GIF is (finally) dead. Long live Webp.

It has been a long and bumpy ride, GIF initially appeared 33 years ago, and improved the next year by supporting animation. In the 90’s, GIF rocked the yet young internet, being the first image format supported by most browsers of the time. It was extremely limited by today’s standards. It only supported 256 different colours, but you could choose those from any of the 4 billion colours supported. And until 1992, it was the only really usable image format in the internet. Not only that, but you could also do animations, small movies. Back in the early 90’s that …

Introduction to Multicast ABR (M-ABR) – Where it works and where it totally fails

Last year (2016), Cablelabs published a very interesting document entitled “IP Multicast Adaptive Bit Rate Architecture Technical Report“, describing how to bring together two fundamental and previously incompatible network concepts: Multicast and Adaptive Bitrate delivery, in what it call Multicast ABR (M-ABR). But, does it make sense? If it does, on which use cases it works? Let me spoil the surprise: It does make sense on one single use case. It spectacularly fails elsewhere. To start with, lets have a look at the generic M-ABR architecture:

HDR wars, battle 2: UHD Alliance Vs Ultra HD Forum – Maybe some sanity arrives at the TV Industry

There are currently two industry groups fight for market standardisation what regards to HDR: UHD Alliance and Ultra HD Forum. Every time this happens is usually due to a fight over consumer awareness on something that doesn’t make sense. We’ve already seen what UHD Alliance brings (or doesn’t….), but know there is a new group trying to make your mind: Ultra HD Forum. A lot has happened for last couple of years in the TV industry due to fuss around Ultra HD, always surrounded by confusion, mishaps and all around caos and damnation. How we got here Starting with the availability of …

iPhone 6s video decoding capabilities – Sometimes Apple underrates it’s products

Although I’ve been an Apple heavy user for a number of years now, it always bugs me when companies misrepresent their products, event if the misrepresentation is a underrating of the actual product. For me, specifications must be as accurate as possible, no matter if it comes from Apple, and understating it’s video decoding capabilities it not on my list of expected weird things, but it does seem to happen.

Secure digital card USB-3.0 reader shootout: MacBook Pro embedded SDCard reader Vs rest of the world

New Secure Digital cards sport theoretical speeds up to 104 MiB/s, for UHS-1 cards, or even 312 MiB/s for UHS-2 cards. Now, those are only bus speeds, and actual speeds may be a far cry from it, but in some instances real performance isn’t that different. On the other hand, it clearly demonstrates need for updates SD Adapters, as those new Secure Digital buses require compatible adapters, and again, USB3 compatibility. Then, which are the use cases for an USB3 adapter? Well, unless you intend to use your SD cards to extend your laptop storage, for instance, using one these …

Playstation 3 as a Media Player: m2ts.

Sony’s Playstation 3 is one of the best media players around: it can play Blu-ray Discs, pictures, music, videos and finally, games. One of the best uses for the PS3 is the ability to stream content from a media server through DLNA. Nothing of what is written above is any news, nor does it brings any big issues to anyone. Now, let’s assume I have a number of media players at home, and I need to find a container that is supported by them all (PS3 included) but also must support all the functionalities I need (HD and subtitles). There …

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