September – 2015 – OSnews

Monthly Archive:: September 2015

Visual updates to Search and Now cards

Thom Holwerda 2015-09-02 Google 3 Comments

The web and tech journalists were all afire yesterday. A major new innovation? A brand new software release? Nope - Google has a new logo. Yeah. That's the hard-hitting tech news deserving of totally unbiased and very unpredictable hot takes.

There was actually real Google news too - the company made some changes to how search is displayed on mobile.

With mobile devices in mind, we've also made some changes to our search results page to help you more easily find what you need and dive into diverse content such as images, videos, news stories and more - by simply swiping and tapping.

Submitted by ddc_ 2015-09-02 Multimedia, AV 24 Comments

Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, and Amazon today launched a new consortium, the Alliance for Open Media. The group plans to develop next-generation media formats - including audio and still images, but with video as the top priority - and deliver them as royalty-free open source, suitable for both commercial and noncommercial content.

The problem is that the supposed next-generation codec, HVEC, is going to be a lot more expensive, whereas other initiatives, such as Google's VP9/VP10, would surely face patent trolling from the other major players. By coming together like this, all these players can have a say, without fear of them suing each other. That being said, smaller players will still want to sue, but at least the united front should make that a little harder.

And, unsurprisingly, one major player is not part of this new initiative. I guess they didn't like the open and royalty-free part.