Latest News - Page 2958

It is safe to bet that any video professional, enthusiast, or even home theater junkie has heard of and most certainly used the H.264 codec which has become the de facto standard for compressing high-definition video. H.264 uses very complicated algorithms that help accelerate the decoding process, which in turn reduces energy consumption and allows for higher bit rates. Yesterday, we participated in a briefing on the new X265 and HEVC encoder project that is being tackled by a company called MulticoreWare.

The X264 encoder remains one of the leading H.264 encoders on the market and it resides under both the open source GNU GPL license as well as a commercial license which is designed for companies that wish to inject their own proprietary code without having to release it into the open source community. With Ultra HD Video beginning to flow in, H.264 was just not delivering the performance needed for high bit rate, high quality output. This is where H.265 comes in the play along with MulticoreWare.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), aka H.265, is being designed to replace H.264 and the official standard was released just over a month ago. And today, MulticoreWare announced its commercial open source project around the x265 encoder. The company has released the source code for x265 and it is available for download at Source #1 below. The x265 encoder is already highly parallel and supports all of the big instruction sets including FMA3/FMA4, AVX, and AVX2.

I still haven't gotten into Bitcoin myself, mainly because I live in a country that is behind in technology: Australia. But, a couple will be living in Utah after spending ten days on a tropical honeymoon in Costa Rica, purely on Bitcoin.

It's a tough challenge, a pure 90-day challenge dubbed "Married... With Bitcoin." Austin Craig and Beccy Bingham have a tough road ahead of them, with Craig saying to Forbes during an interview: "The goal is to find out how developed the Bitcoin ecosystem is, what needs to change, and how easy it is to use, understand, and explain."

The three-month challenge is being documented in a number of ways - Facebook, Twitter, blogging and YouTube clips as well as a documentary called "Life on Bitcoin." They announced their plans last month on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, where they raised over $72,000 as well as 82 Bitcoins, which are valued at the current valuation of $7,000 or so.

A few days ago we reported about Samsung's new Exynos 5 Octa processor, but now we have some more details on the system-on-a-chip (SoC).

The new refreshed 5420 variant of the SoC is based on Mali-T628 MP5 silicon and features four ARM Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.8GHz and four 1.3GHz Cortex-A7s in an ARM big.LITTLE configuration. Samsung are claiming that the refreshed 8-core SoC features 20% more CPU processing power, too.

We also have dual-channel LPDDR3 at 933MHz, which will provide the processor with an insane 1.49GBps of bandwidth, which will help out with that Full HD Wi-Fi display support. Image compression technology is involved, which will help save battery power and use efficient multimedia loading, pushing out more hours of use with high resolution displays.

Today Leap Motion launched what is being billed as the "Worlds most accurate 3-D motion control technology." The software allows people to control their computers with natural hand and finger gestures much in the way that motion tracking WebCam software works. Alongside the software they launched, the company opened up its AirSpace platform, a sort of App Store that is exclusive to the Leap Motion controller.

The company also announced that beginning July 28 the actual Leap Motion Controllers will be available for purchase in Best Buy stores across the United States at a price point of $79.99. Customers in the UK are able to purchase from Amazon and the company has partnered up with ASUS and HP to offer bundled packages with select computers from each manufacturer.

Leap Motion went on to say that at launch the Airspace Store contained over 75 applications that were purpose built by developers and more than four countries. The apps range from free to paid and spans the width of many categories. The Leap Motion controller works with computers running Mac OS X 10.7 or 10.8, Windows 7 and Windows 8. It requires a minimum of an Intel Coreâ„¢ i3 or AMD Phenomâ„¢ II processor, 2 GB RAM and a USB 2.0 port.

Amidst a massive security breach, Canonical today unveiled plans to build a ultra high-end smartphone that would run both its own Ubuntu Mobile OS as well as the latest version of Android. Unfortunately manufacturing a smartphone in any quantity is quite the financial undertaking and not one that Canonical appears to be fully ready to tackle itself. The company has turned to the crowdfunding website Indiegogo to offer its supporters an easy way to preorder their phone.

So how much does it cost to produce 40,000 units of a new smartphone? Apparently $32 million will just about do the job. The company launched its Indiegogo campaign today, and will run for the next 30 days. Supporters can land an Unbuntu Edge of their own for $600 today only and tomorrow the cost of entry will rise to $830. There are also 50 "One of a Kind" numbered edition Ubuntu Edge phones being offered but they will cost you $10,000 a pop.

Additionally, an enterprise bundle of 100 phones is being offered for the low price of $80,000. Those who funded this level will receive additional access to best-practice workshops as well as 30 days of online support to help IT managers integrate Ubuntu for Android into the workplace. Also for those who wish you just donate a little to the project there is a $20 funding option which will land you your name on the founders page.

Over the weekend, the Ubuntu forums went down after a massive security breach resulted in over 1.8 million user credentials being stolen. Canonical made a decision to put the forums in maintenance mode in an attempt to ward off any further attacks. The company says that the attackers managed to get away with every user's local username, password, and email address that was stored in the Ubuntu forum's database.

The company says in the passwords were stored as salted hashes instead of plaintext, but they still recommend that you change any and all passwords that were used on other services such as email, Facebook, or other forum accounts in which you might have use the same password. Canonical says that Ubuntu One, Launchpad, and other related services were not affected by the breach and users of those services need not worry.

Today, AT&T announced that it will be launching two new Mobile Share plans later this week on July 26. The new plans are designed to make data access more affordable for customers who might not need a high allotment of bandwidth. For just $20 a month, users with feature phones can have 300MB of data which will allow them to check their email and perform other less data-intensive actions on their handset.

A new 2GB plan was also introduced that is expected to fill the gap for users who use more than 1 GB of data per month. This plan will run smartphone users $50 plus the additional $45 for unlimited talk and text. AT&T says that their mobile share plans make it easy for customers to manage their data, voice minutes, and texting without needing to keep track of multiple plans.

"Our customers are living mobile lives, and our new Mobile Share plans give them even more options to design a plan that meets their unique needs," said Mark Collins, senior vice president voice and data products, AT&T Mobility. "Now, even more customers are able to enjoy the full benefits of their device, on the nation's fastest and most reliable 4G LTE network, at a great value."

As far as Internet-based corporations go, Google is about as big as they get, and rightfully so as the company offers up so many useful tools that many of us use in our daily lives. Today, we learned just how big Google actually is; a new report from Deepfield that was recently released says that based on the numbers Google represents 25 percent of all North American Internet traffic. This means that it is bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram combined in terms of bandwidth served.

"What's really interesting is, over just the past year, how pervasive Google has become, not just in Google data centers, but throughout the North American internet," says Craig Labovitz, founder of Deepfield, the monitoring company that did the study. Just three years ago, traffic to Google only accounted for about 6 percent of all Internet traffic.

Over the past year, Google has had to add tens of thousands of servers to its ranks to handle this massive growth and has built data centers on four continents within the last few years. Google has even gone as far as adding thousands of servers to ISPs around the world, called Google Global Cache Servers, that store the most popular content from Google's network such as a YouTube video that might be going viral, popular apps on the Google Play Store, or even a trending topic on Google+. These allow this content to be served to you faster than it would if it was all stored in a central location.

Formerly known as Gaymercon, this year's GaymerX gaming conference will be taking place during the third and fourth of August in San Francisco. For those who have never heard of the event, it is a gaming conference that focuses in on the gamers within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. The official site describes GaymerX as a "weekend of fun and socializing," suggesting that "until now, there has never been a safe space for LGBT geeks and their friends to come together, discuss LGBT theory in games as a community, and party as one."

This year's conference was funded by a Kickstarter Campaign that raised over $90,000. The event promoter says that the conference will feature booths, panels, and demos provided by large game publishing houses such as EA games. Microsoft will also be in attendance showing off its upcoming Xbox One console. LGBT rights groups such as GLAAD and The Trevor Project will be out in full force as well.

At the time of publishing, over 2000 tickets have been sold and the event organizers say that more will be sold at the door. Tickets are priced between $45 and $60 and there are red carpet VIP tickets available for the small price tag of $135 per person. We here at TweakTown would like to give a shout out to all our Gayming friends in the LGBT community, and wish you a fun and exciting GaymerX!

On Friday, HTC released its earnings report for the second quarter of 2013 and things did not look well for the company. The numbers show that profit took a nosedive during the second quarter and fell approximately 83 percent, while revenue declined 22 percent. These are usually numbers that indicate a company is heading for a hard and unfortunate brick wall. Fortunately, HTC recognizes this and has decided to reorganize its entire US operations.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that they have obtained an internal memo that unveils how the reorganization will go. President of Global Sales, Jason Mackenzie, will now head up all of US operations and former U.S. Boss Mike Woodward will now lead a new specialized unit dubbed "Emerging Devices" that will focus on innovating new HTC products and global distribution strategies.

"I want to thank these two outstanding leaders for their contributions to the success of the HTC One so far," Mr. Chou wrote about Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Woodward. "But as you know and would expect, we also need to do more. With the success of the One, we have many new opportunities both to expand current sales as well as to enter new distribution channels with new business models."

After speaking with a source that is said to be close to Apple, KitGuru said that they have learned that Apple's new Mac Pro would most likely ship to consumers and arrive for retail sales sometime during the month of October. They also stated that the Mac Pro would return to the UK around the same time after the line was removed from sale in 27 countries back in March of this year.

The delay in release is said to be due to a shortage on E5 processors as well as their mating motherboards. Additionally, analysts are speculating that Apple is waiting on its new operating system Mavericks to be released as it currently is limited to 96 GB of memory. With the new Mac Pro offering up to 128GB of RAM, this makes perfect sense. Apple could also be holding off on releasing the new Mac Pro due to ongoing Thunderbolt 2 development which is said to wrap up sometime during Q3 of 2013.

To further bait the rumor mill, Apple is said to be working on a 4K HDTV screen that will be geared specifically for professionals in the video editing field who would most likely also be purchasing the new Mac Pro's. Whether all of this is true or not is still a bit of a mystery and the only way to truly answer all of the questions is to wait around until October and see what Apple launches.

At the moment, we're fairly positive that we will see Google's next-generation Nexus 7 tablet unveiled on Wednesday at a breakfast press event being held by the company. Fortunately for us, Google is not doing a very good job of keeping its refreshed Nexus under wraps. Today, a leaked image depicting the new Nexus 7 has appeared online as well as a full PR rendering of the 7-inch tablet.

The image says that Google's Nexus 7 II will be available on Tuesday but does not give a specific date, although it is pretty safe to say that they are talking about Tuesday, July 30. It does give us a little more insight into the device and confirms that it will have a 1920x1200 resolution and will run consumers $230 for the 16 GB version.

Making his second appearance this morning on TweakTown, mobile device leakster @evleaks has managed to get his hands on the official press rendering of the new Nexus 7 that shows us a number of changes that the made to the tablet. The device features speakers located at the bottom and top while the Nexus logo has been rotated into landscape orientation. The headphone jack has also been relocated, while the rear facing 5-megapixel camera remains in the top left-hand corner. Google is expected to reveal the full details of the new Nexus 7 along with other major announcements on Wednesday, July 24, so stay tuned to TweakTown for full coverage of the event.

I have been to CES, Dragoncon, The Southeast Linux Festival, the WPPI Expo, and many other conventions over the years, but the one that has managed to evade me is the San Diego Comic-Con. SDCC is the mecca for geeks of all flavors--especially comic book fans--but over the years, it has become the premier showcase for cosplay fans to gather and live their dream of being their favorite superhero.

I won't pretend and say that I want to go for the comic books; my entire motive to attend is to see all of the fantastic makers who have spent hundreds and thousands of hours designing and building their costumes from scratch. One of my biggest guilty pleasures is browsing the hundreds of galleries that pop up from Comic-Con every year. Fortunately for me and you, this year Tested's Norm Chan has posted a full gallery of over 800 cosplay photos that he took during SDCC.

The gallery contains some of the best cosplay I have ever seen and I am so pumped up that I am making it my goal to attend SDCC next year come hell or high water. Head over to link #2 and check out the full gallery and if you spot someone you know, send an email to Norm letting him know the person's name and include the image number as he is trying to name everyone pictured in the gallery. The images above are provided courtesy of Tested.com

Next Thursday, August 1, Motorola and Google will release their long anticipated next-generation smartphone dubbed the Moto X. This is a phone that we've been talking about since January, and if recently leaked benchmarks are any indication, the phone may just prove to be a huge disappointment. Fortunately, Motorola did take the time to focus in on designing an Android-based smartphone that can only be described as beautiful.

Over the weekend, our favorite leakster @evleaks posted two sets of official PR images that show off what appears to be a very refined and very Nexus-like Moto X. A black render was first posted with a follow up of a white version that is said to be the official PR image. The front of the phone appears quite sleek with a very thin side bezel while the microphone appears to be offset to the left by centimeter or so.

Moving on to the rear we can very prominently see that the rear case material appears to be kevlar just like Google's Nexus 4. The camera is perched above what appears to be a Cree-based LED flash. To the right of the camera we can see a series of holes and what we suspect to be the grill which covers up a speaker. Also notable is that the phone appears to feature a microphone hole on the back and the audio jack appears to be placed dead center of the top of the phone. This leads me to believe that the USB charging port is placed opposite directly in the center of the bottom of the phone. I could be wrong, but I guess we'll find out in just over a week.

We know that Motorola and Google are going to unveil the Moto X smartphone on August 1 in New York City, but now we have more of an idea of what to expect to be baked into Motorola's highly anticipated smartphone.

I knew we weren't to expect anything in terms of a high-end handset, but I was hoping for something special at least. But according to Android Police, who have some photos of the AT&T Moto X "Ghost" which ran the AnTuTu and 3DMark tests. These results from the Moto X aren't that surprising, but we know it will arrive as a mid-range Android 4.2.2-based smartphone.

Inside the Moto X, we should expect a 1.7GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, 2GB of RAM and a 720p screen. 16GB of on-board flash storage will be on offer, as will NFC. As for the cameras, we should expect a 10.5-megapixel rear-facer and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera. As you can see, there's nothing to get crazy about, but we might not be seeing the whole picture here, either.

Late last week, Google CEO Larry Page revealed that over 1.5 million Android devices are activated each and every day. This is up from last September's numbers of around 1.3 million each day.

Google are inching closer to having one billion Android-based devices on the market, with Page stating that it is "pretty amazing given the first Android phone launched less than five years ago." Moving onto the Google Play Store, the Google CEO revealed that over 50 billion apps have been downloaded from the Google Play Store.

This number should astound people, myself included, because last September this number was just 25 billion. This represents a 100% increase in under a year, which is an amazing number no matter which way you look at it. Google Chrome received a mention, too, with the web browser from Google now enjoying 750 million users, one of those being me.

Sony's Xperia Z Ultra smartphone will launch at the end of this month in Hong Kong for $799, which includes 3G connectivity. There's also a 4G version which will be available for $824, just $25 on top of the 3G version.

What makes the Xperia Z Ultra special is that it is the world's largest smartphone, coming in at 6.4 inches. This beats Samsung's also-huge Galaxy Mega 6.3, but the price tag might turn people away. While it hasn't been formally priced for the US market, we should expect the same pricing. Sony are marketing the Xperia Z Ultra as the 'world's thinnest' Full HD smartphone too, as it measures in at just 0.27 inches (6.5mm).

Sony have crammed in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC, which is a quad-core processor clocked in at 2.2GHz, while including the Adreno 330. There's 16GB of on-board flash storage backed up by microSD storage that can provide another 64GB. There's an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera that features a mobile Exmor RS sensor.

The encryption used in some SIM cards could allow hackers to take control of your smartphone remotely, according to a security researcher, and a report from The New York Times.

The flaw in question is found in SIM cards using DES (Data Encryption Standard) for encryption, which is an older standard that is slowly being phased out by most manufacturers, but the point is that it is still baked into hundreds of millions of SIMs across the world. The founder of German firm, Security Research Labs, Karsten Nohl, found that sending a fake carrier message to a phone prompted an automated response from 25% of DES-based SIMs, which revealed the cards' 56-bit security key.

If a hacker has that key, they can send a virus to the SIM with a text message. This virus allows a hacker to impersonate the phone's owner, where they can access text messages, and even make carrier payments. Nohl says that the entire procedure takes "about two minutes" and only requires a regular PC.

Thanks to Paramount Home Entertainment, we have ten copies of Star Trek - The Next Generation: Season Four on Blu-ray to give away, valued at $62.95 each.

Starting with Captain Picard's terrifying battle to escape from the inhuman Borg and culminating with the Klingon Empire on the brink of civil war in the series' historic 100th episode, you can now experience Season 4 and so much more on breathtaking Blu-rayâ„¢. This set features dazzling 1080p high definition picture with visual effects painstakingly re-created from original film elements, digitally remastered 7.1 sound (original broadcast audio also provided), and a wealth of newly produced, behind-the-scenes special features and never-before-released deleted scenes.

To go in with a chance to take home a copy of Star Trek - The Next Generation: Season Four on Blu-ray, simply answer the following question:

I'm still adjusting to the awesomeness that was Man of Steel, but while I was over in Melbourne for PAX Australia 2013, I read that the director of Man of Steel, Zack Snyder, confirmed a Superman/Batman movie for 2015.

At the end of the DC panel at Comic-Con 2013, Zack Snyder tool the stage, gesturing that moderator Chris Hardwick should move out of the way where he said "I'm gonna take the lectern from you, because some sh*t's going to happen up here. It's official that we are going to make another Superman movie. And you say, Zack, what is the movie about? But you don't want me to tell you that. You want to go and see the movie. But I can say that maybe there's a single element that will be in the film that I could... help you out with. I was thinking about how to do that. I pored through the DC Universe to look for a way to tell this thing. We're writing the thing now, but I came across a thing I found that'll help you understand it."

While this is exciting news, it doesn't confirm a sequel to Man of Steel, which is weird. Harry Lennix, who starred in Man of Steel, read a line from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns: "I want you to remember, Clark, in all the years to come, in all your most private moments, I want you to remember my hand at your throat. I want you to remember the one man who beat you."