Video Adverts On the Printed Page 153
An anonymous reader writes "Prepare yourself. A staple of near-future sci-fi—magazine video ads—are now a thing of the present. And which high-tech magazine is leading the charge? Wired? Popular Mechanics? Nope. Successful Farming. The advertisement itself is for a pesticide that protects crops against nematodes. You can see a video of the video here."
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mute button (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pimp my mag (Score:4, Interesting)
we put up a video of a video of an advertisement in an advertisement so you can watch while you read about watching while you read!
Your statement is a wonderfully concise explanation of the craziness of this story.
Cool tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Looking at this I was just thinking on how fast our technology moves.
15 years ago CRT screens were still the norm, 10 years ago they were still going strong against the flat screen competition. Now we have screens that are so flat and cheap that they can be added to a magazine page.
15 years ago playing video on your PC started to work, mostly. Not too high resolution and you're fine. Now we play video smoothly on our mobile phones. Video processors are now small enough to fit in a magazine page. The same for storage, even low res video requires a relatively large amount of memory.
15 years ago my simple mobile phone needed recharging of its bulky battery at least every two days, when not using it much. Now batteries have the capacity to run a video player, a small screen, for a significant period of time, all while being small enough to fit in a magazine page.
15 years ago I had a 120 MB hard disk in my computer, a quite reasonable size at the time. It served me well. Software came typically on small stacks of 1.44 MB floppy disks. Nowadays a magazine page can fit larger amounts of storage, at a mere fraction of the price.
It is simply absurd how fast this tech is moving these days. A video in a magazine page was pure science fiction at the time. The idea that you would go to a web page (that did exist already) and click on a link to watch a video without the need for a lengthy download.
We definitely live in exciting times for techies!
Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds to me like a good source of cheap screens to hack and use with your favourite microcontroller.
Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge (Score:5, Interesting)
Strikes me as extremely stupid, then. What stops them to buy an eReader and ask the magazine be delivered in electronic format, with all the multimedia ads they want?
Well, he was talking about farmers. The farmers are smart. Magazine publishers, on the other hand...
Re:Looks cool, but (Score:4, Interesting)
I was thinking the same thing - there's a big difference between something that looks like a sheet of paper, but with animation on it, and something that looks like a small TV screen stuck into a hole in the page.
Maybe it looks better in real life, but it looks quite some way from proper "sci fi" e-paper to me.
Re:Farmers are often on the cutting edge (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mute button (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember Esquire.
Suit: "We encourage hacking of the displays!"
Hacker: "Well... I made a clock out of it... but that's all and it takes a training seminar to learn to read it."
This isn't going to be useless at all... until the suits realize they can save half a penny by shrinking the circuit board to get rid of all those trivial externally-accessible contacts, sealing the ASIC into an epoxy blob to save the expense of IC packaging and switching to PROM to spare the expense of Flash memory.
With the savings, they can afford louder speakers and larger batteries!
Sure, the whole things can no longer be recycled and Mother Nature showed up in person to slash her wrists, but it means another round of gold-plated Bentleysfor the Board of Directors so who gives a shit, right?
Re:Not quite the future I imagined (Score:2, Interesting)
Reminds me of video in Windows 3.1. If it didn't crash every half-second, you were treated to 96x72px moving postage stamps of the moon landing and other stuff that actually made a VHS tape look great in comparison.
Re:Mute button (Score:3, Interesting)
My concern would more be that, recognizing the fact that sponsors will be Less Than Happy if their messages are being cut out and sold on ebay for reflashing, rather than viewed, the company would take some fairly simple; but quite difficult to break without die-level hacking, cryptographic measures.
For instance, if I were their engineer, I'd probably design the driver board as follows: Custom(or customized) ASIC with LCD driver, USB, hardware video decoder, flash interface, and something to support a few buttons. Package or blob, depending on bulk. Flash would be your basic NAND, as seen in USB drives everywhere, from whoever is cheapest. 4 flat test points, breaking out the USB interface, would allow the device to be programmed and charged.
However, to program the device, you would connect it to a computer, where it would present as a simple USB MSC device. You would load the videos you want, and a simple text file defining button functions and playlist order. Each video, and the definitions file, would be cryptographically signed. The ASIC would simply ignore any unsigned files.
Unless I fucked it up, you'd have to decap the ASIC and modify the silicon, which would be wildly uneconomic, to get it to play your own stuff, yet it would all be totally standard, off-the-shelf, type hardware. Boom.