The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged H.264
Windows 7 and RiksTV
Jul 5th
Windows 7 RC has already been out for some time, but I have only recently started discovering the changes since the public beta. I wrote a longer introduction to Windows 7 when I got the hands on the beta. The introduction is still worth reading. Also information about DVB-T and HDTV seems to be some of the topics that are most interesting for my readers.
Get yourself a cup of coffee and read the rest of this article.
Introduction to Windows 7
Jan 14th
It’s two months since I got the first introduction to Windows 7 (code named Vienna) at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2008 in Barcelona, and this week Microsoft released a public beta of their next client operating system. I have installed it on my MacBook Pro, and plan to install it on an office machine in AD and on my home machine.
I have been using Windows Vista for about 3 years now, through some of the betas and later with the released product. At the department where I am the sysadmin, more of then half of our computers are running Windows Vista (three of them x64) and Office 2007. All in all, I can say that we are very satisfied. This is not the situation many other places, as I often hear of companies that have decided to continue with Windows XP and not implement Vista in their organization. At our department we have only ran in to a few problems, most of them have been software not following Microsoft’s coding guidelines.
Watch the video on NRKbeta video – Direct link to this video
More >
RiksTV on a Mac?
May 12th
It’s a long time since I wrote about DVB-T with H.264, and I must admit that it is by far the most read article on my blog. I recently also written that people should not consider RiksTV when the analogue signals are turned off, so I guess some of you are a bit surprised when I wrote about them again.
The reason is simple, I am a Mac guy. Yepp, honestly I am. MacBook Pro, AppleTV, Time Capsule, iPod Touch and an iPhone on it’s way … Elgato is one of the companies only delivering software for the Mac platform that I admire most. I loved their EyeTV software, and have tried both their first and second version of it. Elgato recently launched EyeTV 3, sadly I have not had the ability to try it out yet and I was suprised to see that they in a bugfix release x.0.2 (EyeTV 3.0.2) added full support for H.264 digital broadcasts in standard-def and HDTV resolutions. For a Norwegian with a H.264 terristical sendings, this must be Christmas all over again, well that is if you are using a Mac!
Norwegians will be just as sad to see that the new version only provides QuickTime exporting of ATSC / NTSC Closed Captions for use on iPhone, iPod and Apple TV devices, cause that is for North America only. Other then that users will find a few new deinterlacing options, improved on-screen menus and a handful of bug fixes to boot.
RiksTV About To Launch
Aug 19th
It’s about 10 days left to RiksTV is to officially launch (Sept. 1 2007), and the world’s three first MPEG-4 decoders are appearing on the Internet:
- Grundig DTR8720
- Grundig DTR8740 with MHP and MemoryStick
- Sagem ITD81-HD
As you can see, the more expensive decoder from Grundig is the one to buy, as it is the only one with support for the Text-TV standard MHP and with MemoryStick for recording a TV show. But only MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) is important, PVR decoders with inbuilt hard drive for recording of TV-shows, will appear later this year. The price difference is only 500 NOK. NRK (at their beta site) has published a video of the new Text-TV as it will be introduced when RiksTV goes live:
Do I need Apple TV?
May 13th
It’s time to upgrade my XBOX 360 with Microsoft’s latest patch. The new features are mainly the video codecs H.264 and MPEG4. Nullriver Software was out with updating their Connect360 for MacOS X. Version 3.0 is now released with support for the two new video codecs, including full HD (1920×1080) H.264 in both the MPEG-4 and QuickTime containers (in addition to the previous WMV). This is substantially higher than Apple TV’s support for 720p video, making the Xbox 360 the best full HD video extender available. It is of course also possible to share iTunes Podcasts to the Xbox 360. Great, I now just need a new TV!
None of the devices are perfect, just as the XBOX360 is known for being disappointingly loud, the AppleTV is getting extremely hot! Apple TV’s advantages are firstly that the XBOX360 cannot decrypt iTunes DRM and that the XBOX360 has cluttered menus when using anything else then a Windows version with Media Center as the UPnP server.
Hm, I have been playing a bit with the solution. And it is not working satisfyingly! Most podcasts crashes and some times they even freeze the XBOX. I ripped 10 short movies from a DVD with Handbrake and streamed them. That worked far better, but also then I experienced a crash.
I will be trying this also from my Vista Ultimate installation to see if the problem is the codecs or Connect360. But so far, I am clueless on what the problem can be…
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