Tubular

Phew! After what has been WAY too long of a wait, we’re finally ready with a new beta. It’s waiting for you by doing the Check For Updates from the Tubular window (and we tested it this time, it will actually update now). We’ll also be sending out an email to everyone who preordered with a direct link to the new version.

So what’s new this time around? Well, we’ve finally finished integrating Perian. That took longer than we were anticipating, and for that we do apologize. However, we’re seeing huge performance benefits, and it’ll help us down the road with some things that we’re really excited to do post-1.0. Right now, the only problem we’re having with Perian is that the video needs to preload fully before you can play it. We’re working on making the video streamable, so you only need to preload a small amount before it starts playing (like YouTube’s player). You can scrub to any frame you want, which is a huge advantage over the YouTube player (and, for that matter, any Flash video player, as it is a limitation of the technology).

We’ve also been fixing a bunch of little bugs. We got one of the biggest searching issues, and now you can search numerous times for whatever you want. Also, we think that we fixed the bug that people were having with searching for words with non-Roman characters. However, we only have a few phrases to search for, so if you speak a language with a non-Roman character set, please test out the search and let us know if you bump into any phrases that Tubular chokes on. We’ve also added a cache, so any video that you’ve watched can be loaded instantly should you choose to play it again. There isn’t any size restriction on it yet; we’ll be putting that in in a future version, as well as a category that will let you see the contents of your cache.

Enjoy, and as always let us know what bugs you guys run up against. And once again, sorry for those incredibly lame delays.

We’re almost there. We are currently nailing it in so it works as expected (leaving the video player and going back to the list, drag and drop, copy/paste, etc.). We’ve already seen massive performance improvements and, to a limited extent, graphical quality improvements. Both we’ll be working on improving even further, but the QuickTime and Perian integration is paying off already. The only downside is that, for the moment, videos have to preload before playing. We’re working on that as well.

We’ve been hard at work on using Perian to play YouTube video in a QuickTime video player. We now have a much more reliable method of finding the videos and downloading them, which means that there’s no more ambiguity before trying to play a video as to whether or not it will actually play. Perian’s also given us the ability to scrub through every frame in the movie, and not just to certain frames, like YouTube’s player (although this is a limitation of Flash, and so the same behavior is seen at Google Video, Dailymotion, Revver, etc.). Performance is also much better. And down the line, we’ll start using Core Video to clean up the video files.

We’re in the process of wrapping up the integration. When we’re done, we’ll push out a new version (finally) to everyone in the beta.

Also, I’m sorry for the lack of updates lately, but college work never ends.