BenQ are pitching their new Joybook 6000 as part of their “digital hub” – and is the World’s first high definition 12.1” laptop.
The high definition screen runs at a 1280 x 600 resolution (WXGA) – we haven’t seen it yet, but it is by all accounts beautiful. We’ve been looking around and it seems to retail at about US$2640.
The Centrino notebook has the usual WiFi/Bluetooth/IrDA capabilities, so will be able to connect users to data services easily and under a variety of conditions.
Kevin Rollins, Dell’s president and chief operating officer has taken over the role of CEO from Michael Dell. Rollins joined the company as second in command in 1996, from Bains and Co.
Last year, Dell announced plans to launch new consumer products including televisions and its own personal music player.
Dell founded the company in 1984 with US$1,000 – last year Dell’s sales were worth $41.4bn. Shares in the company closed down slightly on the announcement, but the news is not expected to damage the company’s share price in the long term.
More details of the intriguing BBC interactive media player, iMP, first made public at IBC 2003, were revealed this evening at a AIGA meeting in London. Sara Watkins, Executive Producer, Broadband, BBC New Media gave the audience further details of what iMP will do and importantly, what it will not.
The most significant revelations were concerning the protection of the content. All content will be DRM’d, only available for a limited period time, once downloaded. As expected, it will also only be available to UK broadband users. In a break with the BBC’s long-standing support of Real, Microsoft DRM will be used for the technical trial, but it appears that no final decision has been made.
Sara started by running a video giving an overview of what the BBC hope the iMP will be and where it might go.
As was known previously, the EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) will cover fourteen days; seven looking forward and seven backward. The programs that have been broadcasted will be downloadable to the computer simply by clicking on them. A preview of a piece can be watched before committing to download a complete show.
Although it was not mentioned in this presentation, in previous discussion we have had we understood that upcoming programs could be selected to download, once they have been broadcasted.
People will also be able to recommend programmes it to friends.
The iMP, originally envisaged by BBC man Ben Lavender, will be a PC-only application that will be downloaded from the BBC website.
Further into the future they are looking forward to having the content on other devices, such as portable music players and even further forward, towards mobile phones. This portable content will initially be limited to audio, as the rights to these programmes are nearly all owned solely by the BBC.
Running through the demonstration version of the product, we were shown the player would have four sections
_Library area
A list of the content residing on the computer will be shown, as you would expect from any filing system. A new revelation was that the rights information for each show would be displayed on the right hand side of the screen.
Each separate show will be capable of having its own DRM setting, primarily how many days it will reside on your machine and therefore, how quickly you will need to watch the show before it become unavailable.
The examples given were
Eastenders (most popular UK soap) might be available for two weeks
An episode of Blue Planet (recent super budget natural history programme) might be available for two days.
The amount of compression applied to each piece of content will vary, so the video quality will vary. More popular programmes will be lower quality but programmes that would benefit from better quality will receive it, such as Blue Planet.
_Traffic area
As per standard peer-to-peer (P2P) packages – showing what is being transferred to and from your machine at any time.
It was reiterated that P2P file sharing technologies would be used to automatically exchange content between broadband-connected computers running iMP, thus saving the BBC a considerable amount of money on individually serving each files.
_TV and radio guide areas
No real details were given about this.
Stages of development
The BBC plan to carry out an internal technical trial, where they will work out the logistics of how to get the content from its original source (tape, etc), how to will be encoded, archived and make it available.
Later in the year, possibly around Easter, a closed network of users will be given the product to test it. During this phase they hope to understand how effective the interface design is.
Following these stages they will enter a product development mode – taking all of the learning and re-polishing the product. No date was mentioned for a public release.
During the Q&A session another interesting revelation concerning the Greg Dyke’s idea floated at RTS Edinburgh 2003, the Creative Archive. The content that makes up the Creative Archive will be downloaded using a similar application, but will not be restricted by DRM enabling people to re-edit it, or use it to make other programmes. Importantly it will not be the complete BBC archive, the examples given was – it will be nature programmes but it will not be show such as Dad’s Army (An old very popular comedy show first show in the 1970’s).
ATI Technologies have announced they will be releasing a card capable of receiving and storing US-standard HDTV. Called the HDTV Wonder, the add-on card will receive standard NTSC cable as well as free-to-air HDTV broadcasts enabling content to be saved to the computers hard drive. Full PVR functionality will available, as will the ability to burn recordings direct to DVD.
They plan bundle it with a selection of their All-in-Wonder graphics cards and make it available as a standalone product when they release it in the spring. The price hasn’t been disclosed.
No word has been received from them as to whether the card will comply with the FCC Broadcast flag requirements.
Hy-Tek are getting to free publicity, by announcing their will be releasing two wide-screen all-in-one multimedia computers, Tekpanel 300HD and the Tekpanel 370HD which will incorporate the card.
By Heidi Jacoby-Ackland
Program your Tivo now. Fightbox, the BBC’s new cross-platform interactive programme, is coming to a TV near you. Robot Wars meets The Sims-on-performance-enhancing-drugs, the BBC publicity machine is very keen to emphasise that Fightbox is a TV first. What, exactly, is Fightbox though? Is it the logical future of entertainment? In development for nearly four years at a reported cost of £3-4 million, Fightbox was conceived from start to finish to cross from the net to television and then into the PC/PlayStation 2/Game Boy Advanced game environments. Early indications for Fightbox are fairly positive and the promotional trails look fantastic.
Initially launched online a few months ago, gamers were drawn in their thousands to the Fightbox downloadable kit for creating their own warriors from a variety of different parts: arms, legs, weaponry, hair colour and even tattoos. Contestants “trained” their self-created warriors on their own PC’s before downloading a set of qualifying battles to practice controlling their creation and gaining a score – the higher the score the stronger the warrior. Then the best scoring virtual warriors (and their real creators) were invited to take part in the production of a television programme. According to the BBC, approximately 200,000 people registered their warriors and uploaded scores in the six-week qualifying period. As a demonstration of the interest in the game, apparently clans have emerged in the online community although they can’t play each other. Yet. It’s all gone a bit D&D.
The nay-sayers complain that the PC controls are, well, hard to control. There’s a rumour that the television production had to be put back a week because the software still had some glitches. And, although the BBC claims that twenty percent of the gamers were women, there’s a rumour that the Fightbox producers were so desperate to attract women that an online appeal was made especially to female gamers. Nonetheless, there’s a low hum of anticipation in the gaming community. Those gamers whose warriors made it to the television round report that the controls are better and the virtual studio experience was wicked. They claim that, as with all the best computer games, practice was key to their success. In the 30-minute television programmes, filmed as-live in front of a studio-audience, the virtual warriors have been transformed by the magic of computer graphics and a new type of filming into, um, virtual warriors in a real arena with real hosts (Trevor Nelson and Lisa Snowdon). The contestant warriors fight the Sentients (the virtual equivalent of the House Robots in Robot Wars) then, finally, go on to fight each other to find a winner. It’s a knock-out competition until just one of the audience-created warriors is left. And for those who participated the ultimate prize was on offer. No, not a million quid record contract for singing out-of-tune but the chance to have their warrior return as a Sentient in the next (yet-to-be-commissioned) series. The final champion may not get rich from Fightbox but he (or she) will get the satisfaction of directly creating a part of the game’s future.
When we asked, the BBC spokeswoman refused either to anticipate viewing figures for Fightbox or even to elaborate on what would constitute a successful outcome to this cross-platform interactive experiment. But it is not inconceivable that the programme could bomb as a television show while, at the same time, creating an enormous buzz for the game itself, either online or at the shop. Then what??? Having already spent the equivalent of some countries’ GDPs on development, it would be imprudent for the BBC to completely bale on the TV programme after just one series even if the ratings are poor. After all, the most costly and time-consuming bit of creating Fightbox, the development, is already done and dusted. Aside from the new Sentient, most of the future content will come from the audience who, in true interactive style, are not voting for a winner but creating the characters and altering the outcomes. The online kit is still available for download at the FightBox site. Although it is too late to qualify for Series One, now would be a good time to start practicing for Series Two.
Amazon – Buy the FightBox game on PC, PS2 or GBA
Fightbox Ltd is a joint-venture between Bomb Productions and Ricochet Digital. Fightbox, the TV programme, airs on BBC3 at 19.30 from 13-17 October and continues in that slot for three weeks thereafter. [Episodes will be repeated on BBC3 the following morning at 3.30 and are due to run on BBC2 in November.] Fightbox, the PC/PS2/GMA games, are due for release on 7 November.
Following the announcement of Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 (MCE) , Emuzed, who supply video capture and encoding cards, have signed deals with a number of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) that are using MCE.
Their two products Maui-III PCI PVR and Bali-II USB PVR Beanbag have the ability to encode to MPEG 2 on-board from PAL or NTSC signals, write out the recorded content out to CD or DVD and support an optional FM tuner. The Bali-II connects via USB 1.1 or 2.0
Two deals that they’ve announced recently are the Samsung MagicStation Q Media Center PC, HP’s new 17-inch widescreen Media Center zd7000 notebook PC which uses the USB version and most recently, the ViewSonic Media Center PC – the M2100.
A relative new comer, they look like they are taking trade from the previous default supplier, Hauppauge, which is based in Europe.
Arcade game ROMs have long been a popular download from the internet, due to the popularity of arcade cabinet emulators like MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator). The files are basically software images of the games, which used to be stored on hardware chips before files became bigger and other storage mediums (such as optical drives) became popular in arcade cabinets. Many arcade games have not been ported to home consoles, so players have no legal way to acquire games that they may have nostalgic feelings towards, or have kudos for acquiring. These factors, coupled with the fact that some publishers no longer exist, or the games are seen as old and therefore (erroneously) in the public domain, mean that ROM sites spring up all over the internet. Many downloaders don’t think they’re doing anything wrong by downloading these files, but they are still in copyright.
So, just like the music industry promoting legal downloads, StarROMs Inc has released 60 licensed ROM images, from as little as $2 each – and we bet that people will be downloading these classics, just like iTunes. If the StarROMs initiative takes off, gamers will be able to download many more of their old favourites legally.
Sixty titles isn’t much to begin with – but StarROMs has titles ranging from 1978 to 1992: titles like Asteroids, Millipede and – oh my goodness!!! – Crystal Castles and Marble Madness!
Will other publishers follow? We hope so – there are many, many gaps in the collection. Since the ROMs are images of the original software, they are essentially platform independent – but they rely instead on an emulator to provide all of the functions that the arcade cabinet once supplied. Emulators have been developed and ported to many platforms – so you’ll be able to play perfect arcade classics on a wide variety of platforms: PC, Palm, phone and perhaps even set-top box. Given that many set-top boxes and TiVo devices run a modern Linux kernel, and MAME has long been available on Linux, it’s not too far fetched.
A while back Microsoft started talking publicly about a new piece of software that they called OneNote. It is an interesting application that lets the user to take any of their text document, graphics, audio recordings, or in the case of tablet PC owner’s drawings/scribbles that they make during the day, and connect they together in a logical structure.
They are attempting to provide the user the flexibility of a paper notebook, the power of digital note taking and a powerful way of retrieving that information. It sound like it is an extension of the priciples of a brilliant piece of software that died with DOS, called Lotus Agenda. Agenda’s developer, Mitch Kapor is also working on an updated version of his masterpiece code named “Chandler”.
OneNote is going to be officially released at the same time as the new Microsoft Office suite, due on 21 October, 2003 and Microsoft have added meat to this deal by doing a deal with Toshiba to have it installed on every tablet PC or laptop that is shipped after the released date.
Link: Early review of OneNote beta
UK software company Redxpress have created DVD copying software, DVD CopyWare, which is to be distributed with DVD burners by DVD drive company Tritton Technologies. It will also be distributed by a number of US retailers including buy.com and will be released this coming Monday in the UK, carried by the chain PC World.
Alex Theochari, CEO of Redxpress told Digital-Lifestyles.info that consumers have a right to create personal backups of their own DVDs and pointed out that current copyright law protects content for 100 years, so films like Gone with the wind which was made in 1932 would be out of copyright by 2032 and following that, copies could be made as often as required.
The timing of the release is of particular interest after a California Supreme Court earlier this week. It ruled that the public posting of software on the Internet that broke the Content Scramble System (CSS), used to protect DVD content, was not supporting free speech but was in fact disclosing trade secrets. This overturned a previous ruling in a lower court. It was seen as a victory for the film business in their effort to restrict the copying of their content.
Redxpress tell us they have made provision for legal action, a wise move as we would expect the weight of the US film industry legal representation bearing down on them at any minute.