Saturday, March 29, 2008

Photos from an afternoon in the surf

Kitesurfing, Dollymount, Dublin

Dell Entry level laptops get Blu-ray

Dell is the first manufacturer to offer a portable with a Blu-ray below 1000€ and even under 900€.
This machine is still unbalanced with a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, its resolution of 1280x800 and above all the GMA X3100 (integrated) video board, but apparently is capable of playing a Blu-ray movie in conditions still needing to be verified.
In fact, the processor may need to give everything it has to decode the video, which might be saturated, make noise and have far too low an autonomy.
But the most interesting thing is the the price, proving that with putting a little more money, a few hundred euros, we could get a really well equiped machine. It is sufficient to add a decent graphics chip capable of ensuring hardware decoding of H.264 so that the video decoding is better.
We look forward, of course, to Apple offering decoding Blu-ray in its machines but also authoring for this format on the Mac Pro. Toast 9 is already doing it, but in a frustrat way, but at least proving it is possible to do.

DivX Certified Blu-ray DVD Players

If you follow the digital media space at all (and, because you signed up to receive the DivX News, I have to assume that you're at least somewhat interested in digital video), you know by now that the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD has finally ended and that Blu-ray has won. Now that the war is over, chances are a lot of you will be looking to upgrade your home theaters to get in on all that HD goodness. But before you run out and drop a wallet-full of cash on a new Blu-ray player, remember that not all Blu-ray players are created equal. While they'll all play the new HD Blu-ray discs, some of them are DivX Certified as well, meaning they'll also play your collection of DivX videos.