Jul 25
I have recently finished my second Adobe Air application, Media Player. Media Player is a basic video playing application to watch FLV’s, F4V’s, and many other video formats as long as it is an H.264 video with AAC or MP3 audio. I am a huge movie guy and one of my real loves for Flash is its video playback capabilities and being able to create something with it. I hope what Flash can do with video in the future expands even more because right now the options with video that isn’t coming from a Flash Media Server is limited to how it can be manipulated. One thing you will notice is if you try to scrub the video, it may jump once you release the mouse, this is a thing with Flash because it can only scrub or move to the closet keyframe in a video and not individual frames. If the video source is from a Flash Media Server, then frame-by-frame scrubbing would be possible. That is one of the things I am hoping will be updated. Please feel free to request for features or report any bugs that you may find that I never encountered in development.
Also if there are any other Flash/Flex developers that are reading this and know of how to work with DRM videos such as iTunes bought movies, I would love to include that as a video type that Media Player can play. I can’t seem to find a whole lot of info online about it and the Flash Help just provides bullet points on what to do for DRM files but provides no examples.
May 01
So a new full length Transforms 2 trailer was released today. Ill just say this about it: Optimus Prime + 2 beam swords vs. 3 Decepticons = freaking awesome.
Jul 18
Im going to start off by saying two words: Freaking Awesome! That is how good the new Batman movie is. It is one of those rare movies that is both better then the movie it follows and delivers on all the hype it had around it. Majority of the issues they had with Batman Begins were corrected here. So no more extreme up-close camera shots during fight scenes that prevented you from even seeing what was going on in the first place. That was my biggest problem with Batman Begins.
The story is well put together and it doesn’t feel like a comic book movie at all, which is great. Chris Nolan and the other writers took some liberties with story, but it is so well done and executed that even hardcore Batman fans can and should forgive. Oh right, it would be a good time to mention that Batman is my favorite comic book hero of all time with Wolverine in a close second place. Even though they technically had two “villains” in the film, it didn’t feel that way like the previous Batman films. The whole movie and story just flowed together as a cohesive piece.
The action in this movie was greatly improved and all the hard work shows. I bet the stunt team had a lot of fun on this film getting to blow up so much stuff lol. *Spoiler alert* I wonder if they were sad to have blown up one of the Batmobiles.*End Spoiler* Well, I have to go to work now so I’ll leave you with that bit about how awesome the new Batman movie is. If you haven’t seen it yet, then you are missing out!
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May 17
Elgato Systems has recently released Turbo.264, its h.264 hardware video encoder accessory for Mac computers. Some may be asking why should I buy a video encoder when my Mac can already encode videos with h.264? Well, whenever you use Quicktime, for example, to encode a video, it is using the Quicktime software and your processor to render out and encode the video. When videos are being encoded it pretty much uses 100% of your processors power, leaving you with next to no room to do anything else(browse the internet, listen to music, etc).
This is where Elgato’s new Turbo.264 device comes in. It is the same size as a USB pen drive and even plugs into your computer through USB. The Turbo.264 device’s soul purpose is to render and encode videos using Apple’s H.264 codec and to take the stress off your processor. Elgato is listing the device as being able to encode videos up to 4 times faster on an Intel-based Mac, and is even higher than that on older PowerPC based Mac’s.
The device is only $100 and for that amount of money, this hardware video encoder is well worth it and I will definitely be picking up this new toy.
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May 17
Let me start by saying when I first heard rumors about 2 years ago of a live action Transformers movie being in the works, I was a little bit skeptical. But after seeing the newest trailer for the movie, I can’t help but be excited and I can’t wait for the movie to come out. So here is the link to enjoy this new Transformers trailer goodness. It’s the Exclusive trailer from Yahoo!Movies.
