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Chaos Theory: Nursery tales and TSW's issue #7
I look forward to a new issue in The Secret World as I do any much-anticipated book release. I can't wait to dive right into it, experience a great story, and come out of it changed somehow. We've been waiting months for a new story arc in this game, and now it's finally here. Warning, massive spoilers ahead! While MJ got an advance tour of the issue, I purposefully remained ignorant of it so that I could experience it for the first time on the live servers. The whole affair begins with Who Horrifies the Horrors? in the Besieged Farmlands in Transylvania. The one-eyed Carmen told me that something's agitating the local werewolves, and when the scary beasties that you know are terrified, then it's probably not good all around. It turns out that the werewolves aren't being agitated; they're being hunted, ripped apart, and slaughtered. The alive ones practically trample over me trying to escape the area, but I'm not going to give them a free pass just because they're scared. A little cleanup with my trusty shotgun and those mongrels won't need to worry about fear any more.
NEC chips to include DivX Plus HD support
Expect even higher quality DivX playback from Blu-ray players, HDTVs and other devices, now that NEC has signed a deal to implement DivX Plus HD (aka h.264 in an MKV container with AAC audio) support in its EMMA chipset family. The company has already signed up chipmakers Sigma and Trident, anything rocking the appropriate logo should be able to handle content at resolutions up to 1080p, or older DivX encoded files, so feel free to plug those USB sticks and network cables into home theater equipment anywhere.
NEC shows off super resolution upconverting for your cell, HDTV and all in between
Let's face it, that low res cellphone video of last weekend's party and your Days of Thunder VHS won't be upscaling themselves, hence the sudden explosion of Super Resolution technology including this most recent entry from NEC. Claiming low power and memory requirements, part number uPD9245GJ is ready for duty blowing up images for display on your VGA cellphone or nav system without blurring, or upscaling low res sources to 1080p in a Blu-ray player or HDTV. Don't let the ridiculous soundtrack on the demo reel fool you -- recent reviews have given super resolution tech a thumbs up, and with Toshiba, Hitachi and Broadcom already in the game we've got a clue what feature will be checkmarked on your next electronics purchase.
NEC launching BD-Live compatible SoC for Blu-ray players
NEC seems to be over that whole HD DVD thing, announcing it's begun mass production of its EMMA3P SoC for Blu-ray players. Squeezing USB and Ethernet control components for BD-Live compatibility, h.264 / VC-1 / MPEG-2 compression, Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD and of course DivX onto just one chip should make for more cheap (& fully featured) Blu-ray players on the way soon. Narrowly trailing the announcement of Panasonic's UniPhier single-processor solution it certainly hasn't come a moment too soon.[Via Impress]
