Archive for February 28th, 2009

This water droplet-shaped concept from Ilshat Garipov makes a good run at it, but no matter how small or slick or arty they are, Bluetooth headsets are just never going to look good.

Is it the association they have with bankers, lawyers, and other douche-types? Is it the inherent awkwardness of watching somebody talk into a machine you can’t see? I think we can all agree that it’s not the specific design of an individual Bluetooth headset that makes it irritating. Sorry, Ilshat, your design is pretty sharp and all that but I just can’t get excited over a device with a function I can’t help but find annoying. [Yanko Design]

Welcome to another edition of Gadget Deals of the Day. Today we’ve got the cheapest 1.5 TB external drive ever seen, TVs, PMPs, and for you slobs, a bargain-priced Snuggie.

HDTVs:
• Sharp AQUOS 720p 32″ TV for $480 (normally $580)
• Sharp 720p 32″ TV for $460 (normally $550)

Portable Media:
• 1st Gen Apple iPod Touch 32GB for $310 (normally $400)
• Archos 605 WiFi 30GB for $135 (normally $150-200)

Peripherals:
• Logitech Harmony 676 Remote for $45 (normally $150+)
• 25% off Dell LCD Displays
• Seagate 1.5 TB External Hard Drive for $112 (normally $130)
• 3-Pack of 6′ HDMI cables for $8 (normally anywhere from $30 to $80)

Gaming:
• 20% off on all consoles, games, and accessories at Dell

Cell Phones:
• Nokia E71 Unlocked for $290 (today only, normally $370)

Apparel:
• 2 Snuggies plus 2 book lights for $15 (normally $60)
• Up to 80% off men’s apparel at Amazon
• Up to 45% off Adidas men’s running shoes

I don’t know about this one, Howard. Will your vegetables network properly with your fish? [thanks, Edan!]

Apparently our beloved national institution, the iPhone, isn’t such a big hit in Japan. It’s doing so poorly that Softbank, its Japanese carrier, is offering the 8GB iPhone free with a contract. Update:

Wired points to the iPhone’s high monthly plan, lack of multimedia messaging support, and dependence on a computer for syncing as the main obstacles to popularity in Japan. Many in Japan use a cell phone as the primary computing device and have foregone a full-sized computer, so the iPhone’s requirement is a dealbreaker. Western companies historically have had trouble cracking the Japanese market (Microsoft and Nokia could attest), so it’s not necessarily a shocker that Softbank is reduced to giving the suckers away.

Update: Nobi, one of the leading iPhone proponents in Japan, seems to have been misquoted or at least misunderstood in the Wired article. He explains, at length, that he thinks the iPhone isn’t a failure in Japan, considering it’s sold anywhere from 300,000 to 400,000 units to date. He acknowledges that it’s not necessarily the perfect phone for Japanese users, due to its lack of TV, emoji (Japanese emoticons), and Osaifu-Keitai (an automated scanning/payment system), but that it’s still quite hip and not “lame” like the Wired article alleges. The problem mostly seems to be a matter of perception: Japanese newspapers have printed stories about the iPhone’s failure, even though that’s a bit misleading. But certainly the iPhone is not a huge, game-changing hit in Japan as it is here in the States. [Wired]

Included digital copies are still the exception rather than the norm in the Blu-ray world. Lame. You’d like to rip those discs for playback elsewhere, right? But there is something you should know first.

And that is this: Ripping Blu-ray discs sucks. Hard. It takes forever, eats up a ton of hard drive space, and for all practical purposes requires software that isn’t free. It’s like trying to rip a DVD in 1999: computers still have a long way to go before this is easy.

But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and once your system is set up it’s something you can start before you go to bed and have finished for you in the morning. Here we’ve outlined exactly what you need to rip your 1080p Blu-ray discs (the ones you own, of course) and then convert the video into a more manageable file size for watching on a computer, phone, game console or PMP. Because hey, you own this movie, and you should be able to watch it on whatever device you want.

But you’ll have to earn that right. Let’s start this painful process, shall we?

What’s you’ll need:

• A Windows PC (the Blu-ray ripping process is, at the moment, Mac-unfriendly. I used Windows 7 Beta 64-bit and all the following software is Windows-only)

• AnyDVD HD (free fully-functional 21-day trial, $80 to keep) for ripping and decrypting BD discs

• RipBot264 (free) for transcoding from AVC (you’ll also need a few codecs to go along with it: .NET Framework 2.0, the avisynth and ffdshow codec packs, and the Haali media splitter)

• tsMuxeR (free) for muxing (may not be necessary)

• A Blu-ray drive (I used OWC’s Mercury Pro external)

• A ton of free hard drive space (80GB or so to be safe)

• A decent understanding of how video codecs and containers work (Matt’s Giz Explains has everything you need)

How it Works
AnyDVD HD is a driver that sits in the background, which automatically removes the AACS or BD+ security lock and the region code from any BD disc you load, allowing it to be ripped. The video on most Blu-ray discs is encoded in the MPEG4 AVC format in .m2ts files, so it will need to be transcoded from AVC to something else (like an H.264 MP4 file) for playback on other devices. MPEG4 AVC doesn’t have wide support in all of the best video transcoders we alread love, like Handbrake. This makes finding a free and easy transcoding solution a little tougher, but thankfully RipBot264 seems competent.

You can then either transcode directly from the disc, or go the route I took and rip the disc to your hard drive before running it through the transcoder, which reduces the chance for errors. Give both a shot to find what’s easiest.

Thanks to poster Baldrick’s guide on the Videohelp.com forums and the folks at Doom9—these instructions are based on info found there. Check them out if you get stuck.

Rip Your BD Disc
Again, if you want to try transcoding directly from the disc at the sacrifice of speed or the chance of corruption, you can skip this part (except for step 1) and go to step 4.

1. First up, download and install all the necessary software: AnyDVD HD and RipBot264, which also requires .NET Framework 2.0, the avisynth and ffdshow codec packs, and the Haali media splitter. (All links lead to their Videohelp.com pages, a fantastic resource). These codecs, nicely enough, should give AVC decoding capabilities system wide, so apps like VLC and Windows Media Player should be able to play them without problems.

2. Fire up AnyDVD if it’s not running yet, and from the fox icon in the system tray, choose “Rip Video DVD to Harddisk.” Choose a save point where there’s a healthy 40-50GB free and start it a-rippin’. It’ll probably take around an hour.

3. When it’s done, open up the BDMV/STREAMS directory and try to play the largest .m2ts in VLC or WMP. It should play fine with sound, but if anything’s fishy, you may want to try re-loading RipBot264′s required codecs or trying another AVC codec like CoreCodec’s CoreAVC. This is more paid software, but like AnyDVD, it comes with a free trial period. You need to be able to see and hear an .m2ts file normally during playback before you proceed.

Transcode Your Rip
Now, the fun part.

4. Open up RipBot264. When you try to run RipBot264 the first time, it may say you haven’t installed ffdshow even if you have. If this is the case, open the RipBot264.ini file in Notepad and change “CheckRequiredSoftware=1″ to “CheckRequiredSoftware=0″ and save it.

5. Click “Add” and select the largest *.m2ts file found in your ripped BD disc’s BDMV/STREAMS folder. RipBot will then analyze it and find the various programs available to encode—you want the one that matches the runtime of your movie, and not one of the special features. RipBot will chew on this file for a long time, and hopefully when it’s done, will present you with this dialog:

6. If RipBot throws an error of any kind here, first make sure you’ve got a bunch of HD breathing room on the volume you’re using.

If errors still come up, you may have to mux your rip. To put that in English: Blu-ray discs have a lot of different files on them representing several different audio and video streams. The process of joining all of these disparate elements into a single stream (usually a .ts file) is called multiplexing, or muxing, and its necessary to do before transcoding. RipBot264 can do this on its own, but it has problems with certain discs. So if any of the above fails, download tsMuxeR, select the biggest .2mts file in the BDMV/STREAM folder in your rip or on your disc, choose the appropriate language, and hit “Start Muxing.” You can then add the resulting .ts file to RipBot264 as the source.

7. Now you can choose how you want to convert the video. RipBot gives you presets for Apple TV, iPod or iPhone, PSP or a high-res file which can then be re-burned to a new BD disc. I chose the iPod/iPhone level.

8. Click “Properties”—here you can fine tune the output size of your video (I chose a nice 640×360 file) and preview it before you begin. MAKE SURE you preview your choices using the “Preview Script” button, because you don’t want to sit through the eternity of transcoding only to find that your dimensions are messed up and everything is in the wrong aspect ratio.

9. If all looks and sounds good, press OK, then “Start” and watch as your system transcodes the massive 1080p AVC stream into a new MP4 file. On my 2.53GHz Macbook Pro, it averages around 20fps, which is actually slower than real time playback. Yuck. So you’ll want to set this and forget it.

10. Wake up the next morning, have your coffee, and check your output file. It should play beautifully in your media player of choice, and look crisp as a kettle chip. My 640×360 encode of the Dark Knight was around an even 1GB in the end, which is not bad at all. Copy it to your device of choice and enjoy.

As you can see, this process is a bitch. It takes an hour to rip the disc, another hour and change for all the software to read your rip and get ready, then an amount of time equal to or even longer than the movie itself to transcode it, depending on your system. So hey, movie studios: how about making digital copies standard features on your BD discs so we don’t have to go through this, mmkay?

Note to Mac Users
While the BD-ripping world is largely a Windows one, you may want to fiddle around with DumpHD, a ripping tool written in Java that supposedly works with OS X. I couldn’t get it to work, but you can read more here to try for yourself.

If you manage to rip your BD disc, you’ll then have to find an AVC converter that works with OS X. Most of these are paid and I haven’t used any, but they exist. If anyone has had luck with a particular tool, let us know.

This method was tested and worked perfectly for me, but if you’re a video jockey and know of any additional software or methods that I didn’t cover that may help, PLEASE tell us about it in the comments. The knowledge dropped in the comments of these Saturday how-tos are a huge help to everyone, so please be constructive and provide links to other tools you’ve had success with. Have a good weekend everyone!

Looks like Apple Employee #1′s old 17″, maxed-out PowerBook is for sale on eBay, remarkably devoid of Cheetos fingerprints. But who acquired it from Woz to begin with? The answer might surprise you.

It’s those guys from that webcomic The Joy of Tech! But don’t let that dissuade you, because the PowerBook looks like it did indeed belong to Woz and you can just pretend his maid stole it and posted it on eBay or whatever. Unfortunately, you guys just missed Woz’s G4 Powermac. [eBay, thanks, Chris!]

President Obama’s proposed 2010 budget goes where no Bush has gone before by including significant spending for scientific agencies, including NASA, the EPA, and Department of Energy, on top of the stimulus package.

NASA will get $700 million from the budget, which isn’t all that much, but combined with the $1 billion from the stimulus bill, they’re still getting a substantial increase on last year’s operating budget of $18 billion. Interestingly, the budget stipulates that NASA will need to retire its three space shuttles by 2010, with a push for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle proposed by Obama’s predecessor, He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.

The Environmental Protection Agency will bump their budget up 35% to $10.5 billion with the $2.7 billion increase, in addition to the $7 billion they’ll receive from the retooled stimulus package.

The National Science Foundation, which handles all non-medical science and engineering research, landed an 8.5% bump, which along with their stimulus cash money will give them an operating budget of $10 billion.

On a different note, Obama plans to increase the spectrum license fees for wireless provides from $50 million to $200 million, a huge increase. We’re not really sure why; there’s not a ton of money to be made on this kind of tax and there’s no obvious symbolic reason to up the fees. We’re just hoping the carriers don’t pass the costs on to the consumer. [Wired]

Somebody wanted to build a water filtration center on the spot of a Bronx, NY golf-course driving range. Bad idea? It was until the architects decided to build the plant and keep the range.

“Green roofs” are nothing new—one day soon all of us will have grass for a roof, especially if the economy continues to plunge into its fiery little hellpit. But at the Mosholu Golf Course in the Bronx, the roof of a new water filtration plant is “performative” according to landscape architect Ken Smith—who worked on it with a firm called Grimshaw—because it’s also a nine-acre driving range.

Even though it is full of drinking water, the $2.1 billion facility has to stay dry. The summer downpours and spring thaws that would otherwise buffet the green roof are naturally filtered and collected in innovative drains that route water around the entire 9-hole golf course. It apparently takes up to eight days for water to make its way around the circuit of irrigation.

In case you were wondering, this will be the “largest contiguous green roof in the country,” according to the Architect’s Newspaper, and it alone will cost $95 million. It’s also an impressive step forward for the City of New York in the arena of sustainable architecture. Mind you, this is not a concept, like a lot of the pretty sketches we publish.

George Carlin called golf an elitist sport and a waste of space. Though unspoken, I can only imagine there’s a bit of a hat-tip to Carlin, a New York native, in this move. (Incidentally, the Mosholu public golf course primarily serves underprivileged kids.) So there you go, Georgie—who said the human race was too dumb to listen to reason? Oh yeah, you did. [Architect's Newspaper via Treehugger]

Designed with greasy hands, soapy gloves, and cookie-dough-covered fingers in mind, the minimalistic DAB Digital Radio was created for a nitty, gritty kitchen environment.

With a splash-resistant design featuring large touch-sensitive buttons, users can power on ths battery-operated radio, turn up the volume and control this gadget using their elbows and knuckles. Users also don’t have to worry about knocking it over with their clumsy appendages because this device is fitted with a rubberized weighted base. Other specs include a click-back preset adjuster and a vertical-scrolling LCD. Sounds pretty neat, but as it is still a concept, there’s no word on when you’ll be able to get your slimy hands on one of these. [Yanko]
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The first two I’m a PC ads from Microsoft used little girls, and were super super cute. This latest one? Not so much. Nothing against little boys, but nobody likes them using a computer.