Category: Video Hardware

Epson’s P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer announced

Epson P2000Designed as a replacement for Epson’s P-1000, the imaginatively named P-2000 has higher capacity storage, a faster interface, two memory card slots and the ability to view, store and playback photos, videos and music.  If you are still nostalgic about the black and white photos taken in the back garden with the Brownie camera, just think of the multi-sensorial memories your kids will have.

Powered by a lithium ion battery, the P-2000 features a 40GB hard drive that can store thousands of photos, sparing the next generation the task of transferring all those unlabelled photos from plastic bags and cardboard boxes into albums. The built-in memory card slot supports Compact Flash Type I and Type II and Secure Digital memory cards, allowing you to transfer files quickly without having to connect to a computer.

Budding amateur film-makers can zoom and rotate images, create a slideshow with music and share images on an NTSC or PAL television screen, monitor or projector using an optional third-party cable. And surprise, surprise, you can also print directly to supported Epson printers.

Epson have a long tradition in LCD technology having introduced the first LCD digital quartz watch over 30 years ago, in the early 1970’s.  The 3.8″ Epson Photo Fine LCD screen displays images up to 8.9 megapixels and supports JPEG and RAW image file formats, MPEG-4 and Motion-JPEG video files, plus MP3 and AAC audio files. The P-2000 connects to Macs or PCs using a USB 2.0 interface for transferring photos, videos and audio files.

The Epson P-2000 display offers three colours per image pixel and a higher density of 212 pixels per inch, compared with one colour per pixel and 80-100 pixels per inch on a typical digital camera display. This gives it the ability to display up to 262,144 colours and an impressive, high-resolution image.

The Epson P-2000 will be available in early November for a price of $499 (~€395).

Epson

Gadget review of IBC04

IBC was good this year. There was real stuff to see. Ideas that were whispered two or three years ago are now products you can play with rather than vapourware. But you had to be cheeky to find some of them. Marching up to the stands with a request for a 90 second product demonstration certainly helped to cut through the sales bitch, sorry, pitch. Camera man Dave Allen and I spent a couple of days preparing our "gadget safari", looking for products, including software, of interest to the independent producer.

The Long Slow Fade
I am currently making a documentary on DV-CAM about the (slow) death of analogue radio. The question is whether digital radio will replace it in the form we were all expecting five years ago. In the UK, DAB is working. Elsewhere on the continent, it is a mixed bag. In Holland, for instance, the Dutch public broadcasters have stuck 6 of their channels on the air. But there is no added value for listening on DAB – the data is just the RDS feed and, with so few mountains, people are not writing to their favourite FM stations complaining about reception. Commercial broadcasters, still smarting from a crazy Dutch government auction of FM frequencies, refuse to play the DAB ball until they see a way of getting a return on investment.

With hindsight, the radio dial is the worst human interface ever invented. Millions of pounds of valuable content is hidden behind a number – or in the old days the name of the transmitter site! Do you know anyone who sorts their address book by their friends phone number? If you do, probably best to avoid them for intellectual conversation! It is unlikely that they floss very often too.

Pure Bug with DAB EPGWith all the competition from the "red button" and "iPod favourites" radio needs an electronic programme guide – an EPG. At IBC, Unique Interactive together with two receiver manufacturers – Morphy Richards and Pure Digital demoed the first attempts. Yes, the programme schedule is in there. But the intelligent radio that knows your preferences, anticipates and pre-records shows you might like is some way off. We’ll probably see the "personalised" software on Wi-Fi enabled MP3 players before the radios are out there.

In South Korea, the national broadcaster, KBS, is working with Samsung to make a multimedia enabled radio. On the WorldDab stand they showed how they’re putting video over the DAB network and calling it Digital Multimedia Broadcasting [Watch a QT video of DMB]. Korean Digital Multimedia BroadcastingThey know the broadcast network is ideally suited to mass distribution of media rich content. The economics of sending 3 minutes of video to 100,000 people make 3G a very expensive way of getting content broadcast, especially in a crisis. Nokia know that, but have chosen partners such as NTL and HP to work on a competing method of content distribution, DVB-H. Both are really in the physics experiment stage – no-one has developed stimulating content for these platforms yet – and it is not going to be ringtones that save the day [Watch QT video of NTL].

DAB, the other DRM, Wi-Fi
Two other technologies seem to be moving along. DAB has a complementary technology designed to make AM (long wave, medium wave and short wave) sound like FM. By turning the transmitter into a giant modem, and using 1/3rd of the power, the results are impressive. The RTL group plans to revive the "great 208" and see DRM (in this case, Digital Radio Mondial) as a cheap way of covering audiences spread over large distances. Three radios were on the DRM stand. I was particularly interested in a ?199 (~$245, ~£135) "cigarette box size" radio from Coding Technologies. It plugs into the USB port of a laptop and is also powered from the USB port. You need a bit wire as an antenna (keeping it away from the laptop processor), but the concept is a true plug and play [Watch a QT video of DRM].

As Wi-Fi takes off, a Wi-Fi enabled radio would be handy. There is a huge choice of radio programming streamed on the web. But you can’t carry it around the house. Philips StreamiumPhilips has a system called Streamium, which is more of a Wi-Fi enabled hi-fi/boombox. A clever piece of kit, but Philips haven’t a clue on how to promote it to the public. A Cambridge based research company called Reciva, on the other hand, had a much better concept to show at IBC – a kitchen radio format with a familiar tuning knob to change channels [Watch a QT video of Reciva].

It is no longer cool to be just a supplier to the "radio" journalist. Most of the people making recorders or editing systems are coupling the audio editing to some form of video editor. Handheld Digital audio recorders look pricey (?1000 +) when put alongside the new Sony HDR-FX1 HD-CAM cameraSony HD-CAM, the HDR-FX1, which will offer entry-level hi-definition video for the prosumer market for around €3,500 (~$4,314, ~£2,390). It also seems crazy that many of the best video editors can be downloaded for a couple of hundred bucks for personal use and yet some audio editors have made it impossible for the freelance community to buy cheap personal copies of the software. They forget what power of persuasion these people have in getting technology adopted within many broadcasting stations.

Our shortest visit was to Canford audio who have nothing on their stand – except one of the world’s biggest catalogues of audio equipment. In the back we spotted a pair of headphones, the DM H250 with a USB connector and a built in DA/AD converter – ideal for newsrooms with audio workstations that don’t want the expense of a separate analogue sound network. The headphones retail for around £110 (~$136, ~€75).

And finally on the audio side we picked up an iPod with a difference. It is actually a company within Harris called Neural Audio that was showing what their codec technology can do with a very limited number of bits. You got what sounded like perfect mono at 24 kb/s, and 5:1 surround sound at 96 kb/sec [Watch a QT video of Neural Audio].

Then onto stuff for the video/journalist in the field?and we found something that really is for someone like me. You are out on location with a complicated story?how do you remember your lines? Telescript has a small Teleprompter that works with a lap-top and is bright enough to be useful in the field. It will set you back £1,500 (~$2,700, €2,200). The batteries last for a day’s shooting. [Watch a QT video of the Telescript]

It doesn’t take long for videographers to realize that steadycam isn’t steady enough for the bigger screens we see today. But the tripod and dolly manufacturers guess correctly that we don’t want to spend our old age in a home for the bewildered with back pain. IBC had a lot of useful equipment for the documentary maker. The Italian company Manfrotto had a carbon-fibre tripod with gimbles, just the thing to keep the camera level on uneven terrain. They also had useful remote controls for handycams allowing for much smoother zooms using buttons on the tripod. LED backlights and even dim-able LED spotlights were on show – and much closer to daylight that I expected [Watch a QT video of the lights]. Perhaps one of the fastest demos was from Microdolly Hollywood who have a portable dolly-track which folds up in 5 seconds -flat! [Watch a QT video of Microdolly] I also bumped into an Israeli company called DVTEC. They have some useful devices to take the weight off your shoulders with a heavy camera, plus a compact car mount which, although light, won’t come off as you drive [Watch a QT video on DVTEC’s product].

My vote for originality goes to Puddlecam from the Norwich based EV Group. They’re in the sports TV business, trying to offer way in which to make unique action shots without ruining the camera. The indestructible Puddlecam is ideal for getting those action shots from the side of the road – in fact from anywhere where ordinary cameras fear to tread [Watch a QT video of Puddlecam].

I think software concepts also deserve a prize. If you want a complete set of test and measuring equipment while doing important DV recordings in the field, look no further than DVRack from the US company of Serious Magic. It is like taking a broadcast truck on location – except the software runs on a laptop. Download the demo to try before you think about purchasing [Watch a QT video of DVRack]. Personally, I was impressed, especially since you can start using this software to save DV to hard-drive and only use DV tapes as back-up. US$495 (~?403, ~£274) is the download price. If you need maps on location, then the Norwegian company of MAPcube offer a special deal to independent journalists who need to draw accurate maps, perhaps for a TV documentary or a website. They take publicly available data from NASA, but then adjust the presentation to make it usable for the broadcast industry [Watch a QT video of MAPcube]. Finally, the satellite company of SWE-DISH caught our eye with a satellite dish, FA150T, that can be folded and carried as a back-pack – at 38 kg (84 pounds) a bit heavy for the overhead locker, but ideal for expeditions to some of the remote areas of the world. Why are these devices still so heavy? Because they need a power amplifier to make contact with the satellites. This one from Sweden uses GPS to find the location of pre-programmed satellites. It is controlled from a laptop. A perfect case of shoot the video, then automatically point to dish to transmit [Watch a QT video of SWE-DISH].

That’s all we can squeeze into this space. This survey was done independently of the stand holders – no money changed hands nor was any equipment donated. Colleagues from other IBC sessions in the series also found other gadgets. Perhaps we can persuade them to share their discoveries for a follow-up column. If you want to see the stuff in action, watch the videos!

About Jonathan Marks
Jonathan Marks has worked in public broadcasting in the Netherlands for just over 24 years, but started his own consulting company in the middle of last year called Critical Distance. He produced a popular communications show on Radio Netherlands called "Media Network". He now plays devils advocate to a number of companies, questioning their strategies, but at the same time preparing alternative scenarios for what technology is making possible.

Sony “iPod” Killer Will Play Video

Another week, another “iPod killer” story: Sony have announced that the next version of their Vaio Pocket audio player will play video too.

Sony is keen to get back some of the portable media player market lost to Apple, and is hoping to do so with its next range of machines. Sony’s players will be backed with an online Sony music store, Connect, so the company will be able to provide the entire content process – from PC to content to player. Sony’s insistence on using its own proprietary audio format to reduce piracy may make the job of growing market share harder as customers’ ease of use suffers.

Sony unveiled their new music player in Japan this week, the VGF-AP1. Whilst the device features a 2.2″ colour screen, it’s for the user interface only: it can’t play video.

Sony is working with the Digital Home Networking group to define standards for device interoperability, and will use 802.11g to transmit video from its next generation Vaio Pocket to compatible televisions.

Sony’s new music player

Sony EyeToy gets Sociable

Slowly and steadily, Sony is building on the usage and application of the ground-breaking EyeToy webcam add-on for their Playstation 2. The latest announcement is EyeToy:Chat, which expands the tool into a far more social area.

As you probably already know, EyeToy is a low cost Webcam that plugs into Sony’s Playstation 2 and is placed on top of the television, pointing into the room. The player controls the game by moving their arms, body and head around, which in turn interacts with the games. There is no need to use a joypad. It was originally released as EyeToy:Play and came with twelve mini-games; Kung Fu – chopping opponents, the inevitable dance games – Saturday Night Fever-style arm waving, even Keep-up – using the head to keep a ball in the air and knocking it into objects.

EyeToy: Chat brings voice, chat, video mail, video chat and a selection of video-enabled simple games such as chess and checkers. Utilising the broadband adaptor the text chat rooms allow 256 people to talk together, with 16 people able to converse at one time in the voice chat rooms, as well as real-time video. When people are in one-on-one video chats, the options to play the simple games are presented. The video mail feature will allow users to send 30-second video messages to anyone on their buddy list.

Clearly safety will be a big concern for parents and Sony’s London Studios, the original inventors of EyeToy, who developed Chat and have spent considerable efforts in trying to make the product as safe as possible. User will need to register with Playstation Net to use it and will only be bale to take part once they enter the PIN that is send to their home address. With Chat rooms being moderated and a clear processes for grievances Sony feels “‘EyeToy: Chat’ is one of the safest communication packages available on any system on the market.”

The whole of the Digital-Lifestyles office is looking forward to its European Summer release.

Bringing the School into the Home via Broadband

As Britain moves closer to complete broadband coverage, communities around the country are beginning to explore the potential that interactive services offer and are partnering with technology companies and content providers to create some innovative services.

We decided to look at one of the best examples of community broadband TV: Kingston Communication’s collaboration with an East Yorkshire school which has led to an exciting project to engage pupils in interactive learning, both at home and in the classroom.

The Kingswood High School’s Broadband TV (KBTV) Project was conceived in 2001 under the UK Government’s Information Society Programme and Hull’s own Digital Learning Plan. Kingswood was chosen to collaborate with the BBC in its Headstart project.

The BBC provided the school with access to its film and video archive – and from this, using standard desktop tools like Premiere, pupils and teachers were able to create interactive content that formed the basis of many exciting and informative lessons.

Kingswood High went on to develop the idea into community broadband TV – with the aim of providing a range of interactive services via set top boxes (STBs).  The school secured enough funding for the project to provide a one-year trial of STBs for all the families in the local community with a suitable phone line.

We spoke to Andrew Fawcett, Head of Products and Services at Kingston Communications about the stealthy growth of broadband television: “IPTV has come of age, and it’s come of age in a non-linear fashion.  We’re on both sides of the equation, because part of our business is being a broadband ISP, and that’s been experiencing exponential growth, delivering one megabit of broadband to a consumer PC.  Since 1998, we’ve been delivering five megabits into the back of people’s television sets with a service that people don’t know is broadband.”

We asked him for some background to the Kingswood project: “Everybody who goes to Kingswood School, all the kids basically as part of their school work, use the KIT service – it’s given to them free of charge.  They’re creating their own content at school level.”

“The service covers 200 homes at the moment, but we have a proposal to roll it out to 2000.”

Staff at the school are finding that this new way of learning reaches and appeals to children who would not normally enjoy or benefit from traditional classroom teaching methods.

The interactive service provides immersive learning tools at school and at home. Andrew added, “They (the pupils) get the Kingswood Channel, a school’s TV channel with three elements to it.  One is that we deliver curricular materials – there’s a permanently available set of resources for all subjects that’s very video rich.”

“The second part is taking stock materials and turning them into their own programmes.”  Each (school) year has its own area on the service, though areas are accessible to everyone.”

As an example of this, Andrew showed us a documentary on arson that had been created at the school.  The film had been constructed from content that was put together by the school’s pupils and teachers.

Part of the experience of learning about arson includes the kids going out with cameras and interviewing people.  The idea of making children media literate is very powerful. I’ve seen kids who would be a nightmare in class, but this stops being class work, and becomes making a film – and more importantly it becomes a film that’s going to be on live telly when they get home.  You can suddenly engage kids at a level that’s incredible.  Very significantly, the school comes into the home.”

The film included an interview with victims of arson, and an arsonist – and was put together with standard desktop tools like Adobe Premier.

Interactive television like this also provides educators with valuable information on the effectiveness of services and lessons.  “Year Ten”, he told us, “will be asked to go home and watch this as homework.  We track usage for a select number of pupils who have chosen to opt in to the research elements in the programme.  We’re looking at Educational Family Footprints.  One of the key determinants of the success or failure in education is parental support.  We’ve taken families with different educational footprints – from homes where education is core to the family life, to others where education is less important.”

The third aspect of the service provides pupils with a virtual PC they can access using their television set at home.  The system runs a virtual PC using Citrix MetaFrame – all the processing is done at the server end of the network, which only sends screen updates to the set-top box.  The box essentially becomes a “dumb terminal”.  Pupils can access and save work stored on the school’s network, and use Star Office providing them with applications for word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations.”

A virtual PC service like this has many advantages, as the customers don’t have to maintain a PC at home and so security against spyware, hacking and viruses is taken care of by a qualified IT department at the school.  It also ensures that pupils all have access to the same computing platform.

Andrew is justifiably proud of this aspect of the service, “Of all these things we’ve done with KIT, this brings everything together.  It brings the localness and on-demand aspects of the service together, and it emphasises the difference of broadband TV – you could never provide an application like this with satellite TV.  It’s wholly back-channel dependent.”
Kevin Beaton, Head Teacher at the school explains why they wanted to get so involved in a service like this:  “The rationale for the whole project is that the school becomes the local hub that is able to provide the surrounding community with access to digital services. Initially the focus will be on education, so that we can prove to everyone involved that the principle of on-demand access to information and interactive educational content really is viable.”

Vein continued, “The school is currently developing material to be used on KBTV, and we’ve identified a number of logical and consistent uses for the system. Lessons in several departments are already being developed using our very latest interactive ‘White Boards’. This in turn means that teaching methods and the style of learning are changing, and more and more lessons will begin to make use of film and video as a stimulus to greater creativity. Some of the items will only be produced for homework purposes; hence students would be expected to watch educational material on film, and then complete set work on the film at home. Other material will be work from lessons at school, which can be completed at home, or perhaps reviewed at a later stage as part of a planned revision programme.

“Yet other material will be demonstration work from subjects like Design Technology, where soldering small intricate parts can be clearly be shown to pupils in close-up mode. In the field of Art it would be possible to view many different examples of paintings and sculptures, with the key points that ensured the success of the work clearly demonstrated.

“Another interesting aspect of the KBTV on-demand channel is that parents would have independent access to vital school information concerning their children. This would include attendance records, term dates, coursework deadlines, examination entries, parents’ evenings, exhibitions and school music and drama productions. In addition, direct contact could be made with school staff via e-mail, with the possibility of video conferencing for those parents or guardians who were unable to physically visit the school for whatever reason.”

And what about the future for services like Kingswood?  Andrew Fawcett told us what was up next: “There was a very small budget for this – by squeezing things, as we tend to do, we managed to deliver it to 200 homes, to get a reasonable feel for the potential.  This stage of the trial finishes in June – our intention is to look for additional sources of funding.”

Kingswood High and Kingston Communications are compiling information on the before and after effects of the KBTV initiative – hopefully benefits of this sort of programme will inspire more partnership and research in the educational possibilities of our broadband future.

Kingswood High School

Kingston Communications

BBCi Humber

Gateway’s Wireless, XP Media Centre-aware, DVD Player

Gateway have released an upgrade to their wireless DVD player – and it seems to be a world first. The ADC-320 Wireless Connected DVD Player will take a wide range of content from your PC and show it on your TV. Ideal for watching all those TV programs you recorded with the Windows Media Centre PVR.

The 802.11g enabled player will connect to a PC up to 300 feet away, and is compatible with Windows Media Centre as well as ordinary Windows boxes. Interestingly, multiple ADC-320s on the same wireless network can “listen in” on a media stream and display the same content in multiple locations – handy for events and large parties. Consequently, the DVD player incorporates security features to enable it to comply with secured networks, supporting WEP and WPA encryption.

The player also supports a large range of formats: MP3, MPEG1, 2 and 4, Windows Media , Microsoft PVR and AVI files.

This new hardware is essentially the previous ADC-220 with a firmware upgrade and a 802.11g card in the back – in fact, Gateway are already offering an upgrade path to the 320 through their website.

An ADC-320 will set you back US$199 (€166), and is available now.

More about the ADC-320

Sony Launches Hard Drive for PlayStation2 in US

Sony have finally launched the PlayStation2 hard drive in the US, some might say a little late into the console’s life cycle. The drive is identical to the one that has been shipped with the Linux kit for the last 18 months – but then the drive in the Linux kit wasn’t compatible with game saves or downloading content.

So why now? The hard drive is needed to play Final Fantasy XI, the first online iteration of the baffling (hey, only if you don’t play it) role-playing game, and sales of the FF series more than justify marketing a $99 peripheral that was already in production. The drive comes with FFXI pre-installed, and players will be able to sample the game free for 30 days – but will have to cough up $12.95 a month as a subscription to keep going.

But that’s just one game – there will be a huge range of downloadable content and media available for subscribers: new levels, music, perhaps even full-length films. Given that the average game save is about 200kb and you could fit roughly 200,000 of those on the new disk. Sony obviously have a lot planned – and if the peripheral takes off, suddenly Sony has a potential installed base of more than 70 million broadband-enabled, game playing media hubs in living rooms and bedrooms around the world.

We’ve been quite looking forward to the hard drive, the endless fiddling about with memory cards is annoying: one card for RPGs, one card for all our EyeToy pictures, and Bahamut help me if I lost Sesame’s card with her Grand Theft Auto and Silent Hill saves on it.

Sony’s press release

“But your chocobo just squashed my level 76 Beastmaster!”

 

Microsoft’s’ iPod Killer – Bigger, More Expensive

It had to happen – although Microsoft have had mixed fortunes in the hardware market, it was inevitable that they would release a competitor to the iPod and other personal media players out there.

This new gadget will have functionality not seen in iPods so far: video playback and picture display, and it will run MS’s Portable Media Centre (PMC) OS. “We think this is going to be one of the hot devices for Christmas 2004,” said James Bernard, product manager for PMC. The hardware itself is basically a Creative player with a 20 or 40 gb hard drive. Sizewise, it’s about three times the thickness of an iPod and twice as long.

The device will play MP3s, so won’t be completely tied to Microsoft’s own Windows Media Format. As previously reported, MS have content deals in place with Napster and EMI.

Pricing in the in relevant markets varies, but is estimated to be US$750, €550 (Denmark, Sweden) and UK£399.

The impeding release can only increase speculation that Apple will retort with a video iPod at some point next year.

Slashdot — “LOTS OF SHOUTING”

Reuters

BSkyB Announces Next Stage for Sky+

The Sky+ personal video recorder is set to evolve under new plans from BSkyB: they want to transform the PVR into a video and audio jukebox that subscribers can download films and music to.

Other plans include integrating five separate tuners – a move which will allow subscribers to record four channels simultaneously whilst watching a fifth.

Sky are also working on a technology that will allow Sky+ users to download content from their set top box to their portable video player so they can watch recorded programming whilst out an about.

Sky hopes to make £400 from each subscriber per year by the end of 2005. By building new functionality into their Sky+ product and then charging on a service by service basis, they should be able to earn significantly more revenue per customer, on top of the basic £15 subscription fee.

Since most domestic users are unlikely to ever want to record four separate programmes whilst watching a fifth, it seems to Digital Lifestyles that BSkyB will probably use this new capability to download films and programming to the PVR automatically, to a dedicated area of the hard disk. This will then allow Sky to promote the programming and offer it to to subscribers on an impulse buy, pay-per-view basis.

Media Guardian on Sky’s plans

New Sony Products Shown at Open House

Sony’s Open House event this year covered all the key consumer devices – from HDTV recorders, and new Handycams to extremely desirable PDAs with more bells and whistles than a bus load of Morris dancers crashing into a flute factory.

Sony are going for integration even more than usual – HDTVs have integrated card readers for cable users, Clié PDAs and VAIO notebooks feature even sharper cameras and better wireless access than before, and MP3 support filters into products where there was previously only ATRAC.

More details from DVD Format