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If you can't fix it, buy someone who can. That must be Google's rationale behind this latest acquisition, as the proprietor of YouTube has just bought Green Parrot Pictures, a company concerned solely with enhancing and improving the quality of video content. Through the use of some fancy motion prediction algorithms, the Irish startup has been able to build a name for itself over the past few years, and now it's been snapped up by the biggest fish in the online video ocean. The removal of flicker, noise and blotches from poorly executed recordings sounds nice, but we're most excited by Green Parrot's video stabilization feature. With all the cameraphone video being uploaded nowadays, there's plenty of camera shake populating YouTube's archives, and the addition of such a potent post-production technique seems like a veritable boon to us. Check out video demos of the stabilization algorithm and Green Parrot's other technologies below.

Continue reading Google buys Green Parrot Pictures, looking to make YouTube vids easier on the eye

Google buys Green Parrot Pictures, looking to make YouTube vids easier on the eye originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Mar 2011 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The smart cookies at the Social Science Research Council have spent three years researching media and software piracy in so-called emerging economies -- countries like Brazil, Russia, India and Mexico -- which has this past week resulted in a comprehensive report aimed at establishing the trends and causes of the unauthorized consumption of intellectual property. The major theme of the report is that ever more stringent enforcement of IP rights has proven ineffective in countering the growing tide of content piracy, and it is instead a problem of "global pricing" that needs to be tackled first. Content distributors' primary concern is argued to be the protection of existing pricing structures in the honeypot nations of Western Europe and North America, which has resulted in prices in locales like Eastern Europe and South America being artificially inflated relative to the purchasing power of their population. Consequently, squeezed out of buying media the legal way, consumers have found themselves drawn to the, erm, grayer end of the market to sate their entertainment needs. There's plenty more to this report, including a proposed solution to fixing these broken economics, but you'll have to check out the links below for the full scoop.

Piracy is a problem of 'global pricing,' not enforcement, claims new report originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Ars Technica  |  Social Science Research Council  | Email this | Comments

The road to Android 2.1 may have been a long and treacherous one for Milestone users, but the one to Android 2.2 wasn't even certain of reaching its goal. Thankfully, Moto has managed to conclude its "exhaustive testing process" and is now making a Froyo firmware update available to Milestone users wishing to step their software up a notch. Flash Player 10.1, a faster browser and mobile hotspot capabilities await the intrepid updater, but Motorola warns that any DRM-locked media you have on your SD card will be lost. Weirdly enough, there's also a caution that "users may experience some adverse effects associated with the upgrade which could include slower operation of some phone functions and applications." Once you've read and understood all the warnings, smash the source link to download the new software.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Motorola Milestone achieves Android 2.2 milestone at last, Froyo update ready for download originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Motorola Europe (Facebook)  |  Motorola  | Email this | Comments

Oh, here we go again. Adobe's kicked out a security bulletin for users of its Flash Player on "all platforms" -- that'll be the entire population of the internet, then -- warning them that a new critical vulnerability has been discovered that may cause crashes and potentially permit the hijacking of systems. The issue also affects the company's Reader and Acrobat software products. Even better news is that Adobe has found it's being actively exploited "in the wild" via a .swf file embedded in an Excel spreadsheet, but a fix won't be forthcoming until the beginning of next week. So, erm, enjoy your full web experience until then!

Adobe finds 'critical' security hole in Flash Player, won't fix it before next week originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PC World (Yahoo! News)  |  Adobe  | Email this | Comments

March 18th may seem like an eternity if you expected your Motorola Xoom to come with Adobe Flash on day one. But you know what? If you put your trust in a mysterious file floating about the internet, there's no need to wait that long. MyDroidWorld obtained possession of a leaked build of Adobe Flash Player for the Xoom, which doesn't need root or even a preliminary update to install -- you just need to check the "Unknown sources" box under Settings > Applications, sideload the file or download it from the Xoom's browser and you're good to go. The best part? Based on our preliminary testing, Flash performs exceedingly well on the Xoom's dual-core Tegra 2 processor.

While this early build of Flash was pretty choppy during HD playback, low-res video content rendered at perfectly viewable speeds, and we were able to play games (like Nanaca Crash and Canabalt) so long as they didn't require anything more than single-button control schemes. By contrast, Hulu was a no-go (it's still blocked), and this build has some kinks to work out when it comes to multitasking -- while any single Flash site ran well and we could quickly tab between, the more Flash-heavy tabs we had open, the slower each one ran individually -- which is why the video above starts out so choppy. Adobe's UI also seemed to have some difficulty detecting when we wanted to make a Flash item full-screen. Typically, you double-tap an item to enlarge it, but sometimes that didn't work... but with some Flash content, we found we could long-press on a Flash window to bring up a UI bar that would let us focus on it individually. Before you judge the merits of Flash on tablet, remember that this is a leaked version of a beta release, and if it's this good out of the gate, we're pretty excited about how well it might perform after a few tweaks. Don't miss our video above, and find the file you need to install Flash yourself at our source link.

Update: We managed to get Flash to drop one of those context-sensitive buttons during a session of Canabalt and make the window full screen, which not only enlarged the window but also seriously sped up our little runner -- probably by redirecting the tablet's resources to our game. Photographic proof after the break!

Update 2: We'll be shooting a second video later in the day to show how the Xoom handles Flash one site at a time.

Update 3: There's a brand-new video after the break! As it turns out, you can make certain Flash windows full-screen by long-pressing on them, and we've updated the article to reflect that.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Adobe Flash Player leaks for Motorola Xoom, we go hands-on (update: more video!)

Adobe Flash Player leaks for Motorola Xoom, we go hands-on (update: more video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink MyDroidWorld  |  Surprise_flash.apk (MultiUpload)  | Email this | Comments