GamerBeef: Technology & Computer News

Netgear has uncovered details regarding their latest home theater networking device, the EVA8000. Touted as a direct upgrade to last year’s EVA7000. For those who may not remember the EVA7000, it was a device giving wireless capabilities to stream media from a PC to your home entertainment system. The EVA8000 improves in the way of 802.11n wireless technology (almost 10 times faster than the current 802.11g standard). In addition to improved wireless, the device adds an HDMI port for easy connection to your HDTV. There’s also a quite curious feature that states built-in support for YouTube content.

Netgear will add support for many different audio and video formats and comes packed with just about any connector you could possibly hope for. SCART, S-video, component, composite, and SFDIF digital audio round out the available connection ports. The unit will support “Full HD” with support for 1080p content.

Interestingly, the unit will allow you to stream iTUnes DRM protected content from your Windows PC, but will not allow you to stream from a Macintosh.

Just like the earlier model, the unit has USB ports for compatibility with flash drives and mobile digital media players, such as iPods. Netgear also says the unit has a unique “follow the user” technology where if pause is pushed on one unit and play is pushed on another in the house, the content will resume from wherever the user is at the time.

The unit is scheduled for public consumption in the first quarter of 2007 with an average retail price of $349.

Source:
Register
AfterDawn

Boris Johnson, an outspoken Tory MP has once again managed to pick the right topic to draw optimal attention to himself. The man, who once referred to U.S. President George W. Bush as “a cross-eyed Texan warmonger” and Tony Blair as “a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet”, has picked a new topic for headlines; videogames. He says it is time to “garotte the Game Boy and paralyze the PlayStation”.

Specifically, he is blaming video games for falling literacy rates among today’s youths. “Millions of seven to 15 year olds are hooked, especially boys, and it is time someone had the guts to stand up, cross the room and just say no to Nintendo,” he said. “It is about time, as a society, that we admitted the catastrophic effect these blasted gizmos are having on the literacy and the prospects of young males.”

He cites falling interest in reading among children and the numbers of students in University without adequate writing skills. “I refuse to believe that these hypnotic little machines are innocent,” he said. He went on to mention figures that put Britain as having the highest number of computer games per household, and that 89% of homes with children have a gaming console.

“These possessions are not so much an index of wealth as a cause of ignorance and underachievement and, yes, poverty,” he continued. “The nippers are bleeping and zapping in speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore. They sit for so long that their souls seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube.”

Source:
GamesIndustry.biz
AfterDawn

Sling Media is also going to fight to get its products into consumer living rooms to bridge the gap between the PC and Television set. At CES, the company will show off a nifty and affordable device called the SlingCatcher (may not be final name) which is slated to hit shelves sometime in the summer. The device, which will cost less than $200 will rival products from giants like Microsoft and Apple.

The SlingCatcher sports all the needed connectivity; Component Video, S-Video, HDMI, Ethernet and some USB ports. It includes an (optional) hard disk drive and uses WiFi to stream content from a source PC. An interesting factor for this device is there are no needed file conversions before sending the data to your TV since it literally just relays whatever is displayed on your monitor.

“It works completely independent of how the media was encoded,” Jamie Odell, Sling’s VP of product marketing told GigaOM, “so you don’t have to worry about what file format it is.” More details on this product will be revealed tonight at a press conference in Las Vegas.

Source:
GigaOM
AfterDawn

At a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Robbie Bach are expected to confirm that the console has reached over 10 million units sold and speak about IPTV functionality. The Xbox 360 being able to serve as a set-top box for Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) would be neat. Microsoft’s own video download store has gotten praise for its performance so far, especially with HD content.

Not many details are available about the announcement just yet but the functionality is set to appear sometime later this year. Also, apparently no customers would be “left behind”, meaning all Xbox 360 consoles out will be able to participate in the service at some level.

Source:
Gaming Bits
After Dawn

The recently released Blu-ray title, The Descent, is reportedly causing big playback issues with some early Blu-ray Disc players. Apparently, the cause is that some of the first Blu-ray Disc players don’t support the BD-Java environment, which is used for interactivity features on Blu-ray titles. The movie is reported to give a black screen on some of the players.

The Sony BDP-S1 player and Pioneer’s BDP-HD1 are affected the worst by the problem. Sony has promised a firmware update, early this year, to add BD-J support but the Pioneer users are out of luck for now. Samsung’s BD-P1000, Panasonic’s players and the PlayStation 3 all are reported to play back the disc fine.

Some Samsung players need the latest available firmware installed to overcome glitches.

Source:
Engadget HD
AfterDawn

In a recent interview, UK Minister for Creative Industry and Tourism Shaun Woodward stated that in order for the UK to remain the third largest video game industry, they need to develop an academy for training future developers. Woodward feels that if no such academy exists, the UK will lose its foothold just behind the US and Japan in the video game industry and lose out on many creative minds or ideas in the video game market.

Woodward told the magazine Financial Times, that the “best way for the video games industry to have the talent and the skills it wants is to move into the hot seat itself; to come to the government and say ‘we want to put some money into an academy.’” He sites similar academies such as those developed to inspire burgeoning musicians or film makers as a good model for his video game academy.

Woodward hopes that such and academy with government backing could add a sense of legitimacy to the video game industry that is somewhat lacking. He also hopes that the focus of video games can be turned from just regurgitated mindless shooters to deep, thought provoking stories that give a true impact to the gamer.

Source:
ARS Technica
AfterDawn

On the eve before the Computer Electronics Show, the Consumer Electronics Association stated that overall consumer electronics sales have jumped 13 percent in 2006 which could set the market up for a record $155 billion dollars. These figures record everything in the industry from iPods to mobile phones and everything in between.

Television sets are expected to continue to be the big sellers this year. With falling overall prices of both LCD and plasma displays, coupled with an estimated 19 million units of both displays shipped onto store shelves over the course of the year, expect $26 billion of the overall revenue to be taken up in this category.

The other electronic genre setting the market on its ear is that which includes the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Digital music players have all but replaced standard CD players as the mobile audio unit of choice and the market has reflected that well. Various MP3 player companies plan on bringing out units to grab their own market shares in this category and overall store shipments are expected to be in the range of 41 million units; up from 34 million units in 2006.

Next generation video game consoles, GPS units and personal computers will round up the rest of the big hitters this year. If the long lines prior to the launch of any of the video game systems are any indication of demand, its easy to see how this market will certainly sell well. Also, more and more vehicles are being outfitted with GPS units and PCs are expected to get faster and more appealing as Big Redmond begins to aggressively push its Vista product on the masses.

“Consumers started the year investing in innovative consumer electronics products and seemingly never stopped,” said Thibodeaux of CEA. “With the 2007 forecast, we see the consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.”

Source:
Reuters
AfterDawn

News from the IDG World Expo came in on Friday announcing the replacement for what was one of the biggest video game expositions in the world, E3. Planned to kick off its first annual show on October 18th of this year, E for All or Entertainment for All, promises to bring a better show to the video game industry.

IDG World Expo has already created an E for All website and encourages visitors to visit and learn about the E3 replacement and advices everything that registration will begin in the Spring. The venue will remain the same, the Los Angeles Convention Center.

IDG World Expo stated that the show will allow consumers to “test-drive the latest in games and gadgetry, as well as purchase products they enjoyed.” Many events are already in the works for this year’s show such as a concert playing video game music, tournaments with some of the hottest games on the market, a job fair and many other family friendly events. They’ve planned so many things that they have decided to expand the show into the LA Live arena, directly connected to the LA Convention Center.

E3, which was decided to end in August of 2006 faced many complaints from industry leaders that the show had grown too large for its own good. Plans were in the works to allow a much smaller show to take place for only those who were high-level media and developers. In November of 2006, that idea was scrapped and the E for All ideals took shape. Offer a venue where consumers can truly enjoy the newest and developing products in the video game industry. Now geared as more of a consumer-oriented even instead of an industry expo, E for All appears to be quite a good thing for video game consumers.

Source:
Macworld
AfterDawn

While both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc have a layer of copy protection known as Advanced Access Content System (AACS), one company is emphasizing how Blu-ray is safe from BackupHDDVD due to it’s extra included Digital Rights Management (DRM). Bit-tech.net has an article up about another layer of protection for Blu-ray, known as BD+.

The article publishes quotes from an email apparently received from Cryptography Research Inc. (CRI), the company responsible for BD+. The company seems to be taking advantage of the reported failure of AACS on HD DVD discs, to emphasize the extra security measures that BD+ offers to those content companies in the Blu-ray camp.

“BD+ is a ground-breaking security technology which is designed to enable HD optical formats to recover from major piracy attacks without revoking players or affecting legitimate users. It is a safe-guard that is only available for studios releasing titles in the Blu-ray disc format. BD+ does not exist for the HD DVD format, and was not compromised in the Muslix64 hack.” the email reads.

“A report released by Independent Security Evaluators affirmed that CRI’s Self-Protecting Digital Content, the principal architecture behind BD+, significantly enhances the anti-piracy measures in AACS by providing critical format security needs not addressed by AACS alone.” it continues.

BackupHDDVD recently got an upgrade to v1.00, adding support for Volume keys to be used.

Source:
bit-tech.net
AfterDawn

In the past few years we have seen Apple bring a digital music player to the market, the iPod, which has so far completely held off competition. We’ve seen mobile music phones emerge but fail to have the same impact thus far. We’ve also seen video capabilities added to portable devices and the next generation of consoles putting an emphasis on high definition video content.

However, right now, some of the world’s largest electronics giants are going to clash over which one can dominate the world’s living rooms with their equipment. With services such as iTunes offering TV show and movie downloads, there is a reason to close the gap between PCs and the other consumer electronics equipment in your home.

Apple will soon launch it’s “iTV” device which can use a wireless network to stream video content from the iTunes software straight to your television. The iPod maker’s arch enemy, Microsoft, is also expected to outline its home media server, code-named “Quattro,” at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week.

The Xbox 360 console has media extension features built in, but to get the most out of it you need to have Microsoft’s Windows Media Center OS installed somewhere in your home and with the operating system’s struggle over the past few years, that does limit what the average consumer can get from it.

Other brand name manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Philips Electronics and Sony all have plans to unveil similar equipment this year also. All will face each other this year despite the lack of noticeable consumer demand for the equipment. “It’s a market that has been slow to take off,” says NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin. He estimated that only a few thousand of these devices are sold each month.

Of course, there are other problems that consumers face, like the limited number of homes that do already use wireless networks. For those that do use wireless networks, these devices have not been that easy to get up and running flawlessly either. Never-the-less, for those of us that are interested in sharing our multimedia throughout the home between PC and CE equipment, let the competition commence.

For quite a lot of multimedia enthusiasts, it will be hard for the electronics giants to match the usability and sheer brilliance of software like Xbox Media Center (XBMC).

Source:
Reuters
AfterDawn