Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

"I have a Flip Mino HD. I need to email video in MPEG-4. Flip records in this but the problem is that the file must be reduced. How do I do that?"

Sending video in an email is always a tricky proposition because email programs don't work very well for sending large attachments. Most video tends to be well over the email attachment threshold and if you want to email HD video, you are definitely going to be outside the acceptable size for an email attachment. A better solution is to put the video somewhere that the person you email it to can download from.

I want to take text messages from my iPhone and save them on my computer. Is it possible to save iPhone SMS text messages to my PC?"

Each time you backup your iPhone, text messages are stored by iTunes just in case anything happens to your iPhone and you want to get them back. For some reason, Apple doesn't make these readily available for viewing on your computer (and if you use secure backups they are encrypted). Fortunately some industrious software creators have come up with software that takes those SMS text messages from your iPhone and makes them available in a readable format on your computer.

"Is it better to get a computer monitor with a 400 nits brightness rating or a 400 cd/m² brightness rating?"

If you are comparing two computer monitors and one lists its brightness in nits while the other lists cd/m² brightness, you're in luck. Nits and cd/m² are the same thing. Nits is a term that has gone out of favor for measuring the brightness of electronics, but it is fundamentally the same measure of candelas per square meter represented by cd/m².

"I'm shopping for a new computer monitor to use both for my PC and as an HDTV screen with HDMI. I'm trying to decide between two that appear to be the same except that one says 250 cd/m² and the other one says 400 cd/m². The monitor with 400 cd/m² is more expensive, but I don't see any other difference. What is cd/m² and why does it make a computer monitor cost more?"

cd/m² is the measure of brightness for a monitor in terms of how well the screen will show up in brightly lit conditions. cd/m² stands for candelas per square meter and is roughly a measure of how many candles of light are emitted from the screen being measured. Think of a candle as being approximately one candela. The thing to keep in mind about cd/m² as it relates to your computer monitor is where you plan to use it.

"I have MSN Premium service and they gave me a Hotmail email account with an email address @MSN.com. If I discontinue MSN for Internet service, will my existing Hotmail (now Windows-Live-Hotmail) account go away? Will I have to change the @msn.com part?"

If you can keep up with the number of times Microsoft has changed the name of their email offering, you're doing better than most people. MSN Premium stopped making sense when the Windows Live free products started offering more features than the pay version. With the exception of a dial-up service offering, MSN Premium simply doesn't have anything to offer that can't be had for free somewhere else. The good news for you is canceling your account does not mean giving up your email address. If you contact the MSN Premium service to cancel, they will help you convert your Premium account to a free @msn.com account accessible through the standard Windows Live Hotmail login. Save yourself about $10 per month and cancel your account without worrying about needing to change your email address.

"Can I play a Blu-ray Disc on my PC with my DVD writer drive?"

Blu-ray discs require a Blu-ray compatible drive in order to play Blu-ray movies on your PC or in your home entertainment system. A standard DVD-RW or DVD+RW drive will not play Blu-ray movies on your PC. Fortunately the prices for Blu-ray drives have come down substantially and are now under US $100 for a drive you can connect to an existing Windows PC. Keep in mind in addition to the actual Blu-ray drive, you also need software capable of decoding the Blu-ray video on the disc. The software I use to play Blu-ray on my own computer is Cyberlink PowerDVD, which is a reliable software solution for all versions of Windows.

"After I download a movie torrent file it tells me I need to install x3player to view it. Do I really have to pay for x3 player download or is there some other way to view these x3player movies?"

It is very likely the file you just downloaded contains a virus or other malware that will damage your computer. Most of the so-called video files that run an advertisement for x3players are actually just dummy files meant to trick people unfortunate enough to download the files into damaging their computer. The actual movie or tv show file is almost never what it claims to be.