bruceb news

You’ve just gotta see the Honda commercial airing in the UK. Here’s a page where you can view the commercial in your browser – Flash required. It’s about 4Mb total, so it may be jerky or slow to appear on a dialup connection. Here’s an article about how the commercial was created.

There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film.

Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it. The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn’t work. They would then have to set the whole thing up again. […] continued

You can read the conversation between Neo and the Architect here, in case you missed anything the first time. (For goodness’ sake, don’t read it if you haven’t seen the movie yet!)

The Two Towers will be released on DVD in two editions, as with The Fellowship of the Ring. On August 26, the theatrical release will be available on DVD – but the one you really want is the special edition with 48 extra minutes of footage, available on November 18. Mark your calendar!

There’s an exploding market for home media centers. I can’t cover all the new equipment, but maybe this will help.

I have a huge digital music library on my computers, which I maintain scrupulously – all sorted into folders, with ID3 tags for artist and album and genre, all carefully groomed. But it was frustrating not to be able to play those songs on the home stereo.

I got the Turtle Beach Audiotron and set up wireless equipment to talk to it. (Drop me a note, I’ll tell you the details.) It plays songs from where they live on the computers. […] continued

Learn to live without Real One Player. You won’t be able to play some audio and video streams – but your computer will thank you.

Real Networks has earned a special place for its devious behavior – installing flashing icons down by the clock, popping up incessant pitches for money, concealing the checked boxes during installation that cause you to start receiving volumes of junk mail, and lots more. Its software has long been buggy. Here’s a new example of why to avoid Real products.

Imagine you need to restore to a previous configuration because some junky software broke your Windows XP computer. […] continued

A great new buzz word has turned up. You’ve heard about “time shifting,” in which you use a video-recording device – a VCR or a TIVO – to delay the viewing of live content, such as TV shows.

This year will see the introduction of a wealth of portable video devices. Microsoft previewed Media2Go yesterday , a handheld multimedia device that plays videos, music, and photo slideshows. Media2Go is the size of a thick paperback book, with a 320 x 240 color screen and a 20GB hard disk. The interface, which is based on Windows XP Media Center Edition, allows simple navigation with menu choices such as My Music, My Videos, My TV Shows, and My Pictures. […] continued

There’s exciting stuff being developed that will change the way your home entertainment system works. It will take a couple of years for it all to come to fruition, but the devices in the pipeline look very appealing.

Here’s an article that sums up some of the trends. An interesting prediction from the columnist:

“I’ll go out on a limb and say that, in less than five years, it will be pretty hard to buy a midrange home PC that doesn’t come with a built-in TV tuner and the ability to digitally record television programs. Further, I’ll predict it will be fairly easy to use that PC as the center of a home wireless entertainment system, where the programs recorded on the PC or a standalone digital video recorder can be wirelessly transmitted to displays throughout the home.

[…] continued

The New York Times has an article today with an intriguing premise: the world of video on demand is here, and it’s being delivered by . . . the Post Office.

DVDs hold digital versions of movies. Netflix is mailing out digital data on DVDs – an estimated 1.5 terabytes per day. To give you a comparison, it’s estimated that the total amount of data carried per day on the Internet in North America is between two and four terabytes.

In other words, there just isn’t the bandwidth to deliver high-resolution movies to your home over the Internet. There’s no technical solution to that problem in the immediate future. […] continued

The FCC has proposed draft regulations on two issues:

(1) Beginning July 1, 2004, all new televisions with 36” screens or larger must include digital receivers; in 2007, all new televisions must include digital receivers.

(2) The digital receiver will be required to include copy protection technology, making it impossible to copy digital programs.

What does it mean? Well, the broadcasters, studios, and hardware manufacturers each have ways to extract more money from you, if they can make your existing television equipment obsolete. There will still be regular, non-digital transmissions for a long long time, but the exciting stuff will be delivered digitally to tempt you into buying new hardware and signing up for digital services. […] continued

If you’ve been holding off on buying a DVD player, the time has come to face facts: VHS is dead. You’ve already noticed the shift at Costco, always a reliable indicator – the VHS tapes are almost gone. Now Circuit City has become the first major retailer to announce that it intends to discontinue sales of VHS titles altogether. It won’t be long before new VCRs get hard to find. Not long after that you’ll have children snickering behind your back while you mutter, “I just have to rewind this tape a little further, I know the scene I want is in here somewhere . […] continued