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RealAudio and ultimately Real Video was the original, old school audio and video compression used on the Internet during the early Web 1.0 days. No doubt that Web 2.0’s rise in popularity was caused in part by YouTube and the ability for its users to easily send video up to a server and have it transcoded and streamed on the fly - without the need for expensive programs like the RealMedia server set.
YouTube leveraged the Adobe Flash technology, which in its infancy, would show only cartoon like video, then incorporated codec, or software decoding support for television like motion video. This has been the standard for video distribution on the Internet, but requires support for software, and only lately has incorporated decoding within hardware. Notably the iPad and iPhone are two such media devices that do not have flash media decoding support due to a long feud between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Adobe. Jobs calls flash a CPU hog, and a claims it would cut battery life on his devices from 10’s of hours to just an hour if it was supported. Instead, he and many others hope to see HTML5 take a rise to prominence.
In this SXSW 2010 session, Christopher Blizzard, director of developer relations with Mozilla, and Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project and WikiMedia foundation, go in depth on what HTML5 has to offer as it pertains to video on the web.
Click to continue reading SXSW 2010: Fun with HTML5 video
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SXSW 2010: Media Armageddon: What happens when the New York Times dies?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Internet,
This is a session wrap-up from SXSW 2010. To start the session, a question was asked by the moderators to the audience “If the times ceased to exist, how would you feel?” Only a few hands in an audience of 500 said that would be disappointed. Only several more were indifferent, but a vast majority would be upset if the media giant no longer created their content in print or online.
Those on the panel were:
- David Carr, a writer from the NY Times.
- Amy Langfield, travel and events site New Yorkology a blog on what is going on in New York.
- Marcus Moulitsas of the Daily Kos a blog site with thousands of writers.
- Greg Beato writer for a magazine called Reason
- Henry Copeland the moderator who is with BlogAds
Gawker is believed to be marching towards the Times in regard to a quality of content creation by adding reporters. With Nick Denton running it, a former reporter himself, it is believed by the panel to be pushing towards a spin as a quality web newspaper. Gawker Media has been pushing content out quicker than traditional media outlets. Blogs typically do not spend the time fact checking, do not create a back story, and create quick and concise content with few details, with the benefit of these being published in an extremely timely manner.
Click to continue reading SXSW 2010: Media Armageddon: What happens when the New York Times dies?
Apple just released an update to Safari 4, and you can download Safari 4.0.5 right now by firing up Software Update, or by simply hitting the Safari product page and downloading it there. According to Apple, you get a few performance and stability improvements (always a good thing,) as well as some bug fixes. Can’t complain about any of that, right?
Oh, and if you are on OS X and run something like Saft, be sure to wait before installing the update, in case it breaks your plugins and add-ons.
Latest Gear Live Videos
Google: China Hackers Stole Valuable Source Code
Posted by Finnian Durkan Categories: Google, Internet,
According to McAffee CTO George Kurtz the cyber-attacks that occurred in January targed a small number of employees who controlled source code management systems. These source code management systems handle the myriad changes that developers make as they write software, the breach of which can have a cascade effect across multiple levels of Google and as many as 30 other business targeted in the January attacks. Aside from being awesome and using ‘cyber-attack’ in a sentence, I also have some valuable source-code for sale at rock-bottom prices; check out my store at ‘CyberNinjaAssassinCassanova138’ on eBay.
Read More 
| ComputerUser
Coupon Surfer Challenges Rush Limbaugh to use Internet Coupons
Posted by Finnian Durkan Categories: Internet,
Last week Rush Limbaugh admitted that he had never clipped a coupon in his entire life. This week CouponSurfer has challenged him to use their coupon site to clip his first-ever coupon. Based upon market studies and tons of compiled data, I have come to the conclusion that Rush is going to be disappointed in couponsurfer.com’s performance in this arena; nowhere in the entire internets did I find coupons for ‘blood of 1,000 virgins’ or ‘Oxycotin.’
Bing launches improved Auto-suggest attached to your personal search history
Posted by Finnian Durkan Categories: Internet, Microsoft,
If there is one thing that I hate, it is when technology inconveniences me more than it helps. We’ve all been there: it’s late, there’s a movie quote or an actor that you can’t get out of your head—you want, nay, NEED to solve this riddle before your body will allow you some restful shut-eye. What do you do? You roll over in your bed/futon/inflatable mattress and flip open your ever-present and never shutdown laptop and open a link to your favorite search engine. As you mindlessly begin to type your parameters, in my case the phrase ‘that hairy guy that dated Carla on Cheers’ (Nick, played by Dan Hedeya incidentally) is my search of choice tonight. No sooner have you gotten the letters ‘T-H-A..’ into the searchbox then a menu opens up listing more unrelated ‘tha’ phrases than a Wu-Tang song. After briefly looking at a list of ‘Thai Restaurants’ and ‘Thankless Jobs’ (*ahem*) you quickly close the menu and type out your search terms in their entirety. Annoying, isn’t it?
Well, Bing has taken that first step to making your oh-so-difficult web-searching easier by integrating your query history into their auto-suggest feature. Now when you begin to type your search in Bing your previous search queries will be taken into account when serving up auto-suggest keywords. Not only that, but they will appear in the same color (purple) that your web-browser uses to display already-visited links thus helping to differentiate them from non query-based auto-suggestions. In my case this means that when I type in ‘T-H-A’ like I previously mentioned about 30 purple-hued links to ‘That so-and-so from such-and-such-movie’ will appear since I am forever referencing pop culture but am blessed with the memory recall of a 2 month-old. At least now I’ll be able to save myself a few keystrokes before Bing directs me to IMDB. Bing has also allowed this feature to be turned off completely or to be managed with their ‘Manage History’ option if you are paranoid that your boss is going to search your work computer’s internet history and wonder why you keep searching ‘jobs that don’t suck like the one that i have now’. Either way, it’s progress.
JooJoo tablet shipments delayed to March 25
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Handhelds, Internet,
Well, it looks like one of the two Hail Mary-esque advantages that the JooJoo tablet had over the iPad has just gone away with the company announcing that shipments of the device will be delayed by a full month, due to a manufacturing issue. The culprit? According to Fusion Garage, makers of the JooJoo, it had to do with a defect in the 12.1-inch capacitive touchscreens. To make up for the delay, anyone who has pre-ordered a JooJoo device will also receive a free accessory. From the looks of things, it’ll be the JooJoo kickstand.
Of course, this puts the JooJoo right in iPad launch territory, which can’t bode well. But hey, there is that other distinct advantage, that being that JooJoo support Flash. Is that enough of a factor to make people choose this device over an iPad? Yeah, right.
Internet Explorer 6 needs to die, and anyone sensible will agree with that statement. That’s why we are big fans of the major web publishers that are doing their part to hasten that demise, like that Google is doing with YouTube on March 13th. According to them:
Support stops on March 13th. Stopped support essentially means that some future features on YouTube will be rolled out that won’t work in older browsers.
In the image above, you see that YouTube now features instructions on how to upgrade to a more modern (and more competent) web browser when they detect you are using an older browser, like IE6. Also, it’s not just YouTube that Google is doing this with, as IE6 support for Google Docs and Google Sites ends on March 1 as well.
Read More | YouTube Support via Ars
What is Google Voice? A video explanation
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Videos,
Google Voice, formerly GrandCentral before Google acquired it, has been around for a few years, but the company is really just now starting to push the product hard. They’ve put together a great channel on YouTube that describes each major feature (like voicemail transcription, personalized greetings, SMS to email, the mobile app, and more) individually, but we figured we’d throw the Google Voice overview up there so give you a taste of what we mean. Hit up the Google Voice YouTube channel to check out the rest of the video series, and to request an invite to the service.
Google Chrome for Mac and Linux picks up extension support, bookmark sync
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Software, Videos,
For all of you running the Google Chrome browser on Mac and Linux platforms, you’ll wanna update to the latest version of the beta, which includes support for extensions, as well as bookmark syncing. There are already over 2,200 extensions available in the Chrome Extensions Gallery, so you can get a bunch more functionality in your browser, dare we say, a more Firefox-like experience, just by updating. Seriously, go do it. Oh, and if you need to see how it all works visually, hit the demo video above that Google put together.
Read More | Google Chrome
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