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/

The following is a directory of open source software that can be used for P2P video streaming.

Tribler

• License – GPL (Open Source)
• Language – Python
• Operating systems – Any platform that supports Python
• Supported multimedia – Windows Media video, NullSoft video, Theora video and Dirac video

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I was invited, among thousands of developers, to participate in the Intel Developers Forum this year held in Shanghai. Intel has proved us that he is very rich by holding a really big event in the whole building of the top conference center of Shanghai. Besides the extravagance I experienced, there were several lectures given by Intel fellows and scientists somehow rewarding to me I think. Here are a few pictures taken in the event.

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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/

For those who do online gold trading (like me), I made a tiny gold price watcher extension for Firefox, which displays current gold price (and the change) and USD to RMB exchange rate (useful to me )

The data is retrieved from Kitco.com and Bank of China and is refreshed every 3 minutes. Single clicking the status bar area will refresh the data. Double clicking will display the chart.

Click here to install it. If you have problem installing it directly, please right click the link and download the xpi file and drag-n-drop the file into your Firefox to get it installed.

Firefox 3 is going to provide a wide range of improvements to performance, stability, and security, and it’s also going to present several new user facing features. Here is a quick recap of design work that’s been going on in the Mozilla community over the past few weeks for Firefox 3, along with information about how you can help contribute, by providing feedback on these designs, or creating your own UI mockups.

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Earlier this week, Apple announced that YouTube.com videos would become available on the Apple TV after a software update that will be made available in June.

iLounge spoke with Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Mac Hardware Marketing, David Moody, who provided more details about this upgrade.

According to Moody, not all of the Youtube catalog will be available on day one. Instead, “thousands of videos designed for Apple TV” will be available at launch, but that the remainder will become available by the fall. The reason for the delay is that Youtube will be encoding all of their videos into a “H.264 streaming-efficient compression format” specifically for the Apple TV. All of Youtube’s videos are currently encoded in Flash Video (FLV) format.

While no official reason is given for the mass transcoding of Youtube’s entire catalog, Macformat.co.uk believes it has to do with the iPhone.

As far as I know even now, Flash content per se might not play on the iPhone from day one. But Apple clearly doesn’t – indeed, shouldn’t – care, as YouTube is for many people the most critical site that uses Flash.

Indeed, both the iPod and iPhone can play H.264 encoded video, and so it seems the entire Youtube catalog may also become available to those devices later this year.

In an early iPhone FAQ, Jobs described this exact scenario:
Markoff: “Flash?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”
Markoff: “What about YouTube–”
Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”