Month: November 2007

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Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, why pick sides?

TiVo HD on the Bottom, Toshiba HD-A2 in the middle and Sony Playstation 3 on top. It’s an HD sandwich!

 

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of High Definition Television (HDTV). This means that I also want my movies in HD as well as my broadcast TV and cable stations. Well unless you’ve been living under an analog rock, you have probably heard that there is a format war going on between the major high-def camps. The two formats battling for your attention and money are Sony’s Blu-ray and Toshiba’s HD DVD.

As with any new technology, consumers tend to wait and see who comes out on top before making a major investment. Then there are the early adopters like me that live for today and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. From what I could tell Blu-ray was going to be the winner so I started down that route with the purchase of a Sony Playstation 3 which could playback Blu-ray movies. Life has been good and I really haven’t given HD-DVD a second thought until recently. I read an article about how Toshiba was offering their Toshiba HD-A2 player for a mere $99.99 for one weekend only which amounted to a half-off sale. Even then I really didn’t pay any attention to it. It wasn’t until I read an article about how 90,000 players were sold in one weekend at that magic $99.99 price. That’s when it clicked that for $100 I could have BOTH formats. However, it was too late. The magical sale had ended. I headed over to eBay (of course) where I was sure some enterprising sellers would be selling new in the box units for slightly more than the $99.99 price. I was right and I picked up one for about $25 more.

The Toshiba HD-A2 arrived yesterday and I hooked it up in my theater last night. Of course I don’t own any HD DVD movies, so I headed over to my local Hollywood Video and rented a couple of titles to try out. I was stunned at how few titles they had in either HD DVD or Blu-ray. There was basically one rack dedicated to each. Both of these racks were together in a corner of the store. There were miles of racks for standard def titles. I watched Aeon Flux which was an OK movie, but looked really good in high-def (I also picked up Transformers in HD DVD). I didn’t expect much for $100 and I was right. The unit is pretty basic and comes with a remote and of all things standard composite cables. If you’re buying an HD DVD player, chances are you want to enjoy it in HD. You’ll never get there with the supplied cables, so that was a total waste. I went with HDMI and Optical Audio connected to my Octava HDMI & Optical Audio Switcher (which I love). To be honest I can’t really tell much of a difference (make that NO DIFFERENCE) between my Blu-ray movies and HD DVD movies. So when it comes to picking a format it will likely come down to available content. Right now Blu-ray is winning in the content game as 2 of the 3 major movie houses have gone Blu-ray and Blockbuster only rents Blu-ray in addition to standard def DVDs. My movie rental house of choice is Netflix. They offer both Blu-ray and HD DVD titles and even let you configure your queue to your favorite format first if the movie is offered in both. So now I have Netflix set to prefer Blu-ray first, then HD DVD, and then DVD.

The out-of-the-box experience was pretty good and pretty straight forward. I did connect it to my network via Ethernet (wish there was a Wi-Fi) option. There is a sheet in the box that suggests that you check for the latest firmware right away. I attempted to do so, but it couldn’t connect to the update server. I’ll try again another day. All-in-all, not bad for a little more than $100. The war can rage on and now I don’t really care if anyone wins or not. I’ve got both!

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What a difference a card makes

On Friday, I did a review of the NEW Synchrotech ExpressCard PCIe Card Reader for ExpressCard slots found on MacBook Pros and other various PC laptops. Although the reader performed better than my USB reader in my initial tests, I was disappointed in the apparent lack of speed in the Lexar Professional media. So over the weekend I went out and bought two different CompactFlash cards. I bought the SanDisk (my usual preferred brand) Extreme III 2.0GB card and just for comparison I bought a PNY Optima Pro 2GB Compact Flash. Both cards are rated at 133x.

Using the same exact test folder from Friday of just over 1GB of images I began my tests with the new cards. The results were STUNNING! In my first test with the SanDisk Extreme III card in the Synchrotech reader was almost TWICE AS FAST as my USB reader. However, what was even more shocking was the results I got with the PNY card. I had always seen this brand card, but never tried it before. It seems that most of the pros I know either use SanDisk or Lexar. However, after my tests on Saturday I may be buying a few more PNY cards. Why? Because it was the FASTEST card I’ve tried yet. It copied the same data about 30 seconds faster than the SanDisk card! Now keep in mind that both of these brands come in even faster speeds. SanDisk makes an Extreme IV and PNY makes a UDMA 266x speed card. So the speed increase could even be more dramatic with the ExpressCard reader while over USB there would be no difference because the cards tested are already faster than the USB reader can do. I plan to get the faster versions of each card and do more tests.

In all of my tests the USB 2.0 reader seems to top about at just over 2 minutes to copy over 1.1GB of data from all of the cards I’ve tried. However, the Synchrotech ExpressCard Reader really started to rock with the SanDisk and PNY cards copying the same data in 1:10 and 40.9 seconds respectively.

 

Copying 1.1GB of data from each card Synchrotech ExpressCard Reader SanDisk USB2 12-in-1 Reader
SanDisk Extreme III 2.0GB Card
1:10.8
2:02.01
PNY Technologies Optima Pro 2.0GB Card
40.9
2.03.01
Best results in GREEN.    

 

In this world of Faster, Faster, Faster, the Synchrotech ExpressCard Reader ($65) will become a permanent addition to my camera/computer bag. If you have a notebook with an ExpressCard slot, I highly recommend this reader. It kicks the crap out of USB 2.0 readers. I also recommend that you give the PNY Optioma Pro CompactFlash cards a spin too.

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True Express Card PCIe Speed for Photographers

As our images continue to grow with 10-12MP cameras becoming the norm in the pro world of digital photography, it has become even more important than ever to be able to download our images as fast as we can. When Apple introduced the MacBook Pro, they made one important change that had the photography community grumbling for months. They eliminated the PC Card slot that we had all become accustom to in favor of the new (smaller) ExpressCard|34 slot. The excuse was, "this is where the industry is going" and Apple likes to be on the cutting edge (most of the time). The biggest problem with this slot is that it’s not as wide as a Compact Flash card and therefore any adapters would require the card actually pert rude out of the side of the notebook.

As time went on ExpressCard adapters started to show up for all the various card formats. However, the one thing that these adapters had in common is that most, if not all of them operated at USB 2.0 speeds. Where was the promise of the super fast ExpressCard slot? So when I saw the CFExpressPro+ PCIe ExpressCard to CompactFlash Memory Card Adapter 2.5Gbps I was intrigued! This was the first adapter I had seen that promised to operate at the native PCIe speeds of the slot. So I ordered one.

The adapter arrived the day after I had upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and although I know better to install drivers that don’t specifically say that they are compatible with the OS I’m running, I did it anyway and that was a mistake. Come to find out that Leopard already includes the driver for this card. There was no graceful way to revert back from what I had done (although the manufacturer tried really hard to help me get back to a state before their driver), so it was Archive and Install Time of Leopard to get the native driver back. NOTE: If you’re on Leopard DO NOT install the drivers that come with the adapter!

I started my tests with a Lexar Professional CompactFlash 133x Speed 4GB card and the results were shockingly bad! I thought that there must still be a problem with the driver and the manufacturer went off to try to solve the problem. In my initial tests the card copied the data about ten times faster using my old SanDisk USB 12-in-1 reader. So today I decided to try a different approach. I used a different MacBook Pro that still had Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4.10) on it and installed their driver and the results WERE THE SAME! The problem seems to be with the Write Acceleration (or some other factor) that Lexar uses on this particular card. I tried a test of 2.72GB of data and the USB card reader copied the data in 6 minutes 8 seconds. I stopped the ExpressCard copy after 6 minutes because the Finder reported that there was still 49 minutes left!

When I reported these findings to the folks at Synchrotech, they asked me "which card" was I using? I told them, but this question prompted me to think that the issue may be with the Lexar card itself. This lead me to conduct more tests with my older (slower) SanDisk card which gave me results more in line of what I was expecting.

 

Speed Test Results

 

  ExpressCard USB 12-in-1
SanDisk Card/Leopard Driver (1GB of data) 1:58.0 2:22.7
SanDisk Card/Synchrotech Driver in Tiger (1GB of Data) 1:55.9 2:26.1
Lexar Card/Synchrotech Driver in Tiger (2.72GB of Data) Too Long! 6:08.3

 

Testing environment:

Both MacBook Pros are 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duos with 3GB of RAM. One running Mac OS 10.4.10 and the other running Mac OS 10.5. Both with 5400 rpm internal drives.

 

The Bottom Line

The Synchrotech ExpressCard PCIe adapter goes for $65 and seems to have about a 21% speed increase over my USB 2 Card Reader. However, the one thing that has to be ironed out is compatibility with the very popular Lexar Pro Compact Flash cards with Write Acceleration. I do plan to do another test as soon as I can get my hands on a FAST SanDisk card or a newer Lexar card. And I expect the speed difference with a high speed card to be even greater over USB. So stay tuned…

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The 200th Episode of the Creative Suite Podcast

Time flies when you’re having fun! Not long ago I posted an entry to celebrate a major milestone of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast hitting Over 5 Million Downloads. Well today I’m very pleased to announce that we hit our 200th Episode! That’s right, there are now 200 episodes of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast (with yours truly as the host) available for your viewing pleasure. These episodes cover just about every aspect of the Creative Suite and with more episodes to come.

Today’s episode is done by special guest Kevan O’Brien, the rock star from the Creative Suite 3: Creative License Tour and he details "The Making of the Johnny L Episode" in which he uses the latest and greatest Panasonic P2 camera and new editing capabilities in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.

I’ve had a blast doing this show and the response has been phenomenal. This grass roots effort has reached thousands and thousands of viewers world-wide and many of you have walked up to me at tradeshows and seminars to tell me how much it has helped you in some way. Truly it is your continued support that keeps me motivated in doing these. So thank you!

Subscribe via iTunes for FREE or watch on the web.

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Time Machine not feasible over Wi-Fi

Now that I’ve been running Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) for a week, I’m actually finding Time Machine to still be one of my favorite features probably with Quick Look being a close second. However, 7 days after installing Leopard on my home Macs I have abandoned the idea of backing up wirelessly using Time Machine. While it does work, it’s just too resource demanding. I could always tell when Time Machine was backing up my MacBook Pro to a shared hard drive connected to my Power Mac G5 because my internet browsing would slow to a crawl. I just couldn’t take it anymore and decided to outfit each Mac with its own external hard drive. Luckily I had some drives left over from upgrading to larger drives on my Server, so these drives worked out perfectly for Time Machine backups. I bought some external cases from Other World Computing and I was on my way.

 

Having a "regular" backup has already paid off!

Last week I screwed up iCal and Mail (two separate incidents) and was able to easily and quickly get back up and running by restoring the previous day’s files using Time Machine. It just works!

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TiVo-to-Go on TiVo HD

The gift that just keeps giving. I love my TiVo HD boxes. I had always been a DirecTV TiVo user and therefore missed out on all the Series 2 coolness of things like TiVo-to-Tivo transfers and TiVo-to-Go. Well I came home from a business trip to find a message waiting on my TiVo HD indicating that the long awaited software update had been applied (automatically over my Wi-Fi network) and I now have TiVo-to-Go among other nice features.

TiVo-to-Go allows you to transfer recorded shows to your Mac or PC. From there you either watch the shows, burn them to a DVD or more importantly you can convert them for playback on iPods, iPhones, Apple TV’s and PSPs. This is what I was most interested in because it would be nice to take my favorite shows with me to watch on the plane or in other situations where I have time to kill.

So last night I did a couple of tests to see how it would all work. First off on the Mac, the solution is to use Toast 8 Titanium. It is the officially sanctioned software that enables TiVo-to-Go on the Mac. There are other shareware utilities out there, but since I already own Toast, I decided to start there.

Toast is the app that let’s you actually burn the content to a disc, but it comes with another component called "TiVo Transfer" that you can enable during installation or after the fact from the Setup Assistant under the Help menu. TiVo Transfer sees your networked TiVo Series 2 or Series 3/HD DVRs and will allow you to transfer the recordings of your choice to your Mac (if you’re a Windows user you can download TiVo Desktop). TiVo Transfer works exactly as advertised. It found both my TiVo HDs on my network and showed me a list of the current shows on the drives of each one. I could transfer the shows I wanted, to my Mac and even setup a "Auto Transfer" to automatically transfer a particular show and all of its future episodes. You might really want to do this considering how big these files can be and the time it takes to transfer them. The first show I did as a test was an episode of South Park which is 30 minutes in length and NOT HD. So it was 680MB in size on the TiVo. Not bad. It took about 15 minutes to transfer it to my iMac G5. However, an episode of The Unit which was in HD was 7.5GB and took close to 3 hours to transfer. Once this 7.5GB file was on my iMac it was still in HD format and can be watched at it’s full size and resolution which is cool, because you’ll get that full-screen super clear experience on your laptop provided you’ve got the extra space. Now of course the other option is to simply burn it to a DVD with Toast. There is a "Toast It" button right in the TiVo Transfer window which will launch Toast and add the show to your Video DVD window for burning. Toast will handle the DVD creation and encoding for DVD. In theory if you had a Blu-ray burner you’d be able to keep it in high-def and make a Blu-ray disc.

The next option is to not burn it to disc, but to "Export" it from Toast to an iPod/iPhone/Apple TV or PSP format. This is great, but there is a restriction here. You can only export at a resolution no higher than 320 pixels wide. Which is kind of a bummer since the iPhone and iPod touch have higher res screens. Also it takes time to convert the files into iPod format. However, once the conversion is done Toast automatically adds the shows to iTunes as TV shows with their complete descriptions so you’d be ready to sync with your device. The resulting size for South Park was 221.8MB and The Unit was 364MB as a 320 pixel wide iPod video.

 

The Bottom Line

I welcome this FREE update to a DVR that I was already enjoying. Now I have a few options to take my shows with me and as a person that is constantly on the go, this is very cool. I still wish the process were faster and it prohibits the last minute "I’m heading out the door and wouldn’t it be cool to take a couple shows with me to watch?" kind of situation. However, with a little planning the night before, I could have a MacBook Pro or iPhone loaded with a couple shows ready to go. TiVo HD simply blows away the Comcast supplied DVRs.