Posts tagged with Fusion Media Explorer
Our Memories Close at Hand with AMD Fusion Media Explorer
Posted by Simon Solotko in 11:24 AM
(11 votes, average: 4.09 out of 5)
Loading ...“The citizens of my day live with their place in history always in mind, and always at hand. Their memories and those of their ancestors are recorded in amazing detail and their interconnections have been mined to show the interwoven personal histories of all of human kind. In retrospect, “recorded history” began with records in stone and paper; “retained history” began with the digital record. The new archeology of my time is the ongoing effort by all to reclaim and bind together human history through digitization and final integration with the ultimate record of time.”
- “Inez Drew”
There are two things to know about me. First, I have a muse, who I call Inez. Second, Inez has seen the future.
I have been enjoying the new beta of the AMD Fusion Media Explorer and thinking about a future where we can explore the digital memories of our distant past. Imagine the digital record potentially available to our descendants, browsing photos a thousand years old, connecting their knowledge of the past and the present to all of human kind. Imagine if we had a window to our past, a camera on thousands of ancestors from our distant past? A living history that showed a personal connection to the people and history of the last thousand years?
With the AMD Fusion Media Explorer I cannot synthesize images of my distant past, but I can enjoy digital memories and browse them in a way which makes me feel like a citizen of the future. The ribbon invokes a “fabric of time” and with it I can view my entire history or probe just a piece of it. I can quickly browse images and preview videos using a thoroughly modern interface that complements the functionality of Windows. I can search for family members or places. Even recall a specific week or a specific day. My friends can share photos on Facebook and I can see them at once without navigating online to each friend and each album, seeing them as an integral part of my own history.
The technology of Fusion Media Explorer is a glimpse into the future. The interface is rendered in 3D using the graphics engine of an ATI graphics processor. This allows images to bend on the ribbon, the use of reflections on the black mirrored surface beneath, and accelerates playback while improving the quality of high definition video. For search of local media, the AMD Fusion Media Explorer integrates the powerful file indexing engine of Windows Vista.
With AMD Fusion Media Explorer I have been able to retrieve memories lost on my hard drive and to better organize them by putting them in a proper place. It gathers my photos and videos and feels like a natural extension of my visual memory, reminiscent of the future proposed by Inez.
Here are images of AMD Fusion Media Explorer navigating my recent past…
Be sure to check out Casey’s introduction to Fusion Media Explorer and the free download. And you can also see my prior blog “Virtual Purgatory on the Path to the Cloud”
Simon Solotko is a Senior Advanced Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Introducing the HP DV2, my new Mobile Media Center
Posted by Casey Gotcher in 3:11 PM
(11 votes, average: 4.36 out of 5)
One of the things that has become very apparent to me over the last year is that my TV viewing habits have completely changed. In the past, I would either watch TV shows live or DVR them and watch them later that same day or night. Lately I have found that my wife and I often catch up with our favorite TV shows (Lost, Heroes, The Office, Lie To Me, and 24) on the weekend, when life slows down a bit. We will either watch them on the DVR in our media room, or we will watch them using Hulu on our Bedroom TV (using a PC). Occasionally we will even use our Slingbox to stream the shows from our media room to the PC in the bedroom.
Recently however, my bedroom PC has started to show its age, and has become a bit unreliable. I decided one easy way for me to test out the DV2, was to hook it right to my TV and see what happened.
I had a DV2 at the house anyway, since I was using one for AMD Fusion Media Explorer testing. With the DV2’s nice and convenient HDMI port I figured this would be a snap. I proceeded to run an HDMI cable between my Visio 37” LCD, and the DV2. Within less than 5 minutes I was up and running. While I was able to use the DV2’s integrated keyboard and mouse for navigation, I found myself missing the convenience of a wireless keyboard and mouse. I hooked up my Gyration mouse, and it automatically loaded the driver and I was in business less than a minute later.
In addition to being able to stream content from my favorite TV sites (Hulu, Fancast, Veoh, TV.com, nbc.com, abc.com, etc.), I was also able to watch my collection of archived movies, and TV shows, as well as Blu-Ray and DVD movies. I like to save my movies and TV shows in either WMV or DiVX file formats. Unfortunately, most CE devices won’t play either of these formats. The nice thing about a PC, like the DV2, is support is only a codec install away.
Another feature I put to quick use, is the Sling Media Player, which comes preinstalled on the DV2. I have only 1 cable box in my house, (and hoping to get to none when my Time Warner contract runs out), so I use a SlingBox to get premium content from that box to the rest of the house. I have my DVR setup to automatically record many of the shows listed earlier in the post. As soon as I clicked on the Sling icon, it found my SlingBox, and after entering my password, I was watching TV in seconds. It was a very intuitive and seamless experience.
As for the video quality in each of these uses cases are concerned, here if what I found:
Blu-Ray – Excellent. Looked about as good as my PS3
DiVX/WMV – Very Good. While not as stunning as Blu-Ray, I was more than happy with the playback
Slingbox – Very Good. It was as good as I had seen it on any other PC I have tried it on.
Youtube/Hulu – Good. Youtube playback can only be as good as the content. The DV2 seemed to play it as well as any other PC I have tried. As for Hulu, my experience was mixed. The visual quality was very good, but I did notice an occasional stutter. My wife didn’t notice it though, so maybe I am just ultra picky. It was still watchable, but wasn’t quite as smooth as it was on my quad-core “Dragon” platform system.
AMD Fusion Media Explorer – Good. Installing Fusion Media Explorer on the system was really the highlight of the experience for me. Now I was able to surf the web while I watched TV or movies. That is what I call “getting it done.” Give me a 6 pack of Diet Coke and I am good for hours.
I also really enjoyed the photo, music, and video experiences. I found it very easy to navigate and find what I was looking for. The performance of the ribbon isn’t as smooth as it is on higher end systems, but it was still quite usable. I loved clicking on a song, and having it present music videos to me from Youtube. I wasted about an hour just doing that.
All said and done, I was really happy with my experience using the DV2 as a mobile media center. The other nice thing is I can take it in the car and hand it to the kids in the back seat, and now they are good for hours. As a standard notebook, the DV2 is great; but I really fell in love with this notebook’s better than expected multimedia capabilities.
Casey Gotcher is Director, Product Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
AMD Fusion Media Explorer
Posted by Casey Gotcher in 5:30 PM
A Better Media Experience
My name is Casey Gotcher, and this is my first official blog on AMD’s behalf. I chose to wait a while, specifically to speak to this particular topic. We have been working diligently for over a year now on this product, and I am very excited to finally take the wraps off of it publicly.
What is AMD Fusion Media Explorer?
Already convinced? Get it here.
The AMD Fusion Media Explorer (FME) is a new 3D Immersive Social Media and Digital Media Browser, built and distributed by AMD. In addition to enabling unique multimedia and social media experiences, FME does a great job of showcasing the power of AMD CPUs and GPUs. This application demonstrates what our platforms are capable of when the software is designed to take full advantage.
AMD Fusion Media Explorer combines a user’s local media items, plus related online content from providers such as, Flickr, YouTube, and Microsoft Live. In addition, FME has Facebook integration which gives our users even more options for posting or interacting with their favorite photos or friends’ photos. All of this is managed by an integrated search engine, that makes it very easy to quickly locate what you are looking for.
I like to put the goals of the AMD Fusion Media Explorer into these 3 buckets:
- Explore – Explore your digital media content, from multiple local and online sources, in a quick and easy to use browser.
- Experience – Experience your media in a more exciting 3D, immersive application
- Discover – Discover new related photos, and videos, pertaining to what you are currently looking at or listening to.
Primary Features of Fusion Media Explorer
Photos
- Find and View photos from your local hard drive, removable USB or SD cards, and online sources, such as Flickr, Facebook, and Microsoft Live.
- View related photos and videos from some of these online sources, which pertain to what you are looking at in the main viewing area. For example, if you are looking at your photos of Paris, you might also be presented with other users’ photos or videos from the same area.
- Upload your photos to your Facebook or Flickr account with a simple button click. This is often much faster and easier than going through the Web UI’s for these services.
Music
- Easily find and listen to your favorite music with our integrated search engine or 3D Ribbon.
- Use our AutoDJ feature to automatically queue up playlists for you from the same genre or artist you are currently listening to. Click on one song and AutoDJ will take it from there.
- Be presented with related music videos or other clips while you listen. For example, if you are listening to U2, you will likely be presented with some of their music videos to the right in our related media bar.
Video
- As was the case with Photos and Music, easily find the video, movie, or TV show you are looking for with our integrated search engine or 3D Ribbon.
- See your video collection come to life as FME will actually start playing multiple videos in the ribbon, while you browse, making it easier to find what you are looking for. The better the performance of the machine, the more videos FME can play simultaneously.
- Watch full screen or send to the integrated Mini player so you can surf the Web while you watch a movie.
- Be presented with related YouTube videos pertaining to the content you are currently watching. For instance you might see cast interviews, bloopers, and sometimes even full episodes, depending on what FME can find on YouTube that relates to what you are watching.
Some other details to note about FME… It has been developed for our notebook platform technology, “Puma” and desktop platform technology, “Dragon.” It will be provided free to our customers, via download from www.amd.com, or in some cases may come pre-installed on select AMD-based systems.
Concurrent with the posting of this blog, I am releasing a special build of Fusion Media Explorer for friends and family members. This will supersede our public beta by a couple of weeks. If you are interested in giving it a try, you can find it here, www.amd.com/fmepreview or find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/caseygotcher if you need the link or (especially) if you have feedback on the application.
* Internet access is required to take advantage of the online search / retrieval functions.
Casey Gotcher is Director, Product Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
What is the future of home entertainment? (Streaming, Blu-ray, Download)
Posted by AMD in 12:00 AM
I joined AMD in 2006 to help bring the vision of AMD LIVE!™ to the masses. I have always been a fan of technology, and working for AMD has been like having the keys to the candy store. Initially AMD LIVE! was an ecosystem of software, devices, and service partners. Back then I had my hands full testing every new product under the sun to see if it was worthy of displaying an AMD LIVE! sticker. Being constantly exposed to emerging technology quickly made me an internal authority in all things tech. Those were crazy, but fun days. Now my focus is less on partner products and now is squarely on internally built applications such as AMD LIVE! Explorer, AMD Fusion for Gaming utility1, and AMD Fusion Media Explorer.
In my personal life I consume media in many ways. My primary tool is my AMD LIVE! Media Center PC with Microsoft Vista Home Premium. It is in my bedroom and very integrated into my routine, and I use it heavily. In the morning I watch The Today Show while I get ready for work. When I get home from work I catch up on shows I missed that are pre-recorded. At night my wife and I watch Family Guy as we wind down and head to bed. When we go to parties and take pictures, the first thing I do when we get home is stick the camera’s SD card into the Media Center and copy the photos to the hard drive.
There are several areas that still need improvement. It is still a computer, so a wireless keyboard and mouse is a must. While the integration needs a lot of work, I do love being able to stream video from Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube onto a large screen TV.
Being able to use all the online streaming services without special support is great. Upgradability is also a plus. With all the HD content I’ve been recording, I had to upgrade the hard drive twice. There are still several more ways I plan on using my Media Center. In the near future I want to get either a Pica extender or a Microsoft Xbox 360 to view my content outside of the bedroom. I also want to get a SideShow device to have a more interactive experience with my computer.
I feel like I live two years in the future, because I am not a typical user. But I’m sure in two years everyone will have a computer hooked up to their TV. It might not be in the same form and I’m hopeful the setup will be more polished. I know I didn’t include Blu-ray in my setup, but once again that ties back to the great upgradability of a PC platform. PCs are the best kept secret in home entertainment.
- THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING.
Wesley Faulkner
Wesley Faulkner is a Product Development Engineer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.