Updated Xactis from Sanyo

Sanyo has announced a load of updates to the Xacti line. Engadget has some info, and Sanyo has the press release.

They’ve added three “traditional” camcorder models (meh) plus brought all of the models in the line up to at least 720p. The high end HD2000 gets higher resolution stills, 1080p60 shooting, plus some software improvements.

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There’s no announcement about when these will hit the US, but hopefully it won’t be too long.

YouTube API and quicktime mime types

This is a quick post just in case some poor soul finds it in a google query – it seems that the youtube api no longer accepts video/quicktime as an acceptable mime type for the Content-Type of the mime portion of the client upload payload.

Use video/mov and things will be peachy.

Yes, this was very obnoxious to troubleshoot.

More bad luck with the Zi6

I got my replacement Kodak Zi6 today, and this one has an even more severe offset in the audio (about 12db) than the last one. That’s pretty disappointing. On the plus side, it’s running a newer firmware build which allows you to disable the annoying chimes.

For now though, I guess the message is to avoid the Zi6. I know there are good ones out there, without this issue, but obviously it’s not that uncommon an issue.

Perian: A Cruel Mistress

Perian, the do-everything Quicktime component has been a godsend for Mac users looking to play windows-centric video formats on their Macs. But Perian giveth, and Perian taketh away.

A while back I wrote about how to build your own Perian with only the components you need. Recently, I started wondering whether that was really necessary, or if it was just me being a bit neck-beardish. So, earlier this week I switched Media Mill to a current version of Perian (1.1.2) and removed our DiVX decoder.

An interesting thing happened. I started seeing compressord crashes across the board. The crash logs indicated that it was a thread running Perian that was crashing. What was strange was that this was often happening on files that, as best as I can tell, shouldn’t have been decoded by Perian. For example, Quicktime files containing H264 video. While Perian does have a decoder for H264 (which supports advanced-profile h264 unlike Apple’s decoder) it shouldn’t preempty Apple’s decoder in this case.

I haven’t gone digging in the Perian codebase to see what’s up with all of this, but my initial verdict was that rolling your own Perian, supporting only the codecs you can’t decode some other way is still the way to go.

There is a small (very small) part of me that’s inclined to setup a custom Perian build server with a nice webserver, wherein you could check boxes for the codecs you want and get a custom component.

Hmm.