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For more Leo and friends all week long, listen to the
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Saturday 18 August 2007
Show Audio
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Edited Audio | |
Contributors
Scott Wilkinson
DTS HD Audio and Dolby TrueHD
- For HD movie discs
- Blu-Ray uses uncompressed PCM audio
- Same as what would come off of a CD
- Question is, if it’s compressed well, will you hear the difference
- MP3s have severe compression
- 2 basic forms of compression
- Lossy
- taking away bits that are considered not to be heard by the human ear easily
- Lossless
- Similar to zip files
- Can save you about a factor of 2
- Lossy
- DTS high resolution is lossy, but sounds great still
- DTS HD Master Audio is lossless
- Dolby TrueHD is also lossless
- Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus are lossless
- Movie studio is in charge of deciding what audio codec is available
- For Blu-Ray camp
- HD-DVD requires for all new codecs to be supported
- Most Blu-Ray players can’t even support all these new codecs
Dick DeBartolo - Cubicaller
- Basically a doorbell for your cubicle
- Has several funny ringtones
- Take a listen
- Prevent people from sneaking up on you
- Silly gag gift
Steve Gibson - Paypal Security Key
- Paypal will send you an oval-shaped dongle
- Gives you a different security key when you turn it on
- Changes every 30 seconds
- Logs you into the account
- Added layer of security
Tech News
Apple was showing off the Panasonic HDC-SD5 HD camcorder. This camcorder uses a new AVCHD format to record straight to flash cards, it has 3 CCD ships with 10x optical image stabilization to prevent blurriness and shaking. It will record 1080p video at 4gb per hour.
Leo’s entire podcast network was put into jeopardy when Skype experienced an outage for one and a half days. The outage was blamed on a, “deficiency in an algorithm.”
Hour 1
Q 1080p content - worth it?/Vizio TVs
- Both are always progressive
- Old TVs were always interlaced
- Not enough bandwidth in the past
- Every other line being drawn up every 1/60 second
- When talking about 1080i or 1080p, you are talking about input/output
- Only a few 1080p sources
- Broadcast TV is either 720p or 1080i
- Hard to see difference between 1080p and 1080i sources
- In theory 1080p should look better
- But only if you look very closely
- In theory 1080p should look better
- Vizio does actually make very good TVs
- Excellent quality
- Best selling LCD and Plasma are both best sellers
- All HDTVs look great with HD content
- Need to see how HDTVs deal with standard definition content
- Vizios do a great job with that
Q Peter from Buffalo, NY - Mac alternative for Frontpage
- May have to redesign
- Won’t be able to use Frontpage extensions
- Adobe’s Dreamweaver is a great tool to create static pages
- Very powerful
- Most people create dynamic sites using content management systems
- Wordpress is a great tool for that
- Leo uses Drupal for TWiT.TV
- CSS Zen Garden is a site to show you how the database and design is separated
Q Darell from Van Nuys, CA - Bass from subwoofer is transmitting to people downstairs
- Need to get subwoofer off of ground or find way to insulate it
- Professionals make insulation products
Hour 2
Q Warren from Madison, WI - Connecting MacBook to monitor
- Need to buy a mini-DVI to VGA dongle
- Should probably get a monitor that can accept analog inputs
- Like the Dell panels
- For laptop security, look at the Targus DEFCON locks
Q Scott - Can’t transfer subdirectory files to Vista machine
- Using Apple Airport Express
- Need to have the latest version of Samba installed for it to work well
- New Airport Extreme update just released
- Take a look at this article regarding getting Vista and Samba to work nicely together
- There is also a thread on the Apple forums regarding the issue
Q Chris from Denver, CO - Backing up 3 machines/Security at hotels
- An external drive is a great way to keep backed up
- But something called off-site backup is integral as well
- If you have a fire or something at home, your external drive would be fried
- Windows Backup Utility isn’t that great
- Puts all info in a huge ball of data
- Image backup
- Creates a full and complete “image” state of the drive
- bit-for-bit copy of the hard disk
- Creates a full and complete “image” state of the drive
- Simply use SSL
- Can use a VPN if you want
- Like VforVPN or HotSpotVPN
Hour 3
Q Matt from Ottawa, Canada - Booting Windows Vista from a USB drive
- Macs should be able to boot from USB or Firewire
- On a Mac, you need to slowly train it to use column view
Q Gary from Sunnyvale, CA - No sound out of HD-DVD player/PC not working right with new ECS motherboard
- Video receiver cannot decode Dolby TrueHD
- Only can support Dolby Digital
- Should have a choice in HD-DVD settings to switch to Dolby Digital
- Not using actual ECS drivers, but the Intel chipset
- Should be the same
- Try downloading some drivers from ECS’ site
