Thank you for reading the first edition of the DVD Catalyst newsletter. Because I am quite new to this myself, please bear with me, and things will only get better. If you have any suggestions for what you would like me to provide some additional information on, please let me know.
This week had a few interesting events happen.
The Asus eeePad Transformer was released, and while sold out fairly quickly, there really hasn’t been as much interest about it on the web when compared to the Xoom release 2 months ago. While the eeePad Transformer looks very interesting, its specifications are really not that much different from the Motorola Xoom, but a nice bonus is that with the (optional) dock, you can use it as a laptop.
The NOOKcolor finally received its 1.2 update. The update is quite significant, and turns the eReader into a more capable 7″ Android Tablet. Unfortunately, the update did bring some issues and controversy along with it. As I expected, B&N decided to not incorporate the Android Market, but instead it incorporated its own distribution application to provide apps to users. While this works fine, unfortunately, pricing seems off. On the Android market, many popular apps and games are provided for free and rely on ads in order to pay for development. B&N decided to not let developers use ads, so apps that can be found for free on the Android Market are no longer free. While understandable, apps like Angry Birds sell for $1 on Apple devices, but on the NOOKcolor, it runs for $3.
Video-wise, the NOOKcolor was an amazing device, before the update. It was capable of playback of smooth video at high bitrates, but after the update, the video playback seems “off”. For most users its not really noticeable, but, depending on the video content you watch, it looks like the video just ignores a frame or 2 every second or so. Its not a deal-breaker, and if you are new to the NOOKcolor, you might not notice it, but if you used a NOOKcolor for video before the update, you know it can do better.
Last week I picked up the Blackberry Playbook and while I am impressed with the video capabilities and like its size a lot, thats basically it. Pretty much everything else so far is a disappointment. New apps come out every day, but it looks like many of the more popular developers are waiting to see what Blackberry is doing with it. So far nothing really stands out. The interface is still cool, but without the capability of widgets and lack of base applications, it just doesn’t compare to an Android device yet. Hopefully when BB enables the Android support layer, it would enable some additional features.
DVD Catalyst 4.0.3 Beta 4 was released last night. I didn’t provide much of a change-log, because most of the changes were mainly cosmetics, but I did fix issues with 2 Toy Story Special Edition DVDs, and border detection on Bluray. The fix for that should kick in for other DVDs as well. In addition, I added profiles for the Acer Iconica Tablet, the Asus Transformer and profiles for Tegra2 Tablets in general (all basically the same as the Xoom profiles).
I have also been working on GPU (video card) acceleration, with both Cuda and Intel stuff, but I haven’t had too much luck in that area yet.
Well, thats it for the first newsletter.
If you have any suggestions or requests, please let me know.
