Posts tagged ‘Flash Video’
Flash Player 10.1 has been pushed to litl webbooks
I noticed that litl has pushed 10.1 to webbooks, effective today.
RT @chuckstar: A certified version of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 has been pushed to all #litl products. http://twitpic.com/35om6t
Looking forward to see just how much video playback performance and other processor intensive tasks has improved the device experience (I do believe that litl has a GPU and 10.1 is able to tap into it for hardware acceleration).
Next stop hulu.
litl working to launch a Flash-based web-connected TV product
As I had guessed back in early 2010, litl is apparently working on a new product to add to their litl webbook.
Since the litl is a digital home laptop, it would make perfect sense to tie it to some sort of TV, DVR, or hybrid multi-media product for home use. After all, 2010 is turning into the the year of easily attainable large screen displays, smarter home appliances, and next generation home entertainment (e.g. 3D TV’s, game consoles, media players, etc). 
Chuck Freedman (litl) recently had a blog posting where he gave a few very high level hints on what they are working on these days.
“… Flash-Based “Web-Connected TV” device on the market, running litl OS as well as ALL channels built with our new SDK.”
Also, you can tell something obvious from this ‘hint’ (I won’t spell it out, though):
keynote audience will be the very first to see what we have in ’store’ for the Flash community.
What’s more, you can kind of gauge what type of hardware will be enabled in the new 10.1 SDK:
In the coming months, our SDK will be expanded to include “accelerometer movement, video chat, trackpad gestures, and microphone input” that will allow open development of “gaming, communication, entertainment and other experiences”.
Chuck ends the post with this, which makes it clear that litl will be sticking to Flash for the foreseeable future:
“We believe that our platform’s use of Flash will be the best and easiest way for developers to deliver great content and applications to the TV!”.
Having seen some of the capabilities of early HTML5, it’s pretty clear that if litl were to adopt that now, they wouldn’t be able to attain a lot of the cool stuff it’s device can do with Flash, right now. Maybe in 2-3 years they will adopt though. They do have a built in browser that supports the latest webkit, I believe. So, who knows what this device’s future holds in terms of Flash and the like.
litl webbook gets 1st OS updates
litl has posted it’s 1st set of OS updates including:
- faster full-screen video performance on Hulu and YouTube (or any Flash video),
- lightening fast photo scrolling in our mediawall
- new javascript engine for faster browsing
Apparently the updates happen seamlessly, behind the scenes, and I believe are installed transparently the first time they are possible on the litl. Today, I didn’t see any update screen, and I imagine there isn’t one … it’s all hidden away from users prying eyes.
As a developer, it’s going to be very strange getting updates that I didn’t opt into, but I imagine for most people who buy the litl, they just want the latest and greatest and not have to worry about these sort of things.
Personally, I would like to see an update history somewhere in the settings on the litl, though. Some people want to know that they are getting their moneys worth with updates, as when you buy into the litl, you’re really buying into the software, platform and the idea, and not necessarily just the hardware. 
Big Flash experiences on a litl device
One of the litl team members, Kathryn Rotondo has shared some information about how Flash is utilized to drive the Flash side of the user experience on the first litl device, in a post called “how litl and actionscript became BFFs”.
Apparently, litl supports *both* Flash Lite, as well as Flash Player 10. However, it depends on the mode you place the litl in. Flash Lite is used for channel content when in “easel mode”. When a user is surfing around in webbook mode, the browser supports Flash Player 10 for Flash content consumption on the web.
In regards to Flash Lite capabilities, looks like Calsoft created a custom Flash Lite 3.x implementation for the device. It supports hardware video acceleration, and bitmap caching support. Other the end spectrum, I’m hearing reports from inside litl, that the Flash Player 10 supports microphone, camera, and plays video very well.
The device can do H.264, fullscreen on a 1280 px x 800 px screen with a 178 degree viewing angle. Pretty impressive. Plus, the display is LED backlit. I can tell you first hand that the gorgeous display is probably one of the top reasons why this device is priced so high … but once you see it in action, you’ll notice immediately the quality over lesser netbooks on market (or at least the ones I’ve seen shipping in US).
In regards to Flash Lite channel content development there are three views (card, full, and channel views). From what I recall cards are individual apps (like on the Palm Pre), “full” is where the app is fullscreen mode, and “channel view” is a user interface where all your channels appear and can be selected.
“we’ve written a straightforward protocol to connect the channel with the device over an XML socket.
the channel can make requests (to initialize its title bar or set properties) and receive events (such as notice that the user has flipped the device into easel mode, followed by go-button and scroll-wheel actions).
we’re wrapping up all this goodness into an SDK to open up the fun, innovative, and rewarding world of channel development to the actionscript community. third-party developers, stay tuned!”
Looking forward to developing for this Flash enabled device.
