Category: General

Realtime Raytracing with Javascript in a browser http://bit.ly/9C4HmW Open standards rule!

The debate over HTML5 really doesn’t do the question justice. It’s not just HTML5 and the Video Tag, it’s that plus the Canvas tag (allows all sorts of manipulations of the screen, including images and video), CSS (for styling and animation as well) and Javascript for the brains. But people keep doing really interesting things with Javascript way beyond what has been done in Flash.

The environment is mapped using cube mapping. I store all the values of the cubemap as floats. I increase the definition range by multiplying all values bigger than 0.95 with 2. This makes sure that the bright parts of the image are also very bright in the reflections. You can think of this as faking hdr. I do not calculate any lighting, it is all coming from the environment map. To make the animation look a bit more fluid and hide the aliasing I apply some fake motion blur by blending the current frame with the previous one.

RT @SFCutters: June 5 Early Bird Pricing deadline for Philip Hodgetts’ “Build your Business” “Monetize your Audience” http://bit.ly/aHKbo7

“Build you production of post-production business in any type of economic conditions” in the morning and “Build and Monetize an audience for your independent project” in the afternoon.

Early bird pricing (save some $$$) runs until Jun 5. These are great seminars.

Up To Half Of All Media Sites Plan To Support The iPad And HTML5 Video http://tcrn.ch/dfT9Nl I think that amounts to a bandwaggon!

So it’s not just iPad, that’s support for iPhone and iTouch as well. Those 50 million or so devices without Flash have caused a definite trend.  But it’s not quite as clear as it might seem. H.264 MP4 video is also playable in Flash and Silverlight and some H.264 encoded video is for those targets.

According to the survey, 49 percent plan to support HTML5 video on their media sites by the end of next year, and 36 percent plan to support video on the iPad either through dedicated apps or an iPad compatible Website.

At first blush, these two numbers don’t seem to make much sense. If 49 percent of media sites are going to support HTML5 video, then by default they will also support the iPad. But if you drill down into the survey responses on whether they plan to support the iPad specifically, a full 19 percent wouldn’t disclose one way or the other. Add that to the 36 percent who say they will support the iPad, and you get close to half, which is the same as how many say they will support HTML5 video. What this tells me is that either there is still some confusion on the part of the Web video industry or that there is more support for broader standards like HTML5 video which will work across different devices like Android phones and tablets.

How to get people to pay for content? They never did, but they will pay for access, which is what they have done! http://bit.ly/axtdKt

The simple answer is that people probably won’t pay for content, but that’s OK because hey never have. People have paid for access to content (cable TV, DVD rental, newspapers, CD/LP/Cassette) but rarely paid for the sort of content we’re now thinking of charging.

Now that we know that, it’s time to revise, rethink and revisit business models; particularly considering that access to content in digital form can also be freeish (you’re still paying for the Internet connection).

In all this they’re not paying for data. They’re paying for access to content, the data plan or the subscription just happens to be the way they do it. That’s why when I’m advising a publisher or programmer, I encourage them to focus on access. Make more content available, on more devices, in the most convenient ways possible. Today, that might mean developing a beautiful iPad app for a magazine, but tomorrow that means developing a new content experience altogether, with personal clippings, recommended stories, all of it socially enhanced to reflect not just what I what to read but what my community is reading and discussing. That is a type of access, too, and it’s one that goes beyond what Google can return as a search result.

Why you should always encode from the highest quality source! http://bit.ly/ckvaaR Upload to YouTube, rip, upload (and re-encode) 1000 times.

I expect that everyone knows by now that, no matter what you upload to YouTube, they re-encode it. Even if it was a file that YouTube just encoded!  YouTube user “canzona,” whose personal website is here literally did it 1000 times, so the end result is 1000 lossy generations down.

The result is so abstracted from the original that it is it’s own thing (and that is what the creator was going for, apparently), but it is an abject lesson that we should always encode from the highest quality source available, and only send YouTube high bandwidth, high quality source for them to encode.

Convert Flash to HTML 5 in Javascript http://bit.ly/b7inRP Coming soon but looks amazing, might solve some missing content issues.

This is seriously clever software: Flash plays without the plug-in as if HTML 5 becuase they dissemble the SWF, extract media files and play the media in an HTML 5 way, all in Javascript in the browser.

No need for Flash video sites to retool! Seriously cool and I wish them well.

Australian Airline Jetstart to start renting iPads for inflight entertainment. http://bit.ly/aL1V2O I like 40 channels of Direct on Jetblue free, thank you.

While the iPad is a hot device, I don’t see how this is better than what I already enjoy on Jetblue where it’s free. Seems more like an opportunity to turn something that should be free – inflight entertainment – to another revenue stream for the airline.

“Given the demand for the iPad so far, I anticipate it will have strong appeal amongst our passengers,” he said. “Based on demand for the iPads as part of the trial, we’ll be looking to roll out the devices across our entire domestic and international network later in the year.”

Sonic Solutions buys DiVX http://bit.ly/dmOsar Seems like an odd purchase to me but here’s the rationale from Sonic:

“Sonic has been…developing technologies for the preparation and delivery of entertainment content in popular formats — CD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc and most recently Internet delivery of video..DivX is expected to enable Sonic to deepen and broaden the technology it offers for Internet-based video delivery and expand its relationships with leading retailers and consumer electronics manufacturers.” Fair enough. and also puts DivX out of its small-cap and low profile misery over the years.

Is Flash dead? The future of Adobe’s plug-in http://bit.ly/aitoRs Flash v the “open web” – from Tech Radar.

For many reasons, Flash IS on the decline: from about 3 million Apple devices a month that don’t support it; fewer microsites being built for economic reasons and the rise of open standards.

On each side, people bitterly oppose the ‘rival’ technology. Standards proponents claim Flash is resource-hungry, proprietary and buggy, and say standards should rule. Flash proponents argue Adobe’s plug-in remains the only delivery option that offers cross platform consistency and that it provides scope for projects you can’t create with open standards.

There are some things that Flash is still the right solution for – but for standard video players and basic interaction, open standards should prevail. Over time, there will be less, and less need for Flash. Adobe itself shows that it can build tools for the iPad (Magazine readers) that don’t rely on Flash or AIR (a related technology).