Toshiba Develops Hybrid Blu-ray Disc – Having been on the losing end of the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format battle, Toshiba has now come up with a hybrid video disc which would enable playback of the triple-layer disc on any DVD player as well as on Blu-ray players. A few HD DVD discs also had a standard DVD layer, so this is evidently migrating the idea to Blu-ray discs. (All SACD audio discs are now hybrid, with a separate standard CD layer playable on any player.) The Toshiba discs are made compatible with legacy DVD players by having two Blu layers and one red standard DVD layer on the same side. Consumers who haven’t gone Blu-ray yet would have a greater incentive to purchase one since these movies would play on it without their having to purchase new Blu-ray versions. Those who may have one Blu-ray player but DVD players in other rooms or their car wouldn’t have to purchase two separate discs to view them anywhere. Stores wouldn’t have to deal with two separate inventories, and the struggling adoption of the Blu-ray format would be greatly enhanced. No announcement was made of the additional manufacturing cost of the backward-compatible disc, though it is not expected to be high.
Advanced Micro Devices Supercomputer to Provide HD Content – AMD, one of the largest global makers of microprocessors, plans to revolutionize the deployment, development and delivery of HD content thru a massively-parallel supercomputer that have dubbed the “AMD Fusion Render Cloud.” Seven out of ten of the world’s fastest computers are powered with AMD hardware, but this supercomputer – scheduled for the second half of 2009 – will be unlike any ever built. It is designed to allow content providers to deliver computer applications, video games and various graphically-intensive applications thru the Internet “cloud” to virtually any sort of mobile device with a web browser – without depleting battery life or exceeding the processing power of the device. Movies and games will be transformed thru server-side rendering, which stores visually-rich content in a compute cloud, compresses it, and the streams it in real time over a wireless broadband connection to a variety of devices such as set-top boxes, ultra-thing notebooks and smart phones. HD cloud computing is able to bring HD entertainment to mobile users virtually anywhere by delivering remotely-rendered content to devices unable to store and process the HD content due to constraints such as their size, battery capacity and processing power. The AMD Fusion Render Cloud requires only a fraction of the floor space, power envelope and cost associated with today’s leading supercomputers. Technical software development and a middleware layer are being provided by OTOY. Together, the two firms hope to transform the entertainment industry by “removing the technical barriers between consumers and first-rate content experiences.”
Cisco Readies Consumer Electronics Products – Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. launched a suite of new products to encourage media use thru home computer networks, such as sharing music thruout the home. The hope is to diversity the company’s revenue stream. One of the products is from Cisco’s home networking division Linksys – the Kiss DP-600 networked DVD player. It accesses the Internet wirelessly to deliver 3000 Web radio stations, weather forecasts and stock updates to the living room.
Wayne Shorter – In Memoriam
Rememberance of the artist
