Apparently Sony found out they just don’t make ‘em like they used to and whipped up a belt-driven USB turntable: the PS-LX300USB. It’ll export your 33s and 45s through Sound Forge Audio Studio (bundled) and has its own pre-amp, but Sony, you’re living in the past, man. It’ll go for $150 next month — just sell off a Northern soul single or two to cover costs.

Origin: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/26/sony-announces-ps-lx300usb-usb-turntable-ready-to-fight-next-fo/

Since 0.6.1.4060, MediaCoder comes with XML-RPC APIs through which MediaCoder can be controlled by any XML-RPC client both locally and remotely. The APIs are not yet finalized, here lists some of them and you can see their effects right now.
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Finally, HD DVD users now have the empirical evidence they’ve been looking for to prove that the universe really is conspiring against them. We figured we’d make ourselves useful over here and give you a list of things you can do with your poor, obsolete HD DVD player — starting with taking it out to dinner, excusing yourself to the bathroom before the check comes… then getting the hell out of there.

Gimmes

• eBay
• Doorstop
• Entertainment center cup-holder
• Destroy it. Office Space style.

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The HD Specification
So what is HD? Hi-definition video is more than just a name to indicate an image has higher resolution than previous video forms, rather HD is a specific technical specification that all major hardware manufacturers and software developers have agreed upon for the future of film, TV, video and broadcasting.

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As I’ve been working on Windows XP x64, I am always interested to know how much difference of performance will VMWare and VirtualBox have on a 64-bit host system. VirtualBox has a native x64 version, but I haven’t yet found a native x64 version of VMWare. I guess this factor is likely to help VirtualBox to catch up with VMWare on x64 platform. Today I performed a benchmark for the two virtual machine applications by running MediaCoder in the guest system to transcode an DVD MPEG-2 PS clip of 720×480@29.97fps to an H.264 MP4 file of 320×240@29.97fps with MP3 audio. As there is no multi-processor support for VirtualBox and there is no sense to compare the video transcoding speed of a dual-core guest machine with a single-core one, I just chose Windows 2000 as the OS for guest machine.

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