Myka has launched the Myka ION media center set-top box this weekend, giving users a one-stop shop for Internet video services and video playback via your HDTV.
The ION has an Intel Atom 1.6Ghz Processor 330,a NVIDIA ION Graphics Processor, as well as 4GB of RAM, ten USB 2.0 ports, VGA / DVI / HDMI outputs, an eSATA connector and Ethernet.
“Technology has finally caught up with what consumers want out of Internet video services,” said Myka President Dan Lovy. “They want to be freed from their computers and watch the growing variety of Web video content on their large-screen, high-definition living room TVs. And they want to do it without a lot of hassle and without video quality suffering.
You can add a Blu-ray drive, HDD and Wi-Fi module, but that will increase the price significantly.
Prices start at $379 USD.
Result for: video quality
According to founder Chad Hurley, YouTube now gets over 1 billion hits every day, three years after Google purchased the video sharing site for $1.65 billion USD.
Says his blog:
Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We’d just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world’s information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.
Looking back at those early days, we were committed to some basic principles that have since become fundamental tenets in the world of online video:
* Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
* Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
* Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.
Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we’ve started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we’ve brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business. We’re working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world’s largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.
Result for: video quality
The people at Xiph.org have released Theora 1.1, a year after releasing Theora 1.0. The format itself hasn’t been altered; existing Theora videos will be decoded fine with the new decoder and the new encoder will produce bitstreams that work with existing Theora players.
The update is largely an improvement for the Theora encoder which improves video quality over v1.0, brings rate control for live streaming, two-pass mode, consistent CPU usage and a more efficient decoder.
The Theora 1.1 release fixes a problem for its users, which was the production of “fuzzy video”. The following pictures are from Xiph developer Monty. Click to open both in new tabs and flick between them to see the difference.
Theora 1.0
