Blu-ray Disc Demystified

Wer die Blu ray-Technik ganz genau, d.h. auf professioneller Ebene kennenlernen will, für den hat Jim Taylor, seit Anbeginn der DVD bekannt für seine Website DVD Demystified, jetzt zusammen mit drei anderen Experten das Buch Blue-ray Disc Demystified veröffentlicht. Doch das neue Werk hat wenig mit der populären Ratgeberseite für DVD zu tun.

Jim Taylor, Charles Crawford, Mitbegründer von Television Production Services, Chris Armbrust, Gründer von Marin Digital und Michael Zink, „director advanced technology“ bei Technicolor wenden sich mit diesem Standardwerk vor allem an Produzenten und gehen deshalb bis in die Details dieses HD-Formats:

„The book isn’t for fanboys looking to celebrate Blu-ray’s victory over HD DVD. Rather Demystified acts as a tip book for Blu-ray developers, offering all the nuts and bolts about the format, as well as applications for working with Blu-ray. Comparisons between DVD creation vs. Blu-ray are prevalent.
“The bad news is that the Blu-ray format is vastly more complex than DVD,” Armbrust said. “The good news is that the [Blu-ray Disc Association] has made a commitment to quality control.”
The book offers chapters on Blu-ray content protection, facts and myths about the technical issue of Blu-ray, and reasons why Blu-ray works, and even reasons it doesn’t.
“One of the reasons we keep coming back to Blu-ray as the [high-definition] standard is the bit rates,” Armbrust said. DVD has a maximum video bit rate running at about 10 mbps, with Blu-ray coming in as high as 48.“ (Home Media Magazine)

NASA-Filme online

Rick Prelinger vom Internet Archive wies gestern auf die neue Vereinbarung mit der NASA hin, wonach 12 Millionen Photos und 100.000 Stunden Film- und Videomaterial der NASA gescannt und im Web frei zur Verfügung gestellt werden sollen (Pressebericht). Das Internet Archive wird dafür die neue Website nasaimages.org betreiben.

„The two organizations didn’t say when the site will officially launch, but the project will presumably be well underway and public before NASA’s 50th anniversary next year. (The anniversary of space flight is next month.) They did say that the archive will feature more than 50 years of NASA history, including audio files, computer animations and images on experimental rocketry dating from as early as 1915. Archiving all of that might take a while…

NASA representative David Steitz said that the project was no small endeavor, one best suited to the Internet Archive. „This important public service, bringing online and making available probably the most important scientific imagery collection in the world, is a task we feel is most appropriately managed by the people of Internet Archive,“ Steitz said in a statement.“ (Stefanie Olsen, C-net News Blog)

Nach einer Zusammenarbeit mit Google hat sich die NASA nun für eine gemeinnützige Organisation entschieden.

Nachtrag von Rick Prelinger in AMIA-L : „I should mention that CNET incorrectly characterized this agreement as exclusive. It is nonexclusive, as it should be.“