Matrox MXO2-Mini review for VJs. Uncompressed HD mixing laptop to laptop. from vade on Vimeo. Enough of low-resolution hardware mixing. Our friend Anton aka vade has dreamed for some time of doing full, uncompressed HD mixing of two laptops. And he means laptops — not luggable towers or anything like that. It’s a common enough […]

Apple has rolled out its 10.5.7 OS update. First, the good news: it may enhance video support. Apple’s tech document claims the update “Improves performance of video playback and cursor movements for recent Macs with NVIDIA graphics.” The (potentially) bad news is that it could cause issues with video output and external monitor resolution. There’s […]

Rain Recording make audio-ready notebooks – that is, they’re pre-tested to function well with audio software, with Windows tweaks, driver selection, and configuration all chosen and tested for music and visual production, and no crapware installed. They’re one of a handful of music-friendly vendors that does that (see also: PCAudioLabs, etc.). Given that the PC […]

It’s port talk time again. As I suspected, Apple’s 17” MacBook Pro does get one additional port. You get 3 USB ports and one FireWire 800 port – though this means that, even though there’s almost no hardware that supports FW800, you’ll need an adapter for FW400 devices like HDV/DV cameras. At least unlike the […]

DRM on displays and projectors? Believe it. Apple, like many computer vendors, has added DRM to its new laptops in the form of HDCP (which, bizarrely, stands for “High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection”). This is doubly odd, because Apple cited technical restrictions of Blu-Ray as a reason for not including those drives on their machines – […]

A LiveBook on the test bench at Rain Headquarters, photographed for CDM. One of the things that attracts me to computers: choice. So it’s worth noting that you do have choices when looking to laptops, PCs included. (This sounds like those lame “We know you have a choice in your travel plans” announcements you get […]

So, you’ve got a shiny new MacBook / MacBook Pro — or any number of newer PC notebooks — and suddenly you realize you have no analog video output. Sure, you might be happy to output to VGA/DVI or even HDMI when you can, but for those Special Moments when that isn’t possible and you […]

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Hey, my Apple IIc at least still has a composite TV out (and nothing else, as it happens). Photo: Daniel Höpfl. It’s long been accepted tradition at VJ events: the lingua franca of video interconnects is good, old-fashioned analog S-Video and composite. Add an Edirol V-4 mixer, or […]

Over at Video Thing, Wiley is espousing the competition-winning Boxee – an open-source “social media player”, based on XBox Media Centre, and running on Linux, Mac, Windows, and in the VideoThing setup, AppleTV: I’ve been using an AppleTV since it was released. A device with great potential (cheap, HD enabled, great integration with iTunes) crippled […]