[via Cybernet News]

To give it a spin, just drop &fmt=6 at the end of the URL of any video you’re watching. If YouTube has a higher quality version available on its servers, it’ll start playing right away. Otherwise, you’ll simply be staring at a loading symbol. Greasemonkey users can also download a simple script that adjusts all YouTube URLs automatically.

There’s a long discussion over on the VideoHelp boards about which file types are retaining the most quality after automatic conversion. YouTube appears to be experimenting with a few variants of Flash and H.264, the latter of which became a major part of YouTube with the introduction of the
iPhone and AppleTV–both of which access videos from the service without using Adobe’s Flash player.

Related:
YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do it better

Last week at the Under the Radar conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sat down to an interview with Robert Scoble. The discussion of course came around to the S3 outage, and Vogels explained what happened. It was, he says, a “provisioning” and “logical” problem. Translated: They didn’t program S3 to handle the load they got. It has since been fixed. Amazon also recently upgraded its hosted computing service, EC2.

But while Vogels expressed unhappiness at the outage, he also believes that Amazon’s cloud services are still more reliable than any collection of servers a budding Web start-up could marshal. While that may be true, that’s not what companies who signed up for AWS signed up to hear. We think a simple mea culpa would have gone over better.

On Sale Now: $1,348.99
View the latest prices for Sony BDP-S5000ES

Key features of the Sony BDP-S5000ES:

Earlier this year, Sony hit a major benchmark by releasing the $400 BDP-S350, which was the company’s first standalone Blu-ray with a retail price as low as the PS3. Sony’s newly announced Blu-ray player, the BDP-S5000ES, is headed in exactly the opposite direction, aiming for the high end with a $2,000 list price and a bundle of enthusiast extras. Here’s what you get for your two grand:

Blu-ray Profile 2.0
Onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, as well as bit stream output
Quick start mode loads discs in 6 seconds
Ethernet port for firmware and content
Deep Color and x.v.Color support
HD Reality Enhancer and Super Bit Mapping
XrossMediaBar graphical user interface
7.1 analog outputs
RS-232 and IR inputs
Available in November, $2,000 list price

Altogether, the BDP-S5000ES hits all the major feature points we look for, plus some nice extras such as the quick start option and 7.1 analog outputs. As Sony explains it, the HD Reality Enhancer, “continually analyzes bit by bit of the original source, sharpening edges and reproducing detail, while reducing the effects of film grain.” We haven’t seen the technology yet, but it sounds similar to Toshiba’s XDE technology, which adds edge enhancement to make images appear sharper, but in reality obscures real detail (we advised users to turn it off in our review of the XD-E500). Super Bit Mapping is supposed to “[deliver] smoother color gradation realizing true 14-bit equivalent color tone from 8-bit sources,” but we’ll have to do hands-on testing to see whether that’s hype or there’s actually an appreciable difference.

Of course, even with the extras, Sony is going to have a hard time justifying the $1,600 premium over the company’s other excellent Blu-ray player, the multitalented
PlayStation 3. It will also have standalone competition from Panasonic’s newly released DMP-BD55, which has a similar feature set, including 7.1 analog outputs. There’s certainly a niche market for these high-end Blu-ray players, but we’re betting most buyers will be vastly better off with the comparatively cheap PS3.

In addition, Ubisoft said it will make additional payments to Clancy in fiscal 2008-2009 and 2009-2010.

Video game giant Ubisoft has agreed to purchase Tom Clancy’s name for use in video games and other media products. Previously, Ubisoft had licensed the Clancy name.

So, strictly speaking, Clancy, the author of megahit books like Patriot Games, The Hunt for Red October, and The Sum of All Fears will get to continue to use his own moniker in his personal life. And even on his books.

With that in mind, then, I suppose I’ll have to consider selling the rights to my own name. I doubt I’ll command millions of euros, but you never know. Let me know if you’re interested, and we’ll talk turkey.

To me, this is just bizarre. Maybe I’ve missed previous such deals, but I don’t recall ever hearing of someone like Tom Clancy out-and-out selling his name like this. I won’t liken it to selling his soul to the devil, because I’m sure Ubisoft is a perfectly nice organization, but it’s an unusual situation to be sure.

But when it comes to video game properties based on his work, and even, apparently, most other media, well, Ubisoft is his daddy.

But, Clancy probably saw the opportunity to get a massive amount of money up front and some substantial additional payments for the next few years and figured that there wasn’t much downside. As noted above, Ubisoft is a major-league organization and has done well with its Clancy properties, so it’s not like this will water down the Clancy brand.

“On the basis of past performance of Tom Clancy-branded video games, and excluding any potential contribution coming from sales of ancillary products,” the company wrote, “the royalty savings generated by this acquisition are estimated to have an average positive impact on Ubisoft’s operating income of a minimum of 5 million euros per year.”

French video game giant Ubisoft said Thursday that it has agreed to buy all “intellectual property rights to the Tom Clancy name, on a perpetual basis and free of all related future royalty payments, for use in video games and ancillary products including related books, movies and merchandising products.”

Tom Clancy has sold his name.

Ubisoft didn’t release the financial terms of the deal, though it did say in a press release that it expects to have a net cash position of 130 million euros ($201 million) at the end of fiscal 2007-2008, versus 150 million euros ($232 million) prior to the deal.

(Credit:
Ubisoft)

The consumer version of Glance comes in at $50 a month. More business-oriented clients can go for the corporate tier, which rings up at $119 a month and adds features like administrative controls and a purchase-by-the-session model that lets you only pay for the connections you need.

Related:
WebEx adds Mac support to remote desktop service

One of the companies showing off their wares at today’s Macworld Expo was Glance, a service that’s been around since 2002 but only recently started edging into the
Mac scene starting at last year’s Expo. Glance serves up screen-sharing tools for consumers and private companies. Its claim to fame is its 100-at-a-time screen sharing service, which can be used for large conference sessions or digital seminars.

The company is marketing the new service as a way to help out on tech-support issues, although I was told that clients will also be able to use it to remotely access their own machine as long as they’ve got the conference link handy.

The latest blow came on Monday when a Danish court ordered one of that country’s Internet service providers to block access to the BitTorrent search engine, according to Danish IT magazine Computerworld.

Last week, a Swedish prosecutor charged four men connected to The Pirate Bay with conspiracy to violate copyright law.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry brought a civil case against Tele2 Denmark after the ISP refused to filter the Web sites its customers visited.

The Pirate Bay continues to come under siege.

Hollywood studios have long considered The Pirate Bay an outlaw organization. The site’s founders say they operate in accordance with Swedish law.

And depending on which process and which study you personally ascribe to, the answer on how “carbon clean” ethanol looks depends. In most debates centering on corn fermentation, for example, the studies cite a range from say, 20 to 30% less carbon intensive than gasoline, to 20 or 30% more. This begs one very big question in my mind, what’s the difference? How does the same ethanol in my
car have a possible carbon footprint range that wide?

In the cleantech and carbon worlds, the carbon footprint of ethanol, whether from corn or sugar feedstocks and fermentation processes, or enzymatic or thermochemical cellulosic sources, is always good fodder (or perhaps, “fuel”) for debate.

As usual, the devil’s in the details, and people tend to use the case that best addresses their agenda, and apply it to all ethanol as a whole. Personally, I’m buying all my ethanol from land that is already in production, so my carbon footprint must be good. The rest of you can buy the OTHER ethanol with all the bad carbon footprint.

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is founding contributor of Cleantech Blog, a Contributing Editor to Alt Energy Stocks, Chairman of Cleantech.org, and a blogger for CNET’s Greentech blog.

The last one, land use change, is the bugaboo. For example, if you assume that all the land used to produce the ethanol feedstock is already in production, you tend to find a carbon footprint at the low end of the range, since there is little net reduction in the carbon sink, and ethanol looks pretty good. If you assume that all the land used to produce the ethanol feedstock came from forests that had been chopped down, or marginal land that produces very low yields, you tend to find a carbon footprint at the high end of the range, and ethanol looks bad. Thought about another way, ethanol made from corn or sugar that displaces human or animal food production is likely to be relatively greenhouse gas friendly compared to ethanol made from corn or sugar that comes from new land put into production just for ethanol. The same logic applies to cellulosic ethanol sources, though not quite to the same degree. Interesting conundrum.

It shut down its HD DVD business last month, which Toshiba says will result in an operating loss of 65 billion yen, or $658 million, in addition to 45 billion yen, or $455 million, to shut down the operation.

Though already expecting losses from the failed HD DVD business, Toshiba’s shareholders were told Wednesday to expect more bad news.

The Japanese electronics giant said the market for NAND flash memory (the kind of chips used in portable gadgets) was weak and expected to get worse, the Wall Street Journal reports.

As a result, Toshiba lowered its expected profit for fiscal year 2007, which ends March 31, to 125 billion yen ($1.26 billion), from the 180 billion yen it said it expected in October.

And a member of the developer community told CNET News.com that Cook’s skills were highly respected and that now that the news broke, he’d likely be inundated with job offers.

SAN FRANCISCO–Here at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of Wednesday morning’s talks was to feature Blaine Cook, Twitter’s lead architect, talking about the Jabber protocol and “building the real-time Web.”

The problem: Reports had surfaced earlier that morning that Blaine Cook was leaving the company. Awkward.

After the panel, Cook told CNET News.com that there were “a number of factors” behind his departure, and that he would be relocating to the U.K. in the fall. In the meantime, he said, he was exploring a number of possibilities. He said he’ll probably end up in a role within a U.K. company to avoid the hassle of a semi-regular across-the-pond commute. With regard to the fact that he took the stage at the conference just hours after the news broke that he was leaving the company, he said, “It’s been kind of an insane morning.”

Luckily for Cook, his talk at Web 2.0 wasn’t directly about Twitter. It was also a lecture, not a panel, so there was no moderator to poke around the issue. And it was tech-heavy, with lines of code dominating the presentation screen, which meant that the folks showing up to listen were more interested in geekspeak than gossip.

Cook told several blog sites that he was indeed leaving, attributing it to the fact that he was moving to the U.K. But a source close to the snafu told CNET News.com that Cook had indeed been ousted from his role at the microblogging start-up in one capacity or another. In an e-mail to the Silicon Alley Insider, Cook called the departure “amicable,” that he was out as of two weeks earlier, and that he would likely stay on as an adviser to the company.

(Credit:
Environmental Defense Fund)

EDF President Fred Krupp

The environmental movement got hip to that idea awhile ago, making the right calculation that appealing to business’ self-interest would pay dividends later on. Apropos, I was reminiscing on Friday with Fred Krupp, who heads the Environmental Defense Fund. Time was when the EDF’s informal motto was, “Sue the bastards.” But Krupp, who joined EDF in 1984, has become a big proponent of working with business on this issue.

Call it constructive engagement, if you will, but he’s making progress even though there remains much skepticism among business interests. But in the last year, a number of heavy-hitter CEOs have made strong statements about climate change, including Jeff Immelt from General Electric, Rick Wagoner at General Motors, and Jim Rogers at Duke Energy. We’re not exactly talking about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin here. These are members of the U.S. corporate aristocracy, and if these boys are singing a new tune, change is in the air. Check out the United States Climate Action Partnership, which is an alliance between big-time companies and climate and environmental groups teaming up to support a market-driven approach to climate protection. At the same time, there’s a pending bill in Congress, S. 2191, better known as America’s Climate Security Act, designed to help reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

But I’ve got a better idea. If you could sit down with a big global warming skeptic like United States Sen. James Inhofe, or even with President Bush, forget the “woe is us routine.” Instead, why not appeal to their capitalist greed–and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. You don’t have to believe in global warming to agree that fossil fuel emissions aren’t doing any good for the air we breathe. But the sharp disagreements flare up when the topic turns programmatic. That is, how do you go about the cleanup without wrecking the economy? Good question, but unless the smart money is wrong, the answer will make fortunes for a lot of people.

I wouldn’t exaggerate the swing of the political pendulum–there’s still a lot of resistance–but as the Bush administration finishes out its term, there’s suddenly more movement on this front than at any time in the last eight years. I’ll be publishing a Q&A on Saturday with Krupp where he talks in more detail about technology’s likely role. In the meantime, here’s the nagging question I still can’t answer: Is this issue so bound up with interest-group politics that hopes for a national movement are just a pipe dream? The debate seemingly goes on and on without resolution. Now that there’s new hope for real change just over the horizon, I hope we’re not about to get let down again.

While the pace of investment in Web 2.0 start-ups is waning, clean tech is booming. Venture capitalists sank more than $3 billion into the sector in 2007, and they’ll break that record this year.

Now it’s your turn to weigh in.