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Wireless HDTV will be the next hot product -- after phones, Internet and home networking -- according to ABI Research, which predicted that the number of wireless HD installations will rise more than tenfold worldwide to 1 million by 2012.

But ABI added wireless HD has been hampered by a fight between three technologies: 5 GHz, 60 GHz and ultra wideband (UWB).  And why does it seems there are always competing technologies ... ?

Take a look at another fine site -- TMC Internet Telephony -- to learn more about where this is all heading ...

According to Verizon, beginning next week, Verizon will make available to more than 10 million homes and businesses the nation's fastest consumer broadband connections, with download speeds up to 50 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds up to 20 Mbps over their fiber to the home (FTTH) network.

Verizon had already offered the 50/20 Mbps and 20/20 Mbps services in its FiOS markets in Connecticut (my state), Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. The company is now expanding those offerings to new Verizon FiOS customers in parts of California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington, replacing existing offerings of 30/15 Mbps and 15/15 Mbps services, respectively.

The mid-tier connection speed in those markets for new customers is being increased from 15/2 Mbps to 20/5 Mbps, and the basic service tier is being increased from 5/2 Mbps to 10/2 Mbps. Existing FiOS Internet customers who are interested in the new speed options can call Verizon for information about the new plans.

Check out these performance benchmarks:

At 50 Mbps, downloading a 5 GB (gigabyte) file, such as a 112-minute, high-definition movie purchased online, takes approximately 13.3 minutes, while a 50 MB (megabyte), or 60-minute, Web video takes 8 seconds, and a 5 MB MP3 music file takes less than eight-tenths of a second.

Using a 20 Mbps upstream broadband connection, a consumer could upload a 250 megabyte (MB) file of 200 photos in about 90 seconds, instead of the roughly 47 minutes it takes over a 768 kilobit-per-second (Kbps) upstream connection.  A 500 MB file, such as 400 digital photos or a medical imaging data file, can be uploaded in less than four minutes, compared with about 90 minutes over a 768 Kbps connection.  A 3 gigabyte (GB) file, such as a one-hour family video shot with a high-definition video camera, can be uploaded in around 20 minutes, compared with more than nine hours with 768 Kbps upstream.

Great, now if only Verizon FiOS was available in my neighborhood. Hello? Verizon? My pokey AT&T DSL is crying out to be replaced with your ultra-fast FiOS service. Help!

UK-based MrModchips was cleared of all 26 counts against him for his role in importing and selling gaming console modchips. You know, the kind that lets you play [cough] backup copies of your video games. The Court of Appeal Criminal Division ruled that modchips do not circumvent copyright protection.

The icing on the cake is that the defendant was "awarded full costs as a result of his successful appeal," Sweet! Can you imagine the look on high-priced lawyers faces representing the multi-billion dollar video gaming industry? Poor Sony. Poor Microsoft. Have to pay the lawyers AND the guy selling modchips that allow pirated, I mean backup copies of your DVD gaming collection to play. Now if only the U.S. had such a policy maybe frivolous lawsuits wouldn't be so bad.

[Via TeamXecuter]

Sony has joined forces with six of the top cable companies in the U.S. to adopt tru2way technology in its TVs, thus eliminating the need for a set-top box when accessing television and other interactive services. and anyone else working on a set-top box should be nervous. Read more about it here.

Apple, Netflix, Sezmi

Apparently, Sony isn’t the first TV manufacturer to jump on the tru2way bandwagon. Samsung, Panasonic and LG have all signed licensing agreements to use the technology in TV sets that will go on sale as soon as the upcoming holiday season.

What do you think about that?

Love when boxes get sucked inside of some other gadget -- it's like survival of the fittest. Darwin would be so proud ...

 

According to an International Herald Tribune/Associated Press report, Philips is working on a TV that will enable viewers to have a 3-D experience without the need to wear 3-D glasses.

Discussing the evolution of television, a company spokesman said "... the market progression is black and white, to color, to High-Definition, to 3-D."

ETA? A few years. Like they say, let's see what happens ...

Looks like 3-D glasses will be going the way of the buggy whip?

Nice to see Roku back and how about hooking up with Netflix in the announcement of a $100 set top box that streams free movies (for Netflix subscribers) to the living room.

Instead of wading into a losing battle over cheap downloads and rentals (see Vudu, BlockBuster, AppleTV, Google, etc., which charge for each movie), we now see somebody getting the magic four-letter word right -- "free." That's what I'm talking about!

Of course, the service isn’t really free. Users have to buy the $100 box, and continue to keep a Netflix subscription active ($18/month). There are 10,000 movies available on on the box, which is significantly less than the 100,000 or so titles on Netflix’s DVD mailing service (and it’s old titles, not new releases). And that's a lot!

To read more about it, visit "Bits" at The New York Times.

Wal-Mart plans to break the consumer sweet spot under-$300 price point barrier on Blu-ray players this month, according to a report on Pocket-lint.co.uk.

Traditionally, consumer products really start to take off when they drop under the $300 level (at l ast when the overall economy is sound).

Wal-Mart will sell a Profile 1.1 Funai player under the Magnavox brand with picture-in-picture functionality.

Not to far behind, Best Buy is expected to offer the player under the Insignia brand for $350 or so beginning next month.

Just like Palm simplified the handheld organizer in what now seems eons ago, perhaps Flip Video is heading in the same direction with its low-cost, streamlined (I mean not a lot to learn) digital video camera at a price point that is half the cost of what we have come to accept as "typical" digital video camera capabilities.

I've just gotten my gadget-y hands on one of the groovy Ultra models and will report back soon from the field on what may be the future of DV ...

Record ... connect ... share ... Indeed!

Seems that Blu-ray sales have not taken off, despite the all-but-official demise of HD DVD. You can read more at Ars Technica here.

Really hard not to see why, when prices remain high and supply remains low -- besides, how many copies of the same movie in different formats do you need?

Am sure many of us still have video copies of the DVDs stuck in our closet, taking up space and being considered for sale at a pittance on eBay ...

Now through in a sluggish economy, and Blu-ray may be the DAT of the 21st Century -- another Sony product that hit the market at the wrong time.

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.