I am a big movie fanatic. I love cinema and I have a large DVD and Blu-ray collection that takes up too much needed storage in my cozy inner city apartment, or so my wife tells me.

For quite a while I’ve been toying with the idea of digitizing and archiving my movie collection, but it must be said that with my fanaticism comes purism – I refuse to settle for anything less than the original video and audio quality. In addition, I’m one of those rare folk that enjoy watching the movies’ ‘Special Features’  – I’ve just seen the film, now I want to see how those magicians put it together! – which adds an extra layer of complication to the process. The reality is that whichever solution was right for me needed to be able to replicate the experience of playing the original disc, minus the plastic box and the loading time of my ancient Blu-ray player.

So I had a choice. Option 1) I butter up my better half over an extended period of time and hope that she finally agrees to me parting with our hard earned savings to purchase a Kaleidescape system. Dream on. Option 2) I make up an excuse to upgrade our ageing back-up hard drive and invest instead in a DIY movie server.

Let me make one thing clear from the start. If you are so inclined to take on a similar task but wouldn’t consider yourself a tech-head and don’t have an infinite amount of time on your hands (ie. you have kids) then there is only one solution for you: Kaleidescape. Those wonderful people over in Sunnyvale, CA will do everything for you (including managing your database) and provide one of the best User Experiences of any product anywhere. And that’s because they are obsessive movie purists too. But this premium service comes at a cost, so there must be another option right?

Well fortunately there is, albeit convoluted. In this series of blogs, I will explore the various aspects of putting together your very own home movie solution which I will split in to three parts, in no particular order:

1) Store it

2) Catalogue it

3) Play it

There is a fourth entitled, ‘Don’t get thrown in prison’. But that’s a subject for another time, place and website. I once read the Australian copywrite laws relating to backing up your own content and concluded that they need updating: copying VHS tapes isn’t something I plan on doing anytime soon. For the most part, I’m comfortable in the fact that I have paid my hard earned cash for the content and I am simply using another more convenient device to play it. Plus I build in a bit of fire and theft insurance to boot. But if you find yourself in a position of care-taking a friend’s movie collection and curiosity forces you to sample it on your new 65″ OLED, on your head be it. Piracy is bad, mmmkay?

It’s a highly competitive market notorious for making or breaking the technology giants that choose to compete. But Apple are poised to take on the giants and potentially crush them like they have done so many times before.

We know very little about the much‐hyped Apple HDTV. That’s no surprise, of course, Apple are hardly famous for giving away secrets now are they. But yet, if you think about it for a second or two and consider what the ultimate TV could look like, Apple are in a much better position than anyone to come up with something quite special. Let’s take a look at why this is.

Firstly, let’s ask ourselves, ‘What does everyone want from a TV?’ Forgetting the masculine perception that size is everything, it comes down to a few fundamental features:
• Aesthetics – does it look pretty hung on my wall?
• Content – can I watch what I want, when I want?
• Ease of Use – do I need to have an IT doctorate to operate this thing?

Apple make pretty products, there is no denying it. Their iMac is elegant to say the least; super thin with finishing that knocks the socks off any of their competitors. Will their TV look like a big iMac?

Maybe, maybe not, but rest assured they know a thing or two about design and it’s going to look as good as a piece of modern art hung on your wall. ‘What about the picture?’ I hear you ask. Well, obviously that comes in to play, but not as much as you may think. Some of the best‐selling TVs on the market offer relatively average image quality and let’s face it, hardly anyone actually changes their TV picture settings from the ‘scorch’ mode used to attract their attention on Harvey’s shop floor. Regardless, Apple has been working on their ‘Retina’ displays for quite a while now and given that one of the foremost reasons all graphic designers use Apple displays is colour accuracy, I think they have a pretty good head start in this area. And have you seen their LED Cinema Displays? They’re simply stunning! Of course, no one in their right mind would be setting up a home theatre using a 27” computer monitor, but let’s hope they’re working on a big brother. A much bigger brother (didn’t I tell you, size is everything!).

When it comes to content, that means one thing with Apple ‐ iTunes. Love it or hate it, it’s the Apple way and that ain’t gonna change. It does let you buy or rent movies and popular TV shows, albeit with a focus on the American market. But then there’s a little thing called Airplay which basically enables you to play anything you can find on your iPad on your TV. And that’s a LOT of content, pretty much anything in fact. We won’t get in to streaming illegally downloaded movies because I’ll end up mounting my moral high horse, but suffice to say, you can do that too. Your portal to iTunes already exists ‐ it’s called Apple TV ‐ just plonk one of those in the telly and it’s job done. Which leaves Apple plenty of time to focus on the thing they do best: creating their signature user experience.

At this point, I’d like to show you a video from a company called Archos who are due to release a device called TV Connect which claims to turn any TV in to a Google Android‐powered Smart TV.

http://www.cepro.com/article/archos_tv_connect_turns_any_hdtv_into_android_powered_smart_tv/

I’m showing you this because, to date, all incarnations of Google Android on your TV have suffered from the same encumbrance – a horrendous user interface. And this one doesn’t look much better ‐ did you see that remote? Not really what I want sitting on my coffee table.

The point is you’ll never see that with Apple; with all of their products, the entire experience has been designed and created by Apple with one goal in mind ‐ to make it as simple as humanly possible to use. If you have any doubt in your mind, I’ll challenge you to hand over an iPad to a twoyear‐ old child and see how long it takes them to figure it out. Will Apple completely redesign the way you interact with your TV? Possibly. Will they incorporate Siri ‐ their popular voice recognition technology? Most likely. One thing you can be assured of is that you won’t need to be a brainiac to operate it and you most certainly won’t need to buy a new coffee table. Of course, all of this is speculation and guesswork, but given that our fruitful friends in Silicon Valley have already revolutionised the worlds of personal computing and digital audio, I think there’s every chance in the world that the Apple HDTV is going to be worth the wait.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of clients don’t agree with me – to such an extent that the most common demand request I receive when designing a multi‐room audio system is, ‘I don’t want to see the speakers!’

This used to make life difficult, but thankfully these days there are such a wealth of ‘architectural’ style in‐wall and in‐ceiling speakers available from companies like Sonance that we can usually find a solution that blends the speaker in so effectively as to become unnoticeable.

However, for some people, that’s just not good enough. Those people are called architects. And we like working with architects.

‘So let me get this straight, Mr Architect, you want great sound for your client, but you don’t want to see anything – nothing at all! Not even an outline to suggest a speaker might be there…that’s not good enough, huh? You don’t ask for much, do you…?’

Well fortunately, Mr Architect, the audio world’s equivalent of Q has been working hard to please you and the result is Sonance’s new Invisible Series of speakers.

Let’s get one thing straight first before I get a torrent of smart‐ass comments ‐ invisible speakers are not new. Companies like Stealth Acoustics and even Sonance themselves have been making invisible speakers for years with varying degrees of success. But there has always been a compromise – sound! People didn’t like spending 2 grand on a set of speakers that sounded worse than a Bose clock radio and that’s understandable. But how do you make a speaker sound good when it’s effectively being covered with plaster? I don’t know the answer, because Sonance won’t tell me, but I can confidently tell you that they exist and they’re about to change the game entirely.

Imagine hanging your beautiful new 84” Ultra High Def TV on the wall, but rather than using the TV’s cheap, tinny built‐in speakers, the audio emerges as if from nowhere in a perfect stereo sound stage. Pick up your iPad and choose a track from your iTunes library – the TV switches off and glorious music fills the room without even hinting where it’s coming from. Want more bass? No problem‐ let’s just add an invisible subwoofer to fill in the bottom end so you can crank up those club tunes. Want more treble? Just flick a switch to phase‐align the speakers using BBE technology. Yes, BBE – that’s what you used to have on your Sony Walkman; it makes everything brighter, crisper and cleaner. Works a treat on these invisible speakers. The result is great sound. Not audiophile quality, mind you, but great sound nonetheless.

So now we have a solution for architects, interior designers and minimalist home owners everywhere. Put them in your walls, your ceilings, your living rooms, bedrooms, garage, office…wherever there’s plaster, you can finally have fantastic invisible sound.

Now who’s going to invent the invisible TV?

Review by Mark Nettleton – still loving his big, boxy speakers.

Before I go on to explain why this is a fairly exciting prospect for home theatre enthusiasts everywhere, let’s talk a little bit about this 4K thing: what does ‘K’ refer to, why are there 4 of them and why should we care?

You’ve all heard of 1080p, right? Your brand new 65”, monster flat screen TV has ‘1080p High Definition’ plastered all over it. The ‘p’ stands for progressive‐scan (which I won’t go in to here) and the 1080 refers to the number of horizontal lines of resolution it’s capable of displaying. The equivalent vertical lines of resolution is 1920 (which gives you your 16:9 ratio HDTV picture – do the maths, it works!) and if you multiply them together, you get the total number of pixels – just over 2 million! Bit like a 2 mega‐pixel camera really, if that means more to you.

So 4K refers to vertical lines of resolution where K represents the binary version of a thousand pixels (4096). The horizontal equivalent is 2160, which is not quite the same16:9 ratio as HDTV. Confused yet? I’m not surprised. How they expect consumers to understand these concepts, I don’t know!?

All you really need to know is that 4K has more than 4 times the number of pixels of 1080p, or 4 times the resolution. 4 times as sharp as high definition, 4 times as clear – that’s ultra‐high definition to you and me!

So why does this all matter? Well, have you ever looked at one of your favourite photos taken on your brand new 16 mega‐pixel camera on a 130” projector screen? Looks pretty ordinary doesn’t it. Seeing the equivalent photo presented through a 4K projector, you can really see the difference. What was blurry becomes sharp. Previously hidden details are suddenly revealed. And with detail comes depth, colour and a sense of realism, which is what we’re all working towards – making that picture look as realistic as possible. We want to trick the mind so you’re no longer watching a motion picture, you’re actually in the picture, experiencing every visible detail like you were actually there. That’s why movies seem so much better at the cinema. Cynical views aside, that’s also why Hollywood movie directors are pushing the 3D format so extensively, (incidentally, did you know that 4K is meant to be the equivalent resolution as 35mm film, visible to the human eye? And that some movie theatres are already showing movies shot on 4K cameras, using 4K digital projectors?).

I’ll talk more about Sony’s 4K demonstration in a future blog, but for now let me leave you with this thought: if video technology is improving at such a rate, how long will it be before we are experiencing movies displayed in the same quality as we see in real life, in true 3 dimensional parallax, on 360 degree, all enveloping, panoramic screens? How long before we’re no longer able to tell the difference between image projection and reality? Probably not as long as you think….

Technobabble by Mark Nettleton [rarely living life in reality].