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
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.
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.
Table A.1 describes the MPEG-4 Visual levels for the Version 1 and Version 2 profiles only including natural visual (or video) data, this means the so-called MPEG-4 video profiles. Note that Level 0 for the Simple profile has been defined in the 2nd Extension to the 2nd Edition of the MPEG-4 Visual standard.
Hardware Environment:
Software Environment:
For a successful AMR encoding in MediaCoder, you have these steps to follow:
The concept is simple enough: aspect ratio is the fractional relation of the width of a video image compared to its height. The two most common aspect ratios in home video are 4:3 (also known as 4×3, 1.33:1, or standard) and 16:9 (16×9, 1.78:1, or wide-screen). All the older TVs and computer monitors you grew up with had the squarish 4:3 shape–only 33 percent wider than it was high. On the other hand, 16:9 is the native aspect ratio of most HDTV programming; it is 78 percent wider than it is tall, or fully one-third wider than 4:3. Read the rest of this entry »
Transcoding is a life-or-death issue facing manufacturers and service providers as they try to realize the explosive growth in video entertainment. Consumers have an insatiable appetite for immersion in entertainment, and transcoding among multiple formats will be mandatory for all future video products to be successful. Digital signal processing technology will be an essential piece in laying the foundation for transcoding among multiple consumer devices.
As the accelerating video market extends its reach to products such as cell phones, portable media players and automotive infotainment systems, consumers are demanding easy access to their video content throughout the home and on the go. Multi-format transcoding will enable the seamless transmission of video content between all types of video devices.
Transcoding will be essential for the continued evolution of the video entertainment market. Why? Content is king and consumers are demanding that it be easily transportable and available on any device. Transcoding is the ability to take existing video content and change the format, bitrate and/or resolution in order to view it on another video playback device. This is also true for high definition (HD) content where transcoding extends the reach of content beyond the TV, making it possible to send, receive and view HD source content on any video device at any resolution. For more information on HD, check out the links on the left hand side of this web page.
Transcoding a single video format is available today but that will not meet consumers’ needs to easily navigate the changing video environment. The ability to seamlessly view content on any device in real-time requires the need to transcode many video formats, thus multi-format transcoding is key.
Multi-format transcoding is the most important challenge to overcome for manufacturers and service providers to solve before realizing the potential tremendous growth in video. Consumers have an insatiable appetite for immersion in entertainment, and transcoding multiple formats in real-time will be a necessary function for all future video products to be successful.
* This is a collected article.