It has been just over two years since my last post. I have had many intentions of writing on my blog but apparently always found something else to do. So what have I been up to?

I started working at DivX as one of the product managers on the consumer software team. It has been a lot of fun and I have been able to take the lead on a lot of interesting projects. My products are the Codec Pack, Converter, and Web Player. The digital video space has been a really interesting place for the last couple of years and we’ve been able to turn some big key threats (Windows 7 and HTML5) into big opportunities through our software (Codec Pack and Web Player, respectively). The Web Player in particular is something that I have spent a lot of time on over the past year. We recently released a beta that introduces two new features that I am particularly proud of.

First, it now supports HTML5 API for <video> which is something I have been following for a long time. I am really glad to see HTML5 finally getting some traction but the one area where things are kind of still a mess it in the <video> space. There isn’t a consistently supported format across the major browsers yet, and some browser have a pretty low quality of playback. We are helping to alleviate this by delivering a HTML5 <video> platform with consistent support for multiple formats (H.264, MP4, MKV, MOV, and DivX), all in very high quality with hardware acceleration (when available), on Windows and Mac for Firefox, Chrome, and  even Internet Explorer. Users just have to have our plugin installed and it will support standard HTML5 <video> markup. Check out a little HTML5 demo I made to see how it works.

Second, we introduced a new feature we are calling DivX HiQ. It allows you to choose to use the DivX Plus Web Player on popular sites like YouTube and Vimeo instead of their default Flash players. As the Web Player is solely focused on video unlike Flash it offers a much better experience with dramatically lower CPU and power consumption. Don’t just take my word on it though see what users are posting about it on our forums.

I have also been doing a bit of programming since I’ve been really getting involved in a lot of web/HTML5 stuff through my work. I made an “Instant” search using Bing’s AJAX API which was novel until Google Instant came out. It is a fun project and it works really well on mobiles. I also created a Google Code project for a JavaScript statistics library (I hope my Purdue professors are proud :) and a Silverlight audio player that supports the HTML5 audio API that I made. I’ll probably blog about them more later.

That is a sampling of what I have been up to in the tech world. I will try to post more regularly (once or twice a month) about what is happening in HTML5, media, and the mobile landscape.