...And we're back!

Greetings gentle reader!

Much has happened since my sign off late September last year.

The Broadband unit concluded its move to Sydney to become the "CNC" unit and has since received media coverage following the MD's announcement of a 24 hour continuous news service.

I moved from being an Adobe Community Expert for Premiere Pro to the newly created Video on the Web.

I'm enjoying my new role in the News Online development area looking at allowing quick and painless rich media creation for an institution that spans a continent.

After doing everything I possibly could to avoid the collectible card game fad that started over a decade ago, I have discovered Shadowfist and have become an avid player and collector. It has definitely changed my view on gaming.

My little boy is fast approaching 8 months old and fills me with joy every day.

Life is good.
:-)

There won't be a huge number of posts, but I should get back to using this blog for the reason it was originally designed for; a poor man's del.icio.us where I can spout on about what I find interesting on teh Intuhweb.

The rundown on the newest Flash player

Tinic Uro from Adobe runs through some of the new features of the newly released Flash Player Beta.

Let's put together some thought up scenarios I would imagine are important:

• You created a pod cast for iTunes and happily distribute over this channel. Now you want to add value to it and easily make it accessible over the web without special plug-ins, reaching an audience which does not have QuickTime installed. Well, this new feature will allow you to do this. You can take your existing podcast in .m4a format and present it on any web page through the Flash Player. Add more value by adding interactivity and branding if you want to. The possibilities are endless.


• Your media company has made or is about to make a significant investment into web video or video archiving. You are wondering what format you should choose. Video for Flash reaches everyone now, but the format is not an 'industry standard' so you have the fear that content you will create will become obsolete and unsupported at some point. Flash Player 9 Update 3 comes to the rescue: MPEG-4 is an extremely well documented ISO standard and completely vendor independent. And by using the Flash Player now you get instant gratification for viewers.


• You want to get best the possible quality out of your video and do not want to be tied to a particular encoding solution. You also like open source software to do all of the work you need to do to encode video. A combination of libfaad, x264 and MP4Box which are all licensed under the GPL will do exactly that, albeit with little usability and requiring lots of expertise. But it will now play just fine through the most distributed run time in the world, the Adobe Flash Player.

kaourantin.net: What just happened to video on the web?

You go away for a few weeks and crazy things happen.