SOUNDS LIKE HOLLYWOOD
Home videos famous for their poor audio quality could soon be made to sound like Hollywood epics.
Dolby Laboratories has developed a consumer version of the software that professional film makers use to record multi-channel surround sound for their DVD soundtracks.
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Called Digital 5.1 Creator, the software pans the stereo sound recorded by a camcorder to make it appear to follow the object producing it: an aircraft roaring overhead, for example, or a barking dog running around the camera. The enhanced sound can then be burnt onto a DVD along with the video footage.
When played back on a Dolby-enabled player it will produce the kind of beefy sound found on commercial movie soundtracks. The resulting sound not only pans from left to right, but also around the rear speakers of a home cinema system.
Editing software for home videos incorporating 5.1 Creator is due to go on sale by the end of this year. The next step, says Dolby, is to build the surround software into a camcorder, which would then automatically create surround effects as you shoot.
INSTANT SPAM
The torrent of unsolicited messages deluging email users may be growing fast, but not as fast as a new kind of unsolicited message dubbed 鈥渟pim鈥� 鈥� spam messages sent to the users of instant messaging (IM) services such as MSN Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger.
Spim volumes are set to triple in 2004, according to a report from the technology market research firm Radicati Group in Palo Alto, California. The company reckons that 1.2 billion spims will be sent this year, 70 per cent of them pornography-related. Though this is nothing like the 35 billion email spams expected, the researchers warn that spim is growing about three times as fast as spam as mass emailers turn their attention to the increasing number of IM users.
鈥淭he reason spim has taken off is simple: the money and the marketers go where people are,鈥� says Robert Mahowald, an analyst at the IT advisory firm IDC in Massachusetts.
Unlike email, IM software allows users to exchange messages in real time. This makes spim more insidious than spam because the messages pop up automatically, giving the recipient no chance of deleting them.
