The last year has seen a bitter war raging between manufacturers, movie studios and retailers over what would become the high definition format of choice for the future of DVD.

But with Direct Downloads from the Internet growing at a massive rate over the same time period, is there actually a future for physical discs to be fought over in the first place?

Here, Gigi Sohn discusses how yet again Hollywood seems to be missing the bigger picture, and failing to grasp how new mediums are making the old guard obsolete.

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Internet television is growing at a phenomenal rate, with services such as Joost, Hulu and Stage6 all providing more reasons than ever to turn to your PC or laptop rather than that square box sitting in your living room.

One of the biggest problems with watching television programmes, or movies online however, is the size of the screen you are being forced to watch it on. Unless you are rich, or an early adopter of future technologies, the chances are your PC or laptop screen just isn’t up to the job any more.

You do have an option though, and that is to hook your PC or laptop up to a projector, and have all your favourite video clips, and web episodes, in glorious full screen, home theater sized goodness. But, where’s the best place to begin?

Buying A Projector

First you’ll need a PC or laptop, and a home theater projector. There are plenty of places to find them, but I’d recommend reading through lots of projector reviews before you blindly purchase one which then doesn’t suit your needs.

Prices of projectors can vary wildly, but you’ll be looking to spend between $1,000 and $3,000 for reasonable quality and a good brand.

Be aware that there is a difference between a projector being HD Ready and actually outputting HD. HD Ready simply means it can accept a HD signal, but may output in standard definition so won’t look as crisp as you might expect.

If you want to make sure your new purchase is 100% HD then look at the output. An 800×600 output is not High Definition, whereas 1280×720 (720p) or 1920×1080 (1080i or 1080p) is.

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Adobe has announced that its updated Flash Player 9.0 will support the H.264 video format, an MPEG 4 compression format that can sustain HD video.

Some reports have claimed this could be the catalyst for making high-resolution web video a reality – especially given Flash player is the technology that drives video playback on popular video sharing sites such as YouTube.

Moviestar – as the new version of Flash Player 9 is colloquially known – will be able to play 1080p HD video encoded in a variety of formats. It can also take advantage of hardware acceleration for improved performance – a great feature for smooth full screen playback.

Moviestar is still in beta release and can only be downloaded from the Adobe Labs site.

[Via Wired]

Amstrad has been working with Sky for a while now to deliver Sky+ set top boxes so it comes as little surprise that the two companies are beavering away on an exciting new toy.

Basically the new set top box will eradicate the necessity for multiple boxes for multiple TV’s. The new set top box will be able to connect to at least two TV’s (maybe more) to a single box and will be able to record two different programs on different stations simultaneously.

Sounds like a great idea and certainly cuts down on having various set top boxes scattered about your home. What is a worry is that according to the Telegraph the boxes will be connected via cables which, unless you are extremely patient and are willing to tack them all to the neatly to the walls, are going to be pretty unsightly in themselves.

We are crossing our fingers that some sort of wireless solution will be offered when the box hits retail. The new device will form an integral part of Sky’s plans to deliver television in future.

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The number of Internet video players and aggregators is increasing, each of whch is promising to bring the latest movies, TV and podcasts to your PC.

Most of these however, rely on closed, proprietary technologies in which the viewers are passive viewers. But this isn’t the case with Miro, the newly re-branded Democracy player.

With a new look, a more cohesive website, some added features and a growing social community, Miro shows all of the signs of a good product that is going mainstream.

This is the reason behind the name change, for instance, which was decided on to remove the political connotations many had associated with the Democracy Player brand.

Miro still packs the same great features that made Democracy such a great tool:-

You can watch and store just about any video format in the player, subscribe to over 1800 online video channels, search and download movies from most of the major video publishing destinations and even download torrent files to watch them in the full-screen player.

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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, or Woz as his friends call him, has thrown investment dollars towards a new internet video company run by a bunch of twenty-something university graduates.

Hotswap.com is a three month old company - with a 21 year old chairman – that has developed a high-definition-like video technology. The technology allows everyday users to upload high quality video to the internet more quickly and easily than is currently possible.

The founders of Hotswap see e-commerce as the pinnacle application for their technology – already the company is cornering the online automobile sales market, where it has won several contracts. Car sellers can showcase cars for sale using the video technology.

The company predicts that high-definition quality video will allow e-commerce to further develop and become more established. It’s also confident about its future, predicting it will become a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

[Via InformationWeek]

The Democracy Video Player, a free player for online videos, has been re-branded and re-launched as “Miro” by its developers, the not-for-profit Participatory Culture Foundation.

The new Miro player is more polished and more stable than ever, according to Nicholas Reville, Executive Director of PCF. The restructured channel guide makes finding videos easy, and the addition of Veoh.com as one of the inbuilt video search engines opens up even more available content.

Miro currently has 1571 channels, many of which are in high definition. Similar to RSS news aggregators, the software can subscribe to channels and automatically download new content for you. Videos from YouTube can also be downloaded and saved.

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