The news headlines say Digitally remastered Beatles coming in September. This effort took four years and paid a lot of attention to preserving the original sound with few exceptions. Those exceptions were such things as obviously unintended artifacts such as electrical clicks, and mic pops and hisses (excess sibilance). Prior to this effort, the Beatles [...]
This project started with a friend who wanted to upgrade his PC. He found a deal at $700 with a powerful CPU, lots of memory, good hard drive space, and multi-media capabilities. These multi-media capabilities included a TV card and a remote control. The software was the Windows Media Center in Vista. I got the [...]
Tech Notes has a good 63 page PDF answering the common questions about the DTV Transition coming up in the US. Tech-Note – 141. Dec 17, 2008. It says it was written for the broadcast engineer and technician who will be dealing with the transition first hand. That means it answers some questions you don’t [...]
What kind of audio connection do you have in your AV system? It will determine what you can get out of your audio experience. There are three ways of hooking up your PS3 for audio: using RCA cables (red and white), using optical out, and using HDMI. I guess you could consider using a RF [...]
John C. Dvorak has a point with his essay It’s the TV Killing the Computer, Not Vice Versa. TV’s are the big ticket items at places like Costco but PC’s can be had for about the same price – and many of us spend more time with the PC than the TV. Then there is [...]
LinuxLinks has a nice list of what they call the Best Free Linux Software. It provides an index that links to a more complete description. Most are available in the Medibuntu repositories. Note that this area is fraught with proprietary software, copyright restrictions, and licensing hassles. In Windows, even recording off-air can get you recordings [...]
Aspect ratio is about how wide to how tall the picture is. There is a conflict about this in video presentations because humans tend to see or notice what is side to side much more than up and down (your eyes are side by side) yet the lenses used to focus an image on a [...]
Up until the 1960′s the big deal with recording and reproducing sound was fidelity. That was the effort to make a speaker reproduce what a microphone heard as accurately as possible. Once fidelity goals started to approach what the human can hear, the fun began. The first enhancement was to notice that humans have two [...]
The US Patent and Trademark Office has facsimiles of the patents they have issued available on the web. The include sufficient meta-data to help inventors find any previously issued patents similar to their idea. (see the USPTO how to). You can pay a lawyer to do patent searching for you or you can do it [...]
New audio and video devices have become computers. Over the last ten years or so, those computers have moved from adjunct special processing components to an integrated basic part of the devices. They now handle encoding, decoding, switching, compression, scaling, and basic control functions. As with many things computer, how they communicate with other computers [...]