Software > MultimediaEssentials

If you're old enough, you probably remember fondly the warm glow of vacuum tubes from inside the family television or radio but likely don't wish for the good old days of vinyl records, preferring the convenience of Compact Discs. A Tokyo-based company is hoping to bring together the best of those worlds and do it with style.

The University of Sydney is building a commercial Web development service run by staff and students in its multimedia research centre.

Microsoft and content delivery network services provider Akamai are collaborating to produce a new video service that promises to deliver high-speed video streaming that will not require any buffering.

Nvidia's Tegra system-on-chip will allow portable devices to play high-definition video for more than 10 hours, an engineer from the company told the Hot Chips conference on Monday.

Blender is a popular open-source software package used for modeling and rendering 3-D images. Computerworld recently spoke via e-mail with Tom Musgrove, one of the 35 active core developers on the Blender project. Besides explaining how the tool is used by 3-D artists, Musgrove also addressed complaints about the Blender user interface and discussed directions for future development.

Although the Apple TV first shipped on March 21, 2007, it didn't get an overhaul for almost a year. During that year, the device, which promised to bring digital media (music, photos and video) from the computer to the living room, tried to establish itself in a marketplace rife with competitors. Systems such as Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Netgear's EVA series, not to mention TiVo, are all striving to dominate that elusive space.

In a nod to the success of emerging Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and streaming media, one of the country's largest Internet benchmarking companies will no longer use page views as its primary metric for comparing sites.

Acer unveiled a line of multimedia-optimized laptops in New York this week at its splashy, first-ever US press conference, where it also announced the close of its acquisition of Dutch computer-maker Packard Bell.