Content and publishing

A new compression technology represents a significant improvement over today's standard, a new study found. The result could help pave the way for video with at least four times the pixels of today's 1080p standard.

The new compression technology, called HEVC or H.265, is significantly better than today's prevailing standard video codec, called AVC or H.264, researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland, concluded.

"The test results clearly exhibited a substantial improvement in compression performance, as compared to AVC," the researchers said. "As ultra-high definition television has recently … Read more

A trade show in September will be the coming-out party for video technology called HEVC or H.265, a new arrival in a hotly contested market for the best approach to compression.

HEVC, short for High Efficiency Video Coding, is for encoding and decoding video streams so they can be stored or transmitted more economically than today's dominant H.264, aka AVC or Advanced Video Coding. Specifically, HEVC allies say it can deliver the same quality video as H.264 with half the network bandwidth.

The codec has been in the making for years, but it's now almost … Read more

Illustrating one of its selling points for its software subscription plans, Adobe Systems has updated Muse three months after it first released the tool for designing and publishing Web pages.

Adobe released Muse along with the Creative Cloud subscription service, which lets people use the full panoply of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) software along with some online services including Web hosting, Web fonts, and file synchronization. Part of the Creative Cloud sales pitch is that Adobe will update its components as new features arrive, meaning that subscribers get new abilities without having to wait for CS7.

The new version … Read more

Microsoft's new Bing app brings a simple but visually slick approach to searching the Web.

The app made its entrance on Wednesday as one of the few new features to pop up in the Windows 8 RTM (release-to-manufacturing), the same version that will officially greet consumers on October 26.

The new operating system already offers Internet Explorer, both as a Windows 8 app and a traditional desktop program. As a third option, Bing is a dedicated app that acts as a portal to Microsoft's own search engine.

Launching the app opens Bing's home page with the search … Read more

For more than three years, Skype has worked to improve online audio through involvement in a project now called Opus. But perversely, Skype's new owner, Microsoft, is undermining Opus just as a Web standards effort is poised to carry it into the mainstream.

Opus is an audio "codec" -- technology to encode and decode media streams for efficient transmission over the Internet or storage on computing equipment. Opus backers besides Microsoft's Skype division include Google, Opera, and Mozilla.

Opus has a lot of potential to improve online audio, something that's increasingly important as more communications … Read more

Those of you who use Microsoft's SkyDrive will find a new look, feel, and features the next time you fire up your dedicated page.

The folks in Redmond refreshed the online storage site with a design and functionality that closely mimics the Windows 8 SkyDrive app. What changes will you find? Microsoft's Inside SkyDrive blog provides a good overview of the new features. But here's a quick look as well.

Your SkyDrive page has retired the old details view, at least as the default, in favor of the Windows 8 tile approach. All of your folders and … Read more

Sending items from the Web to your Kindle is now a one-step process for users of Google Chrome.

Amazon has rolled out a new Chrome extension called "Send to Kindle for Google Chrome." Installing the extension adds a button to Chrome that lets you send stories, blog posts, and the like directly to your Kindle device and apps. The goal is to let you archive and read your favorite Web pages while you're not online.

You can send yourself an entire Web page or just selected text. And by tapping into Amazon's Whispersync technology, you can … Read more

How did one Google intern spend his summer? Cooking up a new feature for YouTube users.

In a "Diary of a Summer Intern" blog posted yesterday, Rio Akasaka described the feature for editing video captions. Instead of creating a brand new caption for your YouTube videos, you can now simply change the existing caption online.

As an intern, Akasaka had help from a mentor, but he apparently played a leading role in designing the new feature. And as an associate product manager, he was responsible in large part for the project's outcome.

"My project required me … Read more

Google has added two new features to Google+ in response to user requests.

The first feature lets you view another person's photo albums as a slideshow. To check this out, surf to this album set up by a manager at Google+ Photos. Click on the Slideshow button in the upper right corner. Then just sit back and enjoy the show.

Hovering your mouse over any photo displays forward and backward buttons so you can quickly move to the next or previous photo. You can also pause the show or click the X button to stop it and return to … Read more