The end of high power chips?

A very interesting article on ARS technica seems to confirm what was already said earlier: the days of ever more powerful chips is nearing an end, not because of a technical wall in Moore's law, but because we fail to find usage for all that power!

Following the article there would be only 6 mains customers for high power chips: medical imaging, defense, oil and gas exploration, pharmaceutical research, 3D rendering for movies, and finance.

Now as pointed out in the article finance is one of the biggest consumer of chips, and it is coming to a close. What will this means for the other ones? more expensive processors and GPUs. And what about consumers? Since most of them have already a powerful enough PC that does everything most of them want, this shouldn't be a problem, on the contrary manufacturers will have to compete on price rather than on performance, which would mean cheaper atom and entry level processors.

For the aspiring media creator it is bad news however, as somebody who wish do do video editing or 3D rendering on his home desktop will benefit less from the "trickle down" effect of these high end processors.
Image cc by Olivender

Blu-Ray: Why it only works for the big studios

We hear a lot of hype about Blu-ray these times, both from media companies and from financial analysts. However for the independent movie publisher and for the consumer that is not interested in big Hollywood productions Blu-ray is an epic fail for various reasons:

- Incompatibility issues: not all players seems to be compatible with all discs. This is especially true for recorded discs (that an independent is far more likely to use than pressed discs for reasons I will detail bellow). If you sell your media over the net you don't want to have discs returned because they won't play on someone player: avoid Blu-ray!

- Poor support platform: Pressed Blu-Ray disc are required to include the AACS copy protection scheme, however AACS compatible players don't exists for many platforms: No support on Macs, No support on Linux, hardware dependent support on Windows (it requires a compatible Video card), No support on Xbox etc... If you want something that everybody can play you are probably better providing an MP4 file than a Blu-ray!

- Production costs: Producing and mastering a Blu-Ray title cost an arm and a leg! You can either burn discs yourself at a cost of around $12 per media or have them duplicated at a cost of around $35 per media. Not only is this way too expensive, but this lead to compatibility issues as not all players are 100% compatible with burned disc, meaning a lot of returns. If you want to have your discs pressed (like Hollywood movies) the cost per disc falls to $3 per disc BUT you have to include AACS copy protection, which will cost you $3,000 + $1520 per project + 4 cents per disc. We are already around $5000 here. Add to that a License of $500 if you don't wish to use the Blu-ray Logo or $3000 if you wish to as well as the rental of the mastering software at $300 / month and you'll see that even for a small 1000 discs run you are well over $10.000 in initial investment.

This makes Blu-ray an epic fail for small publishers and consumers alike: it is impossible for independents to release their products on Blu-ray and it is impossible for consumers to buy anything but big Hollywood production. In light of this I would suggest to anyone that want to distribute paid-for HD content to look rather at digital distribution (like VUZE) or at DIVX rather than Blu-Ray.

The problem with Silverlight

I have just read that Microsoft is again pushing some video streaming site to use Silverlight to cover major sporting events.

My problem with Silverlight is that it is not available on enough platforms, and that the version level varies depending on the platform.

On windows and intel Macs it's on version 2, on Linux it's on version 1 and it is not available on non-intel mac and on the Wii. It is also available only for Firefox, IE and maybe the Mac's native browser (I don't have a mac, so I can't confirm this). There is no support yet for Opera or Chrome.

Microsoft should first ensure that the plugin is available on more platforms at a consistent level before pushing the technology in the mainstream, or it will antagonize the user and give the technology an image of "do not work" with the public.

The Olympics were a big debacle for Microsoft because it was the time when the Linux Netbooks were starting to be very popular and the Linux plugin was not yet ready, so the olympics videos didn't play on these gadgets. This resulted in a black eye for NBC and a lot of people going to torrent sites instead of NBC.

Recently I went to a site with my Linux Netbook and the site asked me to install the latest plugin, and redirected me to Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight), only after i installed the plugin it still told me I was missing the plugin because it expected Silverlight 2, which is not yet available on Linux. The result: SILVERLIGHT DOESN'T WORK!

Flash on the other hand works on Linux and the Wii, meaning that Silverlight suffers badly in the comparison

First make it work on all the platforms that tour competition supports, then promote it! Going the other way around WILL antagonize the users to your technology.

UPDATE: Apparently the IPL experiment with Silverlight isn't on a good start

Media Review: Low budget movie

For my first media review I decided that I won't cover an "heavy" tech vodcast like GeekBrief, Tekzilla or Diggnation but that I would cover something funny instead.

Then just on cue "Low Budget Movie" appeared in the Miro featured list. I couldn't resist.

This comedy web video serial covers the adventures of two small scale would be filmmakers that try to produce a new independent sci-fi movie. Problem is they have no budget, no script, no actors and no talent. The tone is very reminiscent of "The Office" with Steve Carrell, be it in the humor or in the style, as it adopts the same "fake documentary" presentation as the NBC serial. The production looks quite professional for something that is published on the web too.

I have seen the trailer and the first 2 episodes which were great. A third episode is due to be released very soon, and if you wish you can buy the whole movie on DVD. As pointed out it is available for download in the Miro directory and in iTunes. If you prefer to watch online it is availlable on the authors website and in high resolution on Openmovies (although it is somewhat too compressed to really benefit from the higher resolution).

I will do regular reviews of free web media that I find interesting, subscribe to my feed to be notified!

Mobile OSes are ported to Netbooks

It started in January when some enterprising hackers announced that they had successfully hacked the Android mobile OS to run on the EEEPC.

It continues today when the people behind the Symbian mobile OS (used by most Nokia phones) announced that they had a first, very crude port the mobile OS to the Atom processor (used in Netbooks).

Now for me the question is why? Android I can understand because with it's Linux underpinnings it certainly has the potential to scale up, and the Google brand and governance can certainly bring advantages in some situations, but what about Symbian? Most Symbian applications are designed for mobiles without a toutchscreen interface and running ARM processors so they are not really usable on Netbooks, it is not proven to scale up very well and is proprietary. Beside with some Netbooks running on ARM processors in the works it would probably be better to let the Netbooks come to symbian than to port Symbian to the current netbook architecture.