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The HD video in question is 720p, which looks absolutely fantastic when watched in its native resolution. HD videos can be embedded on third-party sites and will play in HD as long as the viewer has a good connection. Otherwise they’ll simply play at a dialed-down quality.

Coke - Its Mine HD
by sabotage

There’s been a lot of progress in the world of high definition in the last few days. HD DVD has fallen, and just yesterday, video host Dailymotion rolled out its new HD player. While every visitor of the site with a fast broadband connection has access to the new HD player, only two types of content providers can actually upload HD content to it. The first are the official content providers like movie studios and TV networks. The second, are motionmakers–Dailymotion’s equivalent of YouTube’s director program. Anyone can become a motionmaker; they just need to state what type of content they’re going to be producing, and as a reward get unlimited file size and length.

Related:
YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do it better and Vimeo’s going hi-def next week

I’ve embedded one below. If it’s in HD, the little HD logo in to bottom will be lit up yellow, otherwise you’re watching the lower quality version. Be sure to view it in full screen to see the details.

The Propel will be available in three color options–blue, green, red, and white with red trimmings–and it will cost you $79.99 after a two-year agreement and mail-in rebate.

Other features on the 3G phone include AT&T Navigator, Cellular Video, AT&T Video Share, AT&T Mobile Music, a 1.3-megapixel camera, a speakerphone, Bluetooth and personal organizer applications.

Samsung announced a new cell phone Tuesday that appears to take aim at the recently announced LG Lotus for Sprint and the Verizon Wireless Blitz. The Samsung Propel SGH-A767, which is bound for AT&T later this month, is a slider phone with a square shape that hides a full QWERTY keyboard. This isn’t a true smartphone, so there’s no Outlook Exchange support, but you can text and IM on the Propel to your heart’s content. Web-based POP3 e-mail support will be available as well.

Tap away on the new Samsung Propel.

(Credit:
AT&T)

As the name suggests, the SlingCatcher is a hardware version of the SlingPlayer software that’s available for various devices. Connect the SlingCatcher to your bedroom TV, for instance, and you can access the live TV and recorded programs from your living room DVR (which, in turn, is connected to a Slingbox).

Last week, the folks from Sling Media stopped by to give us a hands-on look at the SlingCatcher. Originally due in 2007, the long-delayed product looks to be finally ready to ship this fall. (The video below is Molly Wood’s preview of the SlingCatcher when it was reintroduced in January 2008.)

We’ll have a full review (with additional photos and video) later this fall, once we get a production version of the SlingCatcher. In the meantime: do you have any interest in the SlingCatcher? If not, is there a missing “killer app” that you’d like to see added? Share your thoughts below.

Bandwidth constraints apply (streaming within a home network generally looks great, but remote Slingbox resolution will be limited by upstream bandwidth at the source location). And the Slingbox monopolizes the AV source to which its connected (if you log in to your DVR and start playing Desperate Housewives while somebody’s in the living room watching football, they’ll suddenly see Eva Longoria instead of Eli Manning.

During Sling’s demo, we accessed both a SlingPlayer Pro-HD setup on our internal network, as well as a live satellite box feed from across the country. The HD source (a football game playing back on a TiVo HD) looked stunning, since it was able to use the full bandwidth of a wired network connection without traveling over the outside Internet. The remote feed, a daytime talk show, was traveling thousands of miles and compressed almost 10 times as much. As a result, it exhibited considerably more jaggies and looked like a YouTube video maximized to full screen–but it was certainly watchable. The included SlingCatcher remote was mapped to the source box, so we could change channels, access the DVR listing, play/pause and rewind–albeit all with a delay, as the signals were transmitted across the long distance.

Editors’ note: Sling Media and CBS (the parent company of CNET) are working together on Sling’s Clip-n-Sling project and CBS’ Interactive Audience Network.

What about those DRM files or Flash videos available on Web sites like Hulu, ABC.com, and YouTube? That’s where the SlingProjector software comes in. Run the SlingProjector software (currently Windows only), and your PC screen–or whatever portion of the screen you specify–is immediately mirrored on your TV through the SlingCatcher. On the surface, it’s a somewhat kludgy solution–you’ll pretty much need to keep a laptop on the coffee table for quick and easy access–but in practice, it worked surprisingly well.

The SlingCatcher can access any Slingbox that you’ve added to your Sling.com account, but the same caveats apply to it as with the software SlingPlayers. Most notably, only one client can access a given Slingbox at a time.

So, instead of being limited to the small-ish screens of a laptop (or even a mobile phone), you’re back to watching TV on…a TV.

We noted a lip-sync issue with a Hulu video, but this was, after all, a beta version of the software. On the bright side, it’s very straightforward: if you can see it on your screen, you can Sling it to your TV. That includes video from any source (including iTunes, Netflix, or anything else), photos, PowerPoint presentations–the works.

The SlingCatcher’s ability to be a Sling viewer is certainly cool, but that’s a niche feature, to be sure. Thankfully, the box offers two other features: playback of all sorts of digital media (via the USB input) and the ability to mirror anything on a PC screen. On the media playback front, the box offers compatibility with a laundry list of non-DRM’d codecs and file formats–WMV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, Xvid, MP2, MP3, WMA, AAC, AC3, avi, .vob, .ifo, .ps, .ts, .mpg, .wmv, .asf, .mov, .mp4,.m4v, .mp3, .wma, .mp4a, .m4a, and .wav. Drag and drop your files onto a USB storage device (hard drive, flash drive, what have you), plug it in to the Catcher, and you can use the remote to navigate to whatever file name you’d like and play it at the click of a button. (Files can also be automatically synced across the network to the attached storage device, using a method called SlingSync.)

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET)

All in all, the SlingCatcher was looking smoother and more polished than the early build we’d seen at CES in January. The “compass” interface was gone, but the new menu system was straightforward and easy to navigate. It looks to be most useful for in-house access to other SlingPlayers, and as a makeshift universal media player. It may still be a bit too niche-y for mass market appeal, but–after spending less than an hour with it–we’d much rather be watching Hulu on a $300 SlingCatcher than, say, a $500 ZvBox.

The popular microblogging site Twitter announced and launched a refresh of its interface on its company blog Thursday. Updated tabs, a new design customizer, and Ajax work on the back end are the major features of this release.

Other than the new Ajax functionality, this update is purely aesthetic. Even though we have not seen any major features added Thursday, this redesign has paved the way for a larger future update, which Twitter promises is coming soon.

The Twitter Blog also notes that moving the tabs to the side was necessary to make room for future tabs since space was limited in their previous location. While Twitter doesn’t clue us in to what features might be housed in these new tabs, Summize (now Twitter Search) is a likely candidate for some sort of inclusion since Twitter’s old search box disappeared in this update.

The most important change, in terms of functionality is the addition of AJAX to the “Home” and “@Replies” pages. Their new implementation allows you to refresh the items in your timeline without having to reload the whole page. This makes for faster load times and less bandwidth intensive reloading of pages.

Twitter's redesign sports a more attractive following/followers display and better tab placement.

The most noticeable UI change is the move of the smaller tabs that were on top of the timeline to the right sidebar, where they can occupy more space, making them larger clicking targets. They also moved the following/followers/updates stats to the top of the page and made them larger, so now I can really see how deflated my follower numbers are.

Twitter's new design customizer.

Twitter also introduced a new design customizer with this release, which allows you to change the colors on your Twitter profile with the help of a color wheel. Instead of typing in color codes and hoping that you got all of the colors right, they are now reflected in real time as you change them on the page. This is an awesome implementation of this feature and makes it far easier to create a good looking profile.

(Credit:
Petergabriel.com)

The Filter, Gabriel and the company’s CEO, David Roberts, will meet with members of the press in San Francisco on April 9th as part of the run up to the launch later that month. The company says that the site will launch with features that go beyond music discovery.

A former member of Genesis, Gabriel is perhaps best known for his classic album So. He has also been an innovator in digital media, developing multimedia CD-ROM-based games, including Xplora.

Correction: Representatives of the The Filter say the April 9 launch date in their correspondence to CNET News.com was inaccurate. The site is due to launch later in the April.

Gabriel and Eden Ventures invested $5 million in The Filter in August. According to an August story in the British publication The Independent, The Filter, developed by U.K.-based company Exabre, can identify about 5 million songs.

The Filter is designed to filter irrelevant material and deliver content that reflects an individual’s tastes. The company started in the UK as a music discovery service, but a representative said what is being launched next month is a very different platform, which she labeled an “online discovery experience.”

UPDATE 1:45 P.M.:
Peter Gabriel, the Grammy-winning recording artist and technology innovator, is scheduled to help launch The Filter, a music-discovery service in April.

Peter Gabriel will help launch The Filter

Executives at The Filter also say their algorithm can make recommendations that cut across different entertainment platforms. Say, for example, you like film director Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, The Filter can suggest certain music based on that.

The service will recommended songs, videos, literature, and news based on a user’s existing digital library. Gabriel will unveil more details about the new iteration of The Filter closer to the launch next month.

I’m not afraid to name names. To the entrepreneurs behind these products I’m about to slam: This stuff sucks! Go back and do it better. I’ll still be here and I’ll give any good product a fair shake. The Web’s users will be here, too. Waiting.

You know what isn’t on my rant radar this week? Cuil. Yes, it flopped badly at launch. But it’s a real business. Search is monetizable, and there are real engineers at the company trying to do something hard. It’s not just a can of Web 2.0-colored spraypaint on a tired old concept.

Summary:

Now, in any entrepreneurial ecosystem, a big proportion of the ideas that people come up with will be bad, and many of those bad ideas will become actual products. But at the moment, the ratio of bad Web products to good (or even interesting) products is worse than usual. Here are few reasons why:

Spendji. This is a tool for creating and tracking budgets. But it buries the user in options once they sign up, and doesn’t link in to any real-world financials the way online banking services like Mint and Buxfer do. Spendji is a collection of record-keeping items for personal financial projects, but it feels more like a database (yawn) than an actual financial or collaborative application.

Fourth, since it’s easier to get funding for bad ideas than it should be, entrepreneurs are getting lazy and releasing products that could use either a lot more development or a wholesale re-think.

First, there are two big product launch shows coming up in a month (DemoFall and TechCrunch50), and the good entrepreneurs accepted to present at either of those events are in radio silence until then, leaving a press vacuum. Since bloggers need things to write about, in the absence of good stories, the pointless ones will have to do. PR companies have to know this.

Second, thanks to the favorable economics of the Web development, almost anyone can build and launch a product these days.

Broong. This is a service that allows you to create little Web notecards with URLs and pictures that you send to your friends, or collect in your own account. For it to work as advertised, it has to be ubiquitous in the browser, and it has to be easier to use than just sending out URLs. It is neither. A mobile app might make the service useful, but it’s not available yet.

This week’s losers:

If you follow me on the nanoblogs (Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed, etc.), you may have seen me complaining recently about getting pitched on new Web apps that I find either derivative or confusing. Or both.

It’s a vicious cycle of mediocrity, leading to the incomplete, unoriginal, and confusing products I’m seeing right now.

Third, venture capitalists, who need to put their money to work, are having trouble finding companies that actually need significant funding to build things, which means they’re putting money into companies they otherwise would pass on. Entrepreneurs who get this money think that it validates their business’ worthiness. It doesn’t.

SearchCloud. My colleague Josh Lowensohn covered this one this morning. It’s a search interface that lets you adjust the weighting of each term in your query. Not an utterly terrible idea, but using the weighting tweak feature makes a simple three-word search query take five times longer to enter than just experimenting with multiple queries on Google.

"Quick start?"

It’s hard to stand out in an orgy.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Dumb money will cost you. To win big, bet big.

The configuration includes a 2GHz Pentium E2180 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and a DVD burner–all wrapped in Dell’s sexy little slimline case.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

The Inspiron 530s is nicely equipped for a $299 desktop.

Indeed, this is a system for grade-level students, home-office users, and others with fairly basic computing needs. That said, it’s a nicely equipped desktop for the price, and it includes a one-year warranty and 24/7 phone support.

Check it out, baby, check it out (sorry, been watching too much American Idol): Dell’s rocking Inspiron 530s desktops for just $299 (plus 30 bucks or so for shipping, and possibly sales tax as well).

(Credit:
Dell)

Like games? Keep looking: The integrated Intel GMA 3100 graphics are more suited to Peggle than Portal. It’s just as well, then, that Dell bundles Vista Home Basic, which lacks Aero, Media Center, and other graphics-intensive features.

Note that because most commercial DVDs are copy-protected, HandBrake can’t work its magic without a decryption utility running in the background. Rumor has it that DVD43, also free (but Windows-only), works really, really well.

So you just bought an
iPod touch or
iPhone and want to stock it with movies from your DVD library. There are countless commercial utilities that promise to rip DVDs, but I recommend trying HandBrake. This open-source (read: free) utility for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux converts your DVDs for viewing on iPods, iPhones, Sony PSPs, and other portable media players. It’s by no means new, but I just had to share my newfound appreciation for it.

(Credit:
HandBrake)

I recently picked up the hilarious Flight of the Conchords on DVD. I also just acquired an iPod touch (quite simply the coolest gizmo I have ever owned). I wasn’t about to pay iTunes for a show I already own, so I fired up HandBrake. A few hours later, presto: New Zealand’s fourth most popular digi-folk duo appeared on my iPod.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

What makes the technology special is that it picks out characters from these series and lets you see individual moments where they appear. The same thing happens when you’re viewing any episode through the service–it’ll pick out who it recognizes and put up a character list next to the clip.

(Credit:
VideoSurf)

(Credit:
Videosurf/CBS Interactive)

The service is currently in private beta but accepting sign-ups Wednesday.

VideoSurf's homepage.

Ideally this technology could be licensed elsewhere. Considering it can figure out who people are in both moving videos and still frames, having this on something like Facebook would mean your photos and videos would automatically be tagged. This would be especially cool for recognizing both your friends and others on the service that you might not necessarily know.

VideoSurf breaks down TV episodes, or any video for that matter, into character scenes.

To make all of that happen, entire episodes–in this case illegally hosted ones on YouTube–get crunched through VideoSurf’s servers. It’s an entirely automated process that scans videos faster than real-time, and does not require people to do the heavy lifting.

At Wednesday morning’s TechCrunch50 demo of video search engine VideoSurf, CEO Lior Delgo showed off how the technology would be useful for finding a single moment from your favorite TV series. Delgo used HBO’s Entourage as an example, picking out a few lines of dialogue from a 30-minute episode.

If a friend sends you a clip from the service it will start and end at the exact timeline they select. When you’re prepping a clip yourself, you can also scrub to the spot you want and e-mail it to them without leaving the page.

Compelling gadgets are the key to consumers’ hearts–and wallets–during a recession, according to a consumer spending study.

In 2001, there was a new
PlayStation game console, and DVD and CD sales were still on the upswing.

Of those surveyed, 37 percent of U.S. consumers say they plan to cut back when it comes to entertainment purchases this year, according to an upcoming report from The NPD Group, “Entertainment Trends in America.” Just under half of the 11,000 interviewed for the study said they’ll likely spend the same amount this year as in 2007.

But what’s more interesting is that 18 percent say they plan to spend more, despite widespread concerns over an unstable economy. More specifically, respondents in that group say they see themselves buying gadgets more than content.

“These are the people who tend to be in a higher economic situation so the cost of technology may not be such a barrier for them, whether it’s a Blu-ray player or a gaming console or a new
iPod,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. “Those are the things they seem to be anticipating purchasing…That’s not to say they’re not going to buy movies or music, but their expectation is if they’re spending more, they’re spending on devices and consumer electronics.”

“What you’re looking at now that’s different, especially in music is CD sales have been down pretty significantly. DVD is starting to look like a mature product category,” said Crupnick. “The willingness of people in bad times to collect things is less than it was five, six, seven years ago.”

In the recession in 2001, spending on entertainment devices and content remained relatively steady, but this time around, as the price of gas and food continues to climb, the landscape of the consumer electronics industry is very different.