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Bogdan from Digital Dreams Design (digitaldreamsdesign.net) is in Copenhagen, this is the second video of the series:

DivX HD: Play, Download

Bogdan from Digital Dreams Design (digitaldreamsdesign.net) is in Copenhagen, this is the first video of the series:

DivX HD: Play, Download

I found this very interesting new 720p SD-memory based camcorder today.

More info: http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=93488
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=95227
http://forums.steves-digicams.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=569962

Here are some native 720p .mov video samples taken with this camera: 1 (38mb), 2 (246mb), 3 (12mb), 4 (9mb), 5 (14mb) - If I’d have the camcorder to test, I’d film some people, do some handheld interviews outdoors instead of just filming cows, ducks, buildings and trees like in these samples.

What I find about this camcorder to be superior than Sony and Panasonic’s expensive AVCHD offerings, as well as interesting compared to Canons and Sanyo’s HD camcorders:

- It records 720p which I find to be better than 1080i, I haven’t seen any Sony, Panasonic, Canon camcorders be able to do 720p

- It records to about 4mbit/s, yes I find this low bitrate very convenient, in theory h264 720p should not use more than 4mbit/s for full quality, that depends only on the performance of the h264 encoding chip, the encoding chip of this one might not be the best but the bitrate is the one I’m targeting for, especially since I would like to be able to upload my HD videos on the Internet directly without conversion. This bitrate also provides 1 hour per 2 GB of the SD card capacity.

- It records to the .mov container using H264, and I don’t know which audio codec, hopefully it is not ADPCM but AAC. I would currently prefer a camcorder like this one to record directly to 720p DivX with Mp3 audioin the .avi container, since that is what I use on my video-blogs, and I think that the .avi container is more compatible with people’s current PC/Mac/Linux setups as well as DivX 720p playback requires less processing power to playback smoothly. H264 only improves quality about 5-10% over DivX at 720p according to some sources I have heard, so I don’t think that h264 really is absolutely needed. Hopefully that current Blueray, HDDVD, PS3 and other devices can support DivX 720p in the .avi container natively, so this isn’t about having a container standard monopoly.

- Price, 249$ is very disrupting I think for a HD camcorder price, even based on SD memory, which you can buy a 8GB capacity for 70$, have a couple of these and transport a portable multimedia player on the move with up to 160GB if you need to empty on of your SD cards with up to 4 houres of footage on 8GB SD while filming with your other SD card.

What seems to be unperfect about this product according to the samples I have seen on the above links:

- There seems to be somekind of Shutter, frame-rate, image stabilization kind of problem, since pans and handheld shots look quite bad.

- Auto-focus seems to be slow

- Zoom is noisy

Anyways, I will try to soon test this camcorder, especially post some shots of people and not only cows, ducks and dogs as the available samples currently are about. I think that this Aiptek Z300HD is very promizing of the upcomming lots of 720p HD camcorders that are gonna be available. This must mean that now there is a cheap DSP solution to use in SD, HDD and other camcorder solutions. So what I hope to see in the next few months, is one cheap camcorder like this with a slight better optics concerning image stabillization shutter smoothness of video framrate or whatever is wrong with this one concerning image quality, and I hope also to very soon see a DivX HD compliant camcorder, 720p 4mbit/s with 160kbit/s Mp3 stereo sound I think would be the greatest. And also I hope that camcorder manufacturers are thinking of adding Wi-Fi, usb-host to plug-in an external hard disc that takes the power from the usb-host connection, also a usb-host that works with an external keyboard, so that one can edit filenames, description and titles when uploading with the camcorder directly onto FTP servers and a 1-click solution to update ones HD video-blog. If a Wi-Fi solution can work to also synch with other camcorders through a portable editor to do a multi camera production and to also stream live the 4mbit/s stream by uploading that through Wi-Fi, thus being able to broadcast 4mbit/s video live.

Also, I hope that this DSP chip is great at encoding at this 4mbit/s using very intelligent variable bitrate algorithm, automatically detecting the action and adjusting more or less bitrate in realtime while recording.

The Air Car, developed by Guy Nègre, will be built by India’s largest automaker, Tata Motors. In the second part of this video, inventor Angelo Dipietro shows a 6-13 kilo rotary engine design, which looks like it could possibly provide a quieter and more energy efficient compressed air engine design, but I wonder if those clean car designs also can provide safety, power and long range.

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Hopefully this electric batery technology can be integrated in the Think car and other electric car designs and sold for the same price as the cheapest normal cars, with local incentives in form of tax-cut, free parking in city centers with reserved 0% emitting park spaces, free and 10-minute fast recharge stations around the city easilly located with on board GPS.

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Yesterday I got on the frontpage of Digg with this story: OLPC on 60 Minutes: Intel is evil, and a few days ago I was also on the front page of Digg with The first children have received their 100$ laptops.

The cost of the Classmate is closer to $400. Though Intel is offering only to OLPC launch states in maximum bunches of 10 thousand units at $180 each. Thus Intel is taking a $220 loss per laptop. Intel will only sell at that price in relatively low volumes, you can be sure Intel won’t commit to deliver a million laptops per country at that price.

I have tried both at http://olpc.tv (even though those were not the latest versions), and I can tell you that while OLPC XO-1 is 100% made of innovation, the Classmate is nothing more than a lower spec conventional laptop with an Intel ULV processor (like the one in the UMPCs) and with a 2GB flash memory instead of a 20GB HDD (which doesn’t cut price more than about $30). Intel might as well give out low spec full screen and full keyboard sized laptops in batches of 10 thousand units, it wouldn’t cost Intel much more. What Intel is doing is making people think that the Classmate is innovation, just because it’s the same size as the OLPC XO-1, while Classmate is 0% innovation.

OLPC XO-1 is better in terms of power managment (12h battery life with backlight and heavy use compared to 2h battery life on the Classmate, the Classmate consumes nearly 10 times more Watts per hour of use), the dual-mode high resolution screen of the XO-1 is sunlight readable and usable for e-books (Classmate is just a conventionnal and expensive 7″ LCD, just like the ones on the expensive UMPCs) and the software of the XO-1 is made for education and is full of innovation for that use, fully open source thus constantly being optimized and new location specific apps can be added (while Classmate is nothing but a normal laptop running Windows XP, Intel did nothing to improve or adapt any educational software for the Classmate running Windows XP, the Classmate comes with no other educational software than what is currently available on Windows XP and on the Internet).

OLPC XO-1 can run Windows XP, but Microsoft has on purpose not wanted to confirm that, because Microsoft also is hoping that OLPC XO-1 will not start mass production as planned. But you can be sure that XO-1 hardware can support a customized slimmed down Windows XP and OSX, once it is mass produced, you can be sure that Microsoft and Apple will be able to relatively quickly deliver those customized unbloated and free-licenced or $3-licenced OS to the OLPC schools on a 1GB SD card.

During a campaign, most french people get their information from television, and Sarkozy has total control on TV and the press media in France. It is impossible for the socialists to regain power in France as long as media is controlled by huge companies that are the friends of the right wing politicians.

The only solution for France and for many other countries that have political immobillism and a right wing ultra-capitalistic agenda, is to build a new form of media and democracy using the Internet. Currently the Internet has some forums, blogs, video systems, content managment systems that permits some interesting fenomenons. But still the barrier to entry is too low to affect elections.

Ségolène Royal did the absolute best online campaign in the world at http://desirsdavenir.org, using the Internet to promote better democracy in France, using the Internet to broadcast video messages to millions of viewers. Ségolène Royal’s Internet campaign beat all the world records in terms of use of of the Web. But the use of the Web needs to go much further that that, and reach into the living room of a majority of the citizen before it can really affect election results.

I believe the french socialists should invest the little money and ambition required to try and really revolutionnize the media, and providing an alternative decentralized access to information to a majority of citizens. This is the only way that reasonable politics will be able to regain the power in states where a monopolizing right-wing owned media has a monopoly on all the way small political tricks are performed to force the public opinion on the side of corrupted right-wing politicians. The revolution in media and information in a much more profound way is required for democracy to become just and effective to change things for the best for most people.