NAB: Adobe has announced Adobe Media Player, a desktop application that delivers more engaging video experiences to viewers while offering content publishers new abilities to distribute, track and build businesses around their media assets.

Delivered as a lightweight download, Adobe Media Player delivers innovation for both viewers and content owners. For viewers, Adobe Media Player enables higher quality Flash format playback, the ability to download and view videos offline, ways to discover interesting new shows, full screen playback, one-click viewer ratings, and a powerful Favorites feature that automatically downloads new episodes of favorite TV shows or video podcasts. The player is cross-platform, based on open standards – including RSS and SMIL – and brings viewers the highly desired ability to play the Web’s most popular video format outside of their browser.

For content publishers, Adobe Media Player enables better ways to deliver, monetize, brand, track and protect video content. It provides an array of video delivery options for high-quality online and offline playback, including on-demand streaming, live streaming, progressive download, and protected download-and-play. The Adobe Media Player enables a wider selection of monetization and branding options including viewer-centric dynamic advertising and the ability to customize the look and feel of the player on the fly to match the brand or theme of the currently playing content. (more…)

Synk Audio has announced version 1.6 of their Musicbed DV music soundtrack generation software with Mac Universal Binary support, new music generation features, new surround music features and more than double the amount of royalty-free music content.

Musicbed DV is an easy-to-use Mac program for generating custom music soundtracks that match the mood and timing of video and audio projects. Users are offered a unique set of versatile controls for adjusting musical intensity, complexity, dynamics and more, all in real-time. Control curves may be used to add musical builds and punctuation that underscore and accent the emotional movement of projects.

Music soundtracks of any duration may be generated without compromise and exported with a wide variety of options, including stereo and surround music. Musicbed DV is designed for video and film projects, podcasts, DVDs, or any project that calls for a music soundtrack.

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Hubdog, a Mobile entertainment enabler, has created a guide to help web publishers encode video podcasts for playback by a maximum number Windows Mobile Pocket PC & Smartphone devices.

“The wide diversity of devices available for Windows Mobile (WM) has made it very difficult until now for video podcasters to provide a smooth, lag-free encoding format universally compatible with all types of WM Pocket PCs and Smartphones,” according to Patrick Hanchay, Hubdog CEO. “By putting together this free guide, we hope to eliminate a significant entry barrier and drive far more independent and mainstream producers to create video podcasts for the fast growing Windows Mobile market”.

PlayStation Portables are getting video podcast support with the latest update to the PSP’s firmware.

The update takes the PSP firmware to version 2.8. It allows the PSP to receive video clips through RSS (really simple syndication) feeds from blogs and other websites. Sony added PSP podcast support using streaming in November 2005 and added support for PSP podcast downloads in April.

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Desperate Housewives take note: This summer, kids have an alternative to getting sunburned, dehydrated, bitten by chiggers and generally humiliated by the other kids at camp.

Apple Camp promises to let kids geek out, making music, movies, podcasts or websites on a Mac.

Workshops are geared towards kids with intermediate computer skills. The “Camps” are free, but require registration.

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