I haven’t had the time to go into this in detail, but was so impressed by my first little test that I just had to share it at once. Visit Vividas.com and click the Spider-man graphic to the right on the page. You might have to accept a small plugin to install on your computer and wait a couple of seconds.
When everything is up and running you’ll see full screen streaming video with a quality that is pretty amazing!
It would be interesting to know if this works on Mac and Linux as well. At least it played fine on my old laptop with Win XP and Firefox 2.0
Have fun.
eirikso 
I got this error message using
Firefox 1.5.0.7onUbuntu 6.06:Unfortunately, the Operating System you are currently using is unsupported.I got the same message on Red Hat Linux
It works in Safari on Mac OS X. It chrashed Safari the first time I tried but I may have been bacause I had 48 tabs open…
Yeah we’re a small company and so we’re always “catching up” to get our technology on certain platforms. Alas, Linux is one of those platforms. We should have a linux player early next year. You’re best bet in the meantime is to view the clip from a windows machine if you have access.
OK, so it works for Mac and Windows. On all the windows boxes I have tried the installation have been one simple “OK” button and a couple of seconds of waiting. And the quality is amazing. Pretty cool if you ask me. When you get the Linux version out you have a very competetive product.
Actually, I can’t think of any other video streaming standard with that quality, such a simple and fast installation and a potential to cover all the major operating systems.
I’ll have to watch this one!
Tried it on Opera under Windows. Just accepted the java and it worked perfectly.
That is also nice that it works on more browsers, not just IE and Firefox.
Indeed!
The only problem I see is that it uses 100% cpu on my laptop and therefore the fan is making a lot of noise. I have the same problem with flash players like you youtube and google video, but not with ordinary streaming with windows media player. I have a centrino 1600MHz with 512Mb ram.
Wow, that is amazing video quality. I’ve never seen anything like it. And as others report, it worked out of the box with just a click on a “Yes” button in Opera 9.10 on Windows XP. If these guys manage to get the same quality in an embeddable player that works just as seamlessly as this, they should knock out all the poor-quality Flash content we have on YouTube and Google in no-time. Excellent!
Yes Vividas is pretty amazing streaming video. I think the best streaming presently out there. Sony has used Vividas for other trailers besides Spiderman – take a look at Casino Royale, DaVinci Code, Ghost Rider web sites.
Vividas’ visual quality is due to their choice of VP compression technology from On2 Technologies, a cutting edge video compression developer that has been flying under the radar for quite a while.
Visit their site at http://www.On2.com and you can see some pretty impressive examples of video streamed in their in native VP6 and VP7 compression formats using their own player, as well as Flash 8 format – which by the way is actually On2 VP6. Also pay attention to the fact that On2 is providing a free personal use license for their VP7 encoder and decoder that can be downloded from their site if you are interested.
You should know that the poor quality Flash seen at Youtube and Google along with many others that use Flash is distinctly a matter of three issues:
1) Original source material of poor production quality, and
2) That poor quality source being encoded into Flash 7 video format and not Flash 8 video format. Garbage in= Garbage out.
2) To whatever extent Flash 8 may be used, the choice of less than optimium encoding paramaters in the rush to get video posted.
Flash 8 video (currently VP6 and probably VP7 at some point in the future) has every bit the the capability to produce comparable quality video output to what you see in Vividas. That’s because Flash 8 utilizes essentially the same compression technology used by Vividas. Flash 7 video is based on Sorenson compression technology derived from H.263 and can not produce video quality comparable to Flash 8. Expect a transition over time (already in progress) from Flash 7 to Flash 8.
With Flash 8 poor quality video is really the fault of content providers who use Flash technology poorly, not the fault of the technology itself. You might want to check out Brightcove.com to see how Flash 8/9 is starting to be leveraged. Brightcove has directly licensed On2 encoding tools to support its Flash related business. Or go to CBS.com and watch a few reuns of their popular shows dine in Flash 8.
By the way, Adobe only recently added embedded, full screen support to Flash in the Flash 9 player which explains why there has been little full screen Flash video available. Expect to see a lot full screen Flash video to start making its appearance. Of note also is that On2 itself also recently released live streaming encoding support for Flash 8/9. Check out Fabchannel.com out of the Netherlands for examples of live streaming using Flash for music concerts. Pretty cool.
Very interesting. On2 VP6 is indeed a good codec. However, Flash lack hardware assisted video rendering. For full screen playback you need a pretty powerful computer. I guess we’ll see enhancements on this as well in future releases of flash.
…and by the way. The fabchannel link is dead. Is there a typo?