Flash Audio/Video updates

Most of you flashers already know about the new Flash player that support
H.264 video and AAC audio.

This is a huge step for all you who are interested in Flash and video, since producing high quality video for Flash has been limited to the ON2 VP7 codec or the older worse VP6.

Now Adobe has implemented a limited sub set of MPEG-4, 3GP and QuickTime movie support whih basically means is that instead of converting your video to VP6/FLV with FFMPEG you can progressive stream .mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.mov and .3gp files using the NetStream API you use to load FLV files now. It only need to have a .FLV file extension.

Another great thing is the support for all audio sampling rates from 8Khz to 96Khz. The old players were limited to 11Khz, 22Khz and 44.1Khz and any other would be played incorrect (slower or faster).


Read more here:
http://www.progettosinergia.com/flashvideo/flashvideoblog.htm#120907

And here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

Resize images 2.0

Everyone who work with publishing images on the web have faced a situation that you need to change the images physical proportions; height and width. I usualy open up the good ol' Photoshop and batch resize the images to the desired height and width. But what if you could resize without make the image smaller or loose information like in cropping? Well smaller ofcourse but I still want to keep that look and feel of the image but it just need to fit in my web design.

There is now a pretty cool technique called Seam Carving to help you with this.

Mario Klingeman at Quasimondo has written a great article how to use Seam Carving in Flash, and yes there is also source code available! :D

Check it out here >>