digital audio

two years ago medialive canceled the annual trek to the las vegas strip for comdex, the largest gathering of IT professionals on the planet. no one event has taken it’s place, but the heir to the event this year will be the international CES 2006. historically, panasonic, samsung, cisco systems, and HP gave keynotes, but this year intel, sony, yahoo, and google deliver addresses.

intel has already reshaped their company logo and processor line for what looks be be an incredible year of product introductions. yahoo and google move outside of internet search to offer a whole slew of web services and applications, some may say only now at a nascent level. computer processors and graphics engines have already exceeded the expectations of the average user generating e-mail, simple documents, and balancing a spreadsheet, but with the introduction of high definitions video and multi channel audio, even the consumer wants a few processors to rev up the music rips, transfer of photos on to portable viewing devices, and simple HD editing. What a year 2006 will be.

if you wait long enough, everything comes to los angeles. dvexpo west opens at the LA convention center from 7-9 december 2005, and panasonic has prepared a presentation on the DVCPRO HD AG-HVX200 camcorder. so 2006 will usher in a new generation of affordable hidef, along with other computational milestones in the mactel world.

if you would have asked me a few months ago about the intel platform, i would say it was good for the x86 operating systems (solaris, linux, irix, windows), but did not have much of an impact, since i was a mac user. this summer everything changed and i’ve become a intel fan.

intel has some work to do to improve the energy efficiency and performance of their silicon, but in about a year, there stuff will rock our world. they’ve been working on a few initiatives ever since andy grove left the company. they’ve botched up a few items like itanium and the calyley (LCOS) microdisplays. grove lead intel for almost 20 years, replacing gordon moore, until craig barrett took the reign for a short 7 years, and now we have paul otellini. otellini took over in may 2005, and for his debut announced that apple computer is their latest customer. then came the woodcrest, conroe, and merom stuff in september at IDF, and next month otellini will keynote at CES 2006 in las vegas releasing the viiv platform.

i wonder when apple will keynote at CES? so 2006 will be a great year for intel and apple as their partnership may start as early as january at macworld expo 2006 in san francisco, and i can’t wait for some great products. sometime in 2006 we should hear about mac OS X leopard, the successor to mac OS X tiger, which should ship around the same time as microsoft windows vista (Q1 2007). never before, in my recollection have apple customers been privy to such long term planning, and budgeting so we should know when to upgrade systems and applications.

apple has a fantastic digital media platform based on final cut pro. in this suite of products called final cut studio, we have DVD studio pro, soundtrack pro, motion, and complementary shake and logic. these applications make staying on the mac platform worth the long wait, since these apps are so tightly integrated into the OS. they perform well, have regular upgrades, and have a devoted user community. in los angeles, i get to go to three monthly user group meetings:

motion graphics los angeles
los angeles final cut pro user group
los angeles logic pro user group

the future is bright. apple will lead the way into the intel transition. apple consumer electronics like ipod and future stuff will lead in new growth and dominance.

so as the year closes out, merry Christmas and happy new year to all. 2006 should be the true transitional year from powerPC to intel, NTSC (SDTV) to ATSC (HDTV), AG-DVX100B to AG-HVX200, and war to peace (i pray).

apple delivers a knock out blow to VC-1 and other proprietary standards. AVC, or advanced video codec, also known as H.264 by the ITU and MPEG-4 Part 10 by ISO/IEC is an open standard developed my many patent holders. VC-1, the public face of microsoft window media 9, along with flash video 8, or on2 video are both welded shut boxes of technology with one patent holder to take the reins.

multiple companies including apple, IBM, Barco, Dolby Laboratories, Fraunhofer Institute, HP, Motorola, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung Electronics, TANDBERG television, and Texas Instruments have all joined forces to give consumers product choice and unlimited possibilities. the fruits of that partnership were the first successful H.264 or AVC product, the sony playstation portable device, and now the second mass consumer product, the apple ipod.

north american disney TV shows are only the start of what is possible in AVC. the codec can scale from mobile phones at 128 pixels all the way to 1080 pixels high definitions images. all media is going to AVC for content delivery for quality, compression efficiency, and broad support through the consumer electronics industry, information technology industry, and broadcast industry.