VSO software has released a new major version update of their well known PhotoDVD slide show authoring software. This new version contains several improvements: the animation engine has been fully rewritten, the image processing is using our new vso scaler. Now the DVD slideshow software can generate automatically DVD menus with better chaptering management. You have more control on animation, better load performance and better quality due to the new engine.
Hardly ever has a Linux distribution raised such a mixed feelings as the Fedora has done for us. On the other hand it represents the most up-to-date software and has some cool innovations, and is backed by one of the biggest Linux contributors - RedHat. However, the out-of-the-box experience of Fedora is far behind the other leading desktop distributions (Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva..) which leaves me wondering that who is this Linux distro for? We decided to give the Fedora 11 ‘Leonidas’ a whirl and try to find out.
The VSO Software has just released a new version of their award winning video to DVD conversion software. The new v3.6.4 comes with minor improvements, but the most interesting part of their announcement was the promise to deliver 2-pass encoding in the next major version update. This has the potential to introduce a nice quality improvement to their already very well performing video encoder. Click here to download the latest version instantly: Download now!
I noticed readers of DistroWatch.com complaining about the small amount of attention that the new Mandriva 2009.1 release has gotten so far. This has a lot to do with the fact that the release date was so close to the always over-hyped Ubuntu 9.04 release. Therefore I decided to write a brief article about it, as I happened to give it a few days of action on my laptop in the RC2 phase and after the final updates for the Gnome edition . My test session was brief and not very thorough, but I have to say this: Mandriva 2009.1 looks like a very promising release and should not be overlooked. It is especially interesting for those that are looking for a KDE 4.x release that would actually be somewhat usable. While Mandriva is somewhat KDE centric, they do have a good Gnome offering and alternative desktops like LXDE and XFCE are also available.
They could have called it the Rushed Ram or Bugsy Bear, but instead its a fictional creature Jackalope. Ubuntu’s latest tries to bring some innovation to the table, after the intermediate Ibex, but unfortunately it doesn’t feel ready from day one. Ever since Mark Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu should be visually as cool as Mac OSX, I have been waiting for the Ubuntu release to deliver this - after all there are lots of smaller distros out there focusing on strong visual appeal. It seems that we are still in the wait mode for this to happen, even after Jaunty’s release. Read on… [Read the rest of this entry...]
Over the last months I have spent some time playing around with various anti-virus and firewall software. The problem with computer security is that while it keeps you safe, or at least safer, it tends to introduce some negative side effects as well. The PC I am writing this on is rather old, so system resource usage is always a big concern of mine - I like to keep my PC snappy and responsive, so I don’t want to install anything that slows things down significantly. This rules out popular security suites of F-Secure or Norton - especially the latter seems to be able to kill the newest of PC’s in terms of performance. For quite some time I used the combination of Sunbelt Kerio firewall (free limited edition) and Avast! anti-virus (totally free) but I felt that an integrated solution might be more convenient. I was very tempted to buy the security suite of Eset NOD, as their anti-virus engine is probably one of the fastest, but their firewall was rather spartan. So I decided to give a spin to the latest offering of Comodo and their Internet Security suite and I am quite impressed - it’s a full-blown suite of applications that wont kill your computer and you can’t beat the price - its’ free.
Comodo Internet Security offers total, 360° protection against internal and external threats by combining 3 critical desktop security products in one application:
Author: Comodo Holdings BVI
License: Freeware
Download: http://personalfirewall.comodo.com
About a year ago we did some Linux mythbusting concerning two of the much debated Linux features vs. Windows: Stability and speed. Now a rather well know editor Bruce Byfield goes much farther than us and comes up with a list nine Linux myths and some busting.
With GNU/Linux, however, the story is different. For over a decade, columnists and bloggers have been explaining how GNU/Linux isn’t ready for the desktop — and, despite all the progress in the operating system over the last ten years, the arguments haven’t changed much. Moreover, increasingly, they’re outdated when they’re not based on complete ignorance. In fact, I often get the impression that those who pontificate on GNU/Linux’s inadequacies have never tried it.
The article is nice reading, but Bruce however makes some pretty strange suggestions while busting these myths, like suggesting GIMP as a replacement for PhotoShop, while the former doesn’t even support CMYK color pallette which is a real blocker for most imaging professionals. Bruce also writes that no Windows “migration tools exists”, while the popular Ubuntu distribution actually has one integrated to the installation process.
Anyway read and judge for yourself - this is always a fertile topic to debate about:
In our previous AVCHD guides for PlayStation 3 we have use DVD recordables as the medium for transferring the content to the console. This however has some downsides, the worst one being that file size increases in the MKV to AVCHD conversion process as the AVCHD adds all kinds of meta-data to the content. In practice this means that if you have a Matroska (.MKV) file that is matched to the size of a DVD-R(W) at 4.4GB and you convert it to AVCHD then it will not fit a regular DVD-R(W) and you’ll need a dual-layer disc. This is where a USB pen drive comes very handy - the prices have gone way down and one can get a 8GB or 16GB USB memory for peanuts. A USB pen drive is an excellent medium for transferring and watching you HD video content on PS3 - it’s reusable, portable, fast, and convenient. And now with the latest mkv2vob version you have an excellent tool for the MKV to USB AVCHD conversion. You’ll be watching your video on PS3 in 5 minutes - read on! [Read the rest of this entry...]
The conversion of high definition .MKV (Matroska) video just got easier with the release of the latest mkv2vob versions. From the version 2.4.3 and up the mkv2vob tool supports creation of AVCHD (aka Blu-ray on DVD) discs with support for subtitles. If you have AVCHD compliant video material then it will not even need to be re-encoded and the whole process only takes a couple of minutes to do. On the other hand, if the video material is not standard compliant, the mkv2vob will notice this and do the whole encoding work for you automatically - it only takes substantially longer time, usually couple of hours.
