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Pepcom Show Touts 720p Zune, New NVIDIA Toys, And Phones Galore
MojoKid writes "Recently, at the Pepcom Digital Experience show in New York, NVIDIA demonstrated the capabilities of the upcoming Lenovo S12 netbook, which features a single-core Atom CPU and an NVIDIA ION graphics processor. However, probably more interesting to some, NVIDIA was also showing off its new Tegra system-on-a-chip CPU, which will be powering the recently-announced Zune HD portable media player. The device was being demonstrated in a netbook form-factor and was streaming full quality 720p HD video over HDMI. On the networking front, Belkin was displaying its Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit — a speedy alternative to wireless networking."
I just had my Firefox taken down 5 times in a row the second I opened the link. I get the HTML but once it starts rendering something Firefox 3.0.11 goes kaplut.
Be warned.
Anytime I read the word Zune, I just laugh... is that just me?
I like the fact that Seagate is expanding its line of hardware AES hard disks. For backups (Time Machine, the included SafetyDrill software, Retrospect, Windows's backup utilities) it should provide decent protection of data in case of physical theft.
For a household or SMB, having the ability to install some "fire and forget" backup software that copies to a hard disk that has hardware AES encryption mitigates a lot of security risks. For larger businesses, it allows external drives to be repurposed from division to division just by telling the drive to do a secure erase (which erases the old AES keys making it well nigh impossible to recover the data.)
The Zune HD features 720p on a tiny, tiny, screen...or at home, where I can watch TV on a computer, console, or cable box. Not to mention, I'm sure the "720p" is compressed to shit just like all the movies on Xbox Live (and probably PSN for that matter). I guess this will make the Zune more attractive to a few people, but I'm not sold. I'd rather they took it more in the direction of a portable console, but I guess they are too chicken to fight Nintendo.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
"Belkin was displaying its Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit...."
Does this have that wonderfully innovative Belch-kin mis-feature where the device will hijack your connection randomly to show you ads for other Belch-kin products?
Seriously - I would NEVER put Belkin gear any place where it could theoretically modify the communications. Add to that Bletch-kin gear is usually overpriced for what it is....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Well, given that the Zune display is expected (as MS hasn't announced anything) to still be sub-standard definition, there isn't much point to having 720p video on the device UNLESS you also commonly carry around a dock so you can connect the Zune to another display that IS 720p.
Otherwise, it would be better for the video to be encoded at the resolution of the Zune's display.
Getting on my Apple soapbox now, this really looks like a 'bullet-point' type feature, like FM-radio, or that bizarre wireless-sync feature MS touted with the last version of the Zune (where they conveniently failed to mention that the Zune still had to be physically plugged into a power source to sync, making the feature at best 'remote' sync and not wireless sync at all). This kind of marketing has been shown over the last 5 years to be completely ineffective against the iPod.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
>where they conveniently failed to mention that the Zune still had to be physically plugged into a power source to sync
Thats not true. It wont sync automatically on battery power, but it syncs fine if you do a manual sync. You dont want it syncing every few hours only to pick it up a couple of days later and have the battery dead.
>This kind of marketing has been shown over the last 5 years to be completely ineffective against the iPod.
To be fair, the amazing Italian place near me cant compete with McDonalds. Popularity doesnt necessarily translate into quality. Consider how one of the most popular apps for the iphone/ipod is the fart simulator and, well, things arent so cut and dried. Those who side soley with popularity really arent convincing.
The Zune HD features 720p on a tiny, tiny, screen...or at home, where I can watch TV on a computer, console, or cable box. Not to mention, I'm sure the "720p" is compressed to shit just like all the movies on Xbox Live (and probably PSN for that matter). I guess this will make the Zune more attractive to a few people, but I'm not sold. I'd rather they took it more in the direction of a portable console, but I guess they are too chicken to fight Nintendo.
The Zune HD's screen isn't HD - it's 480x272. The "HD" just indicates the device is capable of driving an HD display, such as a 720P television.
#DeleteChrome
"Consider how one of the most popular apps for the iphone/ipod is the fart simulator and, well, things arent so cut and dried."
Exactly. But can you get a fart application for the Zune?
While it could be cool to have one file that you can "play everywhere",
doing this with 720p content at this point is impractical. You will
waste space on your PMP and gut your effective storage space.
OTOH, doing this with just quality 480p content would be a nice improvement over previous devices.
"drag drop and play" handily beats "pander to an ipod's limits".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
While I suppose from a very technical point of view, you're "streaming" over hdmi, that's no more streaming than it is over a vga cable or over the air. What it *does* do is confuse consumers by making s.t...re...am....i.n.g sound like a good thing. "streaming full quality" is an oxymoron in normal contexts.
Your wrong on the wireless sync comment.
Zune can be sync'd wireless by selecting it from a menu option or will automatically sync when docked after 1 minute of inactivity.
For example, I have a Zune FM Transmitter in my car that also charges the device. When I pull into the driveway, the Zune sync's automatically to update my playlists and podcasts.
You can also download directly from the Zune Marketplace wirelessly.
SGX chips (see OMAP3430) have been doing this at a fraction of the power for quite a while now....
P!
The head of the amazing Italian place would probably trade place with the head of McDonalds in a heartbeat.
You should see this 720p capability as more options being open to you instead of "OMG, I'll have to encode everything to 720p now, what a waste!" I have plenty of videos in 720p and having a Zune over an iPod would save a few hours of conversion when I bring those videos to a friend's house for showing. And no, not everyone has an HTPC, PS3, or anything that can play files from a USB key.
Interesting that Apple vetted the fart app but not the Kama Sutra.
I'm not saying it says anything about the sexual preference of Apple users, though. Absolutely not. I can unequivocally say that it doesn't have to do with the sexual preference of Apple users. It would be silly to say that.
Silly, I tell you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Zune HD features 720p on a tiny, tiny, screen...or at home, where I can watch TV on a computer, console, or cable box.
It's not that small a screen for a portable media player, and it'd OLED, not another lousy 24-bit LCDs with horrible banding.
For myself, there's an important third place I'm often in: hotel rooms. Which increasingly have nice HD TVs cursed with only lousy 4:3 SD coax analog inputs getting stretched to 16:9. ...and an HDMI input (universal in Marriotts now, and in other chains as well).
Being able to carrying around decent HD programming to hook into those sets should be a lovely thing, and free with Media Center recording HD OTA.
My video compression blog
The head of the amazing Italian place would probably trade place with the head of McDonalds in a heartbeat.
So, the head of the company making the Zune would trade places with the head of the company making of the iPod in a heartbeat.
By similar reasoning, the head of the company making OSX would trade places with the head of the company making Windows in a heartbeat.
Thus Microsoft and Apple get into an infinite loop of Steve-swapping.
I'd rather they took it more in the direction of a portable console, but I guess they are too chicken to fight Nintendo.
I read that when the XBox was being planned different teams at Microsoft got to pitch a solution to Bill Gates based on their technology. One of them was the WebTV team who had a Windows CE based platform.
Bill Gates detected the problem. Windows CE had to be made compatible with the upcoming version of DirectX 8.0. He interrupted the presentation and asked who was working on this project. Berkes, who was in charge of developing the latest version of DirectX, said to Gates that he didn't know anything about it. He would need a lot more programming resources to make sure that this conversion would happen and if done it would be a slow process. "It wasn't a credible claim" that Windows CE would be synchronized with DirectX anytime soon, Berkes said. The Xbox team had considered using Windows CE, but they dropped it as soon as they discovered the file size for CE programs was limited to 32 megabytes; they would have had to partition a hard drive into thousands of parts just to make CE run. Hence, the WebTV people didn't have a good software story. They hadn't had the presence of mind or resources on short notice to put together a demo that showed Windows CE working with a new version of DirectX. Gates also hammered the failure of Windows CE in the Sega Dreamcast.
"Tell me who used Windows CE in a Dreamcast game," Gates demanded.
Kummert had to reply that very few game programmers had done so. He and Phillips offered a half-hearted response about why that was so. Gates knew the matter all too well already.
The other was the XBox team with a proposal based on desktop Windows - apparently the original XBox used a hacked version of the Windows 2000 kernel - which ended up winning. Plausbibly the PowerPC based XBox360 still uses the same kernel, i.e. even though PPC support was dropped in the desktop version of Windows 2000 the build option was kept for the internal projects like the XBox360.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
the Kyocera lady brags about how their new phone has a dedicated music player with "8 megabytes of storage".
Which is actually quite a bit if you listen to SID or NSF chiptunes or tracker files in an 8-bit style. For example:
It's too bad the official firmware of most popular portable music players can't play chiptune formats or tracker formats.
And no, not everyone has an HTPC, PS3, or anything that can play files from a USB key.
Why doesn't everyone who has an HDTV have an HTPC? HDTVs can use the RGB video and analog stereo audio that any old PC outputs. Or are you talking about SDTVs, which need a converter like this one to display PC video?
R!
The Zune HD has a 480x272 screen. It can only display video at 720p using an EXTERNAL device such as a TV.
Because HTPCs are noisy, expensive, difficult to set up and use, prone to crashing, breaking, and just not working right.
They're no worse than a certain media center extender device made by Microsoft that has a "red ring" failure mode.
That said in Europe
My comments refer to the United States market because I live in the United States, as do the editors of Slashdot and the executives of SourceForge Inc., Slashdot's parent company. In North America, the closest thing we have to SCART is YPbPrLR component over five RCA cables, and the video side of that is not electrically compatible with VGA.
All you need is a custom modeline
But will the average Windows driver support a custom modeline?
and the right kind of video card.
You mean ArcadeVGA? Most people don't even know it exists, just like the VGA-to-composite adapter I linked. And unless the Intel GMA series is likewise a "right kind", people who didn't buy a video card for their PC won't be able to use it.