Month: December 2007

Updates

A few program updates…

  • There’s a new 360 dash out. It works a bit quicker than the old one and has been slightly reorganised, for the better in my view. It’s caused a bit of a problem for EA games though which i don’t think are fully resolved yet. DivX & XVid playback now fully supported which is nice as well as a slew of small changes throughout the system. Video Marketplace launches Dec 11th in UK – will be interested in comparing HD quality with Sky & BluRay. With these updates the 360 is finally rivalling XBMC for functionality, while blowing it out of the water for HD. Shame about the noise. And the DVD upscaling – so poor!
  • For Mac users wanting to stream the new video formats to the 360 Nullsoft have updated Connect 360. fast work from the devs to get this out the day after the dash update.
  • Yojimbo has finally been updated with a few new features while hopefully addressing a couple of Leopard bugs. Even though Together has been upgraded I still prefer the features in Yojimbo – and .Mac syncing seems to be working again. Woo!

Flickr Picnik

Photo editing has arrived at Flickr. It makes use of Picnik and having a play around this morning it looks very easy to use and pretty feature rich. You can easily edit any photo, add effects, play with contrast and colours, resize and crop and also apply an ‘auto fix’.

Picnik Crop

It’s nice to have these tools online as opposed to on your computer. Not all photo’s need Aperture or Lightroom and it’s great you can do this editing from anywhere while easily saving results within Flickr. I wonder if it works on the iPhone?

BBC HD Now Official

BBC HD Channel is now official and will launch…today! After trialling for over 18 months it looks to be hastily launched and not that much different from the test channel it’s been running as. It will show more content though, around 9 hours a day starting from 15:00. Programmes like Jools Holland and Planet Earth look stunning in HD – it will be good to see Kill Bill and Sin City at Christmas in HD too.

With Channel 4 rumoured to be launching their HD channel on Dec 10th and ITV in March 08 it looks like HD is finally getting more content. If only Sky would drop their £10 a month HD charge. A lot of people want the HD box and are willing to pay the one off charge but not the monthly fee. The image quality from the HD channels is excellent on Sky, even to the point that I’ll not watch an SD movie as it’s that inferior but I can understand the cost putting people off. Next year may see a TV upgrade!