Free DME & DFIR Resources

Someday very soon, if you stroll through Piedmont Park, travel the Downtown Connector, hit one of the bars or restaurants in Midtown or visit the Georgia Dome or Philips Arena, you'll have an invisible companion: the Atlanta Police Department.

This spring, the department will open a video integration center designed to compile and analyze footage from thousands of public and private security cameras throughout the city. Images from as many as 500 cameras in downtown and Midtown are expected to be flowing into the center by mid-summer.

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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.

If you live in the world of digital forensics, you see hard drives of all form factors and ages (along with plenty of dust bunnies). You also likely wipe and re-purpose hard drives quite regularly. You know more acronyms than your typical teen textaholic, and you went out and celebrated with friends when Serial ATA was released, because you were sickened by the old master/slave relationships associated with IDE/PATA drives. So why do we still see jumpers on SATA drives? Rest assured my friends, it has nothing to do with a master/slave relationship.

Turns out I may just know a thing or two about Mass Video Evidence Collection & Processing.  Who knew? 😎

I have worked several cases that were comprised of thousands of hours of video evidence collected from dozens of sources, including the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots.

Forensic Video Analysts from around the world were brought to Indianapolis to work together, and although I wasn't there, I was responsible for supporting the infrastructure and solving the DME workflow issues that couldn't be resolved efficiently on-site.

Hitachi is not the first storage vendor to bring a 3TB drive to market. However, it is the first to introduce an internal 3TB drive reliable enough for hardcore business use.

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There have been many, many rumors about Windows 8.1 this past couple of months. A couple of days back Microsoft finally unveiled some of the new features that this update is going to bring. Today at the Tech-Ed conference Microsoft detailed some additional features. Windows 8.1 has now been confirmed to support Miracast streaming. For Miracast to work, both display and PC manufacturers will have to ensure that their devices are compatible with this format.

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Grand Saline police officers and FBI investigators are searching for a man who held up a bank in Grand Saline this morning.

View video from this morning's robbery on our home page and visit KMOO.com for the complete story.

P.S. - The Police Chief is a different Larry Compton. ;-)

MPEG DASH is the latest hot topic in the online video space. Here we break down what it is, and what its implications might be for video delivery in the future.

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It's really fascinating to look back at how far our discipline has come in the last 20 years, and how many resources and solutions are out there these days for Forensic Digital & Multimedia Analysts. Even more exciting is knowing some of the new opportunities and solutions for DME professionals that will be coming in 2019, especially in regards to training!

By Sean Hollister

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 hasn't even been officially announced, much less reviewed, but that won't keep you from buying the company's latest Fermi-based graphics card anyhow. Over at Newegg, usual suspects ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and Palit have fielded twelve models in all, most with slightly different features, thought it seems the base configuration has 336 CUDA cores (down from 352) and a mere 768MB of GDDR5 memory.

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If you're looking for filters for VirtualDub or just want to know what filters are available be sure to visit the detailed listing at www.thedeemon.com. Someone inquired about a particular filter earlier, and I've been meaning to post about their listing for several weeks, but just haven't had time.

Part of the reason I've put off posting the link was prior to doing so I wanted to test and report on their Video Enhancer Super Resolution program. I've just been too swamped lately to get to it, so I figured it was time to get off the pot. I hope to find time to do the testing with Video Enhancer and report back in the not-so-distant future, and when I do, we'll all look back at this and laugh...or at least I will. Sorry for the delay. 😎

I gave up my dream of one day owning a single remote control that could replace my basket of "universal" remotes several years ago. As you can imagine I lived in extreme sadness for quite some time, constantly criticizing myself for being so naive to believe such a device existed. As time passed however, I forgave myself for setting such an unrealistic goal and eventually moved on. Then yesterday the delivery man arrived, unknowingly carrying the answer to this long-forgotten dream.

Okay, to be honest, I haven't actually gone out and bought any universal remotes until just the other day. With that said, each time I've replaced a component in my entertainment system I end up with another "universal" remote that just doesn't cut it. Either it won't even work with one or more components or, as is more often the case, you lose a ton of functionality and have to keep the original remote close by anyway. While advanced universal remotes are nothing new, in my opinion finding one within a reasonable price range (below $100) is. If you're willing to invest $80-$100 in a universal remote that will actually replace all of your other remotes, so far I am very pleased with my Logitech Harmony Advanced Universal Remote for Xbox 360.

Locating forensic DME resources just became a bit easier with the introduction of the Media-Geek Forensic DME Resources Map. Several DME related geo-tagging resources are currently being developed, to include a Media-Geek membership geo-tagging feature. Members are encouraged to log-in and update the contact information in their profile, which now includes an option for permitting inclusion in the membership maps.