There seems to be lot of curiosity around Flash Lite 4, especially since Adobe is not spending any marketing efforts to promote it. In our opinion, Flash Lite 4 is an excellent solution for embedded devices since Flash 10 will be too ‘heavy’ given the limitations of CPU and memory for embedded devices. Flash Lite 4 offers the same portability that Flash Lite/FLDH offered (i.e. can be ported to Linux Framebuffer for example),  H.264 acceleration is easier to implement and there are very restrictions on what can be done with FL4. (Flash 10 must be a plug-in in contrast). You could easily have an API based version of FL4 that suites your requirements and do fancy things with it. ......continue reading

Youtbube API blog posted by John Harding suggests that Youtube has no intention to switching to HTML5 to serve youtube videos. The blog post goes onto list several shortcomings of HTML5 that prevents Youtube from making a switch and suggests that youtube will stick with Flash for some time - especially now that Flash has announced that it will support VP8 codec in future Flash releases. DRM, streaming, microphone/camera support, video embedding- stuff that Youtube lives off- all seems to go in favor of Flash. ......continue reading

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

We now have Flash Lite 4 port available on X86 running Linux Framebuffer. Why do you need port on X86 when Flash Lite 4 is meant for low end devices? Well- there are two reasons. ......continue reading

Calsoftlabs has ported Flash Lite 4 to TI OMAP running on Beagleboard. The port runs on Rev 3 of the board running Linux Framebuffer. An evaluation package is being put together and available to OEMs upon request. ......continue reading

Much is being debated about HTML5 replacing Flash and doomsday is coming for Flash so on. My take on this is that HTML5 does not stand a chance to replace Flash in the short and medium term. Long term? Who knows- that’ll depend on how fast HTML5 can overcome some of its deficiencies, how browsers evolve and how Silverlight and JavaFX plays out. ......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

Well- everyone is waiting for Flash 10.1 and Flash 4 on embedded devices that support Actionscript 3 among other things. The official date for the release for either is not set yet, but we (Calsoft) have put together a plan for the OEMs looking to upgrade from Flash Lite 3. The goal is to simplify the process of migrating to newer version based on your requirements. The upgrade plan will allow you to migrate your earlier port to newer version with minimum cost and effort, and will provide with a certified player. I will post more information on this in coming days. Feel free to email with any questions in the meantime. ......continue reading

Adobe does a great job of maintaining a list of Flash enabled mobile/wireless devices, but there isn’t any such list for consumer devices. Originally I started keeping track of CE devices with Flash for my other blog flashliteonline.com where I was hoping to write about Flash Lite applications. But the CE market has been slow to evolve so there has been little to report on Flash Lite applications on such devices. With the addition of Flash Lite for Digital Home, I am hopeful that new devices will start emerging soon and I think this blog is a good place to maintain such list. The list is available on ‘Flash Enabled CE devices‘ page. If you know of any other devices that should be on the list, please comment or drop me a line at anand at joshimail dot net. I will update the list from time to time. ......continue reading

Lightblueoptics, a start-up company that makes a interactive display that converts any surface into touch screen is using Flash Lite for UI. Take a look at press releases from Elecronics Weekly and Geeksmack. They show pictures of of keyboard being projected onto any surface. The display works as any other keyboard and responds to touch as needed. The keyboard is projected using Flash Lite, an IR sensor senses the movement of your finger and the projection technology is based on holograph. The gadget is being demonstrated at CES. ......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

QNX (owned by Harman International now) has a port of Flash Lite available alongwith the OS distribution. QNX is based on Unix and their Car platform comes with Flash Lite. The company provides users with a reference implementation to Flash Lite for selected platforms such as Freescale. To facilitate the adaption, QNX has put together a fairly large consortium consisting of hardware, software and OEMs. The company also has a portal where application developers can post their applications which would then be downloaded by car drivers. ......continue reading

I came across this blog on Cultofmac.com. Here the author sites some unknown source from Reddit and says that Flash in its present form consumed significant battery on iPhone and was one of the reasons why Apple rejected it. The post has quite a bit of information on why Flash was rejected by Apple. Again I don’t know how much truth is to the story but you can read the post here. ......continue reading

Flash Lite 3 for digital home, is now available for TI platform. The port is optimized for h.264 video and AAC audio using TI Codec engine. This allows you to play Flash video in 30 fps at D1 resolution. The port allows for streaming content using HTTP and RTMP protocols.   We have kept the design modular so that the customers can potentially get the development kits from us and integrate their own libraries if they choose to.The port is tested on TI DaVinci DM 6446 processor and runs on Linux. Of course the port is done on Linux framebuffer as most of the embedded devices require a thin blitting layer. Please email me at anand at joshimail dot net for additional information. ......continue reading

Last week Microsoft announced release of Windows Mobile 6.5 that included Flash Lite 3 plug-in for Internet Explorer. At the same time, several new WinMo based phones were announced such as HTC Tilt2, Imagio and Pure.  With the addition of Flash, users can now view several web sites that are Flash enabled. (Of course the CPU/RAM limitation still comes in the picture, but all these are high end phones and hopefully will have a powerful CPU and should come with some sort of video acceleration. ......continue reading