It’s good to see that someone is finally doing something about video piracy, and giving users a legal alternative to download movies online.

From the BBC article:

Sony is to make its top 500 films available digitally in the next year. Michael Arrieta, senior vice president of Sony Pictures, said at a US Digital Hollywood conference that it wanted to create an “iTunes” for films.

However, are Sony the right company to this? Everything they do uses their own weird proprietary technology and is much more expensive than similarly classed products. Look at the memory stick for example – it can cost nearly double the price of other flash memory and only works in Sony devices.

No doubt Sony’s forays into this arena will involve users downloading videos in some strange format, and playable only on overpriced Sony devices.

When I download movies from the Internet, I want to be able to watch them on my PC, TV, mobile phone or other portable video player – whether they’re made by Sony or not.

Like many developers, I’ve usually resorted to using code to select a bunch of random rows from SQL Server, though Nick mentioned a nice solution: SQL Server getting random rows.

The magic command:

SELECT TOP 10 Field1, Field2 FROM myTable ORDER BY NEWID()

No doubt others will find this helpful

Thanks to Nick and James Crowley for this tip!

Since Om Malik blogged ‘get ready for podcasting‘, which talks about how PSPVideo9 could start the PSPCasting revolution, the blogosphere has exploded with people getting excited about this great new idea.

I’ve got no plans to buy a PSP when it is launched in the UK in the near future. But, this application does open up some exciting ideas. Fortunately, PSPVideo9 can also be used to convert videos to a format which works with SonyEricsson P800, P900 and P910i phones (though the three do use slightly different formats).

Although this is not a new idea; it could previously be done using tools from PacketVideo; the tools were very expensive and geared towards content providers. Using PSPVideo9, home users can now convert movies, home vides and other video to a format for playback on their SonyEricson Pxxx mobile device.

Below, I’ll talk about the steps to convert a video file to a format usable on the SonyEricsson P910i.

Before you start, you’ll need to have the SonyEricsson PC suite installed, allowing you to access your phone’s filesystem from windows.

The first step is to download the application from http://www.pspvideo9.com and install it. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Once the application is installed, start it up, and click on the ‘Setup’ icon in the top right hand corner. The main window will display three tabs: Settings, Profiles, and Console.

Click on Profiles, and then ‘New Profile’. Here, we will create a video profile to convert video files to a format usable on the P910i.

In the profile name, enter something descriptive like 240×156 SonyEricsson P900. Next we need to enter our video settings.

According to AllAboutSymbian’s article – ‘A Guide To Watching Movies on UIQ Phones, video dimensions of 240×156 should scale nicely to the P900′s screen size of 320×208. However, P800 users should use 192×165.

In the bitrate box, select ‘Constant’, and type in 145 kbps. I found a framerate of 11.985 fps worked, though this can take some experimenting to get it right.

Under audio settings, choose the bitrate of 96 kbps from the dropdown. Channels should be set to Mono, and the sample rate; 44100 kHz. I found the volume can get a bit distorted at above 100%, though this may take some experimenting to get it right.

Once that’s all done, press Apply to save your profile.

Click on the Settings tab, and make sure that your newly created profile is selected in the Default Profile dropdown. Change the Output Videos path to something more memorable (ie. C:\ConvertedVideos). Hit save.

Click on the Convert tab in the top right hand corner. This brings up the conversion screen. Click on Convert New Video to begin converting a video file. AS this is your first video, I suggest choosing a video which which is relatively short with a small filesize, which will be quick to encode and good for testing. I tested with a 20mb/2 minute video (MPG PAL) which shrunk to 3.5mb when converted to MP4.

Once the file has converted, you need to copy this to your phone. The easiest way to do this is to connect your phone to your PC using the supplied USB cradle, and double click on the ‘My P900′ icon on your desktop. Alternatively, you can use Epocware PC File Manager.

To test your video, open the flip, start the Video application and click on your video! If it’s a little jerky, or the sound is bad, you’ll need to experiment with the settings and repeat the process of copying the file to your phone.

This opens up some interesting possibilities, and perhaps SonyEricsson Pxxx owners can also join in on the PSPCasting fun!

I’ve been a registered user of Skype for a while now, though only used it for the first time today. A relative got broadband, and wanted to test out the video and audio options (seems like the first thing a lot of people want to do when broadband is new to them).

Although the webcam feature in MSN Messenger is very good, the audio capability sucks. Both my relative and I had our versions of Messenger crash as soon as any attempt to use the audio feature was made.

Following some subtle persuasion, he installed Skype, and was registered within a few minutes. Although the quality wasn’t quite as good as a telephone, it was pretty impressive. The fact that neither of us have decent audio equipment may have also been a factor affecting quality.

Shortly after, I had a conversation with Nick, who is using a SkypePhone, and the quality was perfect.

Might be worth investing in one of these (or if not, then a decent headset at the very least). The cordless VOIP/DECT phone looks quite good, and will be a fine replacement to my Samsung DECT phone which has been acting strangely for a long time now.

Grr, it’s annoying that the ToString() method can’t be overridden for arrays, and since the System.Array class can’t be derived from, we’re forced to rely on helper methods to convert arrays (or collections) into strings.

public static string ConvertCollectionToString(IList Collection)

{

 System.Text.StringBuilder SB = new System.Text.StringBuilder();

 for (int i = 0; i 

This helper function will take an array and convert it to a comma-delimited string.  Eg. an array with three elements: apple, pear and banana will be converted to the string apple, pear, banana.