Digital Wanderer |

God giveth, God taketh away

2009-01-16

Great headline.

Google Giveth, and Taketh Away

A number of Google services just announced that they are about to shut down. The Google Video team announced that it will shut down uploads in a few months, while the Google Notebook team announced that it is stopping development (the service will continue to function, however). According to Danny Sullivan, Google is also closing Jaiku, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that was bought by Google before it even launched, but which has lingered in invite-only mode ever since. Google Catalog search, which made shopping catalogs searchable, will also be closed soon.

Translating from Bourgeois. Google is closing a bunch of services: there will be no more video uploads to Google Video (they advise going to YouTube), Google Notebook (which I tried to use) won't be updated anymore, and the microblogging service Jaiku shut down without even opening.

Read more →

Article - The Current Situation with Video Compression, Part 2

2009-01-15

Link to the first part

Reality and Practice

And so, at last, happiness has arrived. Starting with a certain version, Flash began supporting H.264, and even with heavily compressed AAC-HE audio. Microsoft got scared, and announced that future versions of Silverlight will also have H.264 support.

Read more →

Sigh

2009-01-15

Looks like I lost my passport.

Read more →

Article - The current situation with video compression, part 1

2009-01-14

At first, I wanted to use Silverlight for videos on the blog, but hardly anyone has it installed. I don't yet suffer from an inflated ego to such a degree as to think that people would install some obscure crap on their computers just for my ancient, stupid clips. So I started looking at what's going on in the enemy camp, namely Adobe flash video. Along the way, I researched what's generally happening in the realm of digital multimedia encoding.

Crash course and glossary

Codec – a program that uses specific encoding and decoding algorithms to compress video. A codec – the implementation of a standard, meaning a document that defines what the result will be and how it should be played back. This is how compatibility is achieved: what is compressed by DivX can be played by XviD, and vice versa. A codec consists of a coder and a decoder, hence the name.

Read more →