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Imagine, if you will, business travelers gallivanting across the globe with nary a care in the world -- secure in the fact that should they lose their laptop by hook or by crook, they can disable it with a simple text message. Well, the dream is now a reality as Intel has put its third-gen vPro technology in Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 business chips, giving users the ability to lock down and reactivate a PC remotely via SMS.  

Full story:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/08/intel-brings-vpro-to-sandy-bridge-cpus-makes-losing-your-work-l 

January was quite a month for technology enthusiasts, with MacWorld and CES showcasing tons of cool new gear and promising much more in the coming months. Video is taking center stage in 2007, as manufacturers and service providers dump research and development money into video like never before. While some of the major players are still sticking to their proprietary guns, it's refreshing to see that at least a few are doing the exact opposite.

There's no question that Creative Cloud has transformed the way Adobe does business with their customers. I've been a huge fan from day one, but enterprise and government customers...well, not so much. Here's your chance to provide direct feedback to the Adobe Product Manager of Enterprise Tools, Karl Gibson.

Click here for details.

It's a hot topic, maybe not for the general public, but certainly for many of my peers lately. I have yet to meet a Digital Evidence Technician or Analyst who has complained about having too much, hi-speed, secure, expandable & redundant shared storage.  Just sayin'.  😎

Storage & workflow optimization go hand-in-hand when it comes to Digital & Multimedia Evidence. 

Resolution Video is planning their 2009 training schedule and would like input from their current and prospective students. To that end, they've published a brief online survey to collect your input and would appreciate your feedback.

Those who participate in the survey prior to September 1, 2008 will be entered to win an Apple iPod Nano. To complete the survey, please click here.

LEVA is proud to announce the Call For Entries for the 20th Annual Shield Video Awards competition, the only video competition designed exclusively for public safety professionals. Entries must be post-marked no later than Friday, July 3, 2009, and be received by July 10, 2009. Winners will be announced at the Shield Awards Banquet on November 20, 2009, during the 20th Annual LEVA Training and Development Conference in Ft. Worth, Texas. Visit www.leva.org for entry forms and further information.

Assumptions can be dangerous things. Let’s say you assumed your software was displaying your AVI video file at the proper aspect ratio (ratio of width-to-height). Well, chances are pretty good you’d be wrong…no matter what software you’re using. What!? So the perp in my video evidence may be thinner and taller OR shorter and pudgy-er!? Yep.

Fact – the AVI file format does not provide a standardized way to report aspect ratio. Due to this shortcoming, applications cannot calculate the proper Display Aspect Ratio (DAR) if it is supposed to be different than the Storage/Sample Aspect Ratio (SAR). Therefore, applications "assume" a square Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR) and display the video at it's SAR, even if that's not correct...which is generally the case when dealing with DCCTV evidence.

Moral of this story? Don’t assume.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) recently launched an entire website related to law enforcement's use of social media tools and resources - www.iacpsocialmedia.org

The new Center for Social Media has all kinds of information on planning and implementing Web 2.0 and social media tools for your agency, including case studies, white papers, directories, and more.  Be sure to take a minute to check it out by visiting www.iacpsocialmedia.org

I've used everything from freeware tools to high-end encoders to accomplish various audio & video trans-coding tasks over the last 15 years or so, and when time permits, I love testing out new tools.  Recently, when installing software on to a new PC, I decided to try another low-cost solution that's been around for quite some time, but I've never used; AVS Video Converter.

This article appears in the February/March issue of Streaming Media Magazine.

There are three categories of software encoding tools: bundled, desktop, and enterprise. In this article, I'll walk you through the general buying considerations within each category and detail when you need to consider stepping up to the next category.

Read the full story >

A few months ago, my wife got up on a Sunday morning at 3:30am and stood in line at Toys-R-Us to pick up a Nintendo Wii for our son.  Neither her or I have every done anything like that before and trust me when I tell you she's not a morning person, so I was absolutely amazed that she not only got up that early, but even more so that she stood in line in the freezing cold for hours just to get the darn thing. 😮

This afternoon my son and I were playing Guitar Hero III on the Xbox 360 and out of the blue decided to finally configure the Wii for Internet connectivity.  As you probably know, Wii has a Wi-Fi adapter built in, but I just never took the time to configure our router and the settings on the Wii.  Well, within a few minutes of our decision we were online surfing the Web on our Toshiba 46" HD TV.

By Ryan Paul

Developers Ronald Bultje, David Conrad, and Jason Garret-Glaser are creating a native VP8 video codec implementation for the open source FFmpeg project. The aim of this effort is to bring first-class VP8 support to FFmpeg and demonstrate the feasibility of producing an independent VP8 implementation.

Full Story

If you're responsible for recovering video evidence from DCCTV systems, be sure to check out our new class "DVR Assessment & Video Recovery". We'll be in WA, MD, TX and NY in the coming months. Hope to see you in class!

Training Schedule