Flashless for Mobile? Not Exactly

There's quite a bit of confusion about the impact of Adobe's decision (or what exactly the decision was) in regards to Flash Player of Mobile. Rightfully so, as the company didn't spell out its intent to its users at the same time it pushed out news to analysts during the 9 November analyst day briefing.

Besides the StreamingMedia.com article titled "Into (not so) thin AIR" (self-plug) there are two Adobe blog posts that may help explain where the company is going...or at least what it plans to still support:

Pritham Shetty's "Adobe Flash for Premium Video" blog post spells out what's in and what's out.

Mike Chambers's blog post, "Clarifications on Flash Player for Mobile Browsers, the Flash Platform and the Future of Flash" does a good job explaining the "why" of unsustainable growth in complexity Adobe faced in the wild-west atmosphere surrounding Android forking.

We conjectured, in the "thin AIR" article posted on StreamingMedia.com, that Android forking complexities could cause Adobe's costs to run rampant. It was helpful to get confirmation a few hours later, when Mike posted his Clarifications blog post, that Adobe had indeed seen this Great Wall of Android that it had to scale, and chosen a wiser path.

DASH of this, DASH of that...

It's apparent that MPEG-DASH is getting traction—or at least attention—if attendance at the 2011 StreamingMedia West show's panel on MPEG-DASH is any indicator.

It wasn't just standing-room, as alluded to in the StreamingMedia.com article, but was sitting-room only. It's been quite some time since I've seen this level of interest in a topic.

A few notes that didn't make it into the article:


MPEG-DASH will never define a codec, but with DASH-264 there's a move to use an H.264 codec in an MP4 container with a common file format (CFF) and common encryption (CENC).... There's also a possibility of adding DASH-264 into the HTML5 standard, since W3C requires a codec to be considered in HTML5 but MPEG-DASH itself is codec agnostic.


Interesting note about who has been participating and who has not:


Apple has been participating in MPEG-DASH from the beginning; they have contributed actively. We've not seen Google participating in DASH, but our codec agnostic approach means that WebM could be used within DASH (we can already do with profiles around M2TS).


What about royalties? An audience member's question got this reply:

From a licensing standpoint, there is a requirement to notify ISO of their intent to license; Qualcomm and Cisco have announced they'll offer royalty-free since HTTP adaptive streaming has been done for a number of years but to get to a standard we need to see a path forward to royalty-free licensing.

Netflix or Blockbuster: Do Either Offer Total Access?

When it comes to online streaming of premium content, it appears that less is less instead of more.

Netflix stumbled badly, announcing this week that 800,000 subscribers left the service last quarter—over 200,000 more than the company had predicted as its "worst case" scenario. Part of the stumble was an assumption that customers would pay the same amount for online video access to a limited number of movies as they would for a much broader library of DVDs delivered by mail.

I covered this topic two days ago in an online article for StreamingMedia.com, a newsletter and magazine for which I have freelanced for a number of years. After the article was published, a radio station in Seattle, KOMO, requested a phone interview which I did on the 26th.

In addition, the editor of StreamingMedia.com, Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, was also asked to be part of a section on Netflix on PBS Newshour show this evening.

To say this topic is hot would be an understatement, and Eric did a good job bringing to light—in a public forum—what we've often said on StreamingMedia.com: the online premium content world is still nascent and needs to grow to match the expectation (or hype) that many in our industry have pushed when trying to make streaming inventories equal to offline availability.

There's a need for a consolidated approach to online video libraries, ideally through a broader offering of content by a single provider; in the meantime, I'll also cover another approach that indexes what's available on multiple sites. Look for that article in a few weeks.

2011 Streaming Media Europe: Challenges for Android Video Delivery

In between trips to Nigeria and Ghana (for pro-bono work) I was able to speak at today's Streaming Media Europe 2011 conference, on the topic of Android video delivery.

The session presentation is available for download and StreamingMedia.com may eventually post the session video.

The presentation was a walk through the findings we reported in two white papers on the battery impact and performance impact of Flash Player for Mobile 10.1 (first report) and Flash Player for Mobile 10.2 / 10.3 (second report).

The findings, however, were the same for both tests: the native applications don't work nearly as consistently for video playback, and the impact of Flash Player for Mobile on battery life is a small price to pay for consistency in delivery (as in the actual ability to use hardware acceleration to play back full-screen, full-motion video).

2012 Q1 Best Workflows

Transitions has been hard at work on several continents (four and counting) over the past three months, after publishing attributed results for one company that participated in the 2011 Q1 Best Workflows research report.

Within the next two months, we expect to release invitations for the follow-on 2012 Q1 Best Workflows report, based on interest expressed by a number of companies. Stay tuned for more details.

2011 Q1 Best Workflows: Elemental Technologies

In December 2010, we published the 2010 Best Workflows report, a generic version of testing Transitions performed for a number of transcoding and live encoding hardware/software solutions. The report mentioned a few invited companies, but did not detail any one particular participant.

Elemental Technologies has requested that their findings be published, as the company did exceptionally well in a number of categories. The report, labeled as 2011 Q1 Best Workflows: Elemental Technologies, containing the same test results from the December 2010 final report, reveals a company hitting its stride on several fronts.

Flash Player 10.2 for Android Handsets and 10.3 for Motorola Xoom Tablet

Devices powered by the Android OS are gaining in popularity, with first quarter 2011 sales of Android-powered devices far outstripping those of Apple's iOS and Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS.

Yet the success brings with it a major issue—OS forking and code modification—inherent to open-source operating systems. The biggest area where this divergence can be viewed (or not viewed, as the case my be) is in the area of media consumption.

Our most recent report, titled The Right Fit? Video Playback Performance on Android Handset and Tablet Devices Using Adobe Flash Player 10.2 and 10.3 delves into the question of Adobe's Flash Player as a potential universal player for various media types on Android phones and tablets. 

We found that Adobe Flash Player seems to be progressing, alongside advances in the Android OS itself, to a point where we're seeing full frame-rate, high-quality playback on a number of devices.

While this sounds like a no-brainer, our last set of tests found few devices capable of playing 24 frame per second (fps) content at 24 fps, let alone playing back traditional video content at the 29.97 fps required to match fluid television playback.

Yet the past two months have significantly upped the ante: Adobe Flash Player 10.3 on the Motorola Xoom tablet was able to match native content's frame rates (both 24 and 29.97 fps) once the Motorola Xoom was upgraded to Android OS 3.1. This is an increase of 10-15% in frames-per-second playback, compared to Flash Player 10.2 on Android 3.0.1—the original shipping Xoom operating system.

In addition, the Motorola Atrix handset, which contains the same dual-core Tegra 2 processor and GPU, turned in impressive results. The Samsung Galaxy S also improved over its results in our initial tests of six Android handsets and now takes advantage of hardware acceleration for decoding.

The combination of an updated Android OS and an updated Adobe Flash Player seems to provide a much more consistent media experience for the average user.

Review: Video Compression for Flash, Apple (iOS) devices and HTML5

Jan Ozer, a colleague and friend who writes for Streaming Media magazine and a number of other online and magazine publications, has just released his most recent book: Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5.

The 258-page book covers the title's topics in detail, looking first at the evolution of the H.264 video codec (also known at AVC as well as MPEG-4 Part 10 for ITU and ISO) and how it has been adopted by Adobe for Flash Player, Apple for its past and current player (QuickTime 7 and QuickTime X, respectively) and Microsoft for its Silverlight player.

Jan then moves on to the questions of royalties (a topic I've covered in multiple articles, including one on H.264 and one on WebM) and then moves into the meat of the book: tips and tricks for working with a variety of compressor tools, including Apple's Compressor, Rhozet's Carbon Coder, Sorenson's Squeeze, Telestream's Episode and several others.

When it comes to specific environments where H.264 content will be played back, Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5 really shines. Whether it's encoding for the specific vagaries of Blu-Ray discs, Apple's multiple iOS devices—including the variations for iPhone/iPod versus the larger screen size of the iPad—or just the basics of Flash or Silverlight playback, the book examines processing and protocols necessary to make your streaming or offline delivery of H.264 a success. 

Jan's focus is on software-only encoding solutions, but the principles are the same for hardware-based encoding and transcoding solutions, such as the Elemental Server, Elemental Live and Inlet Spinnaker products tested during last year's 2010 Best Workflows report. 

I highly recommend Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5 for anyone needing to refine their media compression workflow, as the tips and insights Jan Ozer provides are pertinent to a variety of today's hottest consumer electronics devices.

Thunderbolt workflows

In a StreamingMedia.com article about the new MacBook Pro, published two weeks ago, we discussed the potential of camera connectivity through the new Thunderbolt port.

Today, Intel announced that Canon—makers of the fine EOS D-SLR cameras as well as consumer and professional video cameras—will be supporting the Thunderbolt technology.  An Intel press release reads, in part: 

Hiroo Edakubo, Group Executive of Canon’s Video Products Group stated, "We are excited about Thunderbolt technology and feel it will bring new levels of performance and simplicity to the video creation market."

Read additional thoughts on this topic—and the implications for live production equipment sizes—on our follow-up blog post at EventDVLive.com.

Roxio Toast Turns 11; But Can It Add?

In September, 2010, we posted an article about the issues highlighting the problem that Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro had with basic addition. The addition problems caused the program to underestimate how much content it could fit on a Blu-Ray disc. After eight hours of encoding, the actual number that Toast presented would be wildly off—to the tune of three or four gigabytes (3-4 GB).

This week, Sonic Solutions, who owns the technology and the Roxio brand name, announced the release of Roxio Toast 11 Titanium. Titanium is a lower-cost version of Toast (which also comes in a Pro version) and Titanium now contains the Blu-Ray plug-in that was only available in the Toast 10 Pro. This move saves users about $40 off the cost of purchasing Pro if Blu-Ray is the primary focus of your Toast usage.

Yet the question remains: can Toast 11 Titanium add any better than the previous Pro version? We're hearing initial reports of similar issues, which really brings into question Sonic's quality control on the Toast products, but we'll let you know what we find when we do a thorough review next week.

We are also hearing Toast 11 has speed issues in burning discs, where the speed of a 16x burner is reduced to 2x (even though the same burner runs at 15-16x in Toast 10).

Stay tuned to find out if remedial math works for Toast.