Firefox 3.5 adds native open video support… and audio
It was a nice surprise to see latest Firefox browser update adding native support for open video (.ogv and .ogg) files. This means, you don’t need any plug-in.
The video player looks solid while streaming video and the interface works great: controller auto-hide, buffering feedback and quite accurate scrubbing.
It is also possible to download the source file using the “right-click” contextual menu and selecting “Save Video As…” :)
Looking at the sources, it looks like embedding a video is as easy as something like this:
<video id="video" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/cdn/OGG-320x240/video/x9euyb?key=a99e7056808342ad0868b4decfe811c814044ec"></video>
Here you can find good information about the video / audio tags (HTML 5 compliant) and how to add JavaScript contorl: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_audio_and_video_in_Firefox
Supported formats are currently Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV.
Firefox automatically opens and streams such files within the native player. If you have Firefox 3.5 installed, try it yourself.
Would be great if fullscreen support is possible in a ear future. I would also suggest to add a standard play/pause toggle by clicking in the actual video.
Related links:
Paint luminous pixels
I don’t know why, but I haven’t tried the Action Script getPixel feature yet. It has been there for a while, and I finally did something with it.
In this little experiment, I am fetching the coordinates of the luminous pixels (above a certain threshold) of a source bitmap, and use tiny particles to repaint them negatively (black over white).
My Alchemy “Hello World”
Some weeks ago, I was attracted by a post by Unitzeroone about an Adobe Alchemy performance test. After watching some other experiments by Peter Nitsch; I decided to take a look into it myself and build my own starting point using Alchemy.
The concept is to use the C/C++ application to make all calculations and deliver a screen buffer (binary data) that can be rendered into a bitmap object in Flash. It is very exciting to see Flash being able to render a massive number of particles without problems.
This is my Alchemy “Hello World”: 20,000 Firefly particles moving around (it worked in my macbook with up to 200,000 particles without noticable performance issues). This might be a great platform to bring complex data visualization experiments to the web as well as to integrate many many things (existing C / C++ libraries) into Flash. I hope I will be able to invest some more time in the future and start to create more interesting experiments. This is just a “Hello World”!
Flash player 10 required. Click on the background to enable/disable clear buffers in the render loop.
Visual accidents
Some months ago, I got these visual results due to some errors in my code, while playing around with openframeworks. I found the visual accidents quite appealing.
Click on the thumbnails to see a larger picture.
Spanning Sync discount code
I have been trying the Spanning Sync trial for the last 15 days. Spanning Sync lets you synchronize all your mac computers with your Google account. Both, calendars and contacts, with your iCal and Address book applications respectively.
Although, there are different free alternatives, including built-in Mac OS X Leopard address book synchronization (Only if you own an iPhone or iPod touch); I think Spanning Sync is one of the best solutions nowadays. Its centralized interface as a System Preference Pane is simple and clean and lets you decide what to synchronize and what not (based on calendars and contact groups).
Spanning Sync launched recently a promotion called “Save 5 + Make 5″. If you are interested in purchasing a license you can use the following code:
CE66RD
You’ll save 5$ and I will make 5$ :) After you purchase your own license you’ll get your code too. There’s no limit on using this promotion, so you can actually make money if you are lucky ;)
Spanning Sync offers two license modalities; a one-year license for 25$ and a lifetime license for 65$.