Exploring Stuff That Makes Life Great
I won’t give away all the details just yet but we have a new webseries that we began yesterday. This video comedy series is potentially the funniest sketches we’ve ever come up with! Yes I’m giving it that much hype…
The new series will be available very soon. By very soon I mean sometime before Saturday.
One of technology’s more heated battles is between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray storage formats, a rivalry comparable to Windows/Linux/Mac, UT/Quake 3 and Sony/Microsoft. The latest strike has been made, and Toshiba reports that HD-DVD is in the lead!
HD-DVD players began to outsell Blu-ray ones since about mid-September, according to NPD sales figures. Jodi Sally, Toshiba VP for marketing of digital A/V products said that year to date, according to NPD figures, HD DVD players command 53% of sales; Blu-ray players, 44%; dual format players, 3%. The lead may sound marginal, but it may just herald a dark future for Blu-ray.
Sony managed to woo many customers to their camp of evil when they released a cheaper version of Blu-ray players, and attained a status of absolute win. Sally says that the victory was short-lived and that HD-DVD still dominates the scene. Sony can be seen crying in that corner again, like last week (or the week before).
And as for the PC, Toshiba expects 5 million HD-DVD drives to be sold in the fiscal year 2008. With this, they seek to compete further against the atrocities of Sony’s Blu-ray. What is Toshiba’s master plan?
Toshiba believes more people are buying PC HD DVD drives with the pure intention to watch high-def movies than people who are buying the PS3. Sources have estimated that just 20% of PS3 owners have played movies on the machine.
Where will war turn next? Will Blu-ray strike back? Will Toshiba merge with Sony to form the Imperial Japanese Electronics corporations and attack American shores? We can only hope wait.
[Via Video Business]
As the search continues to find the cast for Star Trek XI the newest casting announcement is that Eric Bana (The Hulk, Munich) is set to play the villain Nero.
Set for a November start date the studio still needs to cast a young James T. Kirk and Scotty for the J.J. Abrams (Lost) directed project.
While adding the first bankable big name actor to the roster will work in Paramount’s favor as far as box office numbers are concerned we will have to wait until the films release on Christmas Day 2008 to see if Bana is a right fit for the Star Trek universe.
Bana joins the already announced cast members Anton Yelchin, Zoe Saldana, Zachary Quinto (Heroes) and Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek: TOS).
After much debate, Youtube ads are now here for good. It appears that Google is trying to listen to all sides on how exactly it should include ads around the players. Anyone can create a ad based player if they have a Google Adsense. We’ve embedded the Youtube ad player in our Forum. We’re actually having issues including it in this post.
It’s great to know that content publishers can finally start making money off of their creations. Of course not all are welcomed. At this time only certain videos will be shown. Most of these videos are the highest viewed and rated, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But if you’re a content publisher like StuffWeLike and haven’t had that break out video hit, you’re videos won’t be featured in other’s players. But if you have a website, you can still profit off of other people’s work.
Hopefully this will encourage users to improve the quality of their videos. Most likely it won’t, but again I did say hopefully.
Some of the latest news tells us that McG, famous for directing Charlie’s Angels and Stay Alive is in talks for directing Terminator 4. Doesn’t sound like a bad choice to me, at least if you consider the likes of well, Boll. Production on T4 has certainly sped up, though – the script arrived last week and since the movie is pre-strike, we should expect production to start ASAP.
Another piece of news says that Vin Diesel is rumoured to be in talks to play the terminator this time around. At least no one will complain about his acting, that way. Come to think of it – he’d make a fantastic Terminator!
As for the story itself, it has been confirmed that Terminator 4 will carry on from the story of Terminator 3 – the apocalypse has taken place and now John Connor has to form an army of rebels against the evil Skynet. I like the way the Terminator movies take place in two time frames, heh.
Who’ll make the cut? How will the movie fare? You can only discuss and comment right now. We’ll wait for the movie, though.
[Via Snarkerati]
If you’re not in the film industry, you may not have heard about the most advanced video camera in the world. Thanks to the Digital Cinema Society, I had the privilege of getting an in-depth look at what makes the Red camera tick.
First off, what makes this camera special is that it records in 4K. This is the same resolution that 35mm records on – a resolution higher than High Definition. Currently there are only 50 Red cameras in the world. At the event we were looking at #30.
