Gizmodo: conversion

Team Doubles Efficiency of Thermoelectric Material: Good News for Car Electrics

Kit Eaton — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:24:00 EDT

Scientists at Ohio State University have taken a thermoelectric material that's been used for decades to power deep-space probes, and worked out how to double its efficiency. That's good news: thermoelectrics convert heat directly into electrical energy. By catching exhaust heat, the new material may allow car alternators to be replaced... and that'll push up the efficiency of car engines. The team doped lead telluride with tiny amounts of thallium, which adjusts the crystal structure and increases its heat-electricity conversion efficiency from around 6% to over 10%. Even better, since engineers have years of experience of working with lead telluride, it should be easy to commercialize the product. Environmentalists will have to be pleased, and relax about the high toxicity of thallium, though. [Technology Review]

CyberLink Uses ATI Card To Transcode Four 1080p Video Files Simultaneously

Jason Chen — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:00:00 EDT

The fashionable thing these days is to take the tremendous processing power of graphics cards and put them to use when you're not utilizing them to render games. CyberLink, for one, has come up with a pretty ingenous method to take an ATI or NVIDIA card (in their case, the demo was on an ATI Radeon 4850 512MB card) and convert four 1080p MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4. Simultaneously. As long as you've got a pretty fast video card, all you need is a copy of CyberLink PowerDirector 7 and you can be doing this too. We hope this is the kind of thing Apple's going to be putting into Snow Leopard. [TG Daily]

USB Cassete Archiver Converts Your Embarrassing Analog Music Into Embarrassing Digital Music

Sean Fallon — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:35:21 EDT

Have a collection of old cassette tapes lying around? Thanks to this USB Cassette Archiver you can kick out the old school jams once again in full digital glory on your MP3 player. Format conversion is a simple matter of installing the software on your PC or Mac and connecting the archiver via USB. I'm not sure how good the sound quality is, but I'll be dammed if I'm paying for MC Hammer twice. Available for $169. [FredFlare via Cool Hunting]

iPhone Video Conversion

kthompson — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 22:11:00 EDT

[Rewritten by BL 7/15/07] So far, software king of free DVD ripping, Handbrake, has yet to come out with an iPhone preset, but the iPod one works fine. And remember that Handbrake works on copy protected discs, too.

Roxio's crunch is good for non-DVD, video to iPhone conversion and like Handbrake, it does export for most other devices, too. This software costs about $30. Works pretty well. It claims to handle discs, but like most commercial products, won't rip anything copy protected, making this part of the package useless. Best part of Crunch? Fast batch processing of many files.

Visualhub, another paid piece of video ripping software is getting rave reviews, although I've never used it. Most attractively, you can use xgrid to do your compression across multiple networked Macs. Bad ass.

Ask the Readers: Which Video Hosting Site is the Best?

Jason Chen — Wed, 23 May 2007 16:45:27 EDT

Hey, dudes. We're looking to do some hosting and want to ask you, the readers, what you think is the best for online video hosting.

YouTube is a little slow in conversion, when we're uploading videos, so we're looking elswhere.

Which ones do you prefer?

– Jason Chen

Update: There was some confusion on my part before. It was supposed to be for hosting, not conversion. Sorry!

M2Convert Converts DVDs, DivX To Zune

Jason Chen — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 17:05:28 EST

For the seven of you who were unlucky enough to get a Zune this Christmas, you're probably dying to watch some video on its large-sized screen. Too bad, since the Zune only takes a certain type of video files, namely WMV and M4V. M2 Solution's M2 Convert is supposed to help you convert both DVDs and most video and audio formats (AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPG, MPEG, AVC, OGG, MP4, DivX, MP1, MP2, IFO, DIC, MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC) to what the Zune supports.

We've tried a few converters online for the Zune, but after converting to M4V, the Zune converts that video again for some reason.

Format conversion's pretty easy, and although the program hung when we tried it ourselves, we don't imagine that there would be any huge problems with it. We'll give it another shot and report back. – Jason Chen

Product Page [m2solutions]

Railz: Convert Skateboard to Skiboard

Charlie White — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:45:34 EDT

It won't be long before the snow starts falling, and then it'll be time to convert that skateboard to a slope-gobbling four-runner skate ski-board. Do it with Railz, four metal-edged skis that replace the wheels on your favorite skateboard, converting it for downhill skiing in a snap. The conversion kit is $50. – Charlie White

Product Page [Flowlab, via Sci Fi Tech]