Google TV’s Fancast.com backdoor to Hulu video closed; Syfy starts blocking too

Even though Hulu has been blocking Google TV, for a few days users could still access the videos through Comcast’s Fancast.com portal, but that loophole has been closed, repeating a pattern seen after the launch of Flash on Froyo and the overall path of Google TV up to this point. Even more notably, Syfy has joined corporate parent NBC in blocking its streams from the devices. So there you have it, despite being technologically able to play most video on the internet, the Google TV’s selection is still limited by license agreements. Obviously a HTPC is the access route of choice if you’re into cord cutting or just don’t like limits, but if it can’t fix the access problem soon, where does Google’s baby really fit into the connected TV market? Check NewTeeVee for a list of what streaming services you can still check out on Google TV, at least, when you’re not playing WoW.

Google TV’s Fancast.com backdoor to Hulu video closed; Syfy starts blocking too originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba rolls out Blade X-gale SSD modules, makes MacBook Air storage look a little less proprietary

One of the most impressive aspects of Apple’s recent MacBook Air redesign was undeniably the shift to ultrathin flash storage modules that could cram your gigabytes of data into picoliters of space. Needless to say, that’s the sort of storage we could all do with in our lives and today Toshiba’s doing us a solid by introducing its Blade X-gale SSD line to the wider world. It’s basically the same stuff as in the Airs, sans Apple’s bombastic marketing, and while the new SSD modules are not yet readily available to buy by consumers (who wouldn’t have anywhere to put them in their laptops anyhow), system integrators are all free to start building around them as of today. The 64GB and 128GB modules are only 2.2mm tall, while the double-stacked 256GB option is 3.7mm in height, and all three can reach speeds of 220MBps while reading or 180MBps when writing. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Toshiba rolls out Blade X-gale SSD modules, makes MacBook Air storage look a little less proprietary

Toshiba rolls out Blade X-gale SSD modules, makes MacBook Air storage look a little less proprietary originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Skyfire for iPhone hands-on (video)

Although Skyfire for iPhone is almost exactly like its Android counterpart, it’s still not available for download in the App Store due to server issues, so we thought you might want to see how it works. We’ve seen improvements on the Flash-to-HTML5 conversion servers in the past day or so, which makes watching videos a breeze. The app itself serves as a fully functional browser with the usual features you’d hope to find: bookmarking, a dedicated search bar, custom homepage, and even private browsing. Pages render rather quickly, although scrolling and pinching to zoom is a little rough around the edges. As for actually watching Flash videos, it couldn’t be easier — once you’ve navigated to a page embedded with a video, a popup window will appear and you’re good to go. Sadly, though, the browser lacks the ability to scrub videos. But hey, if you’ve been waiting three-plus years to play flash videos on your 3.5-inch display, Skyfire might (or might not) be the solution to your burning desire. Be sure to check out the browser in action after the break!

Continue reading Skyfire for iPhone hands-on (video)

Skyfire for iPhone hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MacBook Air battery shown to last two hours longer when browsing the web sans Flash

Let’s be honest, Apple’s claim that it neglected to preload Flash on the new MacBook Airs so that users themselves could download and install the latest (and safest) version was a bit of a red herring. Behind that thin veil of corporate courtesy, we’re now seeing a pretty potent cause for Apple’s dumping of Adobe’s wares. Ars Technica‘s review of the 11-inch Air discovered that the machine could crank its way through six hours of web browsing when Flash was nowhere near it, but only four hours with Flash installed and giving it “the full web experience.” The primary culprit was Adobe’s penchant for using CPU cycles to display animated ads, which were typically replaced by static imagery in the absence of the requisite software. So yeah, it’s not a surprise that a “richer” web would require more resources, but it doesn’t speak well for Flash’s efficiency to find a laptop loses a third of its longevity when running it.

MacBook Air battery shown to last two hours longer when browsing the web sans Flash originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gadget Lab Podcast: Xbox Kinect, Wired’s Fall Test, Skyfire

In this week’s Gadget Lab podcast, Wired.com’s Danny Dumas joins the show to gush about the Xbox Kinect, a brand new accessory that basically turns your body into a game controller. It uses cameras and microphones to detect your skeletal structure. That’s nuts.

          

We also highlight Wired.com’s Fall Test, our selection of 39 best products of 2010. Danny’s personal favorite is Netflix, a movie-streaming service that keeps getting bigger and better.

I wrap up the podcast with an iPhone app I’m not a big fan of: Skyfire, which promises to play Flash videos by automatically transcoding them into iOS-compatible HTML5 video. Problem is, it doesn’t work very well, and it’s not too useful.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #94

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0094.mp3


iPhone App Plays Flash Video, Though It Hardly Matters

Maybe Apple approved Skyfire, an iPhone web browser that plays Flash videos, to prove a point: Flash is losing relevance.

Despite widespread excitement over the first app to work with Adobe’s plug-in, it turns out that Skyfire isn’t very useful.

My hands-on time with the app, which came out Wednesday (and quickly “sold out,” according to the developer’s press release), was an eye-opening experience. The app’s primary function is to take websites that use embedded Flash video and automatically transcode that video into HTML5 so that it’s viewable on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. To test it, I had to find a popular website loaded with Flash video.

The search was difficult.

I looked at several video-heavy websites, only to realize they were already HTML5-ready. Examples include The Onion, DailyMotion, ESPN, CollegeHumor and CNET. The biggest video websites — YouTube and Vimeo — have moved to HTML5, too.

I also found a report showing 54 percent of web video is now HTML5 compatible.

(Note that Skyfire only displays Flash video — not games, animations, ads, etc.)

Eventually a Twitter follower pointed me to a website where Skyfire really came in handy: CWTV. When Skyfire detected I was trying to play a Flash video, a play button popped up at the bottom of the browser, and the app did its job: Within 5 seconds I was streaming an episode of Smallville. (Hurray, I guess.)

There are some other Flash-dependent websites that work well on Skyfire, like the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

But the browser didn’t play all Flash videos. I loaded the TED Talks website, which is a gallery of Flash videos, and Skyfire didn’t transcode the videos. I tried playing a Flash video on CNN.com, and Skyfire didn’t transcode it, either. But it doesn’t matter so much in those cases, because there are already iOS apps for both TED Talks and CNN, which are capable of playing their videos.

Another major exception is Hulu, whose videos are encoded in Flash. But it’s not Skyfire’s fault that you can’t view Hulu videos. Because of licensing terms, the company doesn’t allow mobile devices to stream Hulu videos for free, as you could with a computer by visiting Hulu.com.

Instead, the company wants you to pay a monthly subscription fee through the Hulu iOS app. If you try visiting Hulu.com through Skyfire, you get a message saying it’s not supported.

Frankly I had a tough time finding reasons to use Skyfire. My hands-on testing of the app made me feel that Flash doesn’t matter anymore (not nearly as much as it used to before the iPad hit stores in April).

But Skyfire was a hot seller when it launched Wednesday — so hot that the developers pulled it from the store because of traffic overload, then labeled it “sold out.”

All this leads me to conclude that the underlying reason is the one big chunk of the web that’s still not available on the iPhone or iPad: free porn. Indeed, many porn-streaming websites still rely on Flash.

That makes me believe that the tipping point for Flash to become irrelevant is when the most-popular porn sites shift to HTML5. My “research” tells me that day isn’t far away.

In the meantime, Skyfire may have only limited utility for most of the web, but it makes a fine porn browser.

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Lack of Flash Gives MacBook Air Two Extra Hours of Battery Life

We sometimes sneer at cellphones equipped with Adobe’s Flash browser plug-in: On tiny, energy-efficient mobile processors, the plug-in spikes CPU-usage, causing a big drain on battery life and often making the poor host browser so stuttery and unresponsive that it is rendered useless. But what of full-sized computers? They can handle it, right?

Maybe not. Much has been made of Apple’s decision to ship the new MacBook Airs without the Adobe plug-in, and in future all Macs will be made this way. In tests run by Wired.com’s sister site, Ars Technica, it turns out that having Flash installed can cut the notebooks’ battery life by one third. That’s right. Simply by not having a browser plug-in installed, the 11-inch MacBook Air gets two extra hours of battery life. Ars:

Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.

Anecdotal reports of the new Airs say that they run cooler and quieter than other Mac notebooks, unless they are using Flash. YouTube videos and Flash ads are pretty much the only things that cause the machines to heat up, and for their usually silent fans to spin up.

What to do? Well, there are lots of great Flash-blocking plug-ins for browsers, but these are rather heavy-handed. The sites you visit still think you have Flash, and serve ads and video only for them to be suppressed. If you uninstall Flash completely, though, the site will often have a fallback, serving static ads and — in many cases — plain HTML5 video. The content creators get their ad impressions, you get less blinking crap and better battery life, and the world gets the hint that maybe Flash isn’t as ubiquitous as it used to be.

The future of notebooks: Ars reviews the 11″ MacBook Air [Ars via Steven Frank]

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Skyfire browser for iPhone hits the App Store, ready to play your Flash videos (update)

It’s been over two months since it was first submitted for approval, but the Skyfire 2.0 web browser for iPhone is now finally, officially available for download, complete with the ability to play Flash videos… sort of. To get around the iPhone’s Flash restrictions, the browser actually transcodes the video in a way that lets the phone only see HTML5, and it compresses all videos by about 75 percent in the process to ease bandwidth concerns. Of course, that workaround also means that Flash video is the only type of Flash that the browser supports, and the company also notes that Hulu is currently blocked but that “scores of other premium sites are supported.” Skyfire also points out that the browser has more than just Flash going for it — it’s a full-fledged Webkit browser in its own right, and packs a few other tricks like easy sharing to Facebook and Twitter, and a so-called Facebook Quickview mode. Head on past the break for a quick video overview, and hit up the App Store now to grab the browser for the “special early adopter price” of $2.99.

Update: Skyfire is now “sold out.” What could that possibly mean? Find out right here.

Continue reading Skyfire browser for iPhone hits the App Store, ready to play your Flash videos (update)

Skyfire browser for iPhone hits the App Store, ready to play your Flash videos (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Transcend issues four new CFast 500 memory cards, promises 108MB/sec transfer rates

February 2010 has come and gone, and we’re still not seeing a heck of a lot of traction with regard to CFast. Hailed as the next major leap in the CompactFlash standard, CFast cards rely on the SATA interface versus UDMA / IDE, with Transcend’s latest expected to boast transfer rates of 108MB/sec. As with other CFast cards, these too are shaped exactly like existing CompactFlash units, and while it seems as if the company is pushing these towards enterprise and industrial applications right now, it’s just a matter of time before they make the jaunt to your local camera shop. Expect four sizes (2/4/8/16GB) to pop up in the next few months, and feel free to let your imagination run wild with respect to prices.

Continue reading Transcend issues four new CFast 500 memory cards, promises 108MB/sec transfer rates

Transcend issues four new CFast 500 memory cards, promises 108MB/sec transfer rates originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TweakTown tests the best thumb drives, invites USB 3.0 models to the party

TweakTown tests the best thumb drives, invites USB 3.0 models to the party

Most USB thumb drives are cheap enough that it rarely seems worth comparison shopping but, as usual with computer hardware, if you want the best you’d best look at some benchmarks. Following in the footsteps of Kristofer Brozio, TweakTown gathered together 16 of the fastest and most common models to test and some of the big brands, like Lexar, finished near the bottom in terms of performance. If you want a fast USB 2.0 drive, the Silicon Power LuxMini 920, a 64GB model, is the one to get — if you can find it. Meanwhile the rather more readily available Patriot Memory models clocked in at a close second. However, taking all the honors is the OCZ Enyo, but given that’s more of an external SSD we question its inclusion. For proper thumb drives, it’s the USB 3.0 Super Talent SuperCrypt taking the cake for performance — as it should for a $120, 16GB model.

TweakTown tests the best thumb drives, invites USB 3.0 models to the party originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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