Firefox 3 is going to provide a wide range of improvements to performance, stability, and security, and it’s also going to present several new user facing features. Here is a quick recap of design work that’s been going on in the Mozilla community over the past few weeks for Firefox 3, along with information about how you can help contribute, by providing feedback on these designs, or creating your own UI mockups.
Category Archive: Tech
YouTube for Apple TV uses H.264, not Flash (Stanley posted on June 2nd, 2007 )
Earlier this week, Apple announced that YouTube.com videos would become available on the Apple TV after a software update that will be made available in June.
iLounge spoke with Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Mac Hardware Marketing, David Moody, who provided more details about this upgrade.
According to Moody, not all of the Youtube catalog will be available on day one. Instead, “thousands of videos designed for Apple TV” will be available at launch, but that the remainder will become available by the fall. The reason for the delay is that Youtube will be encoding all of their videos into a “H.264 streaming-efficient compression format” specifically for the Apple TV. All of Youtube’s videos are currently encoded in Flash Video (FLV) format.
While no official reason is given for the mass transcoding of Youtube’s entire catalog, Macformat.co.uk believes it has to do with the iPhone.
As far as I know even now, Flash content per se might not play on the iPhone from day one. But Apple clearly doesn’t – indeed, shouldn’t – care, as YouTube is for many people the most critical site that uses Flash.
Indeed, both the iPod and iPhone can play H.264 encoded video, and so it seems the entire Youtube catalog may also become available to those devices later this year.
In an early iPhone FAQ, Jobs described this exact scenario:
Markoff: “Flash?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”
Markoff: “What about YouTube–”
Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”
Creative shuffles out tiny Zen Stone (Stanley posted on May 4th, 2007 )
We know that it’s a bit tired to compare every single new DAP that hits the market to one of Apple’s babies, but one look at the screenless, postage-stamp-sized Zen Stone is all it takes to discover where Creative got the design inspiration for its latest player. At 18.3 grams, the Stone is slightly heavier than the 2G shuffle — it seems Creative was more concerned with keeping prices low than weight down, as the 1GB, clip-equipped player will retail for just $40 when it hits shelves on the 14th. Different colors and skins allow for some degree of personalization, and the claimed 10-hour battery life should help you get through most of the 250 or so songs you’ll be able to store on the non-expandable memory. Doesn’t look like we’ve got an iPod-killer here, but with accessories such as the TravelSound Zen Stone dock going for only 40 bucks as well, Creative’s latest “me-too” will likely fall into a comfortable niche.
Apple adds Xvid to QuickTime components page (Stanley posted on April 28th, 2007 )
Is Apple rolling out the welcome mat for XviD? Probably not. XviD has made it to the QuickTime Components listing over at QuickTime’s resources page. Xvid of course is one of the more popular video compression formats out there, with most torrents coming in this variety.
We believe that the adding of Xvid was simply based on the codecs popularity, and the immediate AppleTV hack to support the format. With this codec you can now properly export your XviD movies to a more Apple friendly M4V format.
Whoever updated the site, forgot to change the logo to point to XviD’s site rather than DIVX!
Microsoft mugged over VC-1 codec patent terms (Stanley posted on April 28th, 2007 )
We meet people on the various IPTV, mobile TV and web video circuits who always comment that VC-1, after a flying start, has fallen back and that pretty much these days the codec of choice is either VP6 from On2 Technologies for web video and H.264 for everything else, with no VC-1 in sight.
Just over three weeks ago the MPGE LA issued a final license for the Microsoft-inaugurated VC-1 codec, after forming a group to assess essential patents and to discuss terms for it, back in March 2004, the process taking precisely three years. Read the rest of this entry >>
