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Microsoft Patents DVR for Game Consoles

Professional Mike — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:09:12 +0000

Microsoft has just received a patent that defines in detail, the Xbox 360 as a motion picture entertainment console and gaming center.

“The patent, which was filed in January 2007, barely two months after the release of the competing PlayStation 3, Microsoft laid out “an integrated gaming and media experience” that enables users to record media via a “digital video recorder (DVR) application running alongside a television client component.”

The Xbox 360 has supported DVR functions via the Media Remote for some time, However, the record feature only supports content recording to a DVR that is installed by a TV service provider. This patent appears to be a fully integrated DVR experience that records content directly to the Xbox 360 and supports recording during gameplay or video watching. When Microsoft limited its DVR feature for the game console, it stated that it requires the support of an actual DVR as the game console itself is frequently turned off. However the patent explicitly states that this DVR feature also applies when “the gaming console is turned off.”

A fully functional DVR are a logical step for game consoles as they are becoming entertainment devices and have to deliver many more functions than just game play and video rental” Source: Toms Hardware

This sounds like it could really blow up for Microsoft. By blow up, I mean take off. I have always wanted to record video of me mastering a game and post it on YouTube for all to see. I am a PC guy and using Fraps really just doesn’t cut it because of the high overhead on the CPU. If there was some hardware acceleration on the PC for screen capturing, I would be all over it. Sounds like Microsoft has all of these problems nailed for their console(s).

-M. LoPinto

Some of the Best Free Fonts of 2011

Professional Mike — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:15:07 +0000

Are you looking for something to stand out in your next digital design? Well, stop on over here to take a look at some of the sweetest free fonts you can find on the interwebs.

Source: Adobe News Feeds

Baseball Cap Artwork II

Professional Mike — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:52:13 +0000

Here is the finished product. I love to make designs like this and find it equally rewarding when I get compliments from others. Half of the people that see it think it was printed on there. That’s exactly what were looking for!

Baseball Cap Artwork

Professional Mike — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:31:45 +0000

Today I took the time to be a bit creative. I purchased a NY baseball cap (not a team, just a NY cap) and decided it would be pretty cool to draw the NYC skyline on the bottom of the brim. Took me about 45 minutes to complete and all that is left to do is add some detail to the edges of the buildings.

Material used: Chisel Tip Sharpie, FabricMate Chisel Tip and a Pilot Precise RT V5/V7

Brand New – AMD HD 7970

Professional Mike — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:26:35 +0000

Looking for a fast video card that smokes the competition? At a price of about $700 and a release date set for January 9th – You won’t have to worry about forking out the dough just yet, but have no fear that you’ll have a video card that is more than capable of delivering the required performance of today’s current gaming demands.

Just take a look at the specs:

Up to 925MHz Engine Clock
3GB GDDR5 Memory
1375MHz Memory Clock (5.5Gbps GDDR5)
264GB/s memory bandwidth (maximum)
3.79 TFLOPs Single Precision compute power
947 GFLOPs Double Precision compute power
GCN Architecture
- 32 compute units (2048 Stream Processors)
- 128 Texture Units
- 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
- 32 Color ROP Units
- Dual Geometry Engines
- Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE)
PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus interface
DirectX® 11-capable graphics
- 9th generation programmable hardware tessellation units
- Shader Model 5.0
- DirectCompute 11
- Accelerated multi-threading
- HDR texture compression
- Order-independent transparency
OpenGL 4.2 support
- Partially Resident Textures (PRT)
  - Ultra-high resolution texture streaming
Image quality enhancement technology
- Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
- Adaptive anti-aliasing
- Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA)
- DirectX® 10/11 Super-Sample Anti-Aliasing (SSAA)
- 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
- 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology¹
- Up to 6 displays supported with DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport
- Independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
- Display grouping
  - Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
AMD App Acceleration²
- OpenCL 1.2 Support
- Microsoft C++ AMP
- DirectCompute 11
- Double Precision Floating Point
- AMD HD Media Accelerator
  - Universal Video Decoder (UVD)
    - H.264
    - VC-1
    - MPEG-2 (SD & HD)
    - MVC (Blu-ray 3D)
    - MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX/Xvid)
    - Adobe Flash
    - DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
  - Enhanced Video Quality features
    - Advanced post-processing and scaling
      - Deblocking
      - Denoising
      - Automatic deinterlacing
      - Mosquito noise reduction
      - Edge enhancement
      - 3:2 pulldown detection
    - Advanced video color correction
      - Brighter whites processing (Blue Stretch)
      - Independent video gamma control
      - Flesh tone correction
      - Color vibrance control
      - Dynamic contrast
      - Dynamic video range control
AMD HD3D technology⁴
- Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
- Blu-ray 3D support
- Stereoscopic 3D gaming
- 3rd party Stereoscopic 3D middleware software support
AMD CrossFire™ multi-GPU technology⁵
- Dual, triple or quad-GPU scaling
Cutting-edge integrated display support
- DisplayPort 1.2
  - Max resolution: 4096×2160 per display
  - Multi-Stream Transport
  - 21.6 Gbps bandwidth
  - High bit-rate audio
  - Quad HD/4k video support
- 3GHz HDMI 1.4a with Stereoscopic 3D Frame Packing Format, Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
  - Max resolution: 4096×3112
  - 1080p60 Stereoscopic 3D
  - Quad HD/4k video support
- Dual-link DVI with HDCP
  - Max resolution: 2560×1600
- VGA
  - Max resolution: 2048×1536
Integrated HD audio controller
- Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
- Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
AMD PowerPlay™ power management technology³
- Automatic power management with low power idle states
AMD PowerTune technology³
- Intelligent TDP management technology
- Dynamic clockspeed/performance enhancement for games
AMD ZeroCore Power³
- Ultra-low idle power when the system’s display is off
- Secondary GPUs in an AMD CrossFire™ configuration power down when unneeded
AMD Catalyst™ graphics and HD video configuration software
- Software support for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP
- AMD Catalyst™ Control Center – AMD Catalyst™ software application and user interface for setup, configuration, and accessing features of AMD Radeon products
- Unified Graphics display driver – AMD Catalyst™ software enabling other PC programs and devices to use advanced graphics, video, and features of AMD Radeon™ products