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So, I ditched Windows 8 Consumer Preview for Windows 8 Release Preview Friday night, and so far, so good.  I've even noticed that I've actually started using some the Metro style apps included by default, which I hadn't used at all in the Consumer Preview really.

If you're interested in checking out the new Windows 8 Release Preview visit http://preview.windows.com/

If you believe what Apple is saying about the dying media format that is the CD/DVD (hence the lack of optical drives on the MacBook Air and the latest refresh of the Mac Mini), then you have to wonder why would a company still attempt to innovate the CD despite reports of its declining status. However, if you believe that optical media is still the best way to back up your data then perhaps the M-Disc might be something you could be interested in.

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I was out in the Seattle area Tuesday along with my colleague Ed Baker to provide a couple of free seminars on digital video evidence for members of the Washington Homicide Investigators Association (WHIA).

Many thanks to WHIA for the opportunity and hospitality, as well as to our employer Ocean Systems for their dedication to, and continued support of educating the LE community on the multitude of issues related to digital & multimedia evidence.

This brief (approx. 9min.) introduction into the world of digital video evidence is intended to provide law enforcement professionals with a better understanding of the basic concepts and related issues.  It was geared towards first responders, who in many cases are the ones initially seizing video evidence.

It looks like Verizon might have underestimated the amount of iPhone 4 subscribers they would be getting on their service. It has just been reported that Verizon will be preventing users from downloading entire videos at once to help “ease capacity burdens on the network. "They will also be reducing the quality of the videos by eliminating colors and data “not visible to the human eye.”

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CCTV cameras across London help solve almost six crimes a day, the Metropolitan Police (Met) has said.

Det Ch Insp Mick Neville, who heads the Met's identification unit, said CCTV images were "treated like fingerprints and DNA" by the force.

The number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year.

Full story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12080487

Techsmith has announced the release of Snagit version 1 for Mac users.  Visit http://www.techsmith.com/snagit for complete details.

Upcoming CS6 versions of Adobe's flagship video software change significantly, with a streamlined interface for Premiere Pro and performance improvements for After Effects.

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Today Google launched Google Drive, a free-if-you-just-need-5GB-of-storage Dropbox-like service that lets you easily store and share files in the cloud.

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You can just press play if you want to, but if you're forensically processing evidence, I wouldn't advise it. Know the playback software, as it is just as important to proper playback and interpretation as the hardware. Take Windows Media Player, for instance.

In the following video I discuss a few quirks about Windows Media Player v12, a shortcoming of the popular metadata tool MediaInfo, and more.

LEVA has officially published the latest version of their Best Practices for the Acquisition of DME, version 3.0 dated 4/14/2010.

Click here to download the PDF (77KB)

On vacation, but thought I'd comment on this topic before getting on the Harley to go run some errands in the cold Pacific Northwest. As pointed out in someone else's recent blog post, MPEG-4 can leverage what is referred to as a Sample Aspect Ratio (SAR)...not to be confused with Storage Aspect Ratio (SAR) or Signal Aspect Ratio (SAR). It's important to note that in the case of MPEG-4, the Sample Aspect Ratio is the Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR); they are one and the same.

It's also important to note, again, that regarless of any of these numbers, the shape of the samples from an analog source ARE NOT DEFINED BY THE NUMBER OF LINES.

Oh, one more thing...most multimedia NLE and encoding applications provide precise control of all of these settings.  Just an FYI.  All the best my friends.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a new favorite browser, and it's lightning fast. I downloaded Apple's Safari 3 Public BETA a week or so ago to troubleshoot a log-in issue one of our members was having, and next thing you know I've installed it on all of my PCs at home and the office. Safari 3 provides tabbed browsing similar to IE7 and Firefox 2, which is nice for those of us that have multiple pages/sites open simultaneously constantly. The first thing that impressed me was its look and layout, but I quickly realized that its primary advantage was its performance.

Apple is quick to point out on the homepage for Safari its performance advantages. They claim Safari can load pages up to 3 times faster than Opera, 2 times faster than IE7, and 1.7 times faster than Firefox. Pretty impressive numbers, but what browser doesn't claim to be the fastest? As you can imagine, some of Media-Geek.com's member services are bandwidth intensive, and others require multiple scripts to be loaded by your browser. I did a few rudimentary tests accessing various features of Media-Geek.com using Safari, IE7, and Firefox and was simply amazed at the difference in load times.