Put down your iPhone and close Google Maps, because I’ll tell you the way to get to Sesame Street: it’s via iTunes Store Boulevard. The classic children television show, now in its 39th (!) season has brought several episodes from its 35th season to the iTunes Store.
Like pretty much every kid in the U.S., I spent some serious time with the denizens of Sesame Street, though I think it’s undergone some substantial changes since my formative years. This particular season is peppered with celebrity guests, including Liam Neeson, Venus Williams, and Norah Jones. But I think it’s pretty clear to me what the best episode ever is.
Episodes are available for $1.99 a pop, or $23.88 for all 13 currently available. Of course, you can always catch the show for free on PBS, but if you’re looking for a particular episode (or, more likely, your kid demands repeated viewings) this is a good alternative. Besides, it’s always a plus to support quality children’s programming, especially as the current economic downturn goes from Wall Street and Main Street to Sesame Street.
Xiph.org has announced the release of Theora 1.0. As if we didn’t have enough video solutions and codecs (I thank my lucky stars we have software like VLC and Perian to help avoid trying to understand the mess of them), we have yet another. Theora’s big claim to fame is that it’s royalty free.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s great. The fact that it’s supposed to have a small CPU overhead is also great. I’m just afraid we have another Ogg Vorbis on our hands. It could be yet another well intentioned media format that fractures the spectrum yet more, but never gains any real traction.
The strongest argument that it won’t quickly become irrelevant is Opera and Mozilla’s support for the format. With approximately 20% of the browser market, Firefox brings a lot of clout (I’m not going to pretend the Opera support is a big deal). I honestly don’t expect to see this video in the iPhone any time soon though.
Western Digital is best known for their hard drive offerings, most notably their successful MyBook series of drives (which I, for one, am a big fan of). But it would seem that WD has realized that lots of people are storing gigs and gigs of media on their drives without an easy way to go from storing said media on an external drive to watching that movie on a big screen TV. Enter the WD TV HD Media Player, whose sole goal is to make that happen.
As Macworld's own Jonathan Seff reports in his First Look, the WD TV is a bridge between your USB hard drive and your TV. Plunk the WD TV near your TV, hook it up using either HDMI or composite interfaces, plug in your USB hard drive (I'm sure the folks at Western Digital would prefer you use one of their drives, but the WD TV supports other USB mass storage devices including cameras and camcorders), and enjoy your media on the big screen.
The WD TV supports HD playback up to 1080p in a host of different video formats (MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)), and it also supports a number of popular audio formats (MP3, WMA, OGG (for you hippies), WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA). Of course, the WD TV won't playback any media that has DRM on it (including videos and some music from the iTunes store), so if you're looking for an iTunes Store-friendly set top box the Apple TV is still the way to go.
The WD TV does have some neat tricks to offer. You can attach two USB drives at one time and the WD TV will index the content on both drives and display the media in one collection. You can also run slideshows of your photos right off of your camera.
All of this for $130, so what's the catch? The biggest drawback that I can see, other than that Fisher-Price-looking remote, is that there is no way to manage your media on the device itself. In order to add new movies/music you need to grab your hard drive and hook it up to a computer. Seems like a hassle to me, but if you store your media library on an external USB drive the WD TV looks like a winner.
That day has finally come to combine your love of Netflix and your love of Macs. That’s right, you can start watching movies instantly on your (Intel based) Mac. Not by the end of the year, not soon, today. Oh, I’ll be watching a lot of movies tonight.
First thing, make sure you get the 2.0 version of Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. I know it’s highly disappointing to need a Microsoft product, but go do it.
Second, visit this link to opt-in. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.
Now visit the pages for all those movies in your queue that can be watched instantly and click play. I played a couple seconds of Pale Rider and it seemed to work well. It’s been a long road, but we’ve finally arrived.
[via Hacking Netflix]
In last week’s financial conference call, Steve Jobs reiterated his view that the Apple TV is a hobby for the company. He even went so far as to say that digital video in the living room as a whole had not really caught on.
I think the whole category is still a hobby right now. I don’t think anybody has succeeded at it and actually the experimentation has slowed down. A lot of the early companies that were trying things have faded away, so I’d have to say that given the economic conditions, given the venture capital outlooks and stuff, I continue to believe it will be a hobby in 2009.
That’s prompted some wondering about the future of the Apple TV. This morning, The Mac Observer’s John Martellaro posed the question of why Apple has not yet struck a deal with Netflix, who themselves have been pushing online video watching both through the Web as well as through partner devices.
Apple continues to regard Apple TV as a hobby and has curiously failed, so far, to secure an agreement with Netflix. Instead of getting an Apple TV into every Netflix subscriber’s home, Microsoft, Roku, LG, and Samsung are, in Apple’s absence, seizing the business opportunity, with likely others to come.
There are a couple of issues here, but the major reasons behind this decision have to do with Apple’s ethic: the way that they do business.
Continue reading "Why Apple won't push the red envelope"
DMCA. Four letters. Ten years. Countless frustrated consumers. Passed ten years ago today, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been arguably, for better or worse, one of the most influential pieces of U.S. legislation in recent years.
While the DMCA has been the legal muscle behind shutdowns of P2P services like the original Napster and Kazaa and helped usher in the era of DRM, it also allowed digital media to flourish in certain legal forms, including, amongst many others, the iPod and iTunes. So, whether you love it or hate it, the DMCA has become eternally tied to the spread of digital and online media.
Let's take a trip down memory lane to see just how this whole thing got started.
Continue reading "The DMCA: 10 years of the good, bad, and ugly"
Sure, we’ve showed you pictures of the new MacBook Pro getting its naughty bits put on display for the whole world to see, but you’ve never seen the MacBook Pro like this before. The folks at TechRestore have put together a stop-motion video journaling the entire disassembly process. Yeah it’s truly horrible graphic imagery at its best, but it’s so horrifying you just can’t look away.
[via Gizmodo]
If you couldn’t make it to San Francisco for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, you can still feel like you were there, thanks to the fact that Apple has now released videos of the event’s sessions. And heck, if you were there, you can still relive the good times, albeit without all the fun of the parties and fellow developers.
You’ll need a spiffy Apple Developer Connection Premiere Account in order to access the videos, which are being distributed via iTunes. Both videos and slides of sessions from all three tracks—Mac, iPhone, and IT—are available to developers. Topics ranged from Introduction to Mac and iPhone Development to Creating Widgets with Dashcode and Debugging and Profiling Your iPhone Application.
There’s a lot of great information packed in these sessions, so if you’re an ADC member who didn’t have a chance to to see them in person, there are probably at least a few thata re worth your time (though it might take some browsing to find them).
Much as I hate stealing Derik’s thunder and lightning (very, very frightening), it’s a distinct pleasure to bring you the news that Netflix subscribers can, at long last, finally stream movies and TV shows from the company’s website to their Macs, with the help of Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Well, sort of. The company put out a press release this morning, saying that they’d begun rolling out their “second-generation” media player. Those of you still in a PowerPC way will be left out in the cold, as only Intel Macs are supported by the Silverlight-based player. And the software is being rolled out gradually to Netflix subscribers—it’s not showing up for me yet—though Netflix plans to have it available to all its customers by the end of the year.
And so the battle for dominance in the digital video market wears on, with no clear victor in sight. Netflix has already convinced millions of people to pay a monthly subscription for all their video-watching needs; seems but a short leap from getting those movies via snail mail to watching them on your computer. Later this month, Xbox 360 users will be able to start streaming Netflix movies directly to their TV. If Netflix can bridge the computer-to-TV gap for the rest of its subscribers, it’ll be a force to reckon with.
