Practical Technology

I’ve been a baseball fan since 1969 when the “Miracle” Mets bounced my Chicago Cubs from the National League championship. Living in the backwoods of West Virginia, I never saw my Cubs play in person or on TV. Instead, I listened to my beloved Cubs at night on my radio, which was tuned in to [...]

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First, Google opened up its VP8 video codec. Then, Google removed built-in support for the MPEG-LA patent encumbered H.264 video codec from its Chrome Web-browser in favor of VP8. After that it was only a matter of time before the MPEG-LA patent consortium came gunning for Google VP8. As a MPEG-LA representative told ZDNet’s Ed [...]

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I’ve been watching TV over the Internet since its very early days. Today, I own, and use, an Apple TV, a network capable Sony BDP-S570 Blu-ray Disc Player, and a Roku KDS. I also subscribe to Hulu Plus and Netflix. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I know, like and [...]

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A few hundred words from Google Product Manager Mike Jazayeri announcing that Google would be supporting WebM and Ogg Theroa instead of the H.264 video codec in Google Chrome for the HTML5 video tag has lead to enormous controversy in browser and video circles. Now, Google has explained in more detail what’s its trying to [...]

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In some technology circles, you’d think Google was proposing throwing cats into a wood-chipper from the way some people are reacting to Google’s announcement that it was focusing its support on its own open VP8/WebM and Theora video codecs, and dropping support for H.264. This is not a step back for openness; any kind of [...]

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