Thank you for reading the 11th DVD Catalyst Newsletter.
This week has been hectic for me, and most of it isn’t even related to DVD Catalyst or MovieGallery. The majority of my time this week (and next week) was used on home-improvement jobs. Of course my actual work continues as well.
News:
Google+. Still one of the biggest things talked on the web is Google Plus. Besides numerous reviews on Google’s attempts at a Facebook-like social network, invites have been sporadically enabled.
If you have not received an invite yet, or if you are already using Google+, make sure to sigh up on http://www.googleplustalk.net/ to get the latest info.
HP Touchpad. This week we finally got to experience the HP Touchpad. Currently the Tablet-market seems to be dominated by either Apple (iPad/iPad2) or Android (Xoom,Asus, Acer, Toshiba etc) Both HP and Blackberry decided to use their own operating system, with Blackberry opting for a proven OS called QNX, and HP using its WebOS, acquired from when HP purchased Palm. My experiences with the Blackberry Playbook has been mentioned in previous newsletters already, however, look a bit below for my experiences with the HP Touchpad.
DVD Catalyst News:
This week there isn’t much new when it comes to DVD Catalyst or MovieGallery. Due to the home-projects I have to deal with, I released DVD Catalyst 4.1 RC2 and MovieGallery 1.2 last week, both using the latest codebase. Unfortunately, with so many new features in MovieGallery, 1.2 I had to update to 1.2.1 fairly quickly due to some bugs with the folder-selection part.
In addition, this week, I received an invitation regarding a distribution agreement for MovieGallery from a big company. I can’t go into details, however, it is a huge opportunity, and the fact that this big company noticed my small little MovieGallery App is very exciting.
Tools4Movies.com Articles:
DVD Catalyst & Stuttering Video/Audio Sync
http://www.tools4movies.com/2011/07/dvd-catalyst-stuttering-videoaudio-sync/
A new feature, inverse telecine, introduced (and enabled by default) with DVD Catalyst 4.0.2.7 (and the beta’s of course), can cause some complications with non-Region 1 DVDs. With the recent release of the Xoom and other Honeycomb Tablets in areas like Europe and Australia, I was receiving quite a few questions regarding stuttering issues, so I added an article on my website to explain why it happens and how to turn it off.
How to : Convert DVDs and Video files for the HTC EVO 3D & HTC Sensation
I added a how-to guide on the website for the EVO 3D and the Sensation. It should make it a lot easier for people who have these phone to get DVDs and video files converted for their phone.
HP Touchpad Info:
http://www.tools4movies.com/2011/07/quick-guide-dvd-catalyst-4-hp-touchpad/
http://www.tools4movies.com/2011/07/quick-guide-dvd-catalyst-4-hp-touchpad-part2/
More info on my experiences with the Touchpad a bit further down, but I did add some articles to my website on how to get the best video quality from your conversions for the Touchpad:
Rants:
Home Improvement Part 2:
As mentioned in the previous newsletter, I am stuck having to do some home-projects. Last week I fixed up the roof of the place with some tar (blackjack) and white coating, in order to stop the leaks, and add some extra insulation. I did it a few years ago, but this time I noticed that the tree next to our house is dripping on the roof, and it is actually dissolving the coating. I have a bit left of the coating, and will be back on the roof in a couple of weeks and use it to add another layer on top of what the tree is damaging, hopefully making it last until next year.
Wednesday and Thursday, I spent fixing up the kitchen floor of my in-laws. They had some soft-spots, and before someone gets hurt, I added a layer of plywood and today I spent the majority of the day placing sticky-tiles. The job itself wasn’t that hard (except for cutting the puzzle-pieces for the cabinet corners and little divider walls) but it was just a lot of work. It’s done though.
Today my neighbor and I will be working on a deck in-front of our porch. Yesterday the lumber was delivered, so now all we need to do is put it all together this weekend. Then on Tuesday, the material for the porch will be delivered, so we can finish that up, so hopefully by this time next week, I can lick my battle wounds, and continue my work as normal.
HP Touchpad:
Where to begin?
I picked one up on Monday, the 16GB version, and was quite excited over it. The Tablet market is ruled by either iOS (iPad) or Android (Honeycomb 3.x). Both Blackberry and HP decided to use a different approach. While it has its flaws, the Playbook does not try to pretend to be something it is not, unlike the Touchpad. From the look, shape and the moment you see the “home screen”, it resembles the iPad in a lot of ways. While this can be an advantage, unfortunately for me, the Touchpad did not pull it off. While it looks like an iPad, it just falls short on just about everything.
The loading time for WebOS on the Touchpad is way too long for a tablet. While you don’t need to turn a tablet off that much, 2-3 minutes is just a bit much for me to handle. When the Playbook was released, some guys posted a video on its unboxing experience, and how long it actually took before you get to play with it, but the same experience applies to the Touchpad. While there were no updates available, I was forced to go through the entire setup process. I just wanted to see how a video would play on it, but still had to go through everything in order to be able to get there.
App loading takes way to long as well. I have seen reviews where the loading time for apps on the Touchpad was marked as a plus, but on a brand-new, clean tablet, starting up the image/video app after a clean boot takes 10-15 seconds. I can understand that if I have 100′s of images and videos on it, but on a clean “slate” this should be near instant.
Multi-tasking works great. The card-interface is intuitive and pretty easy to figure out. Once you have apps loaded, switching between them is near-instant.
Casing: The Touchpad feels cheap. With the Xoom, and even the Playbook, at least it feels like you are holding something worth the money you paid for it, but the Touchpad feels like a child’s toy. Plastic, cheap, last-generation. The overall feel of it resembles that of a $150 tablet, not even close to that of a $500.
Video. Because my main use for my devices is video playback, video playback is the #1 feature for me. This is where the Touchpad fails miserably for me.
*Square-screen. This applies to the iPad as well, since both use the same screen type and resolution. While the 1024×768 screen size isn’t such a big deal for me (I used a 480×320 iPod Touch for years), the square-screen is a major issue. While the Touchpad has a zoom feature, the square-screen just doesn’t cut it for watching movies. You can either watch a 3-color-flag-type video, with a (large) black bar on top and bottom of the video, or zoom the video so that it plays in full-screen with half the movie cut off from view. I really don’t understand why HP and Apple decide to base their screen aspect ratio on the 50+ year old original TV standard. It is 2011, the people who purchase tablets already have wide-screen TVs, so why take them back in time?
*Video app. The build-in video app, which for some reason reminds me of Apple’s iPhoto, is a bit different as well. One of the major gripes with Android is the lack of displaying filenames for video files in Gallery. Unfortunately, the Touchpad has the same issue. But, to make matters worse, it also does not display a thumbnail from the video. If you add your own video files on the Touchpad, the only way to figure out which video is which is by the playlength of the movie. But, on the plus side, it does read the AlbumArt tag on MP4 video files, so you can place a cover-image in there to have it displayed, but unless you use DVD Catalyst’s “albumart” feature, it takes a few extra steps (a program called MetaX) to add these to your video files.
*Video playback. The quality of video playback is good, however, during testing of video files (ones that played perfectly on the Playbook and the Xoom) the video player was a bit clunky. Pause/Play sometimes resulted in the movie starting over, adjusting the position seemed to lag, resulting to it switching back rather than actually starting at the selected position.
Touchpad Conclusion:
After 2 days of using the Touchpad, I brought it back. As mentioned (in numerous newsletters before this one) 2011 is the year of half-xss releases. Everything I have picked up so far comes out of the box with promised but missing features. The Xoom, still no 4G and no official SD card support. The Nintendo 3DS, Promised with video and Netflix, but except for a 3D dog video and 2 3D movie trailers, no video playback yet. The Blackberry Playbook, many promises, but very few delivered, and with every update it seems to get slower and slower.
Maybe I have been too harsh on the Touchpad, but with a pile of promises and a lot of waiting for other devices, I don’t want to have yet another gadget now that supposedly is going to be finished in a couple of months.
Closings:
This week is going to be a tough time for me with all the home-projects going on. This weekend a small sun deck, then after the weekend, closing in the porch to make it into an addition to the place. I hope all goes well. During this time my response time might be a bit slower than usual, however, I still hold on to my promise of “always within 24 hours”. Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
Mitch
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