Steve Litchfield

Back in the day, a photo used to be a negative or print, a video would be an 8mm film or perhaps VHS tape - and then the digital age was upon us, with the advent, especially, of phones with cameras. Starting with, arguably the Nokia N93, in 2006, we had useable, focussed, 3MP photos, and useable 'DVD quality' video files - captured from a phone. A photo was, typically, a .JPG file and a video was, typically, a .MP4 file (I won't get into codecs here, to keep things simple). Each - literally - just a file. And then manufacturers started adding on information. Some of which could be contained within the original files, but mostly... not. Starting with Nokia's experiments with 'live' photos on their Lumia phones around 2012, where a small section of video (from before the shutter was pressed and after) was captured and stored with the JPG photo. Then, with the core of Nokia's imaging team being made redundant and moving to Apple, we had live photos making a wel...

One of the annoyances of modern life is that adverts have crept into video streaming services - yes, you can pay more to get an 'ad free' tier, but if you do that for everything you watch then life gets quite expensive. Happily, I have found that many video streaming services support picture in picture (don't worry, I'll explain) and therefore, when an advert does hit, either before or in the middle of a programme, you can swipe the video to a screen corner and at least do something else productive during the enforced 30 second or 90 second ad. For example, answering an email or text or browsing your favourite social network. Then, when the advert ends, a single tap restores full screen playback of your programme. To illustrate this, I'll use Disney+, though this also works for BBC iPlayer, Prime Video, YouTube, and, I'm sure, several others - you'll have to experiment! So I'm watching a programme full-screen: And the ad starts, so I swipe up to go home,...

This is probably a niche - but also common need in the tech world. At least for old-timers like me, capturing video back in the dawn of smartphones and, even before, with VHS tape capture (for example from camcorders) in the 1990s. What we've ended up with, in 2025, passed down from our old computers and, quite probably, the computers before those, on CDRs and old hard disks, a number of low resolution videos that look hopelessly out of place in the modern world. So, typically, there would be a family video captured at 288p. (240p and 320p are also common.) The 'p' is how we talk about lines of horizontal pixels in a video, and for comparison 'modern' (i.e. post 2000) DVD is 480p in the USA and 576p in the UK. While genuinely modern video content online in 2025 is almost all 1080p or above (e.g. 4K, at 1440p). Quite a jump. So what the heck do we do with all our old (e.g.) 288p home videos? I mean, they're priceless in that - usually - there's no way to reca...

I realise that we're in the twilight of my tech career here, but in addition to writing missives in this blog, I'm continuing to produce videos, albeit in Shorts form, mostly on the subject of smartphone tech.  Worth a watch hopefully, even if limited by YouTube's insane compression and time constraints.  For example, extolling the surprising usefulness of Apple's Dynamic Island: And looking at the new features in Google's latest Feature Drop for the Pixel Fold: And then explaining my love for stereo in phone speakers: Plus a load of review content. Here's my three part Fairphone 5 review: Staying topical, will Apple ever release a folding iPhone? I think not: And finally, for now, how to put a skin on a phone, smoothly and successfully(!): That's just the last few months, there's a full two year set of Shorts videos for you to browse through, all listed here . Enjoy!

So YouTube has set up revenue sharing for approved contributors. Great. And they've got a whole heap of understandable restrictions to do with copyright, to make absolutely sure that you're not profiting from someone else's work. So you upload a video (such as my Smartphones Show ) and apply for it to be approved for revenue sharing. So far so good. But then they find some tiny piece of your video that might, possibly, potentially be a copyright problem. Does YouTube: a) Deny the request, email you to tell you what the problem was (in case you wanted to cut the offending word/section out) and invite you to reapply later on? OR b) Deny the request, delete the entire video from YouTube and put blocks in place to stop you re-uploading it for normal viewing? Yep, you guessed it, b) Which sucks, big time. I don't mind the powers that be getting picky over copyright and saying that I can't earn a few cents from it, but deleting the video so that people can't watch it ...

This is just so incredibly cool/awesome. The Japanese have stuck a satellite in orbit around the moon, and have released video showing Earth rise and Earth set. The mission arrived at the Moon on 18 October, when it was inserted into orbit at an altitude of roughly 100km. You can watch the Earth rise here , and set here . And yes, the little blue dot in the centre of the screen is OUR ENTIRE PLANET! Very humbling in every respect, physical and spiritual....

I've lost count of the number of commercial sites I've visited, upon which I want to purchase something simple, something small - and, when I get to fill in my credit card details, they also want me to create an account on their system, complete with user name, password, full address (again) and so on. Look, I just want to buy something, OK, I won't be coming back, don't take it personally, it's just that you've only got the one thing I want. So WHY DO I HAVE TO CREATE AN ACCOUNT? And have to remember (/write-down and keep safe) one MORE username and password. Usually, I just turn back at this point and go to another site, if possible, which doesn't have the same system. What sparked this off? I wanted to use a particular piece of royalty-free ambient music in my video podcast , so I clicked through the relevant site to the 'Ask us for a quote' section. All I wanted was a price, like "$10" or "$100". Instead I was presented with a...