storage and the increasing bandwidth demand would still be well under that for Apple (since they make some of the storage hardware I’m sure).

The point here is, the labels want more money. They aren’t happy with 70.70% of the price – they want more. How much of this money goes to the artists? How much does it cost the labels to market their songs on iTunes? Let’s see those percentages Mr. Recording Label Guy, let’s see where the money is going! iTunes is popular because of the low price. I don’t mind paying $0.99USD for a single song, but much more than that, and I think I’ll pass. Take your eyes off of your bank statements, and look at how beneficial services like iTunes have become to you.
Technology News: Music & Film : Record Industry Pushes Apple to Raise iTunes Prices

Okay, I confess – while being an engineer, I do enjoy the occasional art show/gallery visit. I don’t get into a lot of the modern art stuff, or maybe it’s post-modern art, of which the term never made any sense to me. Anyway, what I do enjoy is digital art, especially art based on mathematical and scientific principles such as projections of 4 dimensional objects onto a 3 dimensional space (2 dimensions loose WAY to much information to make them useful for anything other than text-book material). Anyway, there’s an artist who has done some of this in metal no less: Bathsheba Grossman. There’s some really cool stuff there, go check it out!

The other thing that I enjoy looking at, and working with (though I don’t have the necessary tools or time right now) is completely digital representations of real environments. I’ve always wanted to work on a ray tracer/rendering tool – not to put it to market, but just for personal edification on the techniques of such a system. A company called Next Limit Technologies have come out with some really awesome tools that do much of what I would like to attempt: real-world physics renderers and fluid simulation tools – geared for presentation, not engineering (though they could be used for science). The renders may take longer, but the results from complex materials with internal caustics is simply stunning. Very cool stuff indeed! It’s times like this I know I’m a nerd: “Hey Joe, what would you like to do for fun?” “Why, I’d like to write a rendering engine based on the physics of the real world!” Just go look at the galleries [render] [fluid - click on the gallery button at the top] and you’ll see what I mean!

Back in college (not that it was all that long ago) we used the Yahoo! radio thing to listen to music while studying and things. Well, now there’s this cool web app called Pandora. You don’t just get to rate the songs played, but you can essentially seed the station with an artist or song name! It’s pretty cool, go check it out!

www.pandora.com

From a link on digg.com (which I’m starting to read more and more), an extreme camera: the Red Digital Cinema 4K. Able to shoot in 2540p (that’s right – 2540p, not 1080p, much bigger than that – 11million pixels) at 60fps, this baby would be set for HD recording for a few years to come.

And what would you use to edit video off of this baby? Why the rumored Final Cut Extreme!. Okay, so I may be dreaming a little bit here – especially since I don’t own a digital video camera to upgrade from, the speculated $200,000 price tag on the camera, and the $10,000 price tag on the software (not to mention the price to upgrade the hardware to read, write, and interact with files the size this camera would produce). But, they’re supposed to be released around the time of my birthday: April 22-27 at the National Association of Broadcasters!

As a follow up to the earlier post about Christmas Lights, it just got a lot cooler! They guy who did it lives in Cincinnati! And on the east side no less – so for all you west siders out there [sticks out tongue].

They guy uses software from a company called Light-O-Rama to program everything, and transmits the audio over a low-power fm from his computer to keep things synced. I’m thinking about starting on a project for next year’s Christmas which bumps things up a notch. We’re talking theatre-style controls for things…I may need some help, including the donation of a house to use *COUGH*tim*COUGH*

This….is…awesome….

HTG needs to find a way to market something that does this. Turn the speakers up (or headphones if you’re in an office like me), sit back, and enjoy the best Christmas lights I have EVER seen!

(Click on the picture for the video)

Okay, for those who don’t know, I consider myself a bit of an audiophile. If you get excited about a pair of $900 custom-made earphones, and contemplate buying a pair, consider yourself n audiophile too. I like personal audio products, and touring audio products – I don’t get too excited about home audio things for whatever reason. When I go to the occasional concert, I usually would rather hang out with the sound engineers and talk about their setups rather than being close to the band.

Anyway – about the earphones I’m talking about….
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