Laserdisc

Laserdisc Wikipedia

Laserdisc (LD) was the first commercial optical disc storage medium, and was used primarily for movies for home viewing.

During its development, MCA, which owned the technology, referred to it as the Reflective Optical Videodisc System; changing the name once in 1969 to Disco-Vision and then again in 1978 to DiscoVision (without the hyphen), which became the official spelling. MCA owned the rights to the largest catalog of films in the world during this time, and they manufactured and distributed the DiscoVision releases of those films under the "MCA DiscoVision" label beginning on December 15, 1978.


Laserdisc (left) compared to a DVD/CD (right).

Pioneer Electronics also entered the optical disc market in 1978, manufacturing players and printing discs under the name Laser Videodisc. For 1980 the name was compressed into LaserDisc and in 1981 the intercap was eliminated and "Laserdisc" became the final and common name for the format, supplanting the use of the "DiscoVision" name, which disappeared shortly thereafter; titles released by MCA became MCA Laserdiscs or (later) MCA-Universal Laserdiscs. The format has been incorrectly referred to as LV or LaserVision, although this actually refers to a line of Philips brand players; the term VDP or Video Disc Player was a somewhat more common and more correct name for players in general.



During the early years, MCA also manufactured discs for other companies including Paramount, Disney and Warner Bros. Some of them added their own names to the disc jacket to signify that the movie was not owned by MCA. When MCA merged into Universal years later, Universal began reissuing many of the early DiscoVision titles as MCA-Universal discs. The DiscoVision versions had largely been available only in pan and scan and had often utilized poor transfers, the newer versions improved greatly in terms of both audio and video quality.

UMD

UMD Wikipedia

The Universal Media Disc (UMD) is an optical disc medium developed by Sony for use on the PlayStation Portable. It can hold up to 1.8 gigabytes of data. It is considered the first optical disc format to be used for a handheld video game system.

ECMA-365: Data Interchange on 60 mm Read-Only ODC – Capacity: 1.8 GB (UMD)

* Dimensions: approx. 65 mm (W) × 64 mm (D) × 4.2 mm (H)
* Maximum capacity: 1.80 GB (dual layer), 900 MB (single-layer)
* Laser wavelength: 660 nm (red laser)
* Encryption: AES 128-bit

Despite Sony's efforts, the UMD format has been cracked. Using a combination of unsecure firmware and reverse engineering, the Sony PSP can now use a variety of homebrew games, and backup ISO images. Each disc uses a file system whose format follows the ISO 9660 standard. The ISO image can then be stored on a Memory Stick, and run via a special disc emulator program, such as Devhook. The ISO images cannot be burned to UMD discs as UMD writables and burners are not available. The same game will load much faster and become more energy efficient when stored as an ISO image on a Memory Stick as opposed to the original UMD.

Sony has attempted to halt this type of exploitation by updating the firmware. Versions 1.51 and later of the PSP firmware have attempted to patch the exploit. Recent games also come with a 'software switch' that force users to update before the game can be played. This has also been circumvented: some applications for 1.50 report the firmware version as being more recent than it actually is, or firmware spoofing, bypassing the need to update. This has since been fixed by Sony and no longer works. Firmware versions 1.5 to 3.73 have been decrypted and 1.50, 2.71, 3.02, 3.03, 3.10, 3.30, 3.40, 3.51, 3.52, 3.60, 3.71, 3.72, 3.73 and 3.80 (as of Dec2007) have been converted into custom firmwares. These firmwares allow people to run ISOs that they own from their XMB interface in addition to other homebrew available.

dts

DTS (also known as Digital Theater Systems), owned by DTS, Inc., is a multi-channel digital surround sound format used for both commercial / theatrical and consumer grade applications. It is used for in-movie sound both on film and on DVD, and during the last few years of the format's existence, several Laserdisc releases had DTS soundtracks.

One of the company's initial investors was film director Steven Spielberg, who felt that theatrical sound formats up until the company's founding were no longer state of the art, and as a result were no longer optimal for use on projects where quality sound reproduction was of the utmost importance. Work on the format started in 1991, four years after Dolby Labs started work on its new codec, Dolby Digital. The basic and most common version of the format is a 5.1 channel system, similar to a Dolby Digital setup, which encodes the audio as five primary (full-range) channels plus a special LFE (low-frequency effect) channel, for the subwoofer.

Other newer DTS variants are also currently available, including versions that support up to seven primary audio channels plus one LFE channel (DTS-ES). DTS's main competitors in multichannel theatrical audio are Dolby Digital and SDDS, although only Dolby Digital and DTS are used on DVDs and implemented in home theater hardware. Spielberg debuted the format with his 1993 production of Jurassic Park, which came slightly less than a full year after the official theatrical debut of Dolby Digital (Batman Returns). In addition, Jurassic Park also became the first home video release to contain DTS sound when it was released on LaserDisc in January 1997, two years after the first Dolby Digital home video release (Clear and Present Danger on Laserdisc) which debuted in January of 1995.

Jack Higgins

Jack Higgins Blog

Jack Higgins (b. July 27, 1929) is the principal pseudonym of UK novelist Harry Patterson. Higgins is the author of more than sixty novels. Most have been thrillers of various types and, since his breakthrough novel The Eagle Has Landed in 1975, nearly all have been bestsellers.

Non-Series Novels

* Sad Wind from the Sea (1959) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* Cry of the Hunter (1960) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* The Thousand Faces of Night (1961) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* Comes the Dark Stranger (1962) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* Hell Is Too Crowded (1962) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* The Dark Side of the Island (1963) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* Pay the Devil (1963) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* Seven Pillars to Hell (1963) (writing as Hugh Marlowe) aka Sheba
* Thunder At Noon (1964) (writing as Harry Patterson) aka Dillinger
* Passage By Night (1964) (writing as Hugh Marlowe)
* Wrath of the Lion (1964) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* A Phoenix in the Blood (1964) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* A Candle for the Dead (1966) (writing as Hugh Marlowe) aka The Violent Enemy
* The Iron Tiger (1966) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* East of Desolation (1968)
* In the Hour Before Midnight (1969) aka The Sicilian Heritage
* A Game for Heroes (1970) (writing as James Graham)
* Night Judgement At Sinos (1970)
* The Last Place God Made (1971)
* Toll for the Brave (1971) (writing as Harry Patterson)
* The Wrath of God (1971) (writing as James Graham)
* The Savage Day (1972)
* The Khufra Run (1972) (writing as James Graham)
* A Prayer for the Dying (1973)
* The Run to Morning (1974) (writing as James Graham) aka Bloody Passage
* Storm Warning (1976)
* The Valhalla Exchange (1976)
* To Catch a King (1979) (writing as Harry Patterson) aka The Judas Gate
* Solo (1980) aka The Cretan Lover
* Luciano's Luck (1981)
* Exocet (1983)
* A Season in Hell (1988)
* Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo (1989)
* Flight of Eagles (1998)
* Sure Fire (2006) (with Justin Richards)
* Sheba

Vega

A mid-infrared image of the debris disk around Vega. Spitzer Space Telescope/NASA.

Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, the fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus. It is a relatively nearby star at only 25.3 light years from Earth, and, together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the most luminous stars in the Sun's neighborhood.

Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed, "arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun". Historically, Vega served as the pole star at about 12,000 BCE and will do so again at around 14,000 CE. Vega was the first star, other than the Sun, to have its photograph taken and the first to have its spectrum photographed. It was also one of the first stars to have its distance estimated through parallax measurements. Vega has served as the baseline for calibrating the photometric brightness scale, and was one of the stars used to define the mean values for the UBV photometric system.

This star is relatively young when compared to the Sun. It has an unusually low abundance of the elements that have a higher atomic numbers than helium. Vega is also a suspected variable star that may vary slightly in magnitude in a periodic manner. It is rotating rapidly with a velocity of 274 km/s at the equator. This is causing the equator to bulge outward because of centrifugal effects, and, as a result, there is a variation of temperature across the star's photosphere that reaches a maximum at the poles. From the Earth, Vega is being observed from the direction of one of these poles.

Based upon an excess emission of infrared radiation, Vega has a circumstellar disk of dust. This dust is likely the result of collisions between objects in an orbiting debris disk, which is analogous to the Kuiper belt in the Solar System. Stars that display an infrared excess because of dust emission are termed Vega-like stars. Irregularities in Vega's disk also suggest the presence of at least one planet, likely to be about the size of Jupiter, in orbit around Vega.

H.264/AVC

H.264 Wikipedia
IEEE Overview of the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard (pdf)

H.264 is a standard for video compression. It is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, or MPEG-4 AVC (for Advanced Video Coding). It was written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10 standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003.

The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (e.g. half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems.

The standardization of the first version of H.264/AVC was completed in May of 2003. The JVT then developed extensions to the original standard that are known as the Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt). These extensions enable higher quality video coding by supporting increased sample bit depth precision and higher-resolution color information, including sampling structures known as YUV 4:2:2 and YUV 4:4:4. Several other features are also included in the Fidelity Range Extensions project, such as adaptive switching between 4×4 and 8×8 integer transforms, encoder-specified perceptual-based quantization weighting matrices, efficient inter-picture lossless coding, and support of additional color spaces. The design work on the Fidelity Range Extensions was completed in July of 2004, and the drafting work on them was completed in September of 2004.

Further recent extensions of the standard have included adding five new profiles intended primarily for professional applications, adding extended-gamut color space support, defining additional aspect ratio indicators, defining two additional types of "supplemental enhancement information" (post-filter hint and tone mapping), and deprecating one of the prior FRExt profiles that industry feedback indicated should have been designed differently.

The H.264 name follows the ITU-T naming convention, where the standard is a member of the H.26x line of VCEG video coding standards; the MPEG-4 AVC name relates to the naming convention in ISO/IEC MPEG, where the standard is part 10 of ISO/IEC 14496, which is the suite of standards known as MPEG-4. The standard was developed jointly in a partnership of VCEG and MPEG, after earlier development work in the ITU-T as a VCEG project called H.26L. It is thus common to refer to the standard with names such as H.264/AVC, AVC/H.264, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, or MPEG-4/H.264 AVC, to emphasize the common heritage. The name H.26L, referring to its ITU-T history, is less common, but still used. Occasionally, it is also referred to as "the JVT codec", in reference to the Joint Video Team (JVT) organization that developed it. (Such partnership and multiple naming is not uncommon—for example, the video codec standard known as MPEG-2 also arose from the partnership between MPEG and the ITU-T, where MPEG-2 video is known to the ITU-T community as H.262.)

Stage6

stage6.com

Stage6 is a video sharing website first launched by DivX, Inc. in 2006 and currently in public beta. It is similar to sites like YouTube in allowing streaming video to be uploaded freely by anyone who is willing to register. Significant differences between Stage6 and other sites include better quality video through use of higher resolutions up to 1080p, few upload limitations, and the option to download media directly through the website or the DivX Web Player without the need to install browser extensions.

Unlike most video sharing websites, Stage6 requires the installation of the DivX Web Player to view videos. Since the DivX Web Player is designed specifically for viewing videos, streaming of extremely high quality, high resolution videos is made possible with low CPU overhead. The DivX content uploader is also bundled with the Web Player, enabling users to upload Stage6 compliant videos via web browser.

Stage6 accepts DivX or Xvid encoded files up to 1080p60. Under certain circumstances, Stage6 will reject encoded videos with unsupported audio formats. Upload file size limit for a video is under 2 Gigabytes.

On July 24th 2007 DivX, Inc. announced that it would be seeking to separate Stage6 as a company from the rest of DivX, Inc.. Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Jordan Greenhall will be switching from his current role as CEO to manage the separating Stage6, which, if successful, is expected to be completed later in 2007.