News for Friday, 14 April 2006

A Microsoft Bluetooth 2.0 USB Dongle?

By linathael. Original by Lionel - 14/04/2006 16:03:32 CEST - Category: Peripheral

While looking at the MacOSX Bluetooth drivers, we have found the following information:

Microsoft Bluetooth 2.0 USB Dongle

CFBundleIdentifier
com.apple.driver.BroadcomUSBBluetoothHCIController
IOClass
BroadcomUSBBluetoothHCIController
IOProviderClass
IOUSBDevice
IOProviderMergeProperties

ClassicMustNotSeize

idProduct
156
idVendor
1118

MacOSX is already supporting a Microsoft Bluetooth 2.0 USB Dongle that is not available yet (to our knowledge). It might also be the driver for the Microsoft Mouse/Keyboard kit dedicated to the Mac, and supposed to be released soon.

A promising new video compression format

By jwa. Original by Lionel - 14/04/2006 01:53:08 CEST - Category: Video - Source: CDR Info

The company Euclid has announced that they have developed a new video compression format which, in certain situations, is capable of obtaining a compression ratio of over 15,000 to 1.
Beyond this flashy example, this format should gain a lot of ground.
Unlike the current formats (MPEG2 and MPEG4), the method of compression does not try to find similar pixels nearby, but tries to find shapes and follow their movements by modeling them and compressing them in a more effective manner.
One can imagine that the processing power required for encoding and decoding will be quite high, but this process could make it possible to offer videos for download, as high quality films would be a few hundred MB.