Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has started testing advanced features in the iTunes movie versions of Salt, The Other Guys and Resident Evil: Afterlife, including search in script/scene, social sharing, and song playlists.
When upgrading to the new iOS powered Apple TV, you may have noticed that iTunes Extras and iTunes LP were missing. These features were included with the old Apple TV, so imagine the disappointment when veteran Apple TV users were stripped of them. Conor Winders of Redwind Software was one such user and emailed Steve Jobs himself regarding it.
Boy Genius has an unconfirmed source claiming that, as part of Apple's rumored iLife 2010, long-ignored iDVD will finally see an update -- and that update will be support for iTunes LP (and we're assuming iTunes Extras) creation/authoring.
Apple.com has published a new page with information on iTunes LP and iTunes Extras for Developers:
Here’s everything you need to know to create a rich, interactive experience around your music and movies. All right in iTunes.
It includes the latest version of Apple's TuneKit (think WebKit HTML+CSS+Javascript with iTunes hooks), as well as templates, best practices, a development guide, and info on asset delivery and testing. It's not all automagical yet, however:
It still baffles us how iTunes LP and iTunes Extras content -- which was introduced in the seemingly Apple TV-ideal 720p format -- wasn't compatible with the new Apple TV 3.0 software to begin with. In fact, we've gotten Wall-E with iTunes Extras to play on our Apple TV already. But according to Apple, it's now really for real compatible...
iTunes Extras was easy to see as a DVD extras competitor, offering a similar feature set to what's already on the market, and users are already familiar with using. iTunes LP, on the other hand, harkened back to a time decades ago when vinyl albums and turn-tables were how people experienced music -- something decidedly not familiar to modern MP3 and iTunes music listeners.
More than 2 years post-iPhone launch, no news on Flash ever coming to the iPhone, yet Apple is pressing ahead with technologies like H.264 video (YouTube App's been using it since day one), HTML 5 and CSS animation (iPhone Safari supported them first), HTTP Live Streaming, and now WebGL for hardware accelerated 3D-graphics, and TuneKit, the framework behind the new iTunes LP rich media content.
Read on to find out what they are, how they work, and why they might make plugins like Flash increasingly unnecessary...
