HardwareEncoding
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Fraunhofer working to make HD video conferencing a little less laggy
The early days of VOIP calling required a lot of patience, as the half-second or more delay between you speaking and your conversation partner receiving often turned the convo into a start and stop mess. Those days are gone for voice, but we're right back there again when it comes to HD video calls. However, random product researcher Fraunhofer is working on a new device to kill the lag and speed up your two-way monologues. It's basically an encoder card able to do hardware squashing of HD video via H.264 and audio via AAC, not unlike the sort of tech Skype requires for its SkypeHD-compatible video cameras. Fraunhofer's tech is also said to remove boomy room echoes and even handle network hiccups to keep you streamin' in style. The result is said to be sub-100ms lag, which would be more or less playable for a shooter. Expect more on this development soon from IFA.
Apple planning H.264 hardware in all Macs?
At least that's the word from columnist Robert X. Cringely, who says he's heard a rumor on the subject, that he believes to be "a fact," that has simply yet to be confirmed. Supposedly, Apple will not only be including hardware-based H.264 video decoding across its entire line of Macs, but hardware encoding as well, which would significantly reduce the load on the computers' processors while still churning out high quality video. The H.264 video encoding would also have the added benefit of greatly reducing the file size of the captured videos, making them ready made for spreading across the Internet. According to Cringely, the cost of the across the board upgrade would set Apple back upwards of $500 million, but he seems quite confident that Apple's ready to take that gamble sometime this year. That would seem to jive with at least one other Apple rumor we've heard, which touted updates of an unspecified sort to all Mac lines by June -- although, as with all of these, we likely won't know for sure until we get the word from the man himself.
Leadtek announces "WinFast PalmTop TV" external tuner
External USB TV tuners are a dime a dozen these days, but with DIY media PCs still growing in popularity, we can expect to see even more devices like Leadtek's WinFast PalmTop TV before the flood of products tapers off. This Japanese model features a high-speed USB 2.0 connection, hardware-based MPEG-1/2/4 and AVI encoding, and a wireless remote, along with a suite of bundled software for TV watching, recording, and DVD authoring. Expect this unit to hit an already-crowded market next month, for an unknown price.[Via Impress]
