Verbatim, whose business is memory (and whose name means “to reproduce word for word,” by the way) has done a Rick Moranis job on its MediaShare NAS, resulting in the MediaShare Mini. One third the size of its predecessor, this guy retains its slight stature by going the Iomega iConnect route of eschewing on-board storage altogether for four USB ports (so it looks like you’ll have to factor the four thumb drives into the purchase price). And like the full-size MediaShare NAS server, this bad boy supports remote access via HTTP, support for a number of handhelds (including the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, and Palm Pre), Facebook integration, DLNA-compliant media streaming, and more. Look for it now for an MSRP of $90. Read the rest of this entry »

A low cost apparatus for capturing stereoscopic video is described and footage from the apparatus is presented in anaglyph form.

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No sooner do we ask about just how many readers actually give a hoot about multi-channel audio, in comes this. Considering the plethora of folks in the exact same situation, we knew right away it’d made a beautiful Ask Engadget HD question. Without further adieu:

“I recently splurged on a hot new plasma, but now I am looking for a surround sound system to complete the joy. My issue is that I currently live in a rental property, and don’t have the luxury of poking holes in walls to set up my system. I know there are a few options out there for people in my position (sound bars, wireless rear speakers, PowerLine?) but I have no idea which gives the best surround sound result. I was looking to spend no more than $2,000.”

We’ll be honest — almost anything is possible at $2,000, unless that includes the price of a few (very) nice drivers. We’ve seen solutions from Rocketfish and a slew of other companies that essentially enable users to add two rear surrounds sans wires when running cabling towards the back proves problematic, but often these are underpowered and flaky at best in actual use.

NVIDIA’s cutting-edge CUDA tech is cool, and it’s been talking about throughout the internet. Also it’s attractive to us, we started cuda working from the start of the year. After a period of hard working, we finally successfully integrated it into MediaCoder, it’s very awsome. We can’t wait to annouce it and publish the test report.

The report mainly compares transcoding performance between CUDA-accelerated H.264 and X264. There are two parts, one is performance on HD encoding, the other is on low resolution encoding.
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Carrying on the rich hacker tradition of picking up the slack for companies that are unwilling or unable to provide the functionality users need, a team of Wii coders have given the console what Nintendo could not: DVD playback. By installing a small, hidden channel on a system, this package blesses the console with a libdi file (DVD access library), and allows you to watch your favorite videos with the MPlayer application, an open source media player. The install file will run on modded and unmodded systems, and the software is also capable of playing media from SD cards (though it’s experimental right now). Finally Wii owners can join the ranks of, well… pretty much everyone else.

Origin: http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/13/the-wii-finally-gets-dvd-playback-no-thanks-to-nintendo/