A few days ago I spotted a Twitter conversation between Simon Whatley and Christian Heilmann which brought YQL back into my mind. In case you don't know, YQL stands for Yahoo Query Language is 'an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services'. In short, it's a sort of API to a lot of other APIs, and then some. It's also very easy to use since it's effectively just like SQL. For example you can use this example query to get details about a specific Vimeo video. But not only can you query web services using YQL, you can even scrape HTML pages which do not expose an API - very powerful stuff.

Flickr is one of the APIs that's also supported and I figured that it would be a great addition to one of my products, Scribblar, if a user could get easy access to all the images for a given keyword which are released under a Creative Commons license. Again this is very easy with YQL using a query such as this one.

I've created a simple Flex app which wraps the functionality provided by YQL and the Flickr API. You can check it out here. The source overview is here, and the downloadable zip here.

This is not a trick question, but more of a pushback on the recent FUD that various people have been spreading. Quotes such as 'HTML5 video uses 10% CPU while Flash uses 100%' were both unprofessional and not backed up by any actual data. The short answer to the above question could in fact be yes - if I wanted to spin these results, but the more correct way of putting things would actually be: 'It depends'.

My co-author Jan has gone through some lengths to come up with the most thorough like-for-like comparison of HTML5 versus Flash video decoding requirements as far as CPU usage is concerned. His conclusions follow below, and I recommend you head over to his blog for the full story.

Streamingmedia.com have published a great tutorial and overview on how to get started with Amazon's new Cloudfront Streaming service. While the service currently only supports on-demand streaming of Flash video content the company also has plans to support live streaming in the near future. This service looks like a very cost effective and scalable video streaming service, and is relatively easy to set up.

If you are interested in this service and require any help or advice then please feel free to get in touch. I've set up several video streaming environments on Amazon Cloudfront as well as EC2 in the past.

Evolution Gaming, an industry leader in live, real-time online casino games, is currently looking to fill two positions. The first one is for a Senior Flash Developer with a focus on ActionScriptwhile the second position is more of a general web development role with a focus on HTMl/CSS and also Flash.

You can read the full requirements for the Senior Flash Developer role here, the details for the Web Developer Role are here.

Interested parties should direct their CV and accompanying covering letter to heidi@evolutiongaming.com or call +44 207 563 9140

My friend Jan has published some quality comparisons between the Ogg and H.264 video codec. For those who don't know, Ogg Theora is the video container format and codec favoured by Mozilla for playback of web video in HTML5 whereas H.264 is a widely popular codec - one may say the industry standard - that is used for all types of content from Flash (on sites that include YouTube and Hulu) to Blu-Ray and DVB broadcast television.

I can't say that I'm surprised about Jan's test results in which H.264 comes out on top. Ogg Theora is quite a dated codec which is based on Ons'2 VP3 specs, and which has become a free, open standard. Unfortunately the label of free software alone does not guarantee that Ogg Theora won't be vulnerable to yet unknown patents. For those reasons I would personally be very surprised if Ogg Theora sees any significant uptake in the future, even once HTML5 becomes more widely supported. Major players such as Apple and Nokia were amongst those who opposed the inclusion of this specific format as part of the proposed HTML5 specs, and it is highly doubtful that Mozilla alone has enough leverage to give this compression format a new lease of life.
Meanwhile both Safari and Chrome are focused on supporting H.264 which they consider to be a better choice for web video.

Check Jan's full article here and stay tuned for some more video codec specific tests in the coming weeks.

As you may already know, the Mobile World Congress kicked off today in Barcelona and it did not take long for the first announcements to hit the interwebs. Adobe has of course a large presence at MWC and today announced support for Flash Player as well as Adobe AIR on Android devices. While we have seen some demos of Flash running on Android already, support for the AIR runtime gives developers yet another option for deployment on mobile devices, besides the traditional Flash content for (mobile) web browsers that is going to hit mobile screen sometime in the first half of 2010. Adobe states that 19 of the top 20 phone OEMs are committed to delivering Flash and expects more than half of all smartphones to ship with Flash Player by the end of 2012. 19 out of 20... can you guess the missing one?

My friends Lisa Larson-Kelly and Jan Ozer are hosting a one day workshop in Manhattan on March 23rd 2010 covering streaming media production and Flash video delivery.

These guys truly know their stuff and I can only recommend taking part in this one-off event, especially if you are in the New York area and interested in all things Flash video. The course will not only include video production techniques and Flash Player development but also extend to encoding in H.264 for Flash, i-Pod/Phone/iPad and Silverlight as well as a Flash Media Server Crash Course, amongst other topics.

Sign up now and take advantage of the early bird pricing at $170 for any half day course, or $300 for the full day - a total steal if you ask me. For more information visit Jan's site.

Version 0.9 of the Open Source Media Framework has just been released. For those who haven't heard about OSMF (formerly codenamed Strobe) yet, it is an ActionScript based framework to help facilitate the easy development of media players running on the Flash Platform. The framework is open source and supports not only video and audio playback but also other asset types such as images, SWFs and the like. It could develop into a de-facto standard for Flash based media player development.

With the 0.9 Sprint release the team have effectively locked the APIs in order to prepare for version 1.0.

Some of the new features in 0.9 include support for HTTP streaming (a sign of things to come), a SMIL plug-in and an OSMF Sample Player. There's also a comprehensive Developer's Guide in PDF format.

If you have plans to take a closer look at OSMF then now would be a good time as the 1.0 release is getting closer.