Adobe Flash Won’t Support WebM Anytime Soon

Wondering when Adobe Flash will support WebM, Google’s royalty-free, open video compression format? According to Adobe, WebM support is “not very high” on the priority list. From Phoronix:

Adobe’s MAX 2011 conference took place last week in Los Angeles. During a Q&A session, WebM support in Flash was talked about. After Adobe was questioned about the WebM support, the response was, “Yes, on the priority list it’s not very high because we don’t have a lot of customers or real customers who want to do production with WebM. The problem on the production side is that encoding WebM is simply too slow, it’s not real time. And it’s not JDI too (just do it). Yes, it’s a lot of work for us.”


Apple Lossless Audio Codec Now Open Source

The once proprietary Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is now open source and available under the Apache license. From the Mac OS Forge page:

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files. A description of a ‘magic cookie’ for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.

If you were always curious of its inner-workings, head on over and dig into the source code.