Google's New Toys
19/05/10 13:01 Filed in: Computing
In the past few weeks, I’ve been trying the diet thing (exercise is a great idea too...) One of the more odd things I’ve noticed: Unlike ‘regular’ soft drinks, ‘diet’ soft drinks don’t leave a sticky/sugary film all over whatever container it has been poured into. This naturally falls under the ‘no kidding.’ category; but it took a while to come to this realization. Probably because it took no small amount of time to get used to the flavor of diet drinks. Ugh.
One thing I’m finding I wish iWeb had (it may have it, but I can’t find it). The picture for the blog entries-- apparently if you delete it from the template, then add a new graphic, iWeb no longer recognizes that it had any graphic to begin with. (And the ‘entries’ page doesn’t have a graphic there.) It would be a nice feature if I could actually set some graphic on a blog entry to be the thumbnail for the entry as well. (If I had already deleted the template’s pre-existing graphic).
Migraines suck. Not much else to say about that.
I’ve also received an order from ThinkGeek.com, which contained a book that I’d so far highly recommend: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks. It’s a suprisingly well-thought out treatise on what to do when the dead begin to walk again. Shaun would have done well to heed its warnings before attempting to save his friends when Z-Day hit London.. Google bought On2, and VP8 is a successor to VP3, and has even more advanced features in it. This is a big win for open source.
WebM apparently uses:
Either way, WebM seems to have some fairly significant industry support, including MIPS, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments... so hardware support will be coming. On the software side, you have Skype, Adobe, Opera, Mozilla, Google, Sorenson, and others.I even read a tweet that Microsoft will put WebM into IE 9. YouTube will support WebM. So it looks like the future for video codecs isn’t that dim from an open-source perspective.
IE9 won't support VP8/WebM natively; but you can install a plug-in that will support it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it also gets added to WebKit (by either Apple or Google). There are rumors that Apple doesn’t like VP8 -- after reading a review of VP8’s code and performance, I agree; but like Theora, if you install the proper QuickTime plugin, you’ll be able to use WebM with Safari.
One thing I’m finding I wish iWeb had (it may have it, but I can’t find it). The picture for the blog entries-- apparently if you delete it from the template, then add a new graphic, iWeb no longer recognizes that it had any graphic to begin with. (And the ‘entries’ page doesn’t have a graphic there.) It would be a nice feature if I could actually set some graphic on a blog entry to be the thumbnail for the entry as well. (If I had already deleted the template’s pre-existing graphic).
Migraines suck. Not much else to say about that.
I’ve also received an order from ThinkGeek.com, which contained a book that I’d so far highly recommend: The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks. It’s a suprisingly well-thought out treatise on what to do when the dead begin to walk again. Shaun would have done well to heed its warnings before attempting to save his friends when Z-Day hit London.. Google bought On2, and VP8 is a successor to VP3, and has even more advanced features in it. This is a big win for open source.
WebM apparently uses:
- VP8 as the video codec
- Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec
- A subset of Matroska for the container
Either way, WebM seems to have some fairly significant industry support, including MIPS, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments... so hardware support will be coming. On the software side, you have Skype, Adobe, Opera, Mozilla, Google, Sorenson, and others.
IE9 won't support VP8/WebM natively; but you can install a plug-in that will support it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it also gets added to WebKit (by either Apple or Google). There are rumors that Apple doesn’t like VP8 -- after reading a review of VP8’s code and performance, I agree; but like Theora, if you install the proper QuickTime plugin, you’ll be able to use WebM with Safari.