This is a truly cool and useful post from Emmy Huang, the product manager for Adobe Flash Player. First off, Flash 9 had a very important release in late August (known affectionately as Flash 9.0.47, not to be confused with the newer release of 9.0.97 which provides Leopard fixes) that finally brought H.264 and Flash together. Now the playing field of mainstream web video codecs will merge into 2… H.264/Flash and Windows (VC-1).

Emmy’s post helps provide basic estimates for clients who want to know when all this video goodness will become mainstream. I quote “So here is a basic guideline that you can use to project penetration of a particular release:
@3 months = 30 - 40%
@6 months = 55 - 65
@9 months = 80 - 85%
@12 months = 90+%

So we are looking to the end of summer 2008 to reach near ubiquity, unless everyone starts switching over sooner. Hopefully by this time, the marketing executives at major brands running Windows 98 SE will have upgraded to new machines and will no longer request rough cuts in MPEG1 format

The new Flash player will open up a lot more cool playback possibilities for companies with large Quicktime 7 spot collections.

MS has announced a deal to offer for free the Flip4Mac plug-in from Telestream that will allow Mac OS X users to play Windows Media video and audio directly from Apple’s QuickTime Player software.

This is great news, as the WMP experience on Mac has always been sub-par. We recommend everyone download the free plugin from Telestream immediately.

In the coming month we will be revamping the User Interface for Wiredrive to vastly improve the overall speed and performance of the application. With this update, Wiredrive will be dropping support for all 5.x versions of Internet Explorer on both Windows and Macintosh. These browsers account for less then 3% of the overall usage of the application, and are the great hindrance to our development process.

We estimate the new UI will be launched in early November, 2005; more details on these changes will be sent out in the following weeks.

For the rest of the month, the very few users that are still using IE 5.x will see an alert message on the login page informing them of the upcoming change in browser requirements. After the update, users will not be able to log in using a IE 5.x browser. The alert message will also provide links to download the latest versions of IE, Firefox, and Safari.

For a list of supported browsers please check here.

Information about Microsoft IE

Microsoft discontinued support for IE on the Macintosh in 2003
Microsoft discontinued support for IE on Windows in 2003

Recently, we had a new client request we overlay watermarks on all their thumbnails. This was an easy task since we have been watermaking all the images in Next Trim since the site launced in 2004.

We love it when new and existing clients request features that make Wiredrive better for everyone. Needless to say, this new feature is now available to all new and current WiredrivePro and WiredriveHubclients.