Tuesday 26 January 2010

x264's new bells and whistles

When it comes to H.264 encoding, most people know of x264.

Dark Shikari and the x264 team have consistently produced solid, fast and feature-complete code - in many cases better than commercial offerings. This alone is nothing short of incredible considering the budget, geographical distribution and sheer complexity of the encoder itself.

Even though its already one of the best encoders out there, used by the likes of Facebook, Youtube and commercial cable companies, the team seems to show no sign of slowing down. Last week saw a couple of patches committed into the main x264 git repository which have really got my head spinning with (low latency) possibilities.

Tuesday 12 January 2010

あけおめ!

明けましておめでとうございます!Happy New Year! 新年快乐!

'Tis the season to be busy and that's certainly been the case in Osaka this year. We've moved offices at work, I've taken on a part-time programming role with a UK based tech startup and I spent early January frantically patching our Facebook app to work with the latest round of stream publishing changes Facebook have implemented.

I had planned on releasing a new version of http://www.readalongkanji.com/ by now but due to the busy holiday season it looks like that will happen some time towards the end of this month. The site has now crawled an incredible 1.1 million Japanese news articles so I'm working in some changes that will try to make better use of them. I think the improvements will be worth the wait. :) I'm still figuring out how it will all come together though so I'll leave the details until its actually complete.