DailyApps » flash

High Quality Videos Coming to YouTube Soon

Karthik Kastury — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:00:43 +0000

Speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference Youtube Co-founder Steve Chen said that Youtube will at some time in future stream high quality videos. Although YouTube’s goal, he said, is to make the site’s vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer’s Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if they want it.

Steve Chen said that the high-quality streams will be available in the next months, but only for some of the videos. This is probably the reason why YouTube’s bulk uploader increased the size limit for a video from 100 MB to 1 GB.

YouTube probably has the lowest quality videos on the Web today thanks to the Flash 7 Technology. According to Wikipedia,

“YouTube’s video playback technology is based on Macromedia’s Flash Player 7 and uses the Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec. (…) [The video] has pixel dimensions of 320 by 240 and runs at 25 frames per second. The maximum data rate is 300kbit/s.”

Steve Chen also confirmed that in YouTube’s internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was uploaded it. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with — 320 x 240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn’t going to help much. So expect the rollout of High Quality Videos to be pretty slow from Youtube since the existing setup is working well for them, so this is just an experiment.

AirTalkr : The All in One IM Tool

Karthik Kastury — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:18:44 +0000

I am sure you have accounts in MSN, Yahoo, GMail etc. Many a time you have friends in all the networks who you would like to chat over IM. Ofcourse you can install Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or gTalk but then it becomes very tedious to manage all your buddies. Softwares like Pidgin, Trillian make it easier to manage your buddies over multiple networks. But today I am going to show you a cool Adobe AIR based app called AirTalkr that runs on Adobe Runtime and supports Multiple IM networks like Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ etc..

AirTalkr has a very slick interface and is pretty fast and responsive from my basic testing. The chats seem to be fine, but there are some missing features like File Transfers, Smilies etc.. Apart from the IM capabilities AirTalkr also has support for popular Social networks like Myspace, Facebook, Flickr etc with functionality that is dubbed as AirCard.

All in all AirTalkr looks like a cool app to have. Though not feature rich like Pidgin or Trillian it definitely is the easiest to use, that should help not so technically advanced users. While it won’t replace Pidgin for me but I would definitely use when I get bored.

Thanks to Sindhu, Shankar Ganesh

Photoshop Express – Coming Very Soon

Karthik Kastury — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:10:49 +0000

Adobe the maker of the image manipulation software of professionals will very soon be launching Photoshop Express that will mimic the functionality of the Desktop version of Photoshop. While the Express version will not be extremely powerful, it would have some basic to intermediate effects that should be enough for an average guy who wants to edit his photos without having to install the bulky Photoshop software on your desktop.

While not much is known about Photoshop Express right now John Nack from Adobe has posted a screenshot of the Photoshop Express and from what I can see it does really look like a promising product. What does this mean to other online Image Editors like Picnic and Fauxto.. They might find the going tough to compete with a biggie like Adobe. Afterall Photoshop is a household name for image editors and the brand is going to help Adobe in a big way.

Well here is the screenshot that I promised to give you :

Via John Nack’s Blog

Apple TV Web Edition

Karthik Kastury — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 23:43:46 +0000

If you are one of those who always liked the Apple TV but didn’t have one, then Paul Yanez has a solution for you by creating a web version of Apple TV, similar to web interfaces of Joost and Babelgum. And guess what Paul has named it, it is called Not Apple TV.

Not Apple TV is a flash based version of Apple TV and it has the same enviable UI that original Apple TV has. Not Apple TV works with all the popular Internet Video sites like Youtube, Metacafe etc.. Here is a screenshot of Apple TV in Action :

Not Apple TV is down while I write this so a special thanks to Tech-Buzz for the Image.

Silverlight RC1 is here

Karthik Kastury — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 11:00:19 +0000

Tim Sneath, one of the lead developers of the Silverlight RIA(Rich Internet Platform) has announced the release of Silverlight RC1.

Here is a brief Snip of the release announcement.

Since the beta we released at MIX, we’ve fixed approximately 2000 bugs and work items and we’re now feature complete with the final JavaScript-based API. This version of the runtime is vastly more stable than the beta release: our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release.

To me silverlight looks fairly impressive and I guess it is going to give Adobe Flash a hard run for its money. Download the Silverlight RC1 here and see some impressive demos here.