I am sure several of you saw a notice pop-up on your PC in the morning about the latest Flash update from Adobe ….. Yes, that’s right- Flash player 10.1 is now officially available. Adobe Flash player team’s blog lists all the enhancements in fairly detail. A look at comments also gives you a glimpse into joy and grievances of public. The thing about Flash is that it is so powerful that no matter how many enhancements you make to it, there will always be something else to do. Adobe’s team does deserve a big round of applause for releasing FP10.1 on schedule. ......continue reading

Flash Lite 4 is now available from Calsoft. Flash Lite 4 is intended to run on devices that don’t sport a powerful CPU necessary to run Flash Player 10. (Flash 10 requires the CPU of the order of a minimum of 600 MHz ARM11 class. Of course some people will argue that MIPS 4K series is better than ARM11, but that is left to the judges for the time being ......continue reading

Flash Lite 3 (and now 4) can be customized to support h.264 video but the license for h.264 needs to be purchased separately by OEMs. We often get questions on how much additional costs this is going to incur so I researched and here’s what I found.  H.264 has a different licensing structure for devices and internet users. For non PC type devices, h.264 licenses is free upto 100K units and it costs $0.2 per unit upto 5 million units and $0.1 per unit after 5 million units. They cap the royalty at $5M for 2009-2010. (This information is picked from here). ......continue reading

Moonlight, an open source version of Silverlight is launched by Novell. Moonlight 2.0 is compatible with Silverlight 2.0 and includes some features of Silverlight 3, such as support for Bitmap APIs, file dialogs, pluggable media pipeline.  Moonlight 2.0 also offers better streaming of multimedia content based on the quality of the user’s connections. Moonlight development now closely following Microsoft Silverlight release. Moonlight 3.0 alpha will be available in Q1/2010. ......continue reading

Via youtube blog- “Starting next week, YouTube’s HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.” Youtube is slowly trying to improve the quality of its content and already has XL (Extra Large) version. (Extra large version is meant for large screen and only has h.264 videos from what I’ve seen). A limited youtube content can be viewed outside of Flash, and I am sure h.264 is the preferred format for 1080P. Today, for mobile or embedded devices, one needs to develop a special player to support youtube if Flash Lite is not available. Flash 10.1, when available this playing field will be equal. May be devices with a tiny HD projectors will emerge then. ......continue reading

ARM announced today that Flash 10 has been optimized for ARM Cortex-A series of processors. This is great news. In our experience, Cortex-A handles Flash content very well and we have been able to obtain satisfactory experience on a VGA or even higher resolution monitors for video. I hope that the optimized version takes  advantage of the NEON instruction set freeing up CPU to do other tasks. There are however several unanswered questions: ......continue reading

Fiercemobile is reporting that On2 Technologies has been acquired by Google. As you know, On2 VP6 codec has been at the heart of Flash since Flash 8 and is popular in video streaming. Google apparently paid $106.5 million. Read the press release here. ......continue reading

I came across this blog which describes how to play Youtube videos in Silverlight. Wow - Microsoft going after Flash bigtime? I mean Youtube and Flash is almost synonomous! This particular silverlight application plays h.264 video from youtube but not the Flash video. So Flash is still required if you want to play older videos, but newer videos are now available in h.264 and can be played using Silverlight. ......continue reading

There is a great article in Video/Image design line, a plublication on CMP/EE Times. The article explains how the decoder is similar yet different from any DCT based codec, and what tricks are used to achieve best quality video. VP6, as you know, is used in Flash 8 onwards. ......continue reading

On2 Technologies recently announced results of Q2, and a complete transcript of the call is avaialble on Seeking Alpha. Some of the interesting things that I gathered from the script: ......continue reading

Video and imaging design line has published a great article by Jim Bankoski, CTO of On2, on the techniques used in VP7. The article talks about golden frames, adaptibility to available bandwidth and low complexity to achieve optimum image quality. Jim also goes on to mention that there are several other proprietary techniques that are no discussed in the article. ......continue reading

Much is being discussed about why Flash is not available on iPhone, and why it is taking so long for Adobe and Apple to release it and if it even will be released. Flash Lite has already been ported to several different devices, so there is no reason why it can not be ported to iPhone.. Whatever the reason may be, I have analyzed various hardware and software factors that could impact Flash port and performance on iPhone. In reality, if there is management will, a Flash port on iPhone is very much possible. From the technology perspective, the only limiting factor could be the performance which can be overcome by using video acceleration. ......continue reading