Video Technology: August 2009

Sunday, August 30, 2009

brightness enhancement film - you know for LCD's

3M Vikuiti - brightness enhancement film

For LCD back-lights, it's really disruptive technology in that it allows regular LED's to drive a back light rather then Electroluminescent backlight sheet that dim over time and require 400V at 400 Hz to drive it.

http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/mediawebserver?66666UuZjcFSLXTtMX&6nxMEEVuQEcuZgVs6EVs6E666666--

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Vikuiti1/BrandProducts/secondary/optics101/

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/VikuitiHome/

http://www.insightmedia.info/emailblasts/lcdbefreport.htm

I am going to add a lot more to this shortly.

Buzzword to google,

DataVision head up display for CARS

GM Hughes DataVision head up display system model 110

http://www.weartronics.com/products/DV110

Friday, August 28, 2009

READ "Google exposes web surveillance cams"

http://217.11.38.250/axis-cgi/com/ptz.cgi?camera=1&rzoom=1000
http://217.11.38.250/pics/up.gif
http://217.11.38.250/axis-cgi/com/ptz.cgi?camera=1&move=up
http://217.173.193.218/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=&resolution=352x288

http://195.243.185.195/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?compression=60&camera=1&des_fps=1 (not working)
http://bardcam.colorado.edu/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=&showlength=1&resolution=320x240
http://muwebcam.hhs.oregonstate.edu/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=&resolution=704x480
http://vocafe.aces.utexas.edu/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=&resolution=640x480
inurl:"axis-cgi/mjpg"
http://192.171.163.3/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=&resolution=640x480

NVIDIA 3D Vision Glasses

NVIDIA 3D Vision brings true 3D graphics to games. A simple USB port connects the transmitter to your computer. Have a Blu-Ray drive on your new computer? The NVIDIA 3D Vision also comes with a DVI to HDMI cable so you can connect a DLP HDTV to the NVIDA graphics card in your computer and view HD movies on a much larger screen. If you have a stand-alone Blu-Ray player, don't worry! The NVIDIA 3D Vision can also connect directly to a DLP HDTV via the VESA Stereo Cable Port.

jpeg compression

Hey John,

I'm working on a project for -- that closely relates to the jpeg decompression stuff you showed me a while ago and was wondering if you could help me out...this time I am trying to compress a bitmap into a jpeg using the same IJG library. I've got the library working for the most part, except that something strange seems to be going on with the colors in some instances. Attached is a bitmap and the associated compressed jpeg. As you can see, a lot of the yellows in the bitmap turn to blues in the jpeg. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong? In nature scenes, it is a lot less noticeable.

I should note that the bitmap started out 32 bit, and I had to convert it to 24 bit before feeding it to the compression engine. So, do you have any ideas?

Thanks,
W

---------------
W,
What are your inputs and storage format?
RGB/ YUV?

it looks like your colors are crossed, I recommend getting a red, green and blue object (and yellow) so you can compair and see exactly what colors gone wrong.

Could be U/V or R/B reversal.

John
---------------

Input is RGB. I'll give that a shot. Thanks.

W
---------------
You were correct sir. RB reversal. Thanks again!

W

lowest end video source.

Wow, they have really made some progress since I last looked.
Video totally software generated.

http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/gamesys.php

> Isn't this just 1983 all over again?

in 1983 they needed a lot of chips to make the video.
some of the CPU's were less then 1 Mhz even!

But these microchips are 20 Mhz and up.
They can literally generate video by "Bit banging" or toggling the digital output lines fast enough to approximate a video signal.

At this point it good enough to run a game while generating video on the same CPU.

This literally is the equivalent of taking a printer port wiring a few resistors and creating a video signal out using software.

Something that me and a friend Terje Oseberg did on a PC once just playing around 8 years ago or so using one of my old Audio Bytes.

More info:
Howto on generating video signals using PIC.

What is really impressive is I have seen some projects doing a really simple video overlay using an LM1881 to seperate the video sync and drive a cpu to output the video overlay.

Below is an example
Closed-Caption Decoder

I have also seen where an atmel 2051 was using and a cd4021 shift register. So like 3 chips costing $5 to generate a video overlay!

Monday, August 17, 2009

NICT researchers develop new method to make holography more practical

FROM TECH On

A Japanese institution developed a color electronic holography that enables to take 3D images of moving subjects in normal lighting conditions without using a laser light or a darkroom and reproduce them.

The technology was developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

The holography is based on the integral photography, which shoots subjects in normal lighting conditions by using a video camera with a fly-eye lens composed of a number of microlenses. The same fly-eye lens is used to display 3D images.

In order to produce a color hologram with the existing methods, it is required to shoot the subject separately with red, green and blue laser beams. Therefore, it has been impossible to shoot moving subjects, and it has been required to use a darkroom for shooting.

With the new technology, a video image of a subject is shot in normal lighting conditions. And a hologram is made from the video by high speed computing.

Real-time 3D display: Images of a toy fire truck (front),
a tree (middle) and three-dimensional characters, "3D," (back)
were shot and displayed.

The hologram is displayed on LCD panels provided for each of the RGB colors. Then, the holographic images on the panels are reproduced with laser beams and synthesized so that a color 3D video can be displayed in real time.

At present, the size of the reproducible image is only about 1cm because the holography has a small 3D viewing angle of 2°. NICT aims to quadruple the size to approximately 4cm within the next three years.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Online Video Surges: 11.2 Billion Video Streams in July

FROM: http://mashable.com/2009/08/13/nielsen-july-video/

We thought that online video usage growing by 53 percent was impressive back in May. New numbers released today from Nielsen really put that growth into perspective though.
According to the information and media company, online video usage continued to see strong month-over-month and year-over-year growth. In fact, online video is still ballooning at a current rate of 31% per year in the US. That translates to 11.2 billion total streams in July alone.
That’s nearly double the population of the entire world. Let that sink in for a moment: two videos for every person on the planet, and all of these views were generated just inside the US.

That isn’t the only eye-popping number to come out of Nielsen today, either. There were 135.9 million unique viewers of online video in the last month. If you do the math, that means that the average viewer watched 82.4 streams in July. The numbers also indicate that the average viewer watched online video for 211 minutes during the month. Here’s the data:

+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
|                         |   Jul-09   | Year-Over | Month-Over |
|                         |            |   -Year   |   -Month   |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+
| Unique Viewers (000)    |  135,977   |   14.2%   |    1.2%    |
| Total Streams (000)     | 11,200,093 |   31.4%   |   11.1%    |
| Streams per Viewer      |    82.4    |   15.1%   |    9.7%    |
| Time per Viewer (min)   |   211.6    |   42.2%   |   12.1%    |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------+------------+

When you break down online video by service, there are a few surprises. First, the obvious one: YouTube was #1 with 7 billion total streams and about 104 million unique viewers. Hulu was second with 383.7 streams, but with only 10.3 million viewers. That translates to the average Hulu user watching 37 clips or TV shows in July. Clearly Hulu is able to engage users, but it still doesn’t have the reach of YouTube, or even of Yahoo (265 million streams, 30 million viewers) or MSN/Microsoft (188 million streams, 17.8 unique viewers).

+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+
| Video Brand                                     |   Total   | Unique  |
|                                                 |  Streams  | Viewers |
|                                                 |   (000)   |  (000)  |
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+
| YouTube                                         | 7,010,772 | 104,541 |
| Hulu                                            |  383,779  | 10,299  |
| Yahoo!                                          |  265,570  | 29,948  |
| MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                            |  187,994  | 17,790  |
| Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network             |  179,666  |  7,251  |
| Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network |  155,075  |  7,930  |
| Fox Interactive Media                           |  151,622  | 14,692  |
| MTV Networks Music                              |  119,101  |  6,887  |
| CNN Digital Network                             |  109,221  | 11,680  |
| Blinkx                                          |  86,398   |   268   |
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+---------+

Online video’s growth is storming ahead. Our eyeballs might as well be glued to our computer screens.

Saturday, August 01, 2009

More novel display technologies.

Keep in mind these companies tend to come and go quickly.

I was just checking on Brillian, and LCD maker that developed there own LCoS technology. Poof it's gone. Even the Stock Ticker symbol is gone. I think they were around only 2 years or so before becoming Syntax-Brillian then someone must have acquired them or then went under.

Liquid Vista is a spin off of Philips Research to commercialize a Electrowetting displays,
a technology.
What the hell is Electrowetting? It is the Digital microfluidic manipulation of chemical and biological fluids .

I looks very similar to LCD technology, but supposed to have a better colors.

SeeReal claims to have 3D real-time holography.

PAPERS

Maybe one of my readers can figure out what the deal is with them.

Video Technology