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Canon Vixia Camcorders

Posted by Andrew at 9:07 AM on February 14, 2012

Canon Vixia CamcordersThe Canon Vixia camcorders have been popular with consumers and Canon have upgraded the range with six new models. Jeffrey Powers has been a Vixia owner for some time and chats to Ben Thomas from Canon to learn more.

Some of the new models have built-in wi-fi allowing live streaming from the camera to iOS devices such as the iPad and iPhone. The footage can be captured by the free Movie Uploader app and, if desired, uploaded to Facebook and other video sharing websites.

There’s also new dynamic image stabilization technology that has four different stabilization modes that kick-in depending on the particular situation.

The Vixia camcorders normally record the AVCHD format but they can record direct to MP4 which is great for sharing on media players and mobile phones. The cameras take SDXC cards (up to 64GB) and have internal memory; the price determines exactly how much. Roughly, 32 GB will give 12 hours of 720p footage.

Prices start from $349 for R-series and $549 for the M-series.

Sorry we didn’t get to see Kellie Pickler. Interview by Jeffrey Powers of Geekazine.

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Posted in Apple, ces, Facebook, Interview, iOS, IPAD, iPhone, ipod, Photography, Special Media, wifi, wireless, YouTube

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Life In A Day

Posted by Andrew at 4:35 PM on January 9, 2012

Life In A DayOk, so I’m really behind the curve here but the BBC screened “Life In A Day” over the Christmas holidays and I’m finally watching it. If you haven’t watched it already, you need to put this on your must-see list.

If you aren’t familiar with the film, it’s made up of footage from over 80,000 submissions of video that was all recorded on 24th July 2010 by people across the world. Created in partnership with YouTube, Ridley Scott produced the film with Kevin Macdonald directing. It’s been lovingly crafted into a documentary about the human condition.

And what a documentary it is. It’s a rollercoaster of emotion of taking you across the world to different places, peoples and societies. There’s every facet of human life and the juxtaposition of cultures makes it all the more poignant. One minute it’s a rich nation, the next a poor country. Some of the film is shocking and it doesn’t hide the sheer hard work of existence but throughout it all is the joy of life itself.

The film is available (legally) on YouTube. Warning: there are a couple of scenes that aren’t suitable for younger viewers.

 

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Posted in Film, Information, Social Media, YouTube

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VideoHunters

Posted by KL Tech Muse at 6:03 PM on March 22, 2011

VideoHunters

I was going to write this a couple days ago, but I been having too much fun playing with the application. If you like to watch videos from Youtube but are not happy with the YouTube interface on the iPad you may want to take a look at VideoHunters from the The APP Company.

VideoHunters is a great way to find, organize and share YouTube Videos. They start you off with a couple of themes already set up to get you started. To set up a new theme you simply click on New in the upper right hand corner, name your theme and start searching. Once you find something you like  you can add it to the theme, each search that you add becomes a new row within a theme.  If you want you can join search terms together.   You can filter search by adding and subtracting search terms. For example I like the Anime Bleach, however I have no interest in Cosplay, so I created a search term Bleach -”cosplay”, which created a row with videos about Bleach but no cosplay. You can add as many rows as you want. If you enter a search term and hit the Channel Button VideoHunter will pull up YouTube channels that match your search term. You can also use a a thumbnail of one of the video as the icon for that theme. When your ready to watch, your videos will play at the highest quality available including HD.

There are a couple of things that I do wish VideoHunter could do, the first is I wish it would auto play the next Video. I also wish it would work with other video services. This is a wish maybe coming true because it looks like one of the updates is Vimeo support. I f you like YouTube and have a iPad I recommend getting VideoHunter.

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Posted in Information, video, YouTube

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Movies & Documentaries On iOS Devices

Posted by tomwiles at 9:13 PM on February 16, 2011

Since getting the latest version of the 32 gigabyte iPod Touch a couple of months back, one of the uses that has surprised me has been late-night movie-watching after I’ve gone to bed but am not yet drowsy enough to go to sleep. The iPod Touch works extremely well for this task. I am able to pair the iPod to my Sprint HTC Evo’s WiFi hotspot feature and generally get very good Internet connectivity.

By far, Netflix is the best on-demand movie service available. Netflix has the most and best content available. The Netflix app for iPod/iPhone works great. It gives me the most relevant features of the full Netflix service in a tidy little package. So far, I’ve watched dozens of movies right on my iPod.

But are there other iPod/iPhone movie and documentary apps available? It turns out there are, though the quality can vary tremendously. One of them is called “NFB Films” which is an app created by the National Film Board of Canada. You can watch over 1,000 movies, including documentaries, animations and trailers.

Another app is called “Big Star TV.” The app itself is free to install, but if you wish to watch any content, like with Netflix, you have to pay a monthly fee. Big Star’s movies don’t seem to be up to the high quality level of Netflix.

B-Movies is a free app that presents Internet Archive (www.archive.org) films in an organized, easy-to-use format. It should be noted B-Movies is not associated or a part of the Internet Archive. Among other things, the Internet Archive contains an incredibly rich and diverse set of older classic corporate, school and government documentaries.

Apart from these choices of course is YouTube. Certainly YouTube has a tremendous amount of content, but therein lies the rub: there’s so much YouTube content, it makes it difficult for any single app to categorize, let alone try to catalog what’s available. With YouTube it’s best to simply search on a keyword or phrase that interests you and then start surfing.

The promise of the future that was held up when I was a kid has in many ways arrived, but as always there remains a lot of room for improvement.

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Posted in Android, Apple, google, HTC, iOS, IPAD, iPhone, ipod, IPTV, mobile, Netflix, sprint, TV, video, YouTube

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So You Got An iPad for Christmas…

Posted by Andrew at 4:33 PM on January 18, 2011

If you got an iPad for Christmas, here’s what you did with it over the holidays, according to mobile telco Three.

- You had your iPad unwrapped and working by 10am on Christmas Day.

- You downloaded Maps, Skype, Angry Birds, ebay, YouTube and Sky Sports News apps.

- You visited Google search, iTunes and Facebook the most often, followed by ebay.  Were you selling unwanted presents or looking for the gift you didn’t get?

- While you were out and about and using 3G data, you were using GPS navigation, reading news websites and playing games.  You were also dreaming about your next holiday, surfing travel sites.

- But it wasn’t until Boxing Day that you really got to play with your new toy.

I know this isn’t exactly surprising but I think it captures in a snapshot the essence of consumer technology and activity at the end of 2010. Remember the iPad didn’t exist at Christmas 2009, Angry Birds wasn’t yet the phenomenon it was to become and no doubt 2011 will bring its own crazes and defining technology. It will be interesting to look back at this in a year’s time and see what’s changed.

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Posted in Apple, application, Facebook, Green Technology, IPAD, YouTube

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Google Family Safety Centre

Posted by Andrew at 1:00 AM on October 13, 2010

Google FamilyGoogle has setup the Family Safety Centre to help parents and teachers keep their children safe online.  After spending a little time in the resource, it seems to be a good introduction to online safety for children from a parent’s point of view.  If you need to know more, you can then take it further through some of the links.

The Centre has four main sections:

i) Google Safety Tools – information on Safesearch, which stops inappropriate material being returned in searches, and YouTube Safety Mode, which similarly stops age-restricted videos from appearing.

ii) Advice from partners – information from children’s organisations on cyberbullying, privacy, talking to strangers online, adult content and malware.

iii) Reporting abuse – if you find inappropriate material on any of Google’s properties (YouTube, Buzz, Picasa, Blogger), here’s how to flag the material to Google.

iv) Video tips from Google parents – a set of videos on YouTube from parents to parents.  In this section there’s also six basic tips for on-line safety.  Frankly, I think these tips should be more prominent as they’re good.
- Keep computers in a central place
- Know where your children go online
- Teach internet safety
- Help prevent viruses
- Teach your children to communicate responsibly
- View all content critically

Each country has its own slight variant, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, US and UK versions – there are probably others for non-English speakers. The main difference seems to be the list of partner organisations that Google has worked with (and spelling).

If you are a parent, you should spend a few minutes having a read of the information here.

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Posted in blogger, google, Information, internet, malware, Privacy, YouTube

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Custom Apps

Posted by tomwiles at 8:16 PM on August 11, 2010

The smartphone’s in many consumer hands today are as powerful as the desktop computers we were using five years ago. They may be as powerful from a hardware standpoint, yet the smaller interface demands different methods of interaction. The smaller interface also places different demands on the software that runs on it.

Smartphone software apps typically need to be smaller and very narrowly focused in order to be maximally useful. Smartphones have turned out to be convergence devices, with the functionality of traditional desktop and laptop computers concentrated into a handheld phone.

The best smartphone apps tend to be apps that present a finely honed slice of functionality.

Many podcasters are coming up with their own smartphone apps. One I recently installed is called “Survive!” for Android. It is an Android app for “The Survival Podcast” available at http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com, hosted by Jack Spirko. It’s a great example of simple, functional design that places the web presence of The Survival Podcast in a neat little Android app package.

“Survive!” has a simple home screen that simply lists Survival Podcast Episodes, Videos (YouTube), Twitter, a link to the main website, and recent website forum posts. The single configuration option decides whether or not to download new Survival Podcast episodes automatically or not.

The inclusion of both Twitter and recent forum posts is a great way for the community that Survival Podcast host Jack Spirko has built up around the podcast and it’s website to keep up to date with the latest posts. Additionally the app includes instant access to all of the latest audio and video media.

“Survive!” is an excellent example of a well-crafted smartphone app that presents all of the main podcast and web-based elements in a simple, extremely easy-to-use package. “Survive!” can be found in the Android Marketplace by searching the term “survival podcast.”

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Posted in Android, application, Information, New Media, smartphone, Social Media, Streaming, Twitter, video, YouTube

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