Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

I have wanted to get a Bluetooth headset for driving in the car for quite some time. It always seemed to be second place to something else that was more urgent on the ‘purchase list’. When I was on vacation I received a new Plantronics Discovery 665 as a gift, and what a nice gift it has been.

The first thing anyone asks me about it is “How does it sound?”. I honestly can say that on my side it is clearer that using the cell phone itself while in the car. I believe that this is due to the gel ear insert that for most people will actually hold the unit in your ear without any ear loop. This makes quite the seal in the ear canal and blocks most other background noises from affecting the call. I have quizzed quite a few callers about how it sounds to them on the other end of the call and all except for one person told me it sounds the same as if I was talking directly into the phone. This means that the AudioIQ feature is doing the job of blocking out some of the background noise from the conversation that the sensitive mic would otherwise pass on to the other party.

The unit comes with some nice options as well including a home charger, a car charger and the ability to clip a holster onto your shirt to carry it around. Here is an excerpt from their website that includes those and other details:

The Plantronics Discovery 665 Bluetooth headset is the optimal road-warrior conversation piece! AudioIQ digitally enhanced sound improves the experience on both ends of the call, creating stand-out sound so you can hear and be heard like never before. Unique vehicle power charger with call indicator light helps ensure it’s always ready when you need it. For a comfortable, customized fit it weighs only 9 grams, and comes with three soft gel ear tips and an optional ear stabilizer loop.

I am very happy with this unit but I need to offer one bit of advise. A group of colleagues at my 9-5 bought a set of OEM units off of Ebay and they were not the same at all. The units were very similar in design but seemed a lot more flimsy and many of them have broken. Be careful what you pay for!

The first few times that I attempted to create a DVD of some of my home recordings I always ended up with a final product that was about 15 fps. I had to start digging around as to the cause of the dropped frames. What was strange was that when viewing the captured video and also the edited video before I would import it into iDVD, it looked fantastic.

I did some looking around and it seems that the poor end result is actually caused by the export format of iMovie. I was new to using it so I chose to export the video through the share options so that it was integrated in the iDVD media chooser. That I believe saves it in .M4V format and the forum post that I found suggested to export the movie in .DV format. To do this you need to choose to export via Quicktime. In the save window you have all the options you need to change the export format, one of them being .DV.

This is a good way to do it because you captured in .DV format to your iMovie, you are not losing anything during export. So now iDVD has almost a raw format because .DV doesn’t have any compression.

It seems to take longer to compile the final version of the disc through iDVD but the iMovie export is definitely faster. I chose to perform the iDVD burn overnight and in the morning it was ready.