MP3 Wars: Apple vs. Creative

Interesting discussion going on at Engadget about the ongoing mp3 player battle between Apple and Creative. I posted the following comment that I don't think gets enough air time:

The Creative Zen Micro does have a killer feature: Yahoo Music at $60 a year. Currently no one can touch this. Look, I am an audiophile for the past 30 years. I have thousands of vinyl LPs. Thousands of CDs, some SACDs, etc. I have so much music I couldn't listen to all of it for the rest of my life. Still, I want to hear new things and take it with me. For portability, I am willing to sacrifice a wee bit on sound quality. Yahoo Music offers all their subscription downloads at WMA 192kps. I rip my own CDS at 192 kps. It's a reasonable compromise of sound for portability. For $60 a year I can stuff myself at the Yahoo buffet. If I find something I really like I can buy the real CD. This is much better than buying deaf - the cds I buy I have never actually heard. I buy based on "intelligence guided by experience". Yahoo's unlimited plan at $60 a year is less than half of a satellite radio subscription. With Yahoo Music I'm in the drivers seat.

Things that I have that Apple doesn't have:

1. Cheap ($60/yr) all you can eat music buffet
2. 192 kps downloads (last I checked Apple is still 128k).
3. Voice recording
4. FM radio
5. Replaceable battery (seems a few apple users are bit miffed over this battery thing)

I could go on, but I've listed 5 "killer features". It seems educating the general public about these things is more of an issue than the product itself?

DRM, DCMA, XVid, Bittorrent - the present and the Future

Okay, I'm reading this very good thought piece about Microsoft's potential domination of the DRM media space. I agree with this article's conclusions. I had a brainstorm about how one media scenario could play out. I agree that Microsoft's DRM is spreading widely. I also believe that XVid (the opensource variant of DivX) combined with Bittorrent is currently the most compelling content distribution vehicle. TV content is flowing at a terrific pace around the world. The TV execs are supposedly pulling their hair out over this situation.

Hey content creators, here's a free idea that could reap big rewards. Instead of fighting the inevitable and shutting down bittorrent sites - embrace and extend (an old Microsoft saying). Here's the idea. After each TV show is aired, TV networks should self publish XVid copies of the show with an ad embedded in each of the shows that one has to "collect". Each subsequent episode would add another clue to the collection. One has to download all the episodes to get all the clues. Once all the clues are collected, the downloader would be able to use the clue collection to obtain a discount on the subsequent official DVD version of the show. Imagine the marketing opportunities! Because of the viral marketing, they could sign on and prove to advertisers how many people they are reaching even more accurately than using the current buggy Nielsen rating system. I have some experience here as I once worked on TV ratings at Arbitron many years ago.

Seems like a plan to me?

How to fax in the Internet age

I haven't sent a fax in years. However, due to some business I'm conducting, I have had a need to send some faxes. Problem is I don't have a way to fax. WinXP has a built in fax applet and my laptop does have a fax modem. The only problem is that I only have basic phone service on my landline so I can't dial long distance. Too bad I don't have a data hookup on my cell phone. So what to do?

I search around the net and finally stumble on to Smartfax.com. They offer a free service that allows for 30 free incoming faxes a month and free outgoing faxes for the first month. Afterwards it's five cents per page for outgoing faxes. Very reasonable for someone like me that only rarely needs an occasional fax machine. Many other services charge a monthly fee. As is typical, you download a fax printer driver which lets you fax from any application as easily as printing. In less than fifteen minutes I had the driver installed and my docs to fax scanned in. Faxes were successfully sent on the first try and I got a nice email message confirming this.

Verizon Fios Rocks!

Day 2 of Verizon Fios. Downloaded an 8 gb torrent overnite. Here's a pic of my install. Really nice to have the equipment all in place on one inside wall of my garage. Future upgrades will be a snap.

Verizon Fios Fiber Install Today

I'm up and running on Verizon Fios Fiber service today. 15 mb/s of speed wonderfulness. The install was flawless. My pre-install work really paid off. My Dell wireless router was up to the new speed so I did not need to use the supplied D-Link router. Woohoo! Life is grand. I'm now rerouting my vestigial Comcast email settings and will soon be able to let them loose. I'll keep Comcast live for a few days to make sure everything is stable.

Supposedly, Verizon will start their video service in September 2005. I'm starting to think I will buy an HDTV this year. Looking at the new Samsung DLPs with the new HD4 Texas Instrument chip. This stuff is fantastic!

Palm Tungsten E is a Multimedia Player

I've been gettting good use out of my Palm Tungsten E as an audio player. I had given up trying to use it for playing video. The bundled Kimona app produced very mediocre results. I assumed that the processor was just too slow for decent video playback.

I was wrong.

Listening to the 1SRC podcast, I learned of an opensource media player called TCPMP. It is still in beta but has apparently been available on the PPC platform. I downloaded the beta and some movie trailers. I was stunned by the playback quality. It was very watchable. I found that that the Tungsten E did best with converted MPEG1 files running frame rates in the 12 frame per second range and 250k bit rate. The DivX/XVid/MPEG4 files required a little too much horsepower. So, armed with this new information, I embarked on how to make my own video files that would play well.

Turning to various XVid files sourced from HDTV, I started playing with various tools. I tried a trial of Kimona's Producer 3 but it produced horrible results using MPEG4 files. As it turns out, the best workflow can be had with free tools.

After much tinkering, I found that using a custom template using the freeware version of TMPG Encoder produced great quality MPEG1 files at a size of about 120 mb for 45 minutes of video. That would allow about four of these files to fit easily on a 512mb SD card (3 hours of video). It only takes about fifteen minutes to convert. One trick I found was that the TMPG Encoder does not handle the audio properly by default. I found that I have to first dump the audio track out to a seperate WAV file using VirtualDub. I then use this file as the audio source in TMPG. I also set up TMPG to use the lame MP3 audio encoder and reduced the sample rate to 32k at a bit rate of 128k. I saved this as a template for easy reuse. The final trick is to set the frame rate to one half of the source file rate. Most of my files are about 24 frames per second. Thus the final Palm video file is running at 12 frames per second. Surprisingly, the slower frame rate is not that noticible. The video when played othe Tungsten E appears very smooth. There is a bit of pixalization with action scenes but it is very tolerable.

I may continue to tinker to see if I can achieve better quality without increasing file sizes but I am already very pleased at the results so far.

Verizon Fios Internet Install In Less Than Two Weeks!

Well, I wake up the other day and notice a Verizon truck outside my house. I had a chat with the occupant and he said he was designing the cable drop for my neighbor's Verizon Fios install. Well blow me down. How come I was never contacted by Verizon despite my calling every two weeks since last year? I hop on my Comcrap connection and sure enough I find I am now ready for a Verizon Fios install. Yay!

So, now I need to get back in gear and finish my cable re-routing to get ready for the install. I also needed to install an electrical outlet in my garage near where they will install the fiber ONT on the outside of my garage. I had an existing light switch that I figured I could change to a combo switch and outlet. This would save me from having to install a whole new box. When I got into it I was initially confused about the proper way to wire this because the instructions were a little cryptic and because I was updating from just a switch. After some more research, I figured out how to wire the outlet but needed another small piece of wire to complete the circuit. Off to the hardware store and after a little effort I now have a live outlet for the backup power supply necessary for the ONT.

Verizon Fios ONT Fiber Terminal

The only thing left is to finish terminating the ethernet wires in a wall outlet so that the installers can just do a run of CAT 5 and plug into my new wall plate. I'm also wiring for multiple RG-6 so that I can rerun my satellite feed. This RG-6 install will also make it easy to swap out for eventual switch over to Verizon Fiber TV service when that comes on line. I think the installers will be pleased with my pre-install work and will have a pretty easy time of it.

Mozilla Thunderbird does work with Versamail

I've been fiddling with Palm's somewhat lame Versamail app again. One of the things I gave up when I switched to Thunderbird from Outlook Express was the ability to sync my inbox to my Palm TE. Today I tried setting up a direct sync to Google's Gmail but the only version of Versamail that is available for the Palm TE does not properly support SSL connections that Gmail requires. While browsing around I found a message that indicated that Versamail would work fine with Thunderbird if you selected the Eudora client in Versamail. Worth a shot. What do you know - it works. I don't know why this isn't more widely advertised but I'm pleased to have this functionality back.

It's annoying that Palm will not keep these apps up to date for existing users. They never update the Palm Desktop. There's so much functionality that is missing. Palm is disappointing these days.

Switched to WPA security today

I heard about a free utility that allowed earlier versions of Windows to use WPA wireless security. I still have an old Sony 505 on my wireless network. Since this runs Windows 98 SE, I had to limit my security to WEP. Then I read about this free product that would let me upgrade to WPA. It installed easily and then I switched over my router to WPA. I also set the wireless mode to 802.11g only to get the maximum speed. All I had to do was update all my other Windows XP wireless computers to WPA and things were great. Now I'm reasonably secure for a home network. All my neighbors run their networks wide open. I guess they are more trusting?

Martha Stewart Thinks an iPod is a Radio

So I'm watching Martha Stewart blather on at the Sirius press conference to announce her new Martha Stewart channel on Sirius. She's droning on about she and her family are such radio people and she veers into this riff about how she would like to thank Steve Jobs for inventing the iPod and how her daughter is such a big iPod user and thinks the iPod "radio" is just great for busy people. The Sirius marketing people must be spilling blood all over the place. Talk about unscripted moments. It was evidently clear that Martha Stewart doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. Someone needs to lossen her security ankle bracelet. It's clearly cutting off the blood supply.

Martha! The iPod is a portable audio device for playing ripped or downloaded music. It is not a radio and it is in direct competition to Sirius. Sheesh!