With the ability to watch movies and TV series on Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, those of us without an Internet-ready TV have been settling for watching at a computer desk or on a smaller laptop screen. One way around this is to get the video from your computer to the TV as seamlessly as possible. Last year, I reviewed Warpia’s USB PC to TV video adapter, which provided decent wireless video up to 720p. After that review, many people asked about 1080p video and other features. Today, I reviewed Warpia’s latest product in this line, the ConnectHD.
1080p HD USB PC to TV Video Streaming
Like other streaming products, the ConnectHD includes a USB adapter for sending video and a receiving unit on the television end to convert the signal and display it on your TV. This is accomplished by Windows treating the Warpia adapter as a duplicated monitor and feeding it all the video you see on your screen. That video image is then streamed wirelessly to the receiver and shows up on your TV. I tested this with video in 1080p and it streamed very well. At the request of my wife, several additional tests were conducted with full episodes of Sons of Anarchy from Amazon.com. The 1080p video testing from YouTube looked great and the additional tests passed Michelle’s scrutiny.
HD Video Conferencing
The premier feature of ConnectHD is the ability to, well, connect in HD to others. The TV adapter includes a 720p HD video camera and the ability to stream video both ways. On your computer, the camera shows up as any other camera you might connect directly. This makes the ConnectHD uniquely suited to act as video conferencing hardware for applications like Skype and MSN Messenger. I tried it with Skype today and was pleased with the results. The video quality showed some signs of compression, but that may have been more Skype than the camera as the image was crystal clear in Skype’s video settings panel.
Warpia ConnectHD Video Demonstration
During my testing, I created video of some of the process, showing how well the ConnectHD works and demonstrating the features as seen below:
Conclusions
Listed on the Warpia site with a sales price of $199.99, ConnectHD is a good bundle considering the $100+ prices of most HD PC to TV video solutions and the cost of a good HD camera. ConnectHD bundles both to ensure they will work well together. If video conferencing is something you won’t likely do from the couch, $199 can seem steep, so Warpia and other companies offer cameraless solutions for a lot less cost. This solution performed very well in all of my testing and works great for the task at hand.
If you haven’t heard about S.O.P.A. yet and why it needs to be stopped, spend five minutes and read on.
What Is S.O.P.A.?
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the less known PROTECTIP (PIPA) are proposed legislation that aim to give more control to the U.S. government and copyright holders to thwart piracy online. Sadly, the legislation will instead give our government the power to blacklist sites that allegedly contain any small amount of infringing content, thereby blocking the whole site from users. As an example, if I post a video on YouTube of my cat being funny and it happens to have a pop song playing in the background, YouTube has to remove it quickly or face harsh consequences. And if they’re not fast enough? That’s when Uncle Sam gets to start messing with DNS (the naming system of the Internet), making the site unreachable by normal means to most people in the U.S. If that doesn’t work, private companies (RIAA and MPAA, for example), can get advertising and payment companies like Google and PayPal to shut down the accounts of the allegedly offending site.
In this case, YouTube could vanish to anyone in the U.S. and lose all advertising revenue if I don’t edit some music out of my kitty cat video. Sounds reasonable, right?
And if you want to read the full text, here’s H.R. 3261
Pay attention to 102(c)(2)(A)(i) regarding DNS re-routing and 102(c)(2)(B) regarding search engines.
If all that’s too much to read, check out the SOPA infographic from Mashable or watch a video about the legislation below:
Wikipedia And JoeTech.com Are Going Dark In Protest
At 12:00 AM on January 18th, 2012, the English version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours, and so will JoeTech.com and we’re certainly not alone. Reddit got the SOPA Strike rolling, and Mozilla has been vocal about this for a while. My dedicated server provider, Codero, voiced their own opinion about SOPA/PIPA, urging customers to get educated.
During that 24 hour period I’ll have a blackout page up, but as of 12:00 AM on January 19th, 2012, JoeTech.com will be back to normal.
Even if you don’t have a site, you can make your voice heard. That link will do the work for you to connect you to your senators to voice your opinion about SOPA/PIPA. Politely urge them to consider the freedoms we fight so hard to protect before voting on this horrible legislation.
Share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Better yet, share any of the helpful links above.
Stop waiting for bad ideas to become laws.
Update: It looks like our politicians are listening, promising to make changes to the bill to help with our concerns, but we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of it. At this point, the bill may be vastly changed for the better or may just die completely.
It’s almost Christmas, but I didn’t have to wait to see Santa. In fact, he brought his elves to my house to dance. Well, at least that’s what I was able to make a video of thanks to today’s review of ReelDoozy, a pretty unique iPhone app.
What’s All This About?
ReelDoozy is an iPhone app that uses green screen technology to let you super-impose fun video they provide on top of your own video. The result is a video of, say, your own house with Santa dancing around in your living room. This green screen technology has been used for years in the television and film industry but lately, it’s turning up in all sorts of fun apps like this, thanks to the processing power and video capabilities of today’s smart phone line-up.
ReelDoozy Features And Improvement
When the app is fired up, the first thing to do in order to make a video is select a foreground video. This is the video of Santa, or whatever else you choose, that will be super-imposed atop your own video. There are four short clips starring Santa and his elves that are free to use. For most, these will be fine to play with, but the app offers six additional foreground video collections that can be unlocked for an in-app purchase of 99 cents per collection. While playing, I decided to buy the Dancing Pack to aid in the making of my review video below.
After selecting a foreground video, you select a background video or create one on the fly. So far, it’s been pretty basic stuff I had expected from the app, but the next step was a nice touch. With both the foreground and background videos selected, you can choose where to position the foreground subject and even pinch-zoom to re-size him. Better still, you’re given slider controls to adjust the brightness and contrast of the foreground video and can choose to use the foreground audio, the background, or a mix of both. Of course, this stuff is almost necessary if you want the final video to look good at all. I would have really enjoyed some kind of path selection to allow me to move Santa with the floor if my background video moves too much, but it might be a bit much to ask of a free app.
While I’m being greedy, I’d love some more selection in video packs. The dancing and humor scenes are fun, but I’d love the option for a couple scenes in which Santa is placing presents under the tree or filling a stocking. I’ll gladly throw down another buck for that.
Video of Santa Dancing
Sometimes the best part of a review is playing with fun stuff, so I tried to be a little creative and come up with my own videos with Santa and the elves and here’s the result.
Conclusions
When I first saw the press release for this, I thought it looked like a neat way to show the kids that Santa had actually been there. After installing and playing around, I realized it was pretty fun for those of us without kids, too. The price is always right when it’s free, and even the in-app purchase options were well within reason. The one stand-out problem with this app is that is freezes on me when finalizing a video. The video does save, though, so this is a minor inconvenience. In the end, ReelDoozy is a lot of free holiday fun, leaving you little reason to not check it out. If you try it out, I really want to see what videos you come up with, so share the links in the comment section below.
Online video accounts for an astounding percentage of the internet’s traffic. YouTube, alone, sees about 48 hours of new video uploaded every minute and about three billion video views per day. Still, we find ourselves often looking to third party applications to handle video tasks our base operating systems don’t do – or at least not well enough. A good example of this is downloading video from sources such as YouTube.
Today, I spent some time with the Elmedia Player software and tried many of the features offered in the free version as well as the PRO.
Notable Elmedia Player Features
The free version of the Elmedia Player leaves out most of my favorite features, but that’s to be expected. I found, however, that even the free version is very well polished with a lot of options and advantages over most of the free video tools I see. Here’s a list of most of what you find in the free version:
- Support for many video types (FLV, SWF, XAP (Silverlight), RM and RV (Real), AVI, MOV, MP4, WMV, DIVX)
- HTML5 video support
- Zoom in and zoom out options for SWF and EXE (or APP) files
- Growl and browsers integration
- iTunes-like playlists and star ratings
The PRO version, offered for only $19.95 on Eltima Software’s web site, hones in on a few key features that the product is really designed for and delivers in those areas. While this software isn’t littered with too much fluff, there are a few extras that don’t seem entirely necessary (like video ratings). Regardless, they’re not in the way and, more importantly, they didn’t distract Eltima from doing a good job with the core features. Some of the PRO features include:
- Download Video – even RTMP streams
- Full-screen mode
- “Always on top” mode
- Make a screenshot of the current frame
- Convert file into series of images
Of course, downloading video from a wide variety of sources is the feature I’d pay for, but the screen shot and “Always on top” features will also come in pretty handy. Less needed, but great on occasion, will be the option that lets you take a series of images – I’m thinking animated GIFs here.
Hands On Testing
After installing the software, my first test (as seen in the image at the beginning of this review) was to head to YouTube and try to download one of my review videos. In the past, I’ve used plug-ins to download a video, but Elmedia Player takes a different approach. You paste the URL to a web page into the software and it loads the page like a browser. When it does this, it looks for any videos or links to them in the page’s content and makes a list for you to select from. I first downloaded just the video that I was after, but then I tried the “Download all” option which grabbed everything in site.
Tip: You may need to start playing the video in the preview page before it will appear in the list to download.
Once a video is grabbed, it’s listed under the Downloaded section, where you can pull up everything from just today or broaden the listing. The organization extends in a different way to the file folder structure behind the scenes as well. Here, a folder is created that is named after the page you downloaded from.
While this software’s core features are not that unlike some free browser plugins on the surface, the extra video formats it supports can be invaluable. Additionally, some of the browser plugins I’ve used in the past can be sporadic in their reliability. I haven’t used this software long enough to be certain it will stand up to the many challenges I have in store for it, but so far, everything indicates that it likely will. Finally, one thing that Elmedia Player will not do that the browser plugins do all too often is cease to become useful after I upgrade to the latest browser version or switch from one to another. Being browser-independent has its advantages.
Conclusions
Cons: The only con it that it’s not free – well, it is free, but the best and really useful features are in the PRO version. Pros: This is well-built software with some thoughtful extras, the price is low enough to barely be a factor, and it doesn’t care what browser you have or version. Want 15% off? No problem. Just use the coupon code JOE-TECH-PROMO when you purchase.
Don’t Have 20 Bucks? Win It Here!
That’s right. Even if you’re just a little interested, I have been given not one, but two PRO upgrade codes to give out to lucky winners. Just follow the entry instructions below and come back here next week to see if you’ve won! Entering is as simple as clicking the “Do it” link, following any instructions, and then clicking the “I did this” button. If you’re already subscribed to JoeTech.com via email or you already follow me on Twitter, you can skip right to the “I did this” button for those entries. Good luck!
