YouTube – Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009.

Not only do videos take up a ton of space on space-constrained devices, but converting videos for the iPhone gets painful quickly. Air Video streams videos straight to your iPhone, converting them on-the-fly if theyre incompatible.

via Air Video Streams Your Videos to Your iPhone with Minimal Effort, Is Incredible – Streaming Video – Lifehacker.

“Ever download a movie from—oh, I don’t know—some far-reaching nether-region of the internet, and when your download finishes realize the video is split into multiple parts? AVI Joiner quickly combines those split videos in just a few clicks.”

via AVI Joiner Combines Split Video Files into One – Videos – Lifehacker.

YouTube – Parisian Love.

The Apple TV is an interesting device.  Apple has even said themselves that it is a hobby for them.  The box holds so much potential but it just lacks in too many ways.  At least for me.  Before I go and bash the device I’m going to let you know that there are some positives. 

1. It’s a wonderfully designed piece of hardware.  It’s small and nice to look at. 
2. If you live in the iTunes world it’s also a great piece of hardware.  It connects beautifully with iTunes and if you purchase all of your music and video from Apple, the device makes it easy to put it on your TV. 
3. It makes a great remote speaker for playing music from your computer via a wireless network.
4. It can be hacked

The fact that the Apple TV can be hacked made me hold on to the device a little longer than I expected.  I was able to install XBMC and Boxee and open the device up to my own video collection and to some great internet video via Boxee.  The problem was with my own video collection.  I’m starting to collect higher quality video and the Apple TV just cannot handle it.  Now, I could re-encode my video collection so that it still looks good and the Apple TV can handle it but it is a huge pain in the ass (I actually started to do this and realized there had to be a better way).  Also, the device wasn’t capable of handling some Internet video and the playback would be very choppy.  Even moving around the menus was a laggy experience.  So, I had enough and I sold it. 

I know am the proud of owner of a custom built home theater PC.  It has a quad-core processor with 4gb of RAM and a very nice onboard video and audio card.  I even threw in a Blu Ray drive.  It has HDMI out for easy connection to my TV (just as the Apple TV did).  I could have put it in a small case but I chose a case that looks like a big audio receiver.  It currently has 2.3 TB of storage and I plan on adding another 1.5TB very soon.  This machine can play back any file type I throw at it with ease and is very quiet.  I plan on making another write-up about the machine with pictures and a list of the products I chose to install in it.  I’ll also talk about the software I’m using to power the system.

Anybody else have an Apple TV experience?

Coming to our rescue is a new service, Feedflix.  Feedflix works by utilizing the Netflix API to analyze your usage.  It provides a relative cost per movie you rent (as a baseline keep in mind that Redbox charges only $1/day for new release movies)

It also gives data on recent rentals, how long you hold your rentals for and various other types of data.  This kind of information can be very  helpful in determining what plan you should be on, if any at all.  

Hopefully this can help everyone get the most out of your subscription.

So, you couldn’t watch Jack Bauer save the world again.  Well, I think that’s a shame. Here are 3 ways to catch up on your favorite TV shows:

1. Hulu – This is my favorite site and one we have talked about before here on Student Nerds.  It is very well designed and doesn’t really bug you too bad with ads.  It was started as a joint collaboration with NBC and FOX, so you won’t find any ABC shows on here.
2. Fancast – This is a website started by Comcast.  Fancast is an aggregator that pulls in shows from many networks. 
3. Joost – Joost started out as a standalone application, but now has dumped that idea to focus solely on it’s web interface.  It is very well designed and even integrates with Facebook so you don’t have to create your own account.  It also allows you to share what you’re watching with your friends.  There is a lot of potential with this. (See Boxee)

First, the point and shoot was straight forward and easy, but selecting what quality to shoot in was the hard part.  Do I shoot in Standard basic HD, or MXP (The maximum setting on this camera)?  Well of course, if you buy a fancy HD camera, you want to shoot the max right away.  There are two problems with the highest setting.  First, it will record maybe 5hrs of video (not the advertised 22).  Second, the battery (always buy an extended battery) only lasts about 30 minutes.  Once you have your video shot, I would recommend Adobe Premiere. I tried Final Cut Express but you need to make sure you have it updated, or it will crash your comp.  Corel Video Studio didn’t handle AVCHD at all, or at least I couldn’t figure out how to capture it.  Once I loaded Adobe Premiere everything was smooth sailing for capturing and editing. 

Now the hard part, what format to put the video in to share it, or how to share it?  This is one I have still been messing around with.  I wanted to see if anyone has any ideas.  What is the best format for AVCHD video to share with friends and family that likely have older computers that can’t handle H.264 HD video?.  Do you send them an MPEG or upload to a video sharing site (Youtube or Vimeo)?   Let us know what you think can make this industry a little more uniform with video and if you have any recommendations for sharing HD video on the internet.