Formats

Entertainment

Manufacturers Are Finally Standardising 3D Glasses… Together

4:40AM August 9, 2011 | Kat Hannaford

Big news from Panasonic, Samsung and Sony: they’re teaming-up to put a stop to this silly trend of being forced into buying expensive 3D glasses that only work with one manufacturer’s 3DTV, and will use Xpand’s glasses from next year. More »


Computing

Why We Can’t All Just Settle On One Stupid Standard

12:00AM July 21, 2011 | Brian Barrett

Standards, formats, protocols. There are thousands of them! Probably! I’ve never counted, I’ve always been too buys slamming my head against a wall. But you know what? Even the road to gadget compatibility hell is paved with good intentions. Right before it’s repaved with terrible, pigheaded greed. [xkcd]


Software

WWF Is A New Green File Format That’s Impossible To Print

4:40AM December 11, 2010 | Casey Chan

The rabble rousers at the World Wildlife Fund (they renamed fake wrestling!) have created a new, PDF-type file format called WWF. It’s a file format that CANNOT be printed out. The idea: save as WWF, save a tree. More »


Entertainment

Microsoft: ‘Blu-ray Is Going To Be Passed By As A Format’

7:00PM September 23, 2010 | Kat Hannaford

Need further proof Microsoft will never adopt Blu-ray, as you clutch your HD DVD drive to your chest and sob for Microsoft’s halcyon HD format days? Xbox 360′s UK director Stephen McGill has reiterated the future is digital downloads. More »


Dead Formats Go Trendy With Designer Posters

5:40AM August 17, 2010 | Kat Hannaford

VHS, floppy disks, cassettes, laser discs – they’re all included in these brilliantly hipster posters and T-shirts. Wear your ironic love for a dead format on your Helvetica-laden chest! More »


Software

Perian Makes Nearly Every Video Playable In QuickTime

12:20AM August 11, 2010 | Kevin Purdy

Mac only: QuickTime is a fairly elegant player built into Mac OS X, so why not use it? After installing the Perian component on your system, QuickTime will be able to play nearly any video you throw at it. More »


Entertainment

Sharp Creates First 100GB Blu-ray Disc

3:00AM July 25, 2010 | Casey Chan

Thanks to nifty lasers, Sharp has created the first 100GB Blu-ray disc. The new Blu-ray format, called VR-100BR1, uses a new triple-layer standard that allows storage space of up to 128GB on single-write discs and 100GB on rewritable discs. More »


Online

The H.264 Encoding Boom

9:15AM May 2, 2010 | Kyle VanHemert

Earlier this week, Steve Jobs said quite confidently that alternatives like H.264 have already made the lion’s share of web video available to devices that don’t support Flash. This chart shows why he’s probably right. More »


Entertainment

Blu-ray Discs Increasing In Capacity To 128GB

6:37PM April 6, 2010 | Kat Hannaford

Blu-ray Discs are getting a step-up, after the Blu-ray Disc Association announced two new specs for the format – BDXL and IH-BD. There’s bad news however – you’ll need to buy a new player/recorder to use the 128GB discs. More »


New Digital Music Format, MusicDNA, Bundles Extra Content

3:21AM January 26, 2010 | Kat Hannaford

Fighting back against the downloaders, a new music file format by the name of MusicDNA has been introduced by the people who created the MP3, which will bundle a heap of bonus content with the music file. More »