Free DME & DFIR Resources

An all new year brings an all new look and an entirely different platform for our forensic multimedia community.  Our new site has been redesigned from the ground up to simplify information sharing for our members.  Let's take a quick look at navigating the all new members area and point out a few important changes.

DMEpod, the new Digital Multimedia Evidence video podcast, will not be released this weekend as originally anticipated. Unfortunately, I just haven't had the time that I had previously planned to work on this project the last few weeks due to a number of variables. As it stands I'm hoping to pull off an early October launch.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the "fused architecture" emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip. The technology, called CPU-assisted general purpose computation on graphics processor units (CPU-assisted GPGPU) uses software compiled to leverage the architecture to allow the CPU and GPU to collaborate on computing tasks, boosting processor performance on average by more than 20 percent in simulations.

Full Story

One of the features still in BETA for the new member's area is a video sharing service, which will allow users to upload videos or add their videos currently hosted elsewhere to the Media-Geek video library.  In addition to a searchable, categorized library, each member's profile will list their videos.

  Although this feature wasn't initially slated to be rolled out with our launch on the 11th, it now looks like it will be!  Get your training videos together, get registered, and come back next week to upload!

Found this article from TechCrunch absolutely fascinating.

Prosthetic Retinas displaying a cameras image directly into your noggin using photovoltaic materials, which turn light into electric current. Come on, so cool!

The future is very bright, my friends. Be safe out there & make it a great day!

Color us unsurprised that Ivy Bridge is destined to be faster and smaller than its predecessor, but unbeknownst to us is an interesting tidbit concerning the upcoming architecture's GPU. The revamp will support resolutions in excess of 4K...

Full story:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/19/intel-ivy-bridge-gpu-to-support-4k-resolutions

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.

It's after 4:00 am in the morning and I'm writing about codecs.  That isn't right.  Just curious what lossless video codecs others are using or have used and/or compared for forensic screen capture?  I'm sure the most common answer will be TechSmith's TSCC, but there are others out there that work quite nicely and are priced just right....FREE.

I posted a new member poll on the topic, which you'll find on the right-hand side of your profile page.  Also recently added the free LZO and GZIP based CamStudio codec to our files & downloads library and have been fiddling with some others.    Are you using something else, or do you prefer to keep all captures uncompressed?

The software giant, along with a Swedish technology company, is providing photo-identification technology free of charge to law enforcement to help detect and thwart child abuse.

Read full story >

The AFMA Board of Directors has recently completed a draft of the Bylaws for the organization. This is available on the AFMA network at http://theafma.ning.com/forum/topics/bylaws-for-the-afma for comment. This draft document will be available for comment for 30 days - any suggestions for updates or additions must be submitted within this timeframe. We ask that if you do submit changes or additions please write them in a form that can be easily amended to the document. For example, a change or addition should be submitted as: “Section 15.2 Any changes or additions will be written in the form of the document.”

http://media-geek.com/images/myblog/frontpage/flock.jpg

This weekend I downloaded and tested out v2.5 of the Flock browser.  If you've never heard of it and you're a Web 2.0 junkie, you just might find this browser to be the one for you.

If you plan on buying a Blu-ray player in 2011, don't be surprised if the back panel is lacking a component video output. A surprising number of mainstream 2011 Blu-ray players, (such as the Panasonic DMP-BDT210, Samsung BD-D5700, LG BD670, to name a few) are omitting the red, green, and blue video jacks, which means buyers will have to rely on HDMI for high-def Blu-ray video signals.
It's all about AACS

We can't blame manufacturers for omitting the component out of new players. For one, it's not a huge loss, as the vast majority of buyers will be using the HDMI output for video. But there's another issue: even the new Blu-ray players that are including component video connections will only output 480i signals, rather than high-def 1080i.

Full Story

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.”

Full Story