Adobe brings Flash video to phones
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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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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft held another dog-and-pony show Friday to tout its prized Silverlight rich media technology, which will take on Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player for the hearts and minds of developers. The company's ReMix07 event, held at company offices in Mountain View, Calif, was a slimmed-down replay of the larger Mix07 conference held in Las Vegas in April. Featured were demonstrations of Silverlight benefits for Internet browsers, leveraged with Microsoft's Expression and the Visual Studio tools. "The core [function] that Siliverlight delivers is rich media capabilities," including video and graphics, said Scott Guthrie, general manager of the developer division at Microsoft. Silverlight, which is still in a pre-release stage, is deployable on Windows and Macintosh via a lightweight download. Net and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming models can be used with it. "Our goal is to have [Silverlight] run on as many systems as possible," Guthrie said. Microsoft wants to see it installed on hundreds of millions of clients. Microsoft officials are bullish on Silverlight, viewing it as having higher quality than Adobe Flash and of great use to venture capital-funded companies looking to provide a differentiated Web experience. "I think Silverlight gives you the richest possible way to watch video on the Web," said Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft. "I think that's something that most people in the industry have acknowledged and are pretty excited about." Flash, however, already is installed on more than 700 million Internet-connected desktops, Adobe said. Silverlight technologies currently accessible include the beta release of Silverlight 1.0, which is focused on adding media like graphics to existing Web sites. It is due to be generally available later this summer with a release candidate due soon, Guthrie said. An alpha release of Silverlight 1.1 is also available, geared to rich Internet applications and leveraging .Net programming. Silverlight tools also are planned for the Visual Studio 2008 platform due later this year. Silverlight will be supported on mobile devices and other OSes in the future, Guthrie said. A Linux client version is possible at some point, but Microsoft is focusing on Windows and Macintosh now because they have the largest installed base, Microsoft officials said.Â Â  Featured during this morning's presentation was a demonstration of a Silverlight-based video-editing application developed by Metaliq. With this application, videos could be dragged and dropped onto a palette and edited together. A ReMix attendee saw promise in Silverlight. "It seems like Microsoft is doing what they usually do, [which is] coming out with a tool that really goes over the top and does as much as if not more than what the other competitors do," said Craig Benson, vice president of engineering at InnerAthlete, which is an online athletic training site. InnerAthlete could use Silverlight to show video demonstrations, Benson said.Â  Also at ReMix, Guthrie stressed Windows Presentation Foundation. "It really enables you to build much richer desktop applications and push the boundaries of what the desktop can do," he said. He noted that another item on Microsoft's agenda is the planned Internet Information Services 7 with a rich hosting infrastructure. "This is a major update of our Web server stack," Guthrie said. In a separate, Windows-related development this week, Microsoft offered a "Windows Vista Momentum pack to its OEM partners to promote deployments of Windows Vista. The pack features information on what Microsoft calls "the great momentum and readiness" in the market from the Vista ecosystem.
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With Apple's stronghold on the MP3 player market, Eli Harari is looking to mobile phones, which require more and more of SanDisk's flash memory.
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Adobe has announced ambitious plans to unify the digital camera market by creating a single file format that all digital cameras can record in.
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Richard Lord has a quick post about a handy library that can help with the creation of AVM2 swf files from inside of PHP.   It creates the number formats used in AVM2 swfs, as described here. I created these functions for the SWX project and am releasing the code under the MIT license so it can be used in other projects too.   You can download the file directly from his blog. You can find out more about the native data format (SWX) for Flash on the SWX Format website.
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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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With itsÂ acquisition of Macromedia in late 2005, Adobe Systems won control of the Flash technology that has become a nearly ubiquitous way of authoring and viewing interactive and multimedia content on the Web. Now, the 25-year-old software company with deep roots in creative applications and an iron grip on electronic documents thanks to its de facto-standard PDF document format, has its eye on development and content presentation across all sorts of platforms and devices.
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Recently I had lots of time on my hands visiting relatives and in-laws. Most of the time I was able to get an Internet connection. Sometimes I had to leech my connection from unsecured wireless access points. Some of my relatives and friends posted videos on youtube.com but they wanted to save other flash videos on their hard drive or USB drive. At first this can be frustrating if you don't understand what is going on. So I decided to download them the hard way. For the faint-of-heart, you can scroll all the way to the bottom of the article for the easy way to download flash video and audio files.    Why do this the hard way?  First I wanted to understand why it was less than straight forward to do. I understand why proprietary software developers are scared right now. Software is slowly moving to Internet applications. As most of you know, the Internet is wide open, even SSH and SSL to some degree.    With youtube.com, Google video and some of the more popular video sites you can download and install software to automatically grab the video or audio flash file. However, I had a lot of time on my hands and there are many sites where a video downloader does not work for the particular site.    If you find doing it yourself interesting then here's one way to download flash video files. Keep in mind this only works with embedded flash video or audio streams.
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New Doubleclick technology lets customers schedule, show ads on mobile phones.
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TechWeb - Macromedia and Nokia sign a partnership that pumps Macromedia's efforts to convince developers to use its Flash technology in building mobile-phone apps.
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Blog: Adobe Systems issues three critical security updates designed to address vulnerabilities in its Flash Player.
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Reg review Mobile phone styling comes to the MP3 world
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Adobe Systems Flash-based service, already integrated with Salesforce.com, lets developers embed voice services into Web applications.
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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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Blog: Prototype software sends recent images taken in the vicinity of a Flickr member to that person's mobile phone and keeps people up to date with contacts' Flickr photos.
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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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Inexpensive flash-based player isn't perfect, but it serves its purpose.