CinemaNow was one of the first to offer downloadable video content on-demand, but has been lost in the shuffle of competitors like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix for their digital movie, music, & TV downloads. And of course you have the big buzz surrounding Netflix's new Roku set-top box.

Well, today CinemaNow is announcing that its library of over 3,400 feature-length movies is now available through Windows Media Center. All you need is Windows Media Center, which comes included with Windows Vista and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. These movies are available right now through a new Online Media channel in Windows Media Center that provides access to CinemaNow. Their library includes feature-length movies and even HD-quality movies.

The big benefit of Windows Media Center is that it gives you an easy way to browse CinemaNow’s library with the "10 foot" experience using your Windows Media Center remote control. No need to use a mouse and keyboard in your living room to download & navigate a movie.  I'll be downloading National Treasure 2 - Book of Secrets and some other new release movies this Memorial Day weekend on my Windows Media Center Edition 2005 PC. Break out the popcorn, baby!

"Digital Downtown" is Lower Manhattan's consumer technology expo, designed to serve the one-on-one information needs of high-income consumers who need a convenient way to learn about the latest new products without leaving the Financial District -- or even their office complex. Hey, but anybody can attend since it's all free...

It will take place in The Winter Garden (that's it in the photo above) of the architecturally acclaimed World Financial Center, June 12-14, kicking off the annual "River to River" downtown arts and entertainment festival.

www.digitaldowntown-nyc.com/portal/consumer

Sure do wish I could show you a picture ...

For all of us that want installed sound in every room of our nest, but don't want to see speaker panels all over the place, a company called Onsia is offering what it calls the first truly concealed flat panel speaker system. Designed to blend invisibly into any living space or office setting, (according to the company) only their remarkable performance will remind you they’re there.

The speakers integrate material science and NXT transducer technology to produce a flat panel speaker that delivers evenly distributed, rich, acoustic sound. It works on the principle of radiating sound through vibration, creating hundreds of simultaneous, nonlinear vibrations instead of the piston-generated, directional pulses from conventional cone diaphragms.

Now may be the time to start opening up those walls ...

www.onsiaideas.com

Codeguys.rpc1.org is a popular website run by C0deKing and Kanalratte that offers crossflashing and overclocking of your DVD±RW drives using "hacked" firmware for your DVD burner. Often the hacked firmware enables missing features such as overclocking the speed of the DVD burn and more importantly, setting the 'book type' permanently to "DVD-ROM". (more on that later) RPC1.org also offer "autopatchers", which are are easy do-it-yourself tools with an easy-to-use GUI to patch DVD burner firmware.

I recently bought a Sony DRU-840A DVD burner and when I tried to burn a home movie I noticed Nero didn't list the booktype setting under the 'Options' button. (Here's a screenshot of the book type setting in Nero on my Vista PC with a different DVD burner:)


The Book Type setting, also knowns as "bitsetting" allows you to change DVD+R media's default book type of "DVD+R" & "DVD+RW" to "DVD-ROM" more more compatibility with home DVD players which are looking for this particular book type. The Book Type is four bits at the start of every DVD disc (in the physical format information section of the control data block), which indicates what the physical format of the disc is.Many DVD players will refuse to play burned DVDs without the proper book type. Changing the book type works on both single-layer (SL) and dual-layer (DL) DVD+R media but not on DVD-R or DVD-RW media. In other words, minus (-) is bad for compatibility and plus (+) is good.

So in any event, the reason I bought the Sony DRU-840a was because it was supposed to support bitsetting/book type. I had Nero 7 installed which should have recognized the drive as supporting this. So then I figured I may have had old firmware. I went to Sony's support page and couldn't find any new firmware for this drive. I knew there was "hacked" firmware out there and have gone to the RPC1.org website in the past to add "features" missing in my DVD burner. So I headed on over to codeguys.rpc1.org to see if I could find better firmware for my drive only to discover the site was down. I tried several days in a row and it was still down. The last Google cache is 5 days ago. Not good. Seems like a permanent outage to me. Wonder if they were shutdown for illegally distributing hacked firmware? Yeah well maybe if the original manufacturers didn't cripple the firmware users wouldn't resort to hacked firmware. Fortunately, after some creative Googling I found a RPC1 mirror here:
http://codeworks.cdfreaks.com/cgmirror/

I thought perhaps my Sony drive was a LiteOn OEM, since LiteOn is perhaps the largest OEM manufacturer of DVD drives that do not carry the LiteOn label and past Sony DVD burners I used were LiteOn. Generally speaking you can use "real" LiteOn firmwares with these so-called rebadged drives. But when I attempted to try the firmware loaders from the mirrored website, the utilities wouldn't recognize my Sony DVD burner.

I then figured out it was actually an OEM of the Samsung SH-202J DVD drive. I then tried the OmniPatcher utility which is supposed to support Samsung/Sony DVD burners, but it couldn't detect my drive. Back to square one.

I then said the hell with Nero 7, I'll just use ImgBurn, a popular freeware DVD burning software utility that has a very powerful book type setting utility that works with virtually any DVD burner. It even features an Advanced tab for configuring settings manually. I selected the 'Samsung' tab, and it gave me a warning "Unknown (Drive doesn't report it!)". I read you can just ignore this message as long as you are selecting the correct OEM company. I changed the drop-down box to 'DVD+R DL Media' and then changed the book type to "DVD-ROM". I then clicked 'Ok', and received a "Success!" message, as seen below.


As long as you get this "Success!" message you are good to go. In my experience with multiple burners, I find that you can try each of the tabs with the various models and try to change the book type. At worst you'll get a "Failed!" message. In any case, I burned a DVD and then verified the booktype was correctly set to DVD-ROM by clicking Drive Info in Nero.

Curious if the book type setting I set in ImgBurn would work in Nero, I then burned a second DVD and Nero correctly set the book type. So the bitsetting  change made by ImgBurn is global to all your DVD burning apps. Unfortunately, the setting isn't permanent. If you reboot your PC you have to go back into ImgBurn and change the book type setting again. Using "hacked" firmware would have saved me the trouble of doing this step.

Just when I was going to give up on Nero 7, I decided to see if any updates were available. I downloaded and installed the latest version from Nero 7 from Nero's website. I went back to the Options section in Nero and voila' the Book Type setting was there!

Here's proof:


Conclusion:
So you are having problems with the book type settings in your DVD burner, try these steps:

• Re-install Nero or other DVD burning software with the latest updates.
• Use ImgBurn instead to set the booktype. Here's a good tutorial with screenshots explaining how to do it.
• Go to the RPC1.org mirror and try crossflashing your DVD burner or installing "hacked" firmware. Be aware this will void your warranty and could break your burner!
• If none of these work, it's possible your drive doesn't support setting the book type. Time to go buy a new burner! Try Googling your DVD model + "book type" and see if any discussions are out there mentioning if it supports it.

Hope this info helps someone else since I wasted a couple hours trying to solve this book type setting problem.

SightSpeed just launched a new “SightSpeed Light” widget for MySpace, which adds two-way voice and video to the popular social networking site. If you recall, I wrote the following about SightSpeed Light:

The obvious question that came to my mind when I was thinking about embedded Flash VoIP applets is "what about Flash video conferencing applets that do both voice & video?" Imagine simply visiting a website, and initiating an ad-hoc videoconference with other visitors to that same site. I should mention that there already exists tons of Flash video applications used by popular sites such as YouTube and LiveLeak. The video codecs at least exist within the Flash player. Though, YouTube uses buffering that isn't real-time, so Flash-based videoconferencing would most likely use a different codec that performs better during real-time communication.

In any event, I knew it wouldn't be long before someone took Flash VoIP to the next level and offered Flash videoconferencing. Apparently, SightSpeed is the first company to do so...

Now today its "no download" Flash-based video application, “SightSpeed Light” is available to MySpace users. You can access SightSpeed Light on MySpace here.

Features include video mail, public video posting and free video chat between members of MySpace. Also, SightSpeed Light captures and creates video messages as posts, creating extended video conversations that are face-to-face, but not necessarily in real time. These threaded conversations start with someone creating and posting a SightSpeed video of him- or herself about any topic. From there, anyone in that person’s MySpace friends group can respond and add his or her thoughts. SightSpeed Light organizes the thread automatically, thus creating a video conversation, all without leaving MySpace.

News release after the jump...

AT&T announced today that it'll be cutting about 1.5 percent of its workforce. The company calls it the "next step in streamlining its operations." AT&T had about 310,000 employees at the end of 2007, meaning the layoffs would affect about 4,650 workers. The layoffs mean a one time charge of about $374 million in Q1.

Guess their triple play U-verse isn't growing as fast as they would like. Well, if they came to my neighborhood like they promised they would last year, I'd sign-up to be a customer. Assuming of course they solved the exploding batteries problem. I don't need AT&T burning down my neighborhood. I like my house thank you very much.

Amazon is offering a buy 2 Blu-ray DVDs get 1 Free Blu-ray DVD now that the Blu-ray vs HD DVD war is over.

I just got this email now. Funny how Amazon was very diplomatic when they wrote "Now that all major studios have expressed their support for Blu-ray as the ultimate high definition entertainment experience" as opposed to saying "Now that Blu-ray has whooped HD DVD's arse and we now have a single standard." Guess Amazon didn't want to tick off Toshiba, one of the biggest losers after HD DVD's demise. Oh and speaking of The Biggest Loser, I'm down to 169lbs or 29lbs from my original 198lb weight.

In any event, if you're looking for a free Blu-ray DVD, check out this Amazon.com promotion:

Blu-ray DVDs: Buy 2, Get 1 Free Event

Dear Amazon Associate,

The Associates program is excited to announce a special Buy 2 Get 1 Free promotion on select Blu-ray titles through April 18. Now that all major studios have expressed their support for Blu-ray as the ultimate high definition entertainment experience, this is a fantastic opportunity for your customers to start building their Blu-ray libraries with Amazon’s great selection of titles, including “300”, “The Fifth Element”, and “Bladerunner (Five-Disc Complete Collector's Edition).”

In addition, Amazon.com is currently offering an exclusive bundle of the hit movies “National Treasure” and “National Treasure 2 – Book of Secrets” on Blu-ray, now available for pre-order ($39.99). Check out our Blu-ray store to explore the hundreds of titles available on Blu-ray, all at least 30% off.

To link directly to the Buy 2 Get 1 Free promotion page and earn referral fees on the subsequent qualifying purchases, use the following link format, substituting your Associates ID: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000214241&tag=YOUR_ID_HERE-20

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Team

Interesting news from SureWest where they debuted VoIP service combined with a high-definition digital video recorder (DVR) product for watching recorded and live TV. I'm assuming this is a combined set-top box that does video (TV) and voice over IP. If they really want to get crazy with combining stuff, they should stick a camera in there which will add video over IP (videoconferencing) capabilities. I'll see if I can get a photo of the set-top box.

In the meantime, here's the news from the Sacramento Business Journal:

SureWest Communications has launched Digital Phone, the telecommunication company's new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service and a high-definition digital video recorder product.

SureWest already offers VoIP for business customers, but Digital Phone extends the service to residential customers.

SureWest (Nasdaq: SURW) has been testing the high-definition DVR in region since December. Customer response to the product far exceeded SureWest's expectations, Steve Oldham, SureWest's president and chief executive officer, said in a news release.

Also, SureWest has expanded to 50 high-definition channels, up from 17 a year ago.

The Sony PS3 will finally get in-game VoIP communications with the release of firmware update 2.4.

Sony Computer Entertainment UK boss Ray Maguire stated:

“Our momentum will continue with the introduction of in-game communication in the summer, firmware update 2.4 and the strongest line-up of games through our third party partners and our own studios. I’d personally like to thank our trade and business partners for helping us on the start of the PS3 journey.”

Now the question is "what took so frickin' long?" Both the Xbox and the Xbox 360 have had in-game trash talking VoIPing via Xbox Live since like uhh forever. On the Xbox 360, there's memory reserved just for the guide blade functions, including pulling up friends list, enabling voice chat and custom soundtracks in all games. The Playstation 3's initial design never took this into account so it is much more difficult to add this to the design after-the-fact without causing game instability, affecting performance, etc. But if the 2.4 firmware adds voice chat and IM, without sacrificing game stability, then this will be a huge hit amongst PS3 fans. There's also going to be improved in-game chat perhaps via an in-game Xross Media Bar (XMB). PS3 fans have also been clamoring for in-game XMB GUI, which alas right now you cannot do.

Trivia: the XMB actually won an Emmy award for it's graphical user interface.

Via MCVUK

Arcosoft Inc., those same rascals that built 8 simultaneous video streams only Star Trek's Data could love, today announced the release of TeVeStream FrameSeeker. According to Arcosoft, "Surveillance video, such as those captured for security, paranormal investigation, and wildlife study, often contains many frames that are essentially static. Without FrameSeeker, a reviewer must spend many tedious hours watching the video completely to find interesting events. FrameSeeker reduces the effort by scanning for changes frame by frame. The search stops when a frame differs significantly from the previous."

If you have multiple roommates, now you can catch who's been stealing your Diet Coke from the fridge or capture those pesky spirits that are haunting your abode. If you believe in that sort of thing anyway.

In any event, according to Arcosoft, the sensitivity setting allows the detection of change such as something entering an area, or even a brief flash of light.

FrameSeeker runs on Windows Vista, XP, and 2003. Price is $99 USD, with an evaluation download available from www.TeVeStream.com