Posted 10/30/09 at 03:28:15 PM by Bart Salisbury

Let the wild and rampant speculation begin! Apparently some on the Internet have become all worked up over a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filing by Cisco Systems. The filing covers a remote control, produced by Foxconn, which doesn’t match any current Cisco offerings, but seems to tie in nicely to an existing product, marketed through Pure Digital Technologies: the Flip digital camcorder.

Information on the new product suggest it to be a device for streaming video from your computer to a television--with the biggest hint being an unreleased “FlipShare TV” manual. The device comes with three parts: the remote, a box to attach to your TV, and a transmitter for your computer. Video on your computer can be accessed with the FlipShare software and streamed wirelessly from the transmitter to the TV box. (Doesn’t AppleTV already do this, and much more?)

Little else is know about FlipShare TV. Does it, for example, do anything more than stream Flip videos? And information on pricing or availability is not yet known. But the picture sure does look nice.

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Posted 04/16/09 at 03:00:00 PM by Paul Lilly

It's all fun and games until the prank backfires, spreads like wildfire thanks to the advent of social media, and ends with felony charges and a PR mess to clean up. Or at least that's how it went down for Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer, a pair of Domino's Pizza employees who filmed a prank in the restaurant's kitchen and posted it online.

The pranksters will be hard pressed to find any sympathy for the fallout, as their antics included filming an employee "putting cheese up his nose, nasal mucus on the sandwiches, and violating other health-code standards while a fellow employee provided narration," according to a report by The New York Times.

In just a matter of days, the video received over a million views on YouTube and was spreading nearly as fast via Twitter. After being identified, Hammonds and Setzer, who maintain that they never actually delivered the sandwiches, have been charged with delivering prohibited foods.

"We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea," said a Domino's spokesman, Tim McIntyre. "Even people who've been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino's, and that's not fair." 

McIntyre also said the company is also preparing a civil lawsuit.

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Posted 02/18/09 at 11:30:00 AM by Will Kraft

These days, most people have at least one computer and a large collection of media files. The conventional practice for most people has always been to have redundant copies of their media collection on their various computers. While this system technically works, it is highly inefficient and creates the unnecessary task of keeping the media collection on each computer synchronized and up-to-date with the others. A far better solution is to keep all the media on one computer and stream it as needed to the other machines over the network.

Streaming technology has been around for over a decade and is something that most people are at least a little familiar with. (Youtube uses streaming flash-based video to work)  In the past, playing large files over the internet was usually pointless due to the fact that the software of the time  required the whole file to download (often on slow connections) before the media could be played. With streaming media, the remainder of a file is fetched as the first part it is being played, so there is no need to wait to get the whole thing before watching it. The video quality on early streaming media was often quite bad, (a trade-off between quality and speed was necessary when most people were stuck on dial-up) but with the near-ubiquitous availability of broadband in most urban and suburb areas today, high-quality streaming media has finally become practical.

We have assembled this guide to help you set up a cross-platform media streaming service using a Linux computer as a server. With our guide, you will be able to stream media to any other computer you own. Other guides on the subject discuss how to set up a Samba-based solution, but we feel that our solution is simpler and easier since you only have to install and configure one program instead of several. For this purpose, we use GNUMP3d. GNUMP3d  is a program that makes media available through a web-based interface. Instead of using the Samba protocol, GNUMP3d uses ordinary HTTP to get the job done.

Read on to get started!

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Posted 12/14/06 at 05:13:47 PM by Michael Brown

The Zvox will deliver room filling sound from anything from music to movies, but how can it fit into your life?

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