It’s things like these that make me say wow and what is making me say wow today is a little project created by Ben Firshman. What Ben created is a JavaScript emulator that emulates the Nintendo Entertainment System. What makes it remarkable is that it’s actually playable. Under Chrome and Safari I get ~50 fps. Firefox delivers about ~10 fps and the iPhone surprising works at a miserable ~.5fps.
What I think is cool about this is that it shows us how far JavaScript has come over the years. and how powerful HTML5 + Canvas will really be. I’ll be excited to see what else comes out from the community in the upcoming year.
It always excites me when I’m able to find a new little gem on the internet. I think this could prove to be interesting as a way to develop for multiple mobile platforms. Not just for the iPhone or any other one offs. Today i was made aware of Elips Studio 3. You can register for the developer beta here. It’ll be interesting to see how well it works at compiling to multiple platforms and the differences between all those platforms.
From the site:
“ELIPS Studio 3 cuts through the complexity of the fragmented mobile market by providing a single development toolkit for the world’s most popular handsets. It includes a sophisticated simulator, and the code it generates is compact and rapid enough to run even on low-specification, mass-market handsets.”
How does it work?
- Develop in Adobe Flex/Flash Builder
ELIPS Studio 3 is available as a plug-in for Adobe Flex / Flash Builder, a popular IDE for the development of RIAs and RDAs using the ActionScript and MXML languages.- Use our mobile Flex Framework
The product comes with a mobile-optimized version of the Flex Framework and a wide range of Flex extension libraries, including mobile device features and UI components. These provide additional capabilities beyond those found in the ‘standard’ Flex, such as making voice calls, accessing the phone’s address book, sending SMS or MMS, taking snapshots or videos with the camera, and more. You can also import open source ActionScript Web 2.0 libraries.- Build and deploy for the mobile platforms you want
ELIPS Studio 3 automatically mobilizes and packages your Flex-based applications for industry-leading platforms, including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, plus proprietary mass-market devices that run Real-Time operating systems (RTOS).
And because Open-Plug has a long track record of creating optimized code for cellular handsets… you’ll get amazing performance with your new Mobile 2.0 applications!
D-Link announced the other day the new Boxee media center. I have to say I was very impressed when I first saw it. My only real concern with the design is stack ability. I hate having a bunch of devices by my TV all spread out. But I’m sure i can still figure out a good place for it. Boxee is a really cool media center. It was originally based upon the XBMC project and has since become known for its great UI and features that have been added in. I have to say this box will be a great alternative to the Apple TV or Windows Media Center
Specs and Pics:
- Item (WxDxH): 120mm x 120mm x 120mm
- 1 HDMI Connector
- 1 Optical Digital Audio (S/PDIF) Connector
- Composite Audio Connectors
- Power Button
- AC Power Connector
- Ethernet Connector
- 2 USB 2.0 Connectors
- SD Card Slot
This is a cool little tool written in AIR by Ondrej Rafaj. What iHandler does, is allows you to export your selected files from your iTunes library. I could really see a project like this doing some cool new stuff in the future with the new AIR 2.0 api’s. Maybe let you play your music through the web using an HTTP AIR Server or export them to different formats using the AS3 OGG Vorbis library. Just a thought.
You can grab a copy from here
I found this cool example of an HTTP based socket server over at Christophe Coenraet’s blog. Basically he setup a socket and made it listen for incoming HTTP connections and server data based up the requests. Very neat stuff. It’s always interesting to see people push the uses of AS3 in new directions.
This should also be possible under older versions of AIR too. since those versions supported sockets too. the only difference is in AIR 2.0 we now have UDP sockets.
You can view the code and examples here.
Today Comcast, GE and NBC released information about a new venture deal that will give Comcast 51% ownership in NBC. From GE’s site:
“GE and Comcast have signed a definitive agreement to form a joint venture that will be 51 percent owned by Comcast, 49 percent owned by GE and managed by Comcast. The joint venture, which will consist of the NBC Universal businesses and Comcast’s cable networks, regional sports networks and certain digital properties and certain unconsolidated investments, will be well positioned to compete in an increasingly dynamic and competitive media and digital environment.
The combination of assets creates a leading media and entertainment company with the proven capability to provide some of the world’s most popular entertainment, news and sports content, movies and film libraries to consumers anytime, anywhere. The joint venture will provide consumers the broadest possible access to content, and support high-quality, award-winning content development across all platforms including film, television, and online. It will be anchored by an outstanding portfolio of cable networks and regional sports networks that will account for about 80 percent of its cash flow, including USA, Bravo, Syfy, E!, Versus, CNBC and MSNBC. The joint venture will be financially strong with a robust cash-flow-generation capability.”
This is really big news for everyone. This shows you just how much the market is changing and shifting. With the proliferation of content online and new distribution avenues through the web with services such as Hulu, Netflix and even Comcast’s soon to be release TV Everywhere. I believe this shows just how much the video distribution is moving away from traditional ways and will be moving to online avenues where it is relatively cheap to distribute. It’s very smart for Comcast to buy up content producers. It’ll make it cheaper for them to offer it with their services and also raise the price for others who want to distribute it.
Why would someone pick your service over someone else if you both offer the same content and services at about the same price? It’ll be interesting to see how this in fact pans out.
< Image from GE />
I have to say that I’ve always had a special place in my heart for this camera. To wake up to the news that it will be released this coming summer made me both really excited and sad. Happy that it’s finally coming out and I might be able to play with it. Sad because I don’t think I could ever justify paying 4k for it. But on the other hand to be able to take still photos and to shoot video up to 3k resolution would be amazing. This is definitely something I’ll add to my twisht list.
Specs:
- Increased REDCODE data rates
- New FLUT Color, Gamma and Sensitivity Science. Now same as EPIC.
- More extensive modular system integration.
- Interchangeable Lens mounts including focus and iris control of electronic RED, Canon and Nikon lenses, along with Zoom data (Scarlet 2/3″ Interchangeable)
- “Touch Focus Tracking” with electronic lens mounts and RED touchscreen LCD’s (Scarlet 2/3″ Interchangeable and 8x Fixed)
- Two independent microphone level channels, balanced input circuits, 48V Phantom Power, digitized at 24-bit 48KHz.
- GigaBit Ethernet port
- Scaled 1080P at 60fps
So over the weekend I’ve been playing around a little bit with HTTP video streaming. A lot of the newer video streaming technologies are starting to focus around HTTP + Adaptive streaming. The reason for this is because HTTP based streaming can scale very easily and Adaptive streaming can adjust very easily client restrictions such as bandwidth and hardware capabilities.
- Microsoft (Silverlight) – supports both HTTP and Adaptive streaming with their SmoothHD.
- Adobe (Flash) – supports Adaptive streaming and will be supporting HTTP streaming in FP 10.1
- Apple – supports HTTP and Adaptive streaming in Safari and on the iPhone.
- Move Networks – One of the first to support both HTTP and Adaptive streaming.
So in my attempt to better understand the world of streaming I ended up playing around with apples solution to live video streaming. Thanks to a few great articles at IONCANNON, I was able to create a little streaming application that would dynamically load video into Safari and onto the iPhone. Very cool stuff. I plan on working with what he created already and getting it to work with my other little side project.
I just saw and started playing with this great new tutorial over at the Unity Blog. It goes over character customization and asset bundles.
Author: Bas Smit
Source Files: Character Customization
Screencast: < Quicktime > < AVI >
Demo:
[WP_UnityObject width="100%" height="415" src="http://unity3d.com/gallery/live-demos/players/dressingroom.unity3d" /]
So I thought it would be good to throw out some updates on the progress of some of my side projects I’m working on. Over the past few weeks I’ve been focusing on two projects. A new XBMC media manager written in air and a solution for streaming content from a HDHomeRun to the Flash Player. So here we go..
XBMC Media Manager
So this project has been the one I’ve actually worked on the most. It’s something that I believe will be most beneficial to myself and others. I’ve been doing a lot of research into how XBMC’s database schema works. I’ve created a way to take a file location and convert it into a CRC hash and use that to load the thumbnail image. I’ve also wired up a good portion of the program using the MATE framework and also using the SQL Extension for mate. Overall the progress has been good and steady. I haven’t been able to wire frame as much as I would like but I feel that I have a good handle on the user interface and the experience the user will have. I hope to have something released by the end of this year or early next.
HDHomeRun to Flash Player Streaming
This has actually been a lot of fun (I love playing around with video). I researched a lot of solutions. First I started off with what Adobe had to offer. Which seemed rather restrictive. The best way to get video into the FMS is to use an application called the Flash Media Encoder that only runs in windows. The HDHR has direct show filters which is required to capture in FME. But it seems as though the filter isn’t recognized. But maybe in the future someone can figure out how to make a direct show filter that is recognized as a capture device.
After researching FMS for a while i searched through a bunch of other open source solutions. The one that I found to work best and what I will end up using is Xuggler + RED5. Xuggler lets you capture video and transcode it using ffmpeg. The only hard part is trying to get it to capture from a UDP or RTS stream. Both should be doable but we’ll have to wait and see. I’m not sure when I’ll be done with this project but I’m sure it’ll be a great one. Who wouldn’t want a way to watch their own tv shows over the internet? Almost like a slingbox.
