With the recent launches of Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player and iCloud, there has never been an easier time to buy a song. Each service is different, though, and each has their strengths and weaknesses. Depending on your phone, listening habits and geekiness, you are better off going with one service over another. Here is a handy guide to help you choose which service is best for you.

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Being Mobile World Congress, quite a few software vendors found themselves tucked into corners of bigger booths, eager and willing to showcase their latest work. Ittiam is one of those companies, relying on Texas Instruments’ OMAP 4 platform to power its new HD video conferencing system. The demo shown here at MWC involved a foursome of TI development boxes, but the underlying platform was most certainly Android 2.2. Anil Kumar, the manager of Ittiam’s video communications division, noted that the system would work just fine on Gingerbread and Honeycomb, enabling up to four devices (smartphones, tablets, whatever) to link up and enjoy a multi-faced call over a standard 3G network.

Of course, the demonstration that we were shown used an Ethernet network for maximum stability, but the low-bitrate technology would allow bearable results on 3G networks (and better-than-average results on a 4G network). We were told that the company is in talks with “numerous” phone makers, in hopes of getting their VCS software integrated onto Android devices by the year’s end — think Qik, but for video conferencing — but he couldn’t hand out any specifics. Head on past the jump if you’d like to see a demo (and hear an awful lot more).

Continue reading Ittiam shows off four-way 720p HD video conferencing using Android, OMAP 4 (video)

Ittiam shows off four-way 720p HD video conferencing using Android, OMAP 4 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you read my recent review of the Contour HD 1080p, you’ll know that one of the issues with the camera is that it’s not very flexible, configuration-wise. You could choose a couple different resolutions and frame rates, but that was all. Well, no longer! This firmware update allows you to change the exposure value, bitrate, and a few other things that will come in handy.

The ability to lower microphone volume is nice, since wind noise is a huge issue at speed without a muffler. You can also change the focus mode, though if you’re bumping around a lot it probably won’t make much difference. This makes a good camera better.

Check out the update here; you’ll need a blank MicroSD card to install it. As of this writing, the page says it’s not for the 1080p model; you might just wait until the page switches over, in case the download link gets updated as well. Wouldn’t want to brick your camera.

I’m sure this is a very grand advance in miniaturization, but I’m afraid the results may be questionable. Omnivision has announced a new sensor for mobile phone cameras that will take 14MP photos and do 1080p video at 60FPS. As far as I’m concerned, this is bad news. Cameraphone lenses are slow and of very low quality, and the tiny sensor size means both bad low light performance and bad clarity due to insanely small pixel pitch.

And the video will have to be low bitrate to accommodate the lack of storage on most phones. 1080p video at 1Mbps? It’ll be like watching an HDTV smeared with vaseline.

Yesterday I lamented Apple’s decision to establish its own video standard, which, while little more than a suggested resolution and bitrate, does not fit will with any devices anywhere. The steady progression of VGA or WVGA, 720p, and 1080p are perfectly fine for the moment. That’s why every camera in the world shoots to one of them. 1080p is too much for most people to work with, but 720p isn’t that bad (though render times can be long), and VGA is really not that bad at all (Doug swears by it). So why the hell put a new one in there between WVGA and 720p? I don’t like the idea of Apple bullying companies like Sanyo, who make perfectly good camcorders already, to add an option which needlessly complicates things.

But let’s just get these camcorders out of the way, because they’re worth taking a look at. The two cameras are almost the same spec-wise except the horizontally-oriented FH1 has a 3-inch LCD as opposed to the pistol grip HD2000’s 2.7-inch. They appear to be quite versatile camcorders, able to take 12 stills a second or shoot up to 600FPS video at reduced resolution, something which was until recently the exclusive ability of Casio Exilims. They’ll shoot 1080p video at 60FPS, which is pretty amazing, though I don’t recommend you do it. Interestingly, they won’t shoot 720p or 640×480 at 60FPS — a bit odd. SD cards are the medium you record to, and both cameras have a 10x optical zoom. Quite a neat little package for $500! Or $600 if you want the pistol grip.

But to return to the rant. These cameras will also shoot, and in fact will default to, the 960×540 iFrame format. Come on. It can do so much and you’re defaulting it to this random format?

There really isn’t much debate to be had regarding sound quality: a poorly-encoded MP3 sounds the worst, and an audiophile system playing something on the medium for which it was mastered sounds the best. However, there is a whole continuum between those poles, and some people (audiophiles particularly) can’t resist using arbitrary numbers and unintelligible descriptors to differentiate those different levels of quality.

In this case, John Meyer of Newform Research (opting for arbitrary numbers) has computed the effective bitrates of all the major audio media, from wax cylinder to MP3. You can see the partial results above, but I had to compress and crop them; the full table is at the link above or in PNG form there to the right. His methods are scientific in a way, but also questionable. The effective bitrate of a record can sort of be calculated, since it does indeed rely on a sampling rate and frequency range among other things, but that’s not really the end of the story.

Between your amp, speakers (or headphones), and other acoustic conditions, the end result is going to be so hopelessly complicated by extra variables that at times, sometimes it hardly matters whether the source is a 33RPM record being read by a thousand-dollar cartridge or an MP3 you bought on iTunes. Lossless codecs and high-quality digital audio systems are complicating this even further.

The idea of a reproduction being true to the original has more to do with the process than the medium. Would the Crystal Method sound better on vinyl? Much of their music is recorded and produced digitally, and is intended to be distributed via a digital medium. However, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper was recorded in analog and mixed with the intention that it would sound best on single-channel record players. So it’s no surprise that digital copies of Ratatat are true replicas and sound great, while digital copies of Sgt. Pepper (until lately, ripped from re-mastered stereo CDs with added loudness to compensate for different playback equipment) not only sound worse than the original, but are less of a true reproduction.

It’s not about analog vs. digital; those categories are too broad to allow meaningful judgments to be made. Even choosing simply between one format and another can be too coarse of a distinction. Meyer’s little study notes this at the bottom, but when you give a sort of “quality ceiling” number to every audio format, it suggests that there is some judgment involved. He does, however, say (and truly):

The ongoing debate over the past 25 years as to which format – analog or digital – “vinyl or CD” — sounds better has been conducted in the fog of ignorance and marketing hype.

How true that is of nearly every tech rivalry. What will the historians make of Blu-ray and HD-DVD? But I digress. Meyer cautions that there are “a huge number of caveats and remarks” to be observed, but that I fear I’ll be seeing this chart and others like it referred to in the unending audiophile debates on this internet of ours.

I would simply suggest the following. The true audiophile creates something of a zoo for his music: songs must be kept in as close to their original habitat as possible. That’s the true test of fidelity.

What the table above may prove is that formats like DVD-audio and other high-bitrate digital copies have the potential to deliver more precise audio information than did 45s or cassettes (hence the title of the table). Whether that will ever sound better (what with the way music is produced today) is an unanswered question. Bands like the Flaming Lips, in putting out 5.1 versions of their albums, or classical SACDs with ultra-stringent recording standards are pushing the limits, but for now there is no reason to assert the absolute superiority of one audio format over another.

[via Metafilter, where they are having, as always, a lively discussion]