Fullscreen Flash...Vividas will not be happy i reckon.

Rumours were that the FP team was cooking up some new features at Adobe's HQ and just a minute ago the news came out officially, the upcoming Flash Player release supports Full Screen playback right in your browser!

As said on the wiki, the primary use case is ofcourse Flash Video, and i'm sure we will see the Youtube's, MySpaces and the Google Video's will roll out tests supporting this feature. I'm wondering if it uses the hardware based 2D acceleration of the GPU, as it will ofload CPU usage and usually improve the image quality of the video. I'm definitely will start implementing this on Fabchannel.com tomorrow so you can watch the concerts fullscreen right on your PC.

Stefan blogged about Vividas and their implementation ( Java and On2 VP6 based ) and the one thing that i did like about Vividas was their fullscreen playback. I reckon they aren't very happy with this feature added now onto the plugin player.

Link: Flash Player:9:Update:Full-Screen Mode - Adobe Labs.

Comments

[Flo]

Thanks for the information. You can find a simple demo of the full-screen-mode here: http://www.video-flash.de/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/fullscreen.html

Source-Code: http://www.video-flash.de/index.php/full-screen-mode-fur-videos/

[ohwhen]

HI Flo,

Cool thanks for the ping, that's a pretty ace demo there :)

[JT]

"Vividas will not be happy i reckon"

Well, you'd still have to get your video to match the quality of Vividas which is outstanding. Also, Vividas uses VP6 & 7. Adobe as we know is still on VP6.

[ohwhen]

I agree the examples on the Vividas site look really stunning, but do not forget the source material ( mostly film ) instead of DV. I'd reckon they also clean the source before they feed it to the encoder as well, which improves visual output significant. The tools from On2 such as Flix do not support this, you need something like Cleaner to get better visual output. I'd have to agree that VP7 is much better in out-of-the-box quality when compared to VP6 :)

[Vi and the Torando]

I am one of the three co-founders of Vividas way back when it was called e-genie. I was responsible for outlining albeit 'architecture' of the technology. I am no longer involved with the company.

By the nature of the beast flash video (vp6) WILL facilitate video/2D acceleration. To use Adobe's terminology, "caching as bitmap" implies that it will copy pixel data to the video card in a method whereby directX and quartz drivers understand and even assume to accelerate.

@ the poster on "vividas uses vp7".

Your implication is that vividas' quality is directly related to the codec - this is NOT true.

You CAN make flash8(VP6) look near good enough to pass off as Vividas(VP7) providing you have their guarenteed delivery speed(akamai). Users experience a better quality image because the infrastructure provided by akamai enables Vividas to emphasise quality > compression. They control the encoding process ;)

Finally, IMHO Vividas is a about end to end service and optimising the ENTIRE process from camera -> viewing and NOT about simple compression technology. Of course, this is hardly rocket science stuff.

And anyway, Adobe will undoubtadly license up vp7.

[Vi and the Torando]

oh and one last thing.

Even if flash acquires a license for VP7 then one has to recognise that vividas is a SERVICE from end to end a NOT limited to a compression/playback technology.

Vividas has its little spot and their competition is not adobe directly but rather suppliers of Content Management who will undoubtadly challenge Vividas in this area by facilitating flash video.

Adios!