Adobe brings Flash video to phones
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InfoWorld - Adobe Systems&#39; Flash video, the format that made Web video a hit, is coming to mobile phones.
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(InfoWorld) - Opera Software's plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction. At present, Web developers have no consistent way to deliver media-rich content to the unlimited variety of platforms and browsers used by surfers worldwide. Using client- and server-side scripting, Web developers can divine which browser and operating system a user is running, but that's of little help. Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and the rest all require plug-ins, also known as Browser Helper Objects, to present content that's richer than W3C standards demand. Media player plug-ins, with Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime leading the category, are not consistently implemented across platforms. Each has its own style for wiring into browsers, its own terribly annoying traits, and its own set of proprietary formats that the others can't play, and yet each wants to take control of in-browser media playback when it's installed. And while all of these players have the ability to mix text, video, audio, scripting, and GUI interaction, these features are hardly ever used. Media players are used to play video and audio, and user interaction and scripting are handled in the browser with decidedly mixed results. Only Adobe Flash Player touches all the bases: vector graphics, scalable text, animation, audio, video, and scripting, and it rolls all of these types into a single document that's played by one widely accepted plug-in. Flash Player is smooth and responsive enough to handle interactive games, and encoding video for Flash allows developers to embed a unique GUI into the video. Windows Media, RealPlayer, and QuickTime don't hit that "one for all" sweet spot. But Flash is still a plug-in, large and highly demanding of computer resources, and while its platform coverage is broader than others, it's far from ubiquitous. Flash Player's girth leaves it notably absent from mobile devices, and that's where a common solution for rich, interactive multimedia documents is most needed. Flash Player is well distributed, but the superlative Opera platform-native full browser solution is everywhere: Windows, Solaris, QNX, OS X, OS/2, Linux (SPARC, PowerPC, and x86), FreeBSD, and BeOS, as well as the three most popular feature/smartphone platforms, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, and UIQ. Opera offers consumer electronics vendors a browser for embedded and set-top use as well. Opera is ubiquitous, but even it can't control what happens when a user clicks a link to a media file. Opera Software has decided to attack this issue head-on, promising to implement Flash-like rich, scripted multimedia document functionality directly in its browsers. That's a bold and potentially market-changing move. If Web developers can count on one browser consistently implementing rich multimedia playback, they might steer users toward that browser rather than pointing them to various required plug-ins. Of course, that's precisely what Opera Software is hoping for; Opera is commercial software, and hooking sites on its built-in Flash-like player would drive sales. But that's par for the course: Flash Player, like Apple, Microsoft, and Real plug-ins, is distributed free of charge to pull sites, users, and content creators into tools and premium services, and in Microsoft's case, to Windows. With Adobe open-sourcing its ActionScript JavaScript interpreter, and various open source projects aiming to clone or rival the functionality of Flash Player, Opera Software won't be the only game in town on desktops. But Opera has a shot at locking up the mobile market, freeing users from the proprietary, format-locked players that wireless operators burn into mobile phone firmware and hook to their browsers. One place where Adobe, Opera Software, and open source multimedia players can't go is the one place they're needed most: Apple's iPhone. Apple's decision to keep iPhone closed to third-party applications, despite its OS X underpinnings, means that iPhone is all about writing Web sites that target the Safari browser and play files encoded for QuickTime media formats. Apple's decision to lock developers inside Safari might be more tolerable if Apple were to broaden Safari along the lines that Opera Software intends for its browser. With Safari extending its reach to Windows, embedding Flash-like functionality in Safari would open the door to a great many possibilities for the sort of rich, interactive on-line (and off-line â Flash is competent for a limited range of desktop applications) content that would otherwise require the use of native code. In time, inclusive, cross-platform Flash or Flash-like rich multimedia document player technology will spread to cover all popular desktop, mobile, and consumer electronics platforms. It will happen because mobile and consumer electronics are green fields for a one-for-all rich multimedia document technology. It's a matter of who gets there first and who snags the greatest mind share. Vendors that decide to stay proprietary, who don't start developing or partnering toward the goal of a cross-platform Flash-style player, will find themselves behind the pack among users who want to take their video, audio, games, and lightweight applications on the road without being limited to a vendor or wireless operator's chosen player.
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Company hopes to boost use of its Flash format for delivering streaming video with new development kit.
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Adobe announced Monday that Adobe Flash Lite 3, scheduled for release in the first half of 2007, will include the capability to watch videos, bringing all the features of Adobe Flash Player to mobile devices equipped with the software.
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(InfoWorld) - Adobe Systems Inc. has officially named its new Apollo runtime "Adobe AIR" and will release a beta of the technology Monday along with a beta of the next version of the company's Flex development environment. Public betas and software development kits (SDKs) for both AIR and Flex 3 will be available Monday, marking the first time Adobe is simultaneously releasing its programming model and runtime for building rich Internet applications (RIAs) that can be run both on the Web and locally on the desktop, said Michele Turner, vice president of product management and developer relations at Adobe. Together, Flex and AIR are designed to bridge the gap between developers who write code and designers who use tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash to build Internet applications that have rich multimedia capabilities. MicrosoftÂ is encroaching on the space Adobe currently reigns, however. The company has integrated a version of its .NET runtime into its newÂ Silverlight Web technology which is aimed squarely at Adobe Flash. Silverlight can run video and multimedia applications cross-platform within different browsers. Both AIR and Flex 3 betas can be downloaded from Adobe Web sites. Adobe AIR (which stands for "Adobe Integrated Runtime") lets developers take applications built not only in Flash, but also in HTML, AJAX, and other Web-development languages and create them to run locally on a user's desktop. Flex is the development environment that can be used to build applications for AIR. AIR works as a wrapper, which makes it easy to take code from an existing Web application, wrap it in the runtime, and transfer it to the desktop. Developers can use Flex Builder to transfer Web applications into the AIR runtime, which must be installed on the desktop or embedded directly in the application to enable it to run locally, similar to how the Flash player runs Flash applications in the browser. New features for AIR that can be found in the beta are enhanced support for HTML, Ajax and Javascript, as well as the ability to integrate the PDF (portable document format) into AIR applications. The beta also includes tighter integration with Adobe's Dreamweaver Web design tool so developers can easily repurpose Dreamweaver applications to run on the desktop using AIR. Adobe also has added new features to Flex 3's beta, including tighter integration with Adobe's Creative Suite 3 package of Web, multimedia and image creation and design tools. The test version of the Flex 3 also includes a new tool that analyzes the performance of an application while it's being built to let a developer know where it might be running slowly and how it can be optimized to run more efficiently and faster. Additionally, Adobe has reduced the size of files created with Flex 3 so any application built using the tool will inherently run faster than applications built using Flex 2, Turner said. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Adobe Systems' Flash video, the format that made Web video a hit, is coming to mobile phones. On Monday at theÂ 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Adobe announced video will be included in Flash Lite 3, the next version of the Flash runtime environment for mobile phones. Licensees should be able to get the new software in the second quarter of this year, and Adobe hopes consumers will see it in action by year's end, said Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing for mobile and devices at Adobe. Adding video to Flash Lite will simplify the process of creating and distributing mobile video, which now forces mobile operators to use a fragmented set of special tools, according to Adobe. "The same video tools they use for delivering Web content can be used for delivering mobile content as well," Murarka said. Although relatively few mobile users are watching video on their phones today in most countries, carriersÂ and entertainment companies are starting to bet bigger on the new medium. Last week, a division of Time Warner signed a deal with Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson for use of the company's technology to deliver news and cartoons, and U.S. operator Amp'd Mobile signed on Hollywood partners to create original mobile shows. The drive to put short video programs on tiny cell-phone screens follows the exploding popularity of short, relatively low-quality clips on Web sites such as Google's YouTube that use Flash video. With the upcoming version of Flash Lite, carriers and content companies will be able to use the same Flash server for mobile as for Web video as well as the same streaming protocol and the same encoding tools and processes, Murarka said. Videos probably would have to be resized for small handset screens but would not have to be completely re-encoded, he said. This will make it easier and faster to get shows onto handsets, he said. Flash Lite videos can be presented in a variety of forms, including streaming video, downloadable clips, and screen savers, and within Flash-based applications, according to Adobe. In addition, because the video capability is part of Flash Lite, it will be easier to integrate it with software for using video, such as channel selectors and play, reverse and fast-forward controls, he added. More than 200 million phones have been shipped with Flash, Adobe said Monday. That includes both Flash Lite and FlashCast, a client-server platform that lets carriers send content to phones in the background so subscribers can use it even outside the network's coverage area. About 120 million of those Flash phones shipped in 2006, and that was the first year when a majority of them -- about 70 percent -- were sold outside Japan, Murarka said. Japan's NTT DoCoMo was an early adopter of the technology, delivering a FlashCast news and information service called i-channel, which has more than 8 million subscribers, according to Adobe. Â
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PCS Vision Multimedia streams faster video plus audio channels to Samsung phone.
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Adobe is bringing its video editing tools online through multimedia storage site Photobucket, which would make them available for free. The application would be based on technologies used in Adobe's Premiere product, it said.
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Adobe has released its online video editing software for users of YouTube and MTV.com. Adobe Premiere Express is a free, Web-based video remix and editing technology that is designed to be easy and fun to use.
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Tablet form-factor, Flash UI, 'super 3G' downloads
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New Doubleclick technology lets customers schedule, show ads on mobile phones.
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Adding to its offerings for digital imaging and video hobbyists, Adobe Systems on Wednesday announced a new video-editing package and an update to its Photoshop Elements image-editing product.
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New technology could bring personal video recording capabilities to cell phones next year.
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Pinnacle Systems unveils Pinnacle Transfer Video, a mobile device capable of recording analog video onto iPods and other USB 2.0 storage devices without using PCs.
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Aimed at enabling new levels of interactive content not previously possible on mobile phones, PDAs and other handheld devices, Nvidia has unveiled its GoForce 3D 4500 3D wireless media processor (WMP), which allows mobile content developers to create 3D
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Why Flex and Apollo will shake up client application development Adobe Flash came from nowhere to become the obvious choice for embedding video into websites, despite the presence of well-established alternatives including Real, Windows Media and Quicktime. Could it have a similar impact on client application development? Last month Adobeâs Ben Forsaith ran a Flex 2 workshop for the press, showing off the new Eclipse-based IDE called FlexBuilder.â¦
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This week we look at some of the production improvements, such as Flash SWF recommendations, Express Show, additional playback options, the onyx template for video instead of SWF, and options for sharing your video, including FTP and Screencast. By Nathan Segal. 0104