Avatar dates back to 1977, when Cameron was just a truck driver determined to “out-Lucas George Lucas” in the outer-space epic genre, but it took decades to get the clout to make as outrageous a project as Avatar. When he first sat down to plan the movie, his tech people told him his vision simply was not possible – “‘If we make this, we’re doomed,’ one of the artists told him. ‘It can’t be done. The technology doesn’t exist.’” He had to wait until after Titanic before he could tackle the project again.

This time, he got more invested in the tech side of it. The problem: He needed an incredibly high-definition camera that could deliver both 2D and 3D, without the headaches that sometimes accompanied two hours of 3D watching. There was a camera that could handle it, made by Sony, but the giant 200kg unit wasn’t feasible for Cameron’s style of directing – so in 2000, he went out to Japan and persuaded Sony to re-engineer the camera to his liking. They ended up separating the camera’s huge CPU unit from its lens, connected by a cable, thus bringing the handheld weight down to only 20kg.

Cameron lent the camera to filmmaker buddies to spread the gospel of 3D so his eventual release of Avatar would have the distribution it needed. Spy Kids 3-D and the Lord of the Rings trilogy opened the doors for technologically astounding epic films, just what Cameron orchestrated. His camera and belief in 3D is setting the stage for the current era of blockbusters – not necessarily something you’d expect from a guy who releases a movie about once every 15 years. [Wired]

The move makes Rolls-Royce one of only two car manufacturers to offer HD radio standard, the other being Volvo. Audi and Mercedes-Benz will follow suit in 2011.

HD radio listeners: Does this excite you to no end or what? [CrunchGear]

So yeah, if you’re been chomping at the bit to get HD quality resolutions delivered to your monitor via a USB connection, this may be the adaptor for you. Comes in a kind of periwinkle blue hue for $US99. [Sewell via Engadget]

We don’t know the expected price range yet. Could a company like Creative really undersell the likes of Intel or Nvidia?

That question aside and despite Creative specifically ruling out putting it into smartphones, chips like the ZMS-08 will definitely bring higher performance to lower-power devices and seem worth at least a bit of excitement. [Engadget]

The goal here is simple: Play all the videos that I have ripped from DVD, downloaded from the web, shot with my own cameras or obtained in some other manner, no matter what the format. It sounds simple but Apple TV can’t do it. Video codecs and containers are a nightmare to keep track of, and even more of a nightmare to convert.

This isn’t about photos and music. Apple TV is better at both of those than any of this stuff. It’s also not about renting movies or buying movies, or even streaming movies. Roku has a nice cheap box for that, and Apple TV is suitable if you just want to live inside Steve Jobs’ media store. This is about playing non-DRM movies, pure and simple.

The names might be familiar to you: The Popcorn Hour C-200 by Syabas is quickly gaining cult status (and has its own hacker wiki), while the other four smaller boxes come from brands you probably have experience with, including WD, Seagate, Netgear and Patriot.

My two main tests were simple — I loaded PC and Mac formatted external hard drives with a variety of files ranging from H.264 MP4s to WMVs of several vintages, from raw AVCHD files in MTS wrappers to the hot new DivX 7 MKV. Then I browsed through my local network to a NAS that had a cache of similar files. Could I see them? Could I play them? These shouldn’t be issues, but they’re big issues.

Here’s a rundown of each machine and how they fared in testing:

As you can see, there were clear leaders given my criteria above, but what struck me was how each one differed. Truth is, depending on who you are, any one of these might be the best fit. Here’s what really separates them:

WD TV Live

I would have given this thing the solo spot at the top if it weren’t for a few dings that might very well be fixed in a firmware update: It won’t show you DVD menus on ripped DVD images, and when you play files with the suffix .m4v it won’t fast forward or rewind. Weird bug that can be fixed if you just change .m4v to .mp4, but since that’s the default file naming for Handbrake’s “Apple TV” profile it could be a problem for people, like me, who spent months ripping their entire DVD collection that way.

WD’s strengths include a friendly user-interface with handy video previews, some promising early online services (including Pandora), and the most reasonable photo and music handling I’ve seen in this cluster of gadgets.

Seagate FreeAgent Theater+

I loved this when I tested it a few weeks ago, despite its fugly interface, and it holds up under testing. It does better with ripped .ISO files than WD, doing both DVD menus and chapters (and it doesn’t have that weird .m4v bug either). Video was better, especially when running 1080p content.

The tradeoff is that the interface is bad, and there’s almost nothing in the way of online services. It gets points for making an attempt at sorting music and displaying photos, but if that’s a priority, WD is the better call.

Popcorn Hour C-200

Hardcore AV nerds love this thing, and I understand why. There are more ways to get at video content than in any other set-top box I’ve ever seen, and if you really know how to hack, there’s really not much it can’t do.

It’s a big ole thing — they call it a “network tank” and — despite reminding me of the far cooler ones in Tron — I get it. It has an internal BitTorrent client and you can plug in a Blu-ray drive, for god’s sake. I found very few video formats that it wouldn’t support (FLV was one) but I had to take major points off because for being so big, it has a lame interface, and it comes with an RF remote that only worked when I stood within 1m of it. They even mention that there might be problems with interference, and if people experience that they can buy the IR remote. Great, thanks.

My only question — and it’s not rhetorical — is why spend $US300/$AU599 on this (plus extra for the optional internal HDD and the IR remote) when you can just buy a home-theatre PC?

Patriot Box Office

This was the dark horse of the group, being a late entry by a company known only for computer memory. I was surprised at how well it held up. It actually could decode more tested formats than any other device in this lineup — it did Flash video (FLV), which the three above can’t render. Only the WD and the Patriot show you video previews, too. As small as it is, there’s space for a 2.5-inch SATA drive in there and even a BitTorrent client. You can copy files to and from different drives and the network, and it’s the cheapest of the lot at $US130.

So why did it come in a distant third? Unlike the three above, it can’t read Mac-formatted hard drives, and its video quality was noticeably the worst of the batch. That said, if you are a hacker sort and want something to play with that doesn’t cost as much as Popcorn, set your sights on this.

Netgear Digital Entertainer Live

As you can probably tell by now, Netgear had the most disappointing box of the lineup, despite its Apple TV ripoff look and feel. Lack of Mac media support and the inability to read key file formats — like DivX 7 and AVCHD — meant it couldn’t pass muster with real video fanatics. Its biggest point of woe was the fact that it didn’t support any file over 720p in resolution — whether that’s a software thing or a hardware thing, it’s sure not future-proof and probably best to stay away.

I also didn’t like the fact that its interface is laid out entirely for retail, like an Apple TV without the panache, or a Roku box that costs more and doesn’t do Netflix. Local files were not a priority, and despite the friendly interface, it doesn’t even make an attempt to differentiate photos and music. I did give it a gold star for online services, but only because it had the most in this group — if online services are what you love, buy a Roku, or a TiVo, or an Xbox, or a friggin’ Apple TV.

Still not sure what you’re looking for, check the spec comparisons here:

Kinda Like the Old One

The GoPro Hero HD is squarely based off the old model. It has the same mounting system, case, physical shape and user interface. In fact, it’s so similar that I suggest you read the original short review I did and then come back here for the low down on what makes this one better. Here’s the link. Or you could just take these basic points as a foundation.
• Awesome mounts for everything.
• Meant to be semi cheap so you don’t sweat it, yet capable.
• It has a 170-degree field of vision and the case makes it waterproof to 30m. Very rugged.
• Two buttons for controlling the basic UI. Shoot, toggle modes. The UI is so rudimentary you’ll often forget how to use it, but all you need to do is turn it on and shoot.
• There’s no native LCD for viewing replays.
• It’s not tiny.

The Video is Now HD

Instead of the paltry 512×384, the $US270 camera with surf mount has several modes, most HD. On the higher frame per second mode, which was silky smooth when played back normally, there are standard definition resolutions of 848×480 or HD 720p/1280×720. Both are 16:9 ratio, which is recommended only for motorsports or other activities where you’re not trying to catch yourself in frame standing up. The 60fps modes are noticeably smoother in normal playback but they’re meant to also look better if you slow down the frame rate playback for slow motion in your favourite video editor. The grain was noticeably worse when using 60fps indoors, but it’s not a deal breaker. At 30fps, there are modes for 720p again, but also 1280×960 which is 4:3 high def. That’s the default and I used that for surfing. The 1080p mode is 16:9, and 30fps but limits the field of vision from 170 to 127 degrees. Again, the 16:9 modes are used less than you’d expect in sports shots. There’s also a centre-weighted mode for exposing the road when shooting from inside a car, and it leaves the dashboard underexposed properly.

The bottom line is that this new camera is in HD. That’s the big improvement

Quality

This is a still of the movie at full res, not the actual 5MP stills.

First, watch the movies the guys at the company produced here. Then watch my shitty one filled with shitty surfing. Colours were a little washy/green but the ocean and the sky together, with the lens collecting droplets, well, that isn’t an ideal situation. Watch it for yourself and form your own conclusions, but note the reflections off the water which will inform you of pretty decent autoexposure and sharpness. It’s a vast improvement over other sports cams and the standard def version. Oh, a little thing held over from the last generation that isn’t a ding or a plus: the 170-degree angle is great for reducing apparent vibration and for making sure what you want in shot is in the frame, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making things like waves and jumps and other otherwise impressive looking things seem smaller.

Storage Capacity

The 51 minutes of video I took were 4.6GB big in the standard 4:3 ratio 1280×960 video. That was enough res for me to enjoy it on the screen. Here’s what Justin at GoPro told me the camera would store, which is a little more generous than what I found but still in the same ballpark.

Average recording times:
1080p: 12 min/GB
960p: 14 min/GB
720p: 16min/GB @30fps; 11 min/GB @ 60fps

GoPro recommended you use fast SDHC cards to save battery life, and on a 32GB card you can get almost six hours of recordings, although you’d be constrained by battery life. Oh one annoyance — every time you clear the card, the files are named from 001, 002, again. So if you copy them over to the same location, they’ll ask you if you want to overwrite. I wish the camera kept its file name numbers in series.

Battery Life

The other big change is that instead of being powered by a pair of AAAs, GoPro jammed a 1100mAh, 3.7-volt battery in the case. I did not do a full run-down test, but shooting 51 minutes of video didn’t reduce the charge even one notch; GoPro estimates you can get 2.5 hours of battery life from the camera in normal climates, regardless of the definition of video you’re shooting. The old model died quickly in the cold if you weren’t using rechargeables but this camera’s housing retains a bit more heat making it better for colder weather. You charge it by USB. Unfortunately you can’t charge it while doing a USB transfer yet. They hope to fix this with a firmware update later.

Sound

Sound quality during dry sports is aided by an open back housing door. But even with the closed door during surfing, the sound was fine. A benefit of the closed housing door is that wind noise is nil.

Stills

I didn’t test stills in this mode, but GoPro claims the 5-megapixel shots are better due to better processing. There are several still modes, as before: Single shot, triple shot that takes three shots over two seconds and a time lapse mode that can be set to record a shot every two, five, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. And a 10-second delay timer. For me, this is not why you get a sports camera.

The Surf Mount, in Particular

It’s 3M double sticky and it seems to hold up just fine. You clean your board of wax and then use a bit of rubbing alcohol to apply it. Let it settle overnight. To get it off (permanently) you use a hair dryer, which sounds a bit scary when it comes to something nice and fibreglass, but what do I know? (That’s why I put this one on a pop out longboard.

The Future

Another big but so far not useful thing on the new camera is the expansion port. They plan on offering a bigger back door for the case so you can fit in an external LCD screen for replays or an extra battery pack. I like the idea. I’m thinking they could probably go ahead and work on making the camera smaller even if it costs a bit more, in the next generation, though. I like GoPro enough to use it, even though gadgets on the mountain or in the surf piss me off by way of distraction. Now that they’ve got mounts, higher resolutions and battery endurance covered, I think making it even smaller is the next step to making it more enjoyable.

High def modes

Best mounting options in the business

Rugged, yet affordable case good for bumps and waterproof to 30m

Wide angle lens captures 170 degrees of motion so you fit in the shot and vibration is dampened.

Smooth 60fps great for action shots

Relatively cheap for what you get

Case kind of biggish

There are 20,000 bonus TVs available with TV purchases and 7000 for fridge purchases. The promo is running from today to December 31st. If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out LG’s promo page for more info.

[LG TV bundle & LG Fridge bundle]

If you do happen to pick up an eligible plasma TV from Panny between October 24 and December 24 this year, you’ll be eligible to receive either an HD Tough LUMIX Camera pack valued at $643, an HD Blu-ray Home Theatre valued at $1,099 or an HD Twin Tuner DVD Recorder with 250GB HDD also valued at $1,099.

There are 12,000 of each bonus gift to giveaway, which isn’t too many. I can’t imagine too many people would jump at the camera pack either considering the much lower value in comparison. But still, if bonus free stuff influences your TV purchasing decisions, this isn’t a bad little offer.

The eligible TVs are as follows:

TH-P54Z1A 54-inch Full HD 1080p $6,999
TH-P58V10A 58-inch Full HD 1080p $4,599
TH-P50V10A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $3,299
TH-P50G15A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $2,999
TH-P42G15A 42-inch Full HD 1080p $2,299
TH-P50G10A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $2,799
TH-P46G10A 46-inch Full HD 1080p $2,499
TH-P42G10A 42-inch Full HD 1080p $2,099
TH-P54S10A 54-inch Full HD 1080p $3,399
TH-P50S10A 50-inch Full HD 1080p $2,599
TH-P46S10A 46-inch Full HD 1080p $2,299
TH-P42S10A 42-inch Full HD 1080p $1,899

[Panasonic]

For about $US122, the HD8800 will play back your media in glorious HD on its 4.3-in. screen. Or on a TV, where you can boost the portable’s 800×480 image all the way up to true 1920×1080 HD.

The player supports *deep breath* RMVB, MOV, AVI, VOB, MKV, MP4, WMV, TS, TP, MPG, Flash, and can play MP3, WMA, FLAC and APE music files. [Ownta via PMP Today]