An interesting Blog entry from EDN on AES (Audio Engineering Society) audio standards.

Smith Micro Software announced on the 5th of July their acquisition Of Allume Systems. Allume are the current owners of Stuffit. Stuffit has been in the news a little lately thanks to their new lossless, JPEG-recompression technique (not lossless JPEGs, but a way of packing JPEGs further without making the image worse), as discussed on Slashdot. To quote a large, interesting passage from the website;

“StuffIt’s JPEG compression, represents just part of a much wider commitment on the part of Smith Micro to provide industry leading file compression and management solutions. In addition to the compression of JPEG images, support for the compression of a comprehensive array of image formats will be provided in StuffIt products released over the course of 2005 and beyond. These releases include additional patent pending technology aimed at the compression of both 24bit images (such as pictures in TIFF and PNG format) and indexed images (such as pictures in GIF format). The software will also feature a compression mode specific to processing grayscale images.

Initial research also indicates the applicability of the techniques used in the compression of JPEG files for other media file types such as MPEG movies and MP3 audio files.”

AfterDawn reports that brazilian Rarewares.org has found some interesting additions to InterVideo WinDVD. They require WinDVD 5, 6 or 7 installed, as they don’t do the decryption themselves, and instead patch WinDVD to output the decrypted stream to disk instead of the sound card.

Such tools are also available for recording internet radio. I wonder how successful any DRM solution can be if we can just re-record stuff without any copy-protection.

To prevent the piracy of digital broadcasts on pay television, NEC Electronics America Inc. rolled out a single-chip MPEG decoder with enhanced security features for digital STBs.

NEC has incorporated features specifically designed to prevent the illegal reception and copying of pay TV broadcasts and information stored in STBs.

Read more at EE Times.

NACF processes a very large volume of e-banking transactions daily, and this is increasing steadily as their customers become more comfortable with Internet banking. Currently, these transactions produce at least 12GB of log data per day, and as much as twice that at month’s end. All this data must be kept available for two months so that call center staff can access it if necessary to respond to customer support requests.

A solution based on SAND Searchable Archive is now used to store two months of transaction log data - nearly a terabyte - in a very compact (approximately 50GB) archive that can be directly searched via a simple application using standard SQL. Results are now returned in minutes rather than days. The archive process is fully automated and accommodates changes to archived objects (i.e., addition or removal of fields in the logs) over time with minimal administrative effort.

Product strengths include high compression rates, the ability to query data directly without decompression and the ability to change structure of the source data (add and drop columns) without requiring restructuring of the archive.

Read more here.

In July 2005 issue of Nikkei Electronics Asia reports that at NAB2005, the video technology show held in Las Vegas from April 16 to 19, 2005 there were a number of new coding technologies presented.

The major entry was H.264/Moving Picture Coding Experts Group Phase 4 Advanced Video Coding (MPEG-4 AVC), or just H.264 for short. Broadcasting, communications and next-generation optical discs using the new coding technology are expected to enter mainstream commercial use in 2005 as development accelerates.

NTT Cyberspace Laboratories of Japan offered one of the highest compression ratios for non-realtime processing. In realtime processing, the ME6000 H.264-compliant encoding system from Modulus showed a high compression ratio, achieving a bit-rate of 5.5Mbps for a 1080i HDTV signal.

Read the complete article here.