Most digital cameras and camcorders these days can take both still pictures and video, but there’s still a big difference in their function. Camcorders can take relatively low-resolution photos, and still cameras can capture short video clips in a pinch, at much lower quality than regular videocameras.

Soon, however, the line between cameras and camcorders will start to disappear. Sony just announced prototype digital picture-sensing technology that can capture 6-megapixel images at 60 frames per second, which means that you could take any still frame from the video and print it out at high-resolution. And the video itself, at about 3000-by-2000 pixels, is even higher-definition than HDTV, which is only 1920-by-1080! You’ll need a computer monitor to appreciate it.

We can hardly wait. We’re just worried about how much disk space all this image wizardry will occupy. Time to invest in a 50GB Blu-ray recorder!

Two new Internet Radio search engines make it fun and easy to find the music you want. TUN3R.com lets you search by artist or song title, and then pops up a list of suggested stations with playlists from the last few days, so you can see if they play other things you like, too. You can also narrow things down by genre or language. But the coolest feature of TUN3R is the visual tuning "dial" that lets you click on any station in a big collage of home page icons.

iHeard.com lets you search by country, genre and language, with a much deeper set of genres (7 flavors of R&B, for example, to Tun3r’s one), but no artist search or playlists. Instead, it adds user ratings and "most popular" lists to help guide your station choices.

A: Region codes are used to identify the particular area of the world a commercial DVD can be played in. Theoretically, you are not supposed to play a North American disc in Europe or vice versa. There are six regions, and set-top DVD players are also tied to this system. So a region 1 (North America) disc is not supposed to play in a region 4 (Australia & Central/South America) player.

Home-made and non-commercial discs are normally region-free, or region 0, although burning software does allow you to set a region if you want. A disc can also be authorized for multiple regions, such as 2/5 (Europe and Russia/Africa).

But this system falls down a bit with computers, which are often carried around the world, so DVD drives usually have the ability to change regions, but only a few times, so be cautious about using this capability.

 Learn more about region codes

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From the Editor
Seen the news about Popcorn 3, but not sure how it differs from Toast 8? Here’s the lowdown on Popcorn 3’s exclusive new features:
Broad Media Player Support – Convert DVD-Video, TiVoToGo™, EyeTV and more for your iPhone, Apple TV, iPod, Xbox 360™, PlayStation® 3, PSP and BlackBerry®. Even auto-convert TiVoToGo files!
Video Quality Preview – Preview a short clip of your video at selected quality levels in seconds, and ensure that your video is worthy of conversion!
Pause & Resume– Pause video conversion with one click, so you can perform other tasks at full speed, then resume with another click.
Bookmark Support– Jump through videos on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV without the need for fast forward or rewind.
Batch DVD-Video Compression– Queue up multiple DVD-Video folders and compress them all at once, squeezing 9GB movies onto 4.7GB discs.

This month only, get Toast 8 & Popcorn 3 together for just $89.99 (almost half off the retail pricing)!! See below.

Tip of the Month: Are you using Toast to make DVDs with home video or photo slideshows for the holidays? Give them that finishing touch with printed disc labels and case covers. Our Disc Cover tutorial tells you how.

Life is busy. Tired of missing your favorite shows or simply want to save them for watching again later on DVD or your iPod? Even if you have a DVR, you probably can’t export the contents to your Mac, much less your iPhone. With Toast and EyeTV, you can turn your faithful Mac into a recorder, saving shows automatically that you can view anywhere: on your computer, on your TV, or on a portable player. And it all works with both regular and HDTV! You can even burn DVDs with your recordings.

Assuming you already have Toast 8 or Popcorn 3, all you need to do is add one of the Elgato EyeTV recorders, such as the EyeTV Hybrid USB stick, or the HDHomeRun network tuner (which allows any Mac on your network to use one of the two tuners in the box). Either way you go, Toast makes it easy to save the programs you’ve captured on your Mac to DVD or export them to your iPhone, iPod or Apple TV. See this month’s feature article on MyRoxio.com for the full story.

 Read the tutorial

Want to make your travel or landscape photos more exciting? Or simply provide more compelling pictures of your house for sale? Try making a panorama. Panoramas can turn a humdrum scene into a stunner, simply by virtue of scale and composition. You can use any Mac stitching software (which may have come with your camera), such as Calico or PanoramaMaker. All you need is a camera and a few tips:

• Use a tripod to keep the horizontal planes level, and to make it easy to turn the camera on one spot. Or find a handy rock or table to rest it on. For pro results, a special panorama head can eliminate parallax.

• Start taking pictures at one side of the scene, and gradually turn the camera so that each picture overlaps about 30-50 percent with the previous one. The more overlap, the better.

• Make sure you are not positioned too close to any large object that would fill the frame as you turn toward it. Also keep the main subject off-center, so it doesn’t focus your eye on the middle.

• You can stop whenever you want, anywhere up to 360 degrees, although circular panoramas work best with special viewing software.

 Getting Started

 Shooting Tips

 Inspiration

Where can you search through your iTunes and iPhoto libraries all in one place, as well as iMovies, DVDs, EyeTV shows and TiVoToGo recordings? The Toast 8 Media Browser! This powerful tool even lets you play back any media file instantly, without opening other applications. Even better, Spotlight integration lets you search by filename through large music and photo libraries, as well as files stored elsewhere on your hard disk. There’s no easier way to retrieve all the media files you need for your project.

Want to put your movies, TV shows and home video on your cell phone or media player, but don’t know where to start? Confused by all the new formats like H.264 and MP4? Let Roxio Crunch do the heavy lifting.

With Crunch, the whole process is reduced to just three easy steps. You simply choose the video source files (in nearly any format), choose output presets optimized for your device, then sit back and convert! You can Crunch as many files as you want in one batch, making it a snap to encode entire movie libraries for your new iPhone, iPod Touch or Apple TV.

 See Crunch in action