TechnologiesExpert Blog

There has been talk about Apple introducing an iWatch for quite some time now so I wanted to update you on this. The Apple iWatch concept has been designed by an Italian design house by the name of ADR Studio. When the information about this concept was released there was a tremendous amount of interest in the not only the concept but the actual Apple iWatch itself. It seems that people haven’t forgotten about watches afterall.Since the introduction of mobile phones watches have kind of become irrelevant. When people ask you for the time it is an automatic reaction to take out your phone and look. Do people still wear watches?

Well obviously they do and after the tremendous response that ADR Studio received for their iWatch concept the designer actually went and created a brand new video so that he could show off his vision of what the next best thing from Apple could be like. I have to admit, it looks pretty amazing but you can be the judge of this yourself.

Before you jump ahead and watch the video here is a brief explanation from the designer himself about his amazing concept:

The Apple iWatch concept is a wrist device that features an aluminum body, WiFi and Bluetooth, integrated RSS reader, 16GB of storage for music and pictures, a weather forecast system, connectivity with iPhone and iPad and an LCD projector so that users can beam their photos and videos onto a wall or something similar in order to watch them.

It sounds amazing doesn’t it so take a look at the video below which has been inspired by the official iPhone and iPad ads that have been created by Apple.

Convert DVD into high quality MKV or MP4. Mp4 can be used for iPod. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Supported Inputs:-

Any DVD-like source:- VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (unencrypted--protection methods including CSS are not supported internally and must be handled externally with third-party software and libraries), and some .VOB and .TS files
Any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.

Outputs:-

File Format:- MP4 and MKV
Video:- MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora
Audio:- AAC, CoreAudio AAC (OS X Only), MP3, or Vorbis. AC-3 pass-through, DTS pass-thorugh (MKV only)

Features:-

* Chapter selection
* Subtitles
* Integrated bitrate calculator
* Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
* Live Video Preivew

Higher Resolution MPEG4s on the iPod Video:-

Handbrake can be used to rip movies from DVD directly to a format that the iPod can use. It requires that you download the Handbrake source, make a change, and compile it.

Handbrake source is available via CVS, and instructions are provided on the app's download page. You'll also need to download something called jam that downloads and compiles other bits and pieces Handbrake needs. Copy the jam executable into the Handbrake folder created when you obtained the CVS source.

Next, find a file in the Handbrake source named libhb/encx264.c and open it in a text editor. Two lines need to be added in the hb_work_object_t * hb_work_encx264_init function. You might want to place these lines on lines 63 and 64 of the file:

param.b_cabac = 0;
param.i_level_idc = 13;

Save that file and close it.

Start Terminal, cd to the Handbrake source folder, and run ./jam. Make sure you're connected to the network when you do that. After that, a Handbrake executable will be created in the Handbrake source root that can transcode movies directly to iPod-understandable format.

Also, the bitrate in the hint is much too high. There is a rule-of-thumb formula to use to calculate the bitrate:

Formula to calculate Bitrate

(width * height * FPS * Q) / 1024

width = pixel width of the picture
height = pixel height of the picture
FPS = source DVD's frames per second
Q = bits per pixel quality for the codec. A good setting for MPEG4 is .23, and a good setting for H.264 is .15. You can change those to suit your tastes.

For a 720 x 304 widescreen movie at 24 FPS, the equation looks like this:

(720 * 304 * 24 * .15) / 1024 = ~770

An average bitrate of 770 kbps will produce a very good quality movie.

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India as we all know being a developing country, some calling it 'third' world should have services and goods at a cheaper price. You could not be more wrong. A live example in front of you being the new 3G iPhone.

The 3G iPhone will be priced at 31,000 rupees, a whopping $750 for the 8GB version. The 16 GB one will sell for Rs. 36,100 that is about $850. These prices are simply too high we believe for the iPhone to be a success in India. The phone will definitely make good sales in the first couple of weeks to the cream of the crowd, but this is simply fizzle out sooner than you can think.

To add more misery, 3G services are not even offered in India at the moment and will not be so till late 2009. The user will just be paying for the design and looks of the iPhone and nothing more!