Track of the Week: Shot Yourself In The Foot Again by Skream & Example

This week’s track is Shot Yourself In The Foot Again by Skream & Example, a little dubstep ditty I found at the top of Hype Machine’s popular music list this week. While I generally don’t like the really grimey/dirty dubstep, this song is more dance with a little bit of dubstep thrown in. The solid four on the floor thumps through, layered under a melodic synth line. The track tells the story, one so typical yet always gets retold, of priorities between having fun and committing. Unlike most tracks of the week, I find this song a lot more illustrative with the music video. At the breaks the director does a rapid set of flash-cuts which advance the two sides of the story quickly. Great song, and perhaps one of the few “dubsteps” song that I want to listen to over and over again.

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Hi, I’m The Insides of Your TV

As televisions and TV service has gotten more and more sophisticated since the switch over to digital, the insides of your TV have gotten more and more complicated. What’s actually inside those TVs and how do they tick? Well, it’s both simple and complicated.

In the United States, almost all television is viewed by some pay-TV operator (think cable or satellite) and your TV acts as a display. There’s a ton of smarts and processing in the TV to smooth out the video, deblock compression artefacts, process the audio, etc. But the core part of the video experience is delivered by the cable box and delivered through the HDMI cable. Since the cable or satellite company own the entire pipe, they are normally built with custom made solutions by companies like NDS, OpenTV, and the like. A small percent watch broadcast TV in the United States (think bunny ears). In that case, specs made by the ATSC describe how the digital broadcast is supposed to work and the TV does all the heavy lifting.

In other markets, like in Europe, there is a lot of free-to-air broadcasts, and they’re specified by groups such as the Digital TV Group in the UK or DVB in Europe. Like ATSC in the US, these standards basically describe how broadcast digital TV is supposed to work, including things like the video codec, the audio codec, channel guides, any other data in the stream.

Most broadcast systems in the world currently use MPEG2 as the video codec, and can transmit in the high 10s of bandwidth per carrier, typically the US about 18 Mbps. Systems such as DVB-T2 are looking to move to H.264 as their video codec standard to more efficiently use the same amount of bandwidth.

But enough about codecs, how does it all work? It’s acutally pretty simple. Inside the TV (or cable box) there are a bunch of electronics and at the core of it is a system-on-chip or SoC. In the TV world, there are a few quite a few companies that make these SoC, such as Broadcom, MediaTek, STMicro, Trident, Intel, Zoran, MStar and probably more I can’t recall off the top of my head. These SoCs handle all the work required to make TV happen. They process the incoming stream, whether it’s a raw feed from a cable, satellite or broadcast TV feed, decrypt the streams if it’s protected, then decode the audio and video and sync it up, then sent it along, either to the display or on to the TV.

This picture is the inside of a flat planel TV. There are there major components shown here. On the far right is the logic board. On the logic board is the SoC, connectors to HDMI, cable and audio, memory chips, and a few other parts. In the middle is the power system, which powers the actual panel. On the far left is the speaker. The most impressive part of these systems is how slim hardware vendors have now managed to make everything while still retaining quality, especially around the audio from the speakers.

TVs (and set top boxes) are typically very very good at decoding and rendering video. They can typically decode Bluray quality in their sleep (to put it in context that’s roughly 39 Mbps of data), all the while doing all kinda of real time image and video processing to make it look even better. It’s really quite impressive how much data goes through a TV system in a second when rendering 1080p (1920w * 1080h * 24fps * 24bit color + 448kbps-ish of audio).

So that’s how your TV works! Easy, right?

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Track of the Week: Apply by Glasser

This week’s track is Apply by Glasser off of her album Ring. I’m still not 100% what this album is about, or what kind of music it is, but it’s (a) interesting to listen to, (b) folktronica, and (c) mind bending. Applying layers of tribal drums, beats and haunting vocals Apply is a track that deserves listening to.

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Snowed In Out East

As you’ve probably heard, the East Coast was blanketed in 9″ – 30″ of snow the day after Christmas. I happened to be out east visiting my dad which resulted in me getting snowed in for a day to leave for my vacation to Central America.

On Sunday I ran in to NYC for the morning, right before the storm hit. It took us 45m to get and 2 hours to get back. I shot some photos of the city as it started to get hit.

View from 1540 Broadway, 17th floor:

View walking up Broadway:

I managed to get out last night via White Plains instead of the original Newark to Atlanta, spent the night in Atlanta and am now waiting back at the Atlanta airport to head out. The flight out of White Plains (Westchester County) was pretty harrowing. The 40+mph gusts on the ground made for huge snow drifts, causing it look like we were about to take off of an ice shelf in Antartica. Here are a few pictures as we boarded the plane:

Thankfully everybody is safe and thanks to my dad for driving me up to the airport, I’m ready to go down to Belize and Guatemala and enjoy the sun!

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Track of the Week: Christmas Sarajevo 12/24 by Trans-Siberian Orchestra

This week’s track is fitting for the coming Christmas weekend, Christmas Sarajevo 12/24 by Trans-Siberian Orchestra, off of their first album Christmas Eve and Other Stories. It’s basically a metal cover of Carol of the Bells, and who doesn’t love metal covers of old folk songs? I think I first heard this song in high school and if memory serves it was one of the first MP3s I ever downloaded (along with Oasis, Ace of Base and Quad City DJs). Every year, come Christmas-time, this song pops in to my heads as timeless and epic.

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Track of the Week: Lights by Ellie Goulding

This week’s track is Lights by Ellie Goulding, off of either her American debut An Introduction to Ellie Goulding EP, or her British debut Bright Lights. I first found this track on the Hype Machine twitter top tracks. I’d never heard of Ellie Goulding but a quick set of searches revealed she’s sort of a big deal in the UK, having topped the BBC’s Sound of 2010 chart and some other accolades.

This particular song is a great synthpop (or better yet folktronica!). The track opens with some nice synth tones (best to listen in headphones to get the full effect). It builds slowly adding in the vocals and a drum beat to hold the song together. The songwriting is enjoyable as is the Ellie Goulding’s raspy, reaching, vocals. Her voice stands great alone, and fills out the entire song when overdubbed.

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Track of the Week: Tron Legacy (End Titles)

This week’s track is Tron Legacy (End Titles) by Daft Punk off of the Tron Legacy Soundtrack. It’s Tron. It’s Daft Punk. It’s pretty epic. Based on the visuals from the trailers and the epic and soaring music from Daft Punk I’m pretty sure the movie will be a sight to see. The eponymous track is probably the most Daft Punk-y of the tracks with a quick tempo and pulsing beats, and easily has the most single appeal of the tracks of the album. I highly recommend the entire album.

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Track of the Week: Bright Lights Bigger City by Cee Lo Green

This week’s track is Bright Lights Bigger City by Cee Lo Green off of The Lady Killer. This entire showing by Cee Lo is fantastic, the album holds its own from start to finish. It’s also apparently done quite well in the charts, and been reveiwed well by music critics, so perhaps I’m a bit late to this one, but the album stands out as an incredible hip-hop/soul/funk album.

This track, Bright Lights Bigger City, starts with a huge synth line all alone before it builds in to percussion, and then vocals. Cee Lo’s distinctive brings the song together, and soars (remixed in) through the chorus. This song stands out to for me, but the album has no shortage of good music.

Bonus Track!

This week is a two-for-one. Also in the mix this week is Dr Dre’s theoretical first song leaked from Detox, named Kush. Featuring Akon and Snoop Dogg, it’s a classic West Coast banger with signature Dr Dre piano lines and thumping beats. If it’s a sign of what we can expect off of Detox, it may have been worth the wait.

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Track of the Week: You Got Me by The Roots

This week’s track is You Got Me (featuring Erykah Badu) by The Roots off of Things Fall Apart. This is one of my favorite R&B / hip-hop songs of all time. Co-written by Jill Scott, the lyrics are simple, poetic and potent and weave together to story of a trust and love between Erykah Badu and Black Thought. There are so many good things I love about this song, from how relatable the lyrics are, to the percussion of ?uestlove, to the sound evolving to an Amen-break-esque tempo towards the end, to the live instrumentation that makes the sound warm and enveloping, it’s a fantastic track from 1999 that deserves a revisit.

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Announcing AIR 2.5 for TV

I’m sitting backstage at the Nokia Theater LA Live, working on final prep and rehearsals for our CTO’s keynote. The doors are open and attendees are starting to come in. In the keynote, one of the many things we’re announcing is Adobe AIR for TV. We’re very excited that after a year+ of hard work, crazy travel, late nights, and many conference calls between San Jose, San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, and Bangalore that we’re releasing the first AIR runtime to television sets and Bluray players

Our launch partner is Samsung, who will be embedding the AIR TV runtime on their SmartTV products. Very exciting opportunity for developers who want to get to new screens. There’s already been a ton of overage, but if you’re at MAX come to the keynote today to check out Kevin Lynch present some exciting demos that you won’t want to miss.

Here’s a list of places you can learn more:

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