Just recently, a team at the University of Tokyo found that using titanium oxide could allow optical disks to store 5,000 gigabytes of information. Honestly, that’s astounding. At the same time, a lot of people’s minds began buzzing with the implications. With these discs, Hollywood studios could release entire television series such as Lost and 24 plus bonus content all on one disc. Video games could finally fit huge engines and graphics all on one disk. Finally, studios could include super high resolution video on their discs so that people could see the movie in its fully rendered glory. However, let’s stop for a moment to take a quick poll. How many of you even own a Blu-ray player? If more than one of you out of 10 raised your hand, congratulate yourselves on being ahead of the curve. Though a majority of people still get their movies and television series delivered to them by optical media, it seems as if new media such as Blu-ray simply can’t pick up steam. A Harris poll taken last year showed that only 7 percent of Americans owned a Blu-ray player. Even though Blu-ray offers more than twice the resolution of standard definition DVDs and a higher quality sound, Americans still aren’t sold on the idea. Of course, this begs the question: why?

Popular reasons include the extra price of Blu-ray discs and that some people are happy with things just the way they are. However, there seems to be an even bigger reason behind all of this. Let’s take one last poll. How many of you watch movies or television online? If more than half of you raised your hand, then you would fall in line with research recently done by shopping site Retrevo. The study found that 51% of people in all age groups watched at least some of their television online. With these facts, the question becomes this: when the internet offers both free and cheap high quality video content all without having to leave your La-Z-Boy, why would anyone want to invest in a Blu-ray player or a Blu-ray disc? The answer might be that for most people there are no better alternatives for watching high-definition content on their internet-free TVs. However, with products such as the Apple TV, the new Google TV, Roku, and of course, the HD rich cable set top boxes, it is evident that hardware manufacturers and cable providers are betting that pretty soon, you won’t have an excuse not to.

The only real problem I can foresee with Internet TV is the fact that bandwidth is notoriously spotty with many internet providers. Also, no software or hardware provider has yet mastered the user experience with Internet TV. Often, they’ll make the experience too much like the internet itself (and no one wants to type on a keyboard), or they’ll make it too much like a TV which is very limited in its function. However, one day when a company finally gets the balance of TV and internet just right, Internet TV could be the biggest revolution since cable.

As our lives become increasingly immersed in mobile media and digital entertainment, a question has surfaced: Flash or H.264? Just as the battle started to gain some momentum, new data has indicated that the H.264 format may have already won. According to Encoding.com (via TechCrunch), the H.264 format is used by 66 percent of all videos, whereas Flash has fallen from 69 percent to 26 percent of all video in just the last year.

The popularity of H.264 comes at no surprise. After all, the H.264 codec is supported by all kinds of video hardware and software, as well as video sharing sites such as YouTube (not to mention, Apple’s biased support and undeniable preference for the format). Despite its popularity, legal concerns have emerged regarding the use of the codec by consumers.

A recent concern comes from blogger and MIT graduate Ben Schwartz, who said “A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software pre-installed. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain’t so.” Schwartz supports his claim with text pulled from specific software licenses.

According to an article on Gizmodo.com regarding the topic of H.264 licensing, if you’re making money (selling your product to the end-user) from video encoded or decoded with the H.264 codec you need to acquire a license. In February, MPEG LA announced that the AVC Patent Portfolio License, which the H.264 codec belongs to “will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users”… at least until December 31, 2015.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at times with all of the legalities surrounding video production. The key is to stay well-informed. Learning about new technologies and making sure to read the restrictions listed in the fine print can help you avoid legal problems. Choosing to stay in the dark will only cause issues down the road. After all, you’ll never know whose toes you may be infringing upon.

Thankfully, the majority of my projects require no DVD authoring. Recently though, I needed to make a simple DVD menu and sub-menu with scene selection buttons. I ran into a peculiar DVD Studio Pro quirk that irked my skirt. In brief, this problem had to do with restarting a DVD after hitting stop twice. After hours of combing the web, and heading down dead-end rabbit trails, I finally came up with a solution. Figured I’d pay-it-forward to any bleary-eyed editors out there who’ve been pulling their hair out over this.

First the problem: When you hit ’stop’ on a DVD and then ‘play,’ normal behavior for a DVD is to ‘resume’ playback from the stopped point. If you hit stop, and then stop again, this should reset the disc as if you’d just inserted it into the DVD player. The problem with my disc is that, after hitting stop twice and then play, the disc would start on track 1 and not the first play menu. (My log read, “User action: System initialization. Jumping to Track: Track 1) How annoying is that? I still don’t know why this was happening. But it’s likely an issue with the way DVD Studio Pro writes it’s GRPM and SPRM values. Now you could buy expensive software and learn how to program DVD discs from the ground up, or you could try this…

My Solution: No matter what I tried, I could not get DVDSP to return to the menu after a double-stop. I tried scripting it, I tried rebuilding the project, I even tried some demo versions of that expensive software I mentioned but it quickly got over my head. Since DVDSP was being stubborn, and completely set on restarting at track 1, I finally gave up and said, “fine you can have track 1, stupid software, but I get to tell you what’s going to be on track 1.” And that’s the solution: put 2 seconds of black on track 1 and then tell the DVD to end-jump to the main menu. Hey, it’s not perfect, but it works.

If anyone has another way to solve this problem, please let me know.

________

Jesse Rosten is a filmmaker and photographer currently based out of Northern California. He’s a fan of creativity in all its forms.

With movies like Avatar and recent innovations unveiled at CES, it’s become quite obvious that the world has caught 3D fever. Unlike 3D crazes of yesteryear, the resurgence of 3D technology seems to be here for good. With new 3D products encompassing all areas of video technology, and the Blu-ray Association and HDMI Licensing announcing their 3D specifications, it was only a matter of time before 3D hardware became a reasonably priced addition to home entertainment technology.

Yesterday, Sony launched their newest product, the BDP-S470 stand-alone Blu-ray 3D-ready player. Not only does the BDP-S470 have the capability to play Blu-ray 3D content (with firmware updates that will become available this summer), but Sony has packed it full of other features as well. According to Sony’s press release, once connected to broadband Internet, the Blu-ray 3D player can “instantly stream movies, videos, music, and more from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, YouTube, Slacker Internet Radio, Pandora (Coming Spring 2010), NPR, Sony Pictures, Sony Music, and over 25 total providers through the Sony BRAVIA Internet Video platform.” And, because the iPhone has an app for everything, it also has an app for the BDP-S470. The Blu-ray 3D player can be controlled by the user’s iPhone or iPod Touch with a free app (downloaded from the Apple App Store) called “BD Remote.”

The BDP-S470 is priced surprisingly low ($200), making 3D home entertainment an affordable addition to consumer households and further perpetuating 3D fever. Have you caught it yet?

It’s Official – Apple released their tablet today! The iPad.

Read the rest of this entry »

Frameline has announced a significant update to their MPEG7 video logging and media asset management software for Mac OS X. It’s available for £89 (US$139); upgrades are free for existing customers.

Frameline 47 is especially designed to work with video. It scans drives for video files, extracts their metadata and builds an SQL Database. It features file management, editing and annotation tools as well as a Capture interface. The application can be used alone or as part of a network-based video editing and media cataloging workflow. Read the rest of this entry »