Free DME & DFIR Resources

Headed out to Cincinnati, OH today for the IAI's 101st Forensic Educational Conference. If you're attending, stop by the Ocean Systems booth (#513) and say hello! Safe travels my friends. - LC

Lossless trimming is the ability to trim, cut or extract segments of audio & video without re-encoding the original multimedia streams, maintaining both the original frames/samples and their related metadata. It is a process as old as digital video itself, and one that can be extremely helpful when dealing with hundreds or thousands of hours of digital video evidence for a case.

Reduce file size, reduce duration and maintain the original frames & quality. Bonus, the process is even faster than traditional editing, as you don't have to wait for the video to be re-encoded!

Spatial vs. Temporal Compression

Spatial (Intraframe) compression is applied to each video frame independently, treating each frame as a stand-alone image. This is the type of compression leveraged by high-end video production facilities as it provides superior picture quality and efficiencies in the editing process. Every frame is a key frame.

Forensic Video Analysis - FVA 101
dTective/ClearID/Avid - 4 Days

Forensic Video Analysis using Ocean Systems dTective and ClearID is 4 day course that provides a comprehensive approach to your casework for both digital and analog video evidence with a primary focus on our the stream-lined workflows and digital media processing.   It is intended for anyone who is new to the field of FVA or persons who have not been formally trained using these tools. 

Apple is once again offering the previous version of its professional video-editing software after getting mixed reactions on a newer version.

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In an effort to make it easier for YouTube users to make changes to their videos after uploading them, YouTube is rolling out a brand new video editor.

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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.”

The Scientific Working Group for Imaging Technology (SWGIT) has released a DRAFT of "Best Practices for the Retrieval of Digital Video" for public comment. The comment period ends April 19, 2013.

Visit SWGIT

Come on, you knew this was coming.  Looks pretty cool, I must say...

Next-Level Autonomously Flying Indoor Security Camera | Ring Always Home Cam 

(Video embedded below in full post)

As demonstrated in a series of articles published earlier in this blog, solid-state disks (SSD) tend to wipe deleted information on their own pace due to the way their garbage collection mechanism is designed. Wiped information cannot be recovered by any means, not even with expensive hardware, and not even by pulling flash memory chips out. It’s gone forever.

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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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The Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence (SWGDE) is pleased to announce posting of the following fourteen new draft documents for public review and comment at https://www.swgde.org/documents/draft-released-for-comment

• SWGDE Best Practices for Acquiring Online Content (21-F-001-1.1)
• SWGDE Best Practices for Apple MacOS Forensic Acquisition (23-F-005-1.0)
• SWGDE Best Practices for Digital Forensic Video Analysis (18-V-001-1.1)
• SWGDE Best Practices for Drone Forensics (21-F-002-1.1)

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.

As you may know, version 1.10.4 of Avery Lee's video capture/processing utility was released a little over a month ago. I've packaged it with several of the input plugins I regularly use, with one notable exception; the FFmpeg input plugin. I've had nothing but issues w/version 0.7 of the FFmpeg input plugin when used with version 1.10.4 of VirtualDub, so I've provided the source but did not install the plugin in my v1.10.4 package.

The v1.9.11 package contains all of the same input plugins, and version 0.7 of the FFmpeg input plugin is loaded automatically as well. Head past the break for the links to download.