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Let’s talk a little more about aspect ratio. Always a lively topic everywhere I go, and regularly misunderstood by industry leading CCTV equipment manufacturers, engineers, and other video professionals. Should we correct, when do we correct, how do we correct, and of course the why. I’ve done a few short posts on the topic in the past (here's one), but this will be in a little more detail. Still writing on the fly, just going to break it down into a few posts over time.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year my friends!  Just a quick note to pass along season's greetings and give you a heads up regarding upcoming topics for my podcast, Nerds & Non/Sense™ .

In our January, 2020 episodes we'll be discussing The Illusion of Privacy.  Cambridge Analytica, "The Great Hack" documentary on Netflix, the Best Selling book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and chatting about how metadata about your daily activities is used to not only predict, but influence your behavior.  How you are the commodity, and most of you still don't even understand the extent to which you've facilitated this.

In our February, 2020 episodes we'll be discussing Work/Life Balance.  Mandatory professional therapy and mental health resources & evaluations for digital evidence practitioners, and how they should be mandated in ALL agency SOPs, IMHO.

Come on, you knew this was coming.  Looks pretty cool, I must say...

Next-Level Autonomously Flying Indoor Security Camera | Ring Always Home Cam 

(Video embedded below in full post)

The director of the FBI used his keynote address at the RSA 2010 conference to appeal for greater co-operation between law enforcement and the private sector to tackle online crime.

Robert Mueller told delegates that the need for co-operation had never been stronger, as online fraud rises to huge levels and the next generation of terrorists move online in unprecedented numbers."

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An all new year brings an all new look and an entirely different platform for our forensic multimedia community.  Our new site has been redesigned from the ground up to simplify information sharing for our members.  Let's take a quick look at navigating the all new members area and point out a few important changes.

Sorenson Media introduced the latest version of its popular video encoder today with the release of Squeeze 8. Improvements include greater adaptive bitrate support, x264 support, enhanced GPU acceleration, and integration with Sorenson Squeeze Server. In addition, Sorenson will offer a lite version for smaller needs and budgets.

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Assumptions can be dangerous things. Let’s say you assumed your software was displaying your AVI video file at the proper aspect ratio (ratio of width-to-height). Well, chances are pretty good you’d be wrong…no matter what software you’re using. What!? So the perp in my video evidence may be thinner and taller OR shorter and pudgy-er!? Yep.

Fact – the AVI file format does not provide a standardized way to report aspect ratio. Due to this shortcoming, applications cannot calculate the proper Display Aspect Ratio (DAR) if it is supposed to be different than the Storage/Sample Aspect Ratio (SAR). Therefore, applications "assume" a square Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR) and display the video at it's SAR, even if that's not correct...which is generally the case when dealing with DCCTV evidence.

Moral of this story? Don’t assume.

One of the features still in BETA for the new member's area is a video sharing service, which will allow users to upload videos or add their videos currently hosted elsewhere to the Media-Geek video library.  In addition to a searchable, categorized library, each member's profile will list their videos.

  Although this feature wasn't initially slated to be rolled out with our launch on the 11th, it now looks like it will be!  Get your training videos together, get registered, and come back next week to upload!

Support for x264 is now available in Sorenson Squeeze. How does the encoding quality stack up against MainConcept H.264?

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"The world is changing so quickly, that it's really hard for a standard to keep up. So when we introduce new protocol delivery or new codecs or new content protection inside the Flash player, we can effectively bring that new technology to at least 50 percent of the market within three months," said Kevin Towes, product manager for Flash at Adobe, speaking at a red-carpet interview at Streaming Media East. "There's not many technologies that can make that claim."

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If you have a Dropbox account, you have Dropbox Replay.  I've been so impressed with the implementation, and I keep thinking of more ways to use it.  Obviously, you can invite others to comment on and review videos in your Dropbox account (Frame-level review with comments & annotations), but you can do so much more. 

One of the coolest features is the live review capabilities, IMHO.  In any case, rather than regurgitating all of their marketing stuff about it, here's a short video from Dropbox. 😎

VFPro 3.0.1 is now available for immediate download from the Salient Stills website. This is a refresh release and is available to all VFPro 3.0 customers whether on the upgrade & maintenance program or not.

Salient Stills encourages all VFPro 3.0 customers to download this version as it has a screen capture bug fix and a number of other small bug and usability fixes.

This year I helped Ocean Systems introduce a new 3-Day training class titled "Fundamentals of Video Evidence Recovery & Processing (FVRP)".  The course is designed for anyone who recovers, handles, processes or disseminates Digital & Multimedia Evidence (DME), regardless of prior video evidence training or experience. 

The course is based on industry Best Practices and focuses on obtaining the Best Evidence, and learning how to quickly get accurate images & video out for investigative leads.  It is predominantly hands-on, and will expose students to various Ocean Systems and Open Source solutions that can help.

Join me July 23rd through 25th at our offices in Burtonsville, MD or for one of our future training dates.  Hope to see you in class.  Have a great weekend my friends!