26897266
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
Rob Glidden notes on his blog that MPEG has recently 'announced it has received proposals for a royalty-free MPEG standard and has settled on a deliberation process to consider them.' There two tracks towards royalty-free video currently under consideration by MPEG. The first track is IVC, a new 'standard based on MPEG-1 technology which is believed a safe royalty-free baseline that can be enhanced by additional unencumbered technology described in MPEG-2, JPEG, research publications and innovative technologies which are promised to be subject to royalty-free licenses.' The second proposed track is WebVC, an attempt to get the constrained baseline profile of H.264 licensed under royalty-free terms. Rob Glidden offers an analysis of both proposals. Also of interest is Rob's short history of why royalty-free H.264 failed last time.
25385516
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
One Millionth Tower is a documentary about the high-rise apartment residential areas of Toronto. The documentary is presented using an interesting combination of HTML5, WebGL, Popcorn.js, and three.js. From the article: 'The movie, which makes its online premiere above, was carefully crafted to be watched on the internet. It uses interactive tools to illustrate the Toronto residents’ ideas about how to improve the decaying high-rise in which they live. Powered entirely by HTML5 and open source JavaScript libraries, One Millionth Tower is loaded with photos and information from all over the web, and exists in an online environment that is about as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen can get.'
22529538
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
Mozilla Hacks has an article on Tilt, a Firefox extension which visualises the DOM tree of a Web page in 3D. They write, 'Tilt is a Firefox extension that lets you visualize any web page DOM tree in 3D. It is being developed by Victor Porof (3D developer responsible with the Firefox extension itself), along with Cedric Vivier (creating a WebGL optimized equivalent to the privileged canvas.drawWindow, see #653656) and Rob Campbell (who first thought about creating a 3D visualization of a webpage). Everything started initially as a Google Summer of Code project, but now, with an enthusiastic team behind it and so many new features and ideas, it has become an active Developer Tools project.' There's also a Tilt blog for development updates.
22073622
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
The pdf.js project aims to implement a PDF viewer using standards-compliant Web technologies. The project has reached its first milestone: it renders the sample PDF (a paper on Mozilla's Tracemonkey JavaScript engine) perfectly. However, that perfection currently comes with some caveats: 'pdf.js produces different results on pretty much every element in the browser×OS matrix. We said above that pdf.js renders the Tracemonkey paper “perfectly” if you’re running a Firefox nightly. On a Windows 7 machine where Firefox can use Direct2D and DirectWrite. If you ignore what appears to be a bug in DirectWrite’s font hinting. The paper is rendered less well on other platforms and in older Firefoxen, and even worse in other browsers. But such is life on the bleeding edge of the web platform.' Still, the progress so far has been impressive and pdf.js will no doubt get better with time.
20516716
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
Google's WebM project has announced the formation of the WebM Community Cross-License Initiative. Members of the WebM-CCL agree to license patents they may hold that are essential to WebM technologies to other members under royalty-free terms. This initiative would seem to address some of Microsoft's concerns about WebM. Meanwhile, the MPEG LA appears to have remained silent after the submission period of its call for patents essential to WebM ended over a month ago.
20380174
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video. Google's James Zern writes, 'Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.'
20216742
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
With the release of Emscripten 1.0, Mozilla's Alon Zakai has put together a demo which renders PDF documents in JavaScript. He writes, 'I released Emscripten 1.0 over the weekend, which came with a demo of rendering PDFs entirely in JavaScript (warning: >12MB will be downloaded for that page). Emscripten is an LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler which allows running code written in C or C++ on the web. In the linked demo, Poppler and FreeType were compiled to JavaScript from C++.'
20134738
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
The H reports that Nokia has confirmed that Symbian will no longer be open source. They write, 'Nokia has confirmed that it has closed the source code for the Symbian smartphone operating system. It says that despite it describing its new model for Symbian smartphone operating system development as "open and direct" the "open" part did not refer to "open source" but to being "open for business". The "open and direct" model is designed, according to Nokia, to "enable us to continue working with the remaining Japanese OEMs and the relatively small community of platform development collaborators we are already working with".'
20021790
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
As noted by the Mozilla Blog, the AP News Registry is the first large scale service to support the Do Not Track (DNT) feature of Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9. They write, 'The Associated Press (AP) is the first company to deploy DNT on a large scale, and it only took a few hours for one engineer to implement. The AP News Registry tracks 1 billion impressions of news content, with 175 million unique visitors per month, and has membership with more than 800 sites. When consumers send a DNT preference via the browser while viewing a story at one of its publisher’s sites, the AP News Registry no longer sets any cookies. The previous solution was for users to opt-out via a link to a central opt-out page referenced in each participating news site’s privacy policy. They still count the total number of impressions for each news story, but aggregate consumer data for those with DNT in a non-identifiable way.'
20008988
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer recently gave a Google Tech talk explaining the Web Video Text Track file format. She writes, 'On Wednesday, I gave a talk at Google about WebVTT, the Web Video Text Track file format that is under development at the WHATWG for solving time-aligned text challenges for video. I started by explaining all the features that WebVTT supports for captions and subtitles, mentioned how WebVTT would be used for text audio descriptions and navigation/chapters, and explained how it is included into HTML5 markup, such that the browser provides some default rendering for these purposes. I also mentioned the metadata approach that allows any timed content to be included into cues.' Slides of her talk are also available.
19999610
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
Over on the IE Blog they've posted a power consumption comparison of the five major browsers. They write, 'Power consumption is an important consideration in building a modern browser and one objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to responsibly lead the industry in power requirements. The more efficiently a browser uses power the longer the battery will last in a mobile device, the lower the electricity costs, and the smaller the environment impact. While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant.'
19998216
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Mobile for Android and Maemo. A post on the Mozilla Blog outlines the various features of Firefox 4 Mobile and Brad Lassey from Mozilla has written a performance overview of Firefox 4 Mobile for Android.
19875012
submission
19749042
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
Google has released a preview of the WebM media foundation components for Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. CNET's Stephen Shankland writes, 'In an effort to bring its Web video technology to a browser that doesn't support it, Google has released an IE9 plug-in to play WebM video. The move won't bring an end to the industry scuffle over the best way to build video into the Web, but it will mean that allies behind Google's preferred mechanism will be able to reach beyond the three browsers that support WebM today, Google's Chrome, Opera Software's Opera, and Mozilla's Firefox. Apple's Safari and Microsoft's brand-new IE9 support the rival H.264 video codec (though IE9 requires Windows 7 or an updated version of Windows Vista).' Further detail can be found on the WebM components for IE9 page on the WebM website.
19733856
submission
theweatherelectric writes:
The WebM Project has made available (but only by request) the RTL source code of their VP8 hardware encoder. They write, 'The H1 encoder offloads the entire VP8 video encoding process from the host CPU to a separate accelerator block on the SOC. It significantly reduces power consumption and enables encoding of 1080p resolution video at full 30 FPS, or 720p at 60 FPS. Without a hardware accelerator like the H1, modern multi-core mobile devices can only encode video at around VGA 25 FPS, and are not able to do much else while doing that.' This follows on from the recent 0.9.6 release of the VP8 SDK which improved encoder speed and image quality.
