09/03, 8:25pm
iPhone live streaming platform to launch in Q4
Telestream and Wowza Media Systems have announced a new platform for streaming live media to the iPhone and other web players. Using Telestream's Wirecast production software alongside Wowza's soon-to-ship Media Server 2 Advanced, which has expanded beyond Flash by adding H.264 support, users can stream high-quality video to the iPhones or iPod touch, Silverlight, Flash, QuickTime and IPTV-based set-top boxes.
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07/11, 9:45pm
MS Silverlight 3 released
Microsoft has released Silverlight 3, a new release of its multimedia software for Web. The software is available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Version 3 of new version of software, designed only for Intel-based Macs, offers better performance, GPU acceleration, tools to run on the desktop, and support for higher quality audio and video, including native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline. For developers, it new 3D graphics, animation features, hardware accelerated effects and text improvements to enable designers and developers to create next generation Web visuals.
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01/05, 11:30pm
64GB SSD full-HD camcorder
Samsung Electronics has extended its line of full-HD digital camcorders with four new models - the HMX-H106, HMX-H105, HMX-H104, and HMX-H100. In addition to full HD video, the new H-Series offers a renowned Schneider Kreuznach Varioplan HD lens with Optical Image Stabilization, H.264 and internal Solid State Drives to provide onboard memory. Samsung's new flagship HMX-H106 features an internal 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD), increasing both write performance and dramatically reduces power consumption. The company claims that when actively reading and writing data, Samsung's SSD technology consumes approximately 1/8th of the power of a comparable HDD.
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08/13, 3:25pm
BBC upgrades to H.264, AAC
Later this week, the BBC will update its iPlayer streaming service with H.264 and AAC+ compression schemes, the UK broadcaster has announced. The move is aimed at supporting open standards, and additionally improving steaming quality, jumping bitrates from 500 to 800Kbps, according to Macworld. The compression schemes will offer improved visuals and sound for users streaming over Flash, currently the only way to access the BBC's media on a Mac. The network has already been broadcasting in non-Flash H.264 and AAC for its iPhone and iPod touch streams.
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05/08, 3:10pm
EveTV 3.0.2 update
Elgato has released the v3.0.2 update to EyeTV, its TV streaming and recording software. The patch makes significant changes, most crucially support for broadcasts with H.264 compression, which are said to be increasingly popular; in Europe, for example, a number of DVB-T channels offer only H.264 streaming. Elgato has also introduced the export of closed captions to QuickTime videos, in particular text broadcast over ATSC and NTSC. As a result, users can now toggle captions on and off in software ranging from iTunes to the iPhone OS.
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04/15, 12:50am
Blackmagic USB video, SDI
Blackmagic Design recently unveiled several new video interfaces at the NAB 2008 conference, the USB-based Video Recorder – available in consumer and professional versions – and a large scale 8U rack-mount SDI router. The Blackmagic Video Recorder offers consumers the ability to capture video directly to H.264 through component or S-Video onto their computer. The consumer USB Video Recorder sells for $120.
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04/10, 12:35am
Ambric Am2045 GT for Mac
Ambric today unveiled plans to show its pre-release version of Am2045 GT on the Mac platform at this year's NAB conference. The Am2045 GT is a video reference platform that allows video professionals users to accelerate HD MPEG-2 and HD H.264 encoding for distribution on platforms such as Blu-ray, Flash, and DVD. The hardware also accelerates Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and After Effects CS3 via a plug-in.
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01/10, 12:30pm
Pyro debuts video encoder
Pyro AV has unveiled Pyro Kompressor HD, a PCI Express-based accelerator solution that encodes HD MPEG-2 and HD H.264/AVC up to eight times faster than software-only video compression. The single-slot PYRO Kompressor HD board is powered by the Ambric Am2045, a parallel processor with 336 RISC processors delivering 1.2 teraOPS-class of video horsepower for consistently high throughput encoding. Pyro Kompressor HD for the Mac platform will be available this spring for $3,500.
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12/14, 1:25pm
QuickTime Broadcaster
Apple has released QuickTime Broadcaster 1.5.2, an application combining the power of QuickTime with Apple's ease of use that allows average users to produce a live broadcast event. The update offers H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10 video) live broadcasting, as well as 3G streaming support for sending live broadcasts to multimedia-enabled cellular phones. QuickTime Broadcaster 1.5.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4.10 or later.
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12/11, 7:45pm
FixMyMovie.com service
MotionDSP today unveiled H.264 support on FixMyMovie.com, its free online one-click video touchup service. Originally designed for military applications, FixMyMovie.com allows users to upload video footage from digital cameras, mobile phones, or webcams and remove pixelation errors, and the service also supports up-sampling – taking low resolution video and retrieving high definition content from it. MotionDSP opted to support H.264, as the format is quickly becoming the standard for broadcasting high quality HD footage.
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12/05, 1:20pm
Squeeze 4.8 for Flash
Sorenson Media on Wednesday released Sorenson Squeeze 4.8 for Adobe Flash. On the heels of Adobe's Flash Player 9 Update 3 with H.264 video support, the company said that the upgrade enables users of Sorenson Media’s application to encode MPEG-4 video compatible with the newly-released Adobe Flash 9 Update 3 software, using the H.264/AVC, AAC and HE-AAC codecs. The "true" MPEG-4 files are also compatible with popular devices such as Apple's iPod and Sony's PSP, the company noted. Sorenson has also included other MPEG-4 variants within Squeeze 4.8 Flash, including the ability to encode into MPEG-4 Part 10 or 3GPP formats. In addition to the H.264 support, two other Flash-based codecs are also available: Sorenson Spark Pro and, for an additional $100 purchase, the On2 VP6 Pro Encoder plug-in.
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12/04, 7:40pm
Flash Media Server 3
Adobe has taken wraps off the Flash Media Server 3 series of products, consisting of two offerings: Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3 for live and on-demand video streaming and Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3 for scalable video streaming services and social media applications. The new releases support nearly double the amount of streams per server; support for industry standard H.264 video and HE-AAC audio in Adobe Flash Player 9 ; upgrades to Adobe’s patented protocol for delivering protected content; and enhanced live video support. In addition, Adobe Flash Media Server 3 supports both prerecorded and live streaming to Adobe Flash Lite 3.
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12/04, 2:20pm
Adobe Flash with H.264
Adobe today launched one of its most significant updates to its web tools for video creation and playback. Flash 9 Update 3 is the first public version of the player to support video in the H.264 format, significantly improving video quality. With a fast-enough connection, viewers can watch HD-quality clips in the same format used by many Blu-ray and HD DVD movies, Adobe boasts. Videos can also use the High Efficiency AAC standard to provide backing audio at higher quality without affecting bandwidth.
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