The DHL courier arrived unexpected, carrying a mysterious parcel. Inside a small box containing the new Miglia VideoExpress, a short USB extension lead, CD and small booklet. All for me to play with.

Miglia’s VideoExpress is a hardware-based converter designed to turn unprotected DVDs, QuickTime and mpeg files into the h.264 format used by AppleTV, some iPods and the iPhone.
Literally ripping the tiny device from its backing sheet – Miglia’s glue is very strong - plugging it into a USB2 slot of a G4 or better and bunging in the CD produces a ‘contact us’ document, a short PDF instruction guide and clickable link to download the VideoExpress software.
The software expands to a small ‘dumb’ application with no preferences to set other than the save location and output format. These are: Sony PSP, iPod and AppleTV with different degrees of quality. Plus full-size NTSC and PAL and a web video option. VideoExpress can convert from: DV, mpeg2, DivX, VOB, MP4, MPEG2 TS or PS (Transport or Program stream). It can also convert EyeTV’s native recordings by using the .mpg file within the package EyeTV records to, inside its archive. This is selected by Control-clicking to ’show package contents’.
All it takes is dragging and dropping a movie to be converted, selecting the setting to use, where to save it and clicking the start button. Once running, only a standard progress ribbon shows anything is happening. I ran with Activity Monitor open to check on CPU usage, which is low on my G5 2×2GHz. According to Miglia, the Mac’s processor/s are used to decompress the original file so there are slight variations in conversion times depending on the speed of the processor. This is more than made up for by the rate of video conversion which is done entirely by VideoExpress itself.

Comparing VideoExpress with ElGato’s Turbo.264
These two devices are almost identical in price, size, shape and what they set out to achieve. They both work with any QuickTime enabled program and are much faster than current Macs at compressing and converting video.
They were both used to convert the same .avi movie and conversion times were similar with VideoExpress taking 93 minutes compared with Turbo.264’s 81 minutes.
Better quality output from VideoExpress
VideoExpress produced a 1.17GB file compared with Turbo.264’s 1.15GB but the quality of the two resulting movies was different. VideoExpress produced a much brighter result than Turbo.264, something I noted when I tested it here.

Next, both devices were connected to a MacBook Core2Duo 2Ghz laptop at the same time and a copy of the same 31MB QuickTime movie was converted by each simultaneously, both set to output iPod highest (640×480). VideoExpress complete the task in 5 minutes creating a 51.4MB file compared with the faster (4 minutes), smaller (42.2MB) but darker Turbo.264.

Software
Using the programs for both devices is very easy with a little more information and tweaking on hand from Turbo.264. Surprisingly, neither device can work with their creator company’s own native files. VideoExpress cannot convert ‘The Tube’ format recordings made by several of Miglia’s TV tuners and Turbo.264 cannot use EyeTV recordings made by ElGato’s TV tuners except from within the EyeTV software itself. I did not have any ‘The Tube’ recordings to play with to see if Turbo.264 can convert them.
Miglia notes that a software update will be released to fix the ‘The Tube’ problem along with the ability to convert XviD files and an improved QuickTime Export plug-in.
VideoExpress has more output options than Turbo.264 which in turn has more user-definable conversion options. Turbo.264 shows the movie stepping through the conversion with an estimated time to completion while VideoExpress shows a simple progress bar. On the other hand, the richer graphic display of Turbo.264 takes an increased amount of Mac processing power compared with VideoExpress.
Turbo.264 can set up a list of files to work with whereas VideoExpress can only do one at a time. This might be important if you want to set up a joblist and then leave your Mac to work its way through it.
Conclusion
Both devices are excellent. Miglia’s VideoExpress is marginally easier to use than Turbo.264 by having more presets but without user-definable options. It also takes a tad longer to produce better and slightly larger files than ElGato’s Turbo.264. If I were an AppleTV, iPod or iPhone user and wanted a hardware-based video converter I’d be hard pressed to decide which to buy.

Isn’t it irritating when the French are so much better at things than us Brits? Their car industry is in the best of health and producing futuristic if a little unreliable vehicles. Go to a market in France and see the beautiful array of foods instead of the chips-with-everything offerings of British supermarkets. A bottle of Minervois bought in the UK is a Jimmy Nail compared with the Pearce Brosnan wines of Languedoc. The French hang onto the best for themselves as Rick Stein found when he sampled Pierre Cros’ wines in Badens as he travelled the Canal du Midi for his TV show.

Coincidentally, it was in Badens last week where Alan, a British ex-pat, told me about the French broadband service. He and his partner Sue run an architectural design and project management business from their base in the Black Mountains, a little hamlet with a population of 162. Catering mainly for Australians, who find the summer climate in the south of France to their liking, and a few Brits who enjoying moaning about how hot it is, they manage their business almost entirely via the Internet.

Until recently this meant slow telephone-based services. Good enough for e-mailing and finding suppliers but a nightmare for sending plans and photographs to customers around the world. Alan and Sue petitioned their village mayor who in turn pressured France Telecom to upgrade their local telephone exchange. It took less than 6 months to achieve and now they enjoy up to 20MB/sec ADSL services for €29.90 (about 20 quid) a month, complete with free telephone calls throughout France as well as to UK, North America and Australia. Plus a UK number so they can be called at local rates. All this from an English-speaking ISP.

Do you feel lucky?
There are still many parts of ‘built-up’ Britain waiting for broadband to arrive and even those with services running at up to 8MB/sec rarely see more than 2.7MB/sec, according to a recent Which survey. Our own line, nearly 3km from the exchange, manages a healthy 5.75MB/sec on a good day and we feel lucky.

But is all rather laughable compared with the services on offer in French cities. Instead of sticking with antiquated copper and aluminium lines, France Telecom’s Orange and others are laying down fibre optic cables and offer a 100MB/sec, 51 TV channels and unlimited phone calls for €45 a month (about £30). Their theoretical maximum is a staggering 2.5GB/sec downstream, 1.2GB/sec upstream.

OK for them but not us
At around £10 billion, new cabling is viewed as too expensive for the UK but in France they ignore such trivialities and simply lay the fibre optics down existing pipelines. Even their ordinary telephone lines offer up to 28MB/sec and for about €14 per month (£10) you can get 18MB/sec plus free TV, video-conferencing and phone calls.

It’s not just France where data speed is measured in tens of megabits per second. Deutsche Telekom are laying fibre optic cables in Germany and plans to use VDSL (Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line) for the last few metres to supply 50MB/sec services. Sweden too has nearly 30% of it’s subscribers on fibre optic. Meanwhile for us here in the UK, BT’s CEO Paul Reynolds stated he sees no business case for fibre optics, here, at last year’s DigiWorld Summit held, ironically in Montpellier, France. Instead we will be offered a slow roll-out of the up to 24MB/sec ADSL2+ and an even slower move to an all-IP single platform with gigabit ethernet to the box in the street.

It’s all enough to drive me to drink, the huge tax on which alone would pay for fibre optics to the desktop.

All we need now is the Aston Martin. Then we’ll have nearly half of the top ten in YouGov’s survey of the coolest 500 brands, here. Apple brands appear throughout the list with three in the top 20. The rest are things we’ve used for years such as Google, Amazon and eBay. We’ve even appeared in Tate Modern (in at number 15) when we created Simon Patterson’s JP233 in CSO Blue, now in the Tate Collection.

Blimey! we never realised we were so cool. Excepting Green and Blacks (number 18) because who wants chocolate when IT Pro sends us bottles of champagne (cheers).

Is there anybody there?
Something else we’ve been doing for years is connecting Macs together. It has always been easy since they included the AppleTalk printer network in the original 1980s computers, here, even though it was never intended to transfer large files which in those days was done via floppy disk. Applications such as FileMaker databases could be linked, network games appeared, speed-up and compression routines made the network run faster. Then along came 10baseT, followed by 10/100 ethernet, both of which transformed our work practices.

In the days before CD writers, instead of leaving Macs running overnight to transfer a few measly hundred megabytes over the serial network, ethernet accomplished the same in an hour or so – which became minutes as ethernet speeds rose. Since around the time they abandoned floppy disks, Apple has shipped Macs capable of gigabit ethernet. The problem being that the price of gigabit routers stayed near a thousand pounds when 10/100 routers sank to fifty. There are still no SOHO gigabit/DSL combinations (AFAIK) – until now.

Extremely fast
The latest update to Apple’s £119 AirPort Extreme base station gave it gigabit ethernet as well as IEEE 802.11n (draft). Tests, here, show wired LAN to run at a steady 800-900Mbps with Wi-Fi at 50-90Mbps. The latter is likely to improve as the 802.11n standard is finally settled.

On the other hand
An alternative high-speed wired network has been built into all Macs since the turn of the century and made available via Mac OS X. Running at four times the speed of 10/100 ethernet, the Firewire ports can be used to create a peer-to-peer, 400Mbps network. Adding a hub for £40 or so makes a star network for a small workgroup or to share Firewire devices. We use our thin iPod Firewire leads to go Mac to Mac if we ever need to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data. Just plug them into each Mac, daisy chaining from one to another and the Macs automatically do the rest of the configuration. The throughput speeds are the same as writing to a hard disk connected to the Mac. But to be honest, most of the time 10/100 ethernet is all we need.

Update to last week
A Director of Carphone Warehouse read my blog (hello, sir) and arranged for a new phone to be shipped to me with staff discount. Thank you, much appreciated.

Today, I read the iPhone is coming to the UK next week. Darn!

It’s all my brother’s fault. He’d just come back from a factory in Italy where he’d picked up a brand new, 85′ floating gin palace. Then driven it back to Blighty, accompanied by the retired chief constable of a shire county. Who was along for the ride, presumably to ensure the boat didn’t make off in the opposite direction. It is, after all, likely to be worth a figure with six zeros following a figure greater than one.
Apart from a gale in Biscay which kept them in harbour on the Northern Spanish coast, they had had a slow but comfortable voyage. Both paid by the day at a rate less than the vessel drank diesel per hour. Bro’, had the photos of his voyage, all taken on his Sony camera phone and that’s what did it. I want, no, NEED a new camera-phone.
No go on discount
Off to Carphone Warehouse Sunday morning, armed with my daughter’s details to get staff discount. Despite the best efforts of the amazingly helpful and knowledgeable staff in their Worthing shop, better by far than any of the many other ‘phone shops I tried, I couldn’t get the discount. My daughter would have to accompany me to do the actual purchase, even though she is on the management team at HQ. The spikey-haired salesman did everything he could to get me the discount and approved my choice in phone – he wanted one himself.
Reverse logic polish
Oh well, it did at least save me nearly two hundred quid, which is about what the phone would cost. According to my reverse logic always applied when I want/need a new toy, this saving, coupled with the pair of shoes I nearly bought, would make the phone free.
However… it sets you thinking when you see all the boys’ toys in the ‘phone shops. Like blackberry and apple pie, what other combinations work well together? The latest being sat-nav on a Nokia but do I actually need sat-nav I wonder? As well as an MP3-playing, video-making, games-consoling gadget. Usually I’d go for the smallest phone on offer or whatever hand-me-down one of my kids passes on.
Who needs a Beemer?
Being an independent worker, I only use PAYG phones and don’t need to subscribe to office one-upmanship. For example, I don’t want a BMW because all my colleagues have one. Instead I make decisions about equipment based on their specifications, independent reviews and what the toy…erm…device can do for me. A BMW then becomes an expensive, unnecessary and not particularly attractive car where a Japanese vehicle would serve me better and be more reliable and economical, Civic Type R aside.
Phones, on the other hand, are a bit different. They have moved a long way from their original purpose to such an extent that they are directly challenging kit such as digital cameras and PDAs. The Blackberry is okay but limited compared with the iPhone. With unlocking and a son in Chicago, an iPhone could be mine by the middle of the week, courtesy of DHL. But its 2 mega-pixel camera doesn’t excite.
Go on Steve
If the iPhone runs on Mac OSX why haven’t Apple made it a fully-fledged pocket computer and be done with it? At Wall Street Journal’s 2004 All Things digital conference, here, Steve Jobs told the audience he was as proud of the products Apple hadn’t shipped as much as they ones they had. He was alluding to a PDA, here, which one assumes became the iPhone. But it was clear the audience wanted an Apple pocket computer, something Apple hasn’t tried since their 1990’s Newtons.
And put a better camera in for me please.

It was thirty years ago today when Voyager 1 started on its mission. Not quite seeking out new life-forms and splitting infinitives, but there’s still time. Voyager’s speed is now at roughly 34,000 mph or about 307 million miles per year – so great, even the Stig would be impressed.

Voyager 1 and 2 were designed originally to fly past every planet in the solar system. Even after the program was scaled back they only missed Pluto, still classed as a planet in the 1970s. In the 1990’s Voyager 1
zoomed past Pioneer 10, the then furthest man-made object. Today, Voyager 1 continues to collect data on a digital tape recorder which transmits it back to Earth every six months.

Powerful but powerless
The computing power controlling each Voyager are three 6.4MHz RCA 1802 CPUs. Although military strength they are about as fast as the average home computer of the early 1980s. The CPUs have managed the scientific instruments, navigated past all the planets, dealt with control and sequencing, fault detection and correction.

Originally they had ample electrical supply from the on-board plutonium powered generators but time has taken its toll, electric output is depleting and thermocouples degrading. Eventually, around 2020, power levels will be too low to support any of the scientific instruments and the Voyagers will turn off.

Unless, that is, one falls into a black hole, meets a race of hyper-intelligent machines who fix it, truncate it’s name and send it home.

Coincidentally…
It was thirty years ago today I got married. Since then I’ve not sought out a new life-form in case my head gets split infinitely as the frying pan crashes down on it. The Stig would definitely be unimpressed by the speed I can reach and I plan to keep going after 2020 as well.

But at least my computing power has come on a bit. Back then the best I had was still 4 years away – a 48k, 8-bit Spectrum also tape powered. Nowadays, Spectrum emulators on our current machines make Jet Set Willy so fast as to be virtually un-playable but at least Elite becomes less of a tedious trip.

However, a recent job involving a gazillion images made me realise it’s time for a new computer. The question is which to get, Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac?

Stupid question, there’s only one worth having which will run them all. All I need are the readies and hope that Apple don’t bring out a newer, faster, cheaper Mac a day after I take delivery of mine.