Google gets into gears, music videos on YouTube

Google Gears is an open source browser plugin which allows users to work with applications bothe offline and online. Developers will be able to use the API to create applications using the Javascript API. The plugin is supposed to be around 700 kb large and it will work with Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.

There are three different APIs involved here:
- one for the creating data objects to store application information locally on the user’s computer
- one is a SQLite relational database for searching the data - the final part will enable asynchronous JavaScript so applications can sync data in the background. This will hopefully keep the downloading time to a minimum.

To find out more about this development, have a look at the offical Google Gears site.

EMI Music and YouTube have reached a deal to allow for EMI music videos to be place legally on YouTube. The videos will be tracked through YouTube’s reporting system in order to be able to pay the artists. EMI already went through a deal with Apple in April which allows for music to be sold withough copyright protection.

Real Networks have announced a new version of their player which will allow users to save and organize video files in many major formats including Flash, QuickTime, RealMedia and Window Media and will also support video ripping. The new version will onyly be available for Windows until later this year.