As per every post, these are just brain farts that emit from my minds orifaces so if Im way off base feel free to let me know.

Ok so to set the scene I will outline what I have been noticing.

1. People have been downloading Torrent video quite happily for a long time now.  Take for example the series of Hero's. Its actually available for free from the network website (streamed). But seeing all you US folk have the latest releases I have noticed all my mates have downloaded the torrents to view them before they arrive in New Zealand.
2. The common video format for these torrents is AVI in either xvid or div (more and more so the previous).
3. HDTV is popping up on all the torrents, not because everyone has hdtv Tv sets but the quality of the final converted video is alot better with less artifacts.
4. More and more media centers are popping up and people are transfering media files to a central storage, ignoring DRM people seem to be hoping to watch these again, and keep them for later.
5. Apple now P0wns the music scene because of the hardware; Lessons to be learnt?

Right onto the points of interest. 

Torrents work! I dont mind leaving something running overnight or over a couple of days if the quality is going to be good. I cant myself see in the near future  wanting to watch streamed media of anything over a few mins long. I prefer to wait for quality, and other people seem to be the same. Why is FMS pressing with streaming technologies when it has it covered well enough for now. I noticed that some time ago the Adobe teamed up with Verisign but this is only a step in the right direction. I am hoping Adobe is going to start stepping towards peer to peer video transfer to speed things up and do file transfer as oposed to streaming. Im sure they are watching Joost with interest, I know I am.

Thats not to much of a step away from what I have at the moment. I turn on the TV and check out what time I can watch a show….I turn on a media center and see when my file transfer will be finished and I can watch my show. FMS seems to have been missing the mark. Its only Java, which although is not a bad thing, it is a limitation to intergrate with some things *awaits Java fanboy rants in cooments* , and I havent seen much more than chat apps done with it (again I would love some more examples).

The flash player really really needs to take advantage of hardware accelleration to get a great codec for HDTV. Like I stated previously div-x and x-vid are leading codecs for torrents. But I can see why. Imagine having to convert to a format that can only be viewed in web players and a few desktop apps that not to many people have. Adobe seem to be working on a flv converter on the labs but they really need to do some work to play catch up if they want to OWN.

Lastly hardware support. Apple demonstraighted how a piece of hardware can lead to software and create sales channels. Adobe has such a tight grip on who uses its SDK's and how much they cost that I cant see how FLV could ever make it into the home entertainment area. The Wii is great with its Flash player 7, but imagine it with Flash player 9!

Lastly what I would love to see happen: FLV encoders free! FMS devlier some amazing developments in the network delivery and enable distribution of feature length video. HDTV FLV codec (with hardware accelleration)

Bring it on Adobe … let's see some advances in Flash Media server.

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