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

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

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

Flash Lite 3 running on Marvell Inc. Kirkwood platform is now available. Marvell as you know, acquired XScale line of processors from Intel a while ago, and Kirkwood SoC has a 1.2 GHz XScale core.  (Xscale is basically ARM9 capable of ARM V5 instruction set.) Target market for Kirkwood is Set-top boxes, home gateway, home media servers, point of sale computers and plug-computers. ......continue reading

Here’s a video of Flash Lite 3.1 running on Intel CE3100 platform that was demoed at IDF (Intel Developer’s Forum). The demo showed an accelerated FL3.1 capable of playing 1080P HD h.264 content via a UI designed using Flash Lite. Let me know if you are interested in any additional information. ......continue reading

Some of you have must have seen the documents published by Adobe on devnet that talk about several details of the Flash Lite digital home platform. One of the powerful features of the Flash Lite for digital home is the ability to be able to extend Actionscript. You can create your own Actionscript commands, define them and implement corresponding logic in Flash Lite code. For example, you can have a command to change volume of TV, or channel or fetch updated data for an ad- etc. etc. This is a very powerful feature and is available for Flash Lite on digital home devices. ......continue reading

Here’s a cool application for digital home.  Boxee is designed to be used on a TV screen and remote. Boxee runs on your laptop and via specialized UI, allows one to bring up applications, games, photos etc. on the TV.  It is still running on your laptop and is only available for Mac OS, Windows, Ubuntu and Apple TV. There is a remote control application available for iPhone. (Without spending time reading specs, my guess is that to be able to extend this to use general purpose remotes, you’d need some kind of special hardware/receiver on your laptop.) It requires a CPU running at 1 GHz or faster. Boxee is also using Twitter like ‘follow me’ model in which you can follow other users and recommend them shows. ......continue reading