Finally had a chance to look at the Flash export for Encore CS5 and I have to say I wasn’t expecting any changes actually but it’s very nice to see they updated the playback features on it. The usual chubby looking buttons for pause and skip are now replaced with a sleek little bar for playback, volume, subtitles, and even search:

     The best improvement I think so far is the ability to scrub (seek) in the video, instead of just skipping through chapters. The search feature lets you find chapters that contain a keyword and actually allows search engines to find your Flash file as well, but for an actual movie, I haven’t found much use for it yet.

While I like the new features though and the redesign, there are a few issues:
     - Playback controls show up on menus. In previous versions they were hidden until a video started playing. Here they overlap the menu constantly as soon as you move the mouse.
     - White bar beneath the video. This is more or less just a bit of sloppiness on Encore’s part. If you look at the image above, you’ll see a white bar beneath the navigation. That was not an error in resizing the screen on my part; there’s actually a white strip that is part of the Flash SWF the entire time.
     - Flash applet loads slower. I had the old CS4 version side-by-side with the CS5 DVD. I have to say that whereas the old version loaded instantly, the new one took a few seconds to come up and start playing. Keep in mind that this is on my desktop computer. Over the internet, this delay might be longer because you’ll the connection to worry about as well.
     - Still no “Hide Controls” feature. You’ll notice they changed the playback bar to be a solid black now. In the past, it was semi-transparent so it wasn’t as intrusive. Now however you’ll actually have part of the video completely obscured by the controls. Unfortunately the only thing you can do is wait about 10 seconds for the controls to fade out.

     I was actually thinking of converting all my current Flash DVDs to the new CS5 player, but I think I might leave them be. Having the DVD load the first menu, that should be mightily impressive, but have it appeared tampered with by having an intrusive playback bar is something I don’t want to deal with yet. For newer works though, I imagine I’ll have to use the new CS5 version no matter what.

Great Memories by Watsons

     For those of you who don’t know, there’s an option to send email from other addresses you own by going to Mail Options in Yahoo Mail. However, it doesn’t tell you there’s a limit of 10 addresses, and even if you remove the addresses, you may still be capped. The error message you get when trying to verify additional addresses doesn’t help either; it instead tells you the confirmation code “does not match our records” (even though you click on the link directly).

     Yahoo Support told me it takes about 6 months for deleted addresses to clear from the max 10 limit, but I actually waited about a year before dealing with the issue and it still didn’t clear up. …[More]