Techspansion is no more

Nostalgia

Which may not mean a lot to most people, but they produced the software I blogged about on here recently called VisualHub and AudialHub.  The second I didn’t get to try out in the end, and the first is the primary solution I use for converting video files from one format to another, and in my case specifically, producing the iPod compatible mp4 files (H264 codec).

Apparently the products will still be compatible with the next Mac OS (10.6 – Snow Leopard), but with the recipient hardware changing regularly and rapidly (iPods etc), the software will become dated very quickly.

It is disappointing, and somewhat surprising that they’ve simply closed their doors and discontinued the product, rather than selling it.  Guess I will be looking for a new conversion solution in the near future.

The Turbo264 is ok, but doesn’t produce as small a file with the same quality, and more importantly, cannot handle static images (such as powerpoint slides) inside the video file – they tend to run like a watercolour painting in a rainstorm – weird, and unusable.

Antiquating Modern Tech

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the repackaging of modern tech into alternate forms.

One that caught my attention a couple of years ago was the ‘depetrification’ of the iPod as part of “Project RedWood” It may not be to everyone’s taste, but ZapWood does some amazing work.

Some other places documenting retro-modding of technology includes:

The Steampunk Workshop

ElectriClerk

Bit Tech

Slipperyskip

New iPods

Apple are releasing a new iPod Touch and iPod Nano.

New iPod Touch

The Touch now includes a built-in speaker and increased battery capacity (and up to 32GB storage), while the Nano has increased capacity (up to 16GB), and an increased range of colours for those who care about the fashion.

Strangely, in my opinion, the Touch still does not appear to have Bluetooth capabilities, which I would have expected given it’s ever converging role with PDAs (and its ability to have contacts, calendar, email etc), and the increasing range of bluetooth headsets.

New iPod Nano

MP3 Players and Car Accidents

There is an article here from the Sydney Morning Herald with input from the Monash University Accident Research Centre about the risks of driving while wearing earphones to listen to music.

Research into what are the main causes of driver distraction after mobile phones is continuing, and the article doesn’t specifically say that using earphones causes driver distraction, but rather completely isolates the driver from the “acoustic world”.

There is no hearing test for driving licenses, so I wonder if this will open a can-of-worms – if research shows that safety is compromised because of a lack of acoustic awareness of surroundings, then will things like car insurance premiums be affected by a driver’s hearing test?

Interesting coincidence- about an hour after writing this post, and completely independently, I was rung by Accident Research and asked if I was available to be part of a study of in-car entertainment systems and driver distraction (I occasionally do driver tests for them in their driving simulators).

Converting Videos to mp4 (eg iPod) (Mac only) – updated

This is not going to be a long discussion on all the ins and outs, or even requirements of converting videos, but a look at 2 solutions, one hardware, one software.

I have been using a MacBook Pro to do the conversions, and to date have been using a program called Visual Hub – a really cool (Australian?) program that can convert videos from many different formats to another, including mp4, mov, avi, flv etc.

An alternative is a hardware solution, called the Elgato Turbo.264.

It is touted as being a co processor for the video conversion (and with a significant speed gain).

So I put it through its paces, testing the conversion of a 500MB video file to mp4 format, H264 codec. 640 x 480

Updated. I have since been giving the Elgato a serious workout, and am becoming increasingly impressed with the device. For some reason the first test were underperforming, but since then, speed has increased 3 fold. As I write this, I have a conversion happening in the background, and there is still plenty of CPU spare for other tasks. The Turbo.264 and associated program are consuming around 60-70% of the CPU, and it is encoding at a cool 90 frames per second. (Update 2 – the fastest now experienced has been 149 frames per second. I was almost expecting to smell burnt rubber!)

The software equivalent encodes around 30 – 60 FPS, and consumes every bit of resource available, and almost 100% more again. (I know that doesn’t make sense, but what does 180% of the CPU actually mean?)

If it continues to be as impressive, this will quickly become an indispensable device for anyone doing this sort of function – whether that be converting movies from DVD to watch on an iPod, preparing videos for podcasting/delivering video online etc.

The Turbo.264’s onboard processor encodes video into the H264 codec with approximately the capabilities of a 2.GHz Core 2 duo Mac.  If your computer is faster than this, you may be able to encode it quicker with a software only solution (although it will consume more resources to do so).  If you have a computer slower, then this will definitely give a huge boost in performance.  On a PowerPC for example, the Turbo completely outstrips the CPU for performance, so will turn an otherwise slow old computer into quite a reasonable H264 encoder.

In any respect, the graphs Elgato use compare the Turbo to the encoding done with Quicktime.  Based on that, I’d certainly say that Quicktime is a poor choice for H264 conversion – there are much faster software-only solutions.

At the moment, you can only use one Turbo.264 at a time- I’m hoping in the future that there will be the ability to double them up for a further performance boost.

The Elgato took 12 minutes, and consumed 60% of the CPU for the operation

Visual Hub took 13 minutes, and consumed 180% of the CPU (in a faster computer, or rather one with a quad core, the ability of Visual Hub to push the computer to its limit would give it a significant speed gain over the Turbo.264

I must admit, I was very surprised. Given that they are claiming such significant speed gains, the result here don’t substantiate the claims. This is using the latest program they supply, running on a MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. That makes it reasonably spec’ed but certainly not a front runner as far as overall computer powerhouses.

Granted, having the CPU freed up is an advantage, but I’d much rather see a significant speed gain in converting the files, than just having the computer itself having to work a little easier in doing so.

Update: I have been using the Turbo over the weekend, and have found it to be pretty good. The speed has increased a bit – encodes around 60 frames per second (from DVD) which isn’t too bad, and the CPU is still relatively free for me to use the computer for other tasks.

Testing a different delivery mechanism

The latest iPods- the Touch (and now iPhones) that have hit the market have built in WiFi (ie wireless), and come with Safari, which is the Apple equivalent of Firefox or Internet Explorer.  Not only does that mean that you can search the web, receive emails etc, but in this case, actually write a blog entry entirely on one.

Despite the small screen size, the ability to zoom the screen simply by placing 2 fingers on it then moving them further apart to zoom in (or vice versa), and single finger dragging the screen around makes it surprisingly easy to use as a web browser.  Obviously no substitute for a full blown computer, but remember, this device is a tiny 110×60×7mm and weights just 120 grams.