- Tuesday, 9 February 2010
- INQ Mobile
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Incorporating The Micron, Intelligible, and PC Independent News
AMD unveils Fusion Media Explorer
AMD IS TODAY showing off the latest member of its Fusion brand – the Fusion Media Explorer (FME) – a highly-attractive 3D media browser complete with social media integration.
The INQ actually got a sneak peak of the FME last month in Austin, but was told finishing touches were still being added before it was ready to step out as the firm's spring debutante. Now, however, all touched up, it looks like FME is ready for the spotlight.
On his blog, AMD's Director of Product Marketing, Casey Gotcher, says the software "does a great job of showcasing the power of our CPUs and GPUs and what our platforms are actually capable of when the software is designed to take full advantage of them".
Actually, in our INQpinion, FME isn't particularly innovative, but it sure is exceptionally good looking and user friendly!
A scrollable 3D ribbon displays all a user's local media, pulled directly from their hard drive, removable USB or SD cards and a plethora of online sources like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.
Alongside the user's own media, FME will also throw up a load of related online content it hopes its master may find interesting. For example, if a user is looking through their holiday snaps from Brazil, FME will pull up related online pictures of half-naked carnival beauties, videos of street dancing, and the latest Samba hits. All these are handily displayed in a right-hand column for the user's perusal.
Another nice feature is its integration with social media sites, allowing users a really simple way of uploading and sharing pictures and videos on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube et all, with the click of a button on the player itself.
You can also scroll through your friends' online photos and videos on FME's 3D ribbon, an infinitely more user friendly option than constantly clicking the "next" button on Facebook!
FME has some pretty nifty music features too. As well as displaying all your album covers in the 3D Ribbon so prettily that it would make Apple take a short, sharp breath, FME also boasts an Auto DJ feature which – much like Itunes' Genius feature – suggests playlists for users based on the genre or artist they are currently listening to.
It also bungs a load of related music videos, picture, and clips into the 'related content' bar, so if you're listening to the latest U2 album (to each their own), FME will find you the related clip on YouTube.
A particularly stunning feature of the software is video search, which plays multiple videos in the ribbon simultaneously (at 30 FPS), while a user browses through all of them. Obviously, the better the performance of the machine, the more videos FME can play at the same time, but seeing it run on an optimally performing machine is ‘wow' worthy.
A user can also opt to watch a video full screen or send it to a little mini player on the side, so they can continue surfing the Interwibble and even listen to music at the same time.
The whole thing is actually managed by a particularly well-developed integrated search engine which, for people with extensive mp3 and video libraries, is something of a godsend, allowing for really quick pinpointing of files with minimal hassle.
AMD is saying the platform has been specially developed for its Puma and Dragon-based notebook and desktop systems and will be provided free to AMD customers.
But a little birdie tells us that Intel processor users shouldn't be too blue. Although untested and PURELY speculative, we've heard there's a hack which contains the words "inferior technology" which allows FME to work on Chipzilla machines too.
Happy Cracking! µ
L'Inqs
Check out Casey's blog and download a trial here
YouTube video of FME
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This program is nothing new in terms of innovation the only difference i can see between fusion media explorer [AMD] and Cooliris for firefox [Cool Iris Team]
is that the Fusion media explorer has a bend effect on the current selection set.
Check Cool Iris out at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5579
I think its cool. Doubt i'll use it but cool.
And BTW Ryan "Actually, in our INQpinion, FME isn't particularly innovative, but it sure is exceptionally good looking and user friendly!" - Inq even said its not innovative but pretty
It only runs in the odious vista thing! (at least the beta). :\
Fair enough i only scanned the article and didn't catch that.my comments were not intended as criticism but more as a heads up about the cool iris program which is in fairness pretty much the same program. ive also realised that cool iris works for i.e firefox and sahara.
I like to support AMD products, so that there is competition in the CPU market. Thus keeping innovation high, and prices low. But this piece of software from AMD is useless for me. Besides the fact that I run Ubuntu Linux.
I get the impression that this sort of software is for people that save or store their date and media files anywhere on their computer. With no order or categorization. So they basically have no idea where the media files they are looking for are kept. I'd hate to see how they keep their house/apartment.
I learned years ago, that if you don't keep some order to your data. You won't find what you are looking for. It's become second nature now for me to place data in it's appropriate folder with a descriptive file name and such.
Thought I'd give it a try, and it's a Vista only. Which automatically makes it crap as CoolIris works fine under XP. Close but no cigar AMD!
Cool Iris is a cool plugin. I like it myself, but Fusion Media Explorer is very different. There may be some similarities in how they appear on the surface, but FME is a full media management system. It combines local with online, allows for live TV, surf the web while you watch TV or videos etc. The feature most people really fall for is the Facebook integration. It stores and manages your friends FB photos. In any part of the app, I can type in Sylvie's name and get to the photos she has shared on FB. All doing it in the same 3D UI and even merged in with my local photos if I like, for slideshow purposes, etc. Please give it a try, and see if you still think they are the same thing. They really are very different if you take the time to try them both.
Casey: "Please give it a try"
No can do for many people until support for XP is added. Hopefully this is something that we can expect for a later beta or RC? Otherwise, a lot of people aren't going to be able to even try FME.
Wouldm't install on 7 beta ethier, So mes running dozen webcam balls, ALL at once, to simulate multi window media, latter on Vista, ole' Red i will report back. drashek
Not to trash AMD, but I think they should just concentrate finishing Bulldozer. Things like this don't directly increase their sales. Who buys AMD processors so they could use custom software?
Also, on a different note, I think AMD people should quit posting blogs and just concentrate on... again, Bulldozer. Blogs don't pay the bills. And they'd better stop whining about how Intel is just copying their architecture with i7. If there's a company who's an expert with memory controllers, it's Intel. They've been doing it since they started making chipsets in the early 90s. AMD, on the other hand, never really made a lot of chipsets (except when they were forced to come out with the first Athlon chipsts because VIA and the others didn't have their chips ready yet). So stop blogging, AMD. Start Bulldozing.
This interface is missing the point of "rich user interface".
If you start using 3D as a tool to find data, you can't do it by stuffing videos or picture on the screen. You have to help the user to match his human side intuition with the data represented by computer. For example, with deepviewer, Jerome my buddy did figure out that humans remember "fuzy days" ... so, Zooming into a calendar make perfect sense and help you finding the "wedding I went in 2006" ...
you usually remember as well where you went, so, a map was making sense too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M3WrdDy_Dg
Just my 2 cents, UI needs to add value.
Francois
iT PRETTY nice, JUST 6.8 MB on Vista 32, yet it takes ALL resources to run it, maybe turn off sidebar, too. Perhaps Pogo was smoother, both have limits. Like all floating libraies, Pretty COOL. STeWie Drashek
For both Intel and XP instructions
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/9/updated---how-to-run-amds-fusion-media-explorer-on-an-intel-cpu.aspx
Enjoy
Not to trash AMD, but I think they should just concentrate finishing Bulldozer.
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i think this guy is the type of the one who knows it all. the people who worked on this browser are not hardware engineers but rather software engineers. they are entirely in different division. i can't imagine what will the cpu look like if these software engineers will be in charge of the hardware research division.
So does this now mean that I could have a way (Via a rather nice and shiny GUI), to use my ~collection~ of DVB Cards under Windows?
As it turns out Microsoft apparently NO INTEREST in supporting anything other then DVB-T. Which as I said before is about as useful as a useful thing.
If this could run with DVB-C and DVB-S/S2 w/Common Interface / Conditional Access Module(s), this could be very interesting for me.
But then, what I'm looking for is something along the lines of a Reelbox, and I already have that (in part to the Reel eHD) and Klaus Schmidingers' VDR.
This already ticks all the boxes (Save GUI), but then which is more important nice looking GUI's or watching TV??
So... I see no reason to go back to M$ again..
I agree with your comment but lets face it, those software developers are not adding to the bottom dollar for AMD. So why employ them when those salaries can go to hardware developers working in the CPU or GPU divisions.... or put them to work on driver development if they are capable of doing so.
Cool - maybe. I may never know. This thing only installs on Vista (at least the beta), leaving us XP masses out in the cold. No matter how cool it might be, it will never be cool enough for me to switch to that POS called Vista. And though there may be a workaround in progress, this shouldn't even be necessary in the first place. Oh well.