(28 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...A Better Media Experience
My name is Casey Gotcher, and this is my first official blog on AMD’s behalf. I chose to wait a while, specifically to speak to this particular topic. We have been working diligently for over a year now on this product, and I am very excited to finally take the wraps off of it publicly.
What is AMD Fusion Media Explorer?
Already convinced? Get it here.
The AMD Fusion Media Explorer (FME) is a new 3D Immersive Social Media and Digital Media Browser, built and distributed by AMD. In addition to enabling unique multimedia and social media experiences, FME does a great job of showcasing the power of AMD CPUs and GPUs. This application demonstrates what our platforms are capable of when the software is designed to take full advantage.
AMD Fusion Media Explorer combines a user’s local media items, plus related online content from providers such as, Flickr, YouTube, and Microsoft Live. In addition, FME has Facebook integration which gives our users even more options for posting or interacting with their favorite photos or friends’ photos. All of this is managed by an integrated search engine, that makes it very easy to quickly locate what you are looking for.
I like to put the goals of the AMD Fusion Media Explorer into these 3 buckets:
- Explore – Explore your digital media content, from multiple local and online sources, in a quick and easy to use browser.
- Experience – Experience your media in a more exciting 3D, immersive application
- Discover – Discover new related photos, and videos, pertaining to what you are currently looking at or listening to.
Primary Features of Fusion Media Explorer
Photos
- Find and View photos from your local hard drive, removable USB or SD cards, and online sources, such as Flickr, Facebook, and Microsoft Live.
- View related photos and videos from some of these online sources, which pertain to what you are looking at in the main viewing area. For example, if you are looking at your photos of Paris, you might also be presented with other users’ photos or videos from the same area.
- Upload your photos to your Facebook or Flickr account with a simple button click. This is often much faster and easier than going through the Web UI’s for these services.
Music
- Easily find and listen to your favorite music with our integrated search engine or 3D Ribbon.
- Use our AutoDJ feature to automatically queue up playlists for you from the same genre or artist you are currently listening to. Click on one song and AutoDJ will take it from there.
- Be presented with related music videos or other clips while you listen. For example, if you are listening to U2, you will likely be presented with some of their music videos to the right in our related media bar.
Video
- As was the case with Photos and Music, easily find the video, movie, or TV show you are looking for with our integrated search engine or 3D Ribbon.
- See your video collection come to life as FME will actually start playing multiple videos in the ribbon, while you browse, making it easier to find what you are looking for. The better the performance of the machine, the more videos FME can play simultaneously.
- Watch full screen or send to the integrated Mini player so you can surf the Web while you watch a movie.
- Be presented with related YouTube videos pertaining to the content you are currently watching. For instance you might see cast interviews, bloopers, and sometimes even full episodes, depending on what FME can find on YouTube that relates to what you are watching.
Some other details to note about FME… It has been developed for our notebook platform technology, “Puma” and desktop platform technology, “Dragon.” It will be provided free to our customers, via download from www.amd.com, or in some cases may come pre-installed on select AMD-based systems.
Concurrent with the posting of this blog, I am releasing a special build of Fusion Media Explorer for friends and family members. This will supersede our public beta by a couple of weeks. If you are interested in giving it a try, you can find it here, www.amd.com/fmepreview or find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/caseygotcher if you need the link or (especially) if you have feedback on the application.
* Internet access is required to take advantage of the online search / retrieval functions.
Casey Gotcher is Director, Product Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
(4.90 out of 5)
#1 by Dave K - April 9th, 2009 at 10:09
I’m sure it might be very nice, but why on earth does it require Vista? This automatically makes it useless to many people such as myself who otherwise find the idea of this program to be quite nice.
#2 by Casey Gotcher - April 9th, 2009 at 10:28
I will also work with Win 7 very soon. Sorry about XP, if that is what you are using. In order to do what we are currently doing with the app, we had to heavily leverage some of the newer technology that comes in Vista, but not XP.
#3 by Bill R - April 9th, 2009 at 11:26
@Casey Gotcher,
How soon is soon vis-a-vis Windows 7? Also, what kind of system requirements does this realistically have to give a good, solid, consistent experience?
Also, do you have a direct link to somewhere on AMD.com? Trying to find anything other than a press release for this thing on the site is near impossible.
#4 by Casey Gotcher - April 9th, 2009 at 21:50
Probably this summer for Win 7. It works now, but needs a great deal more testing first. As for hardware, I have it working on a DV2 single core from HP, with discrete graphics. That said, it doesn’t have any of the eye candy or performance you would find on a high end system. We turn things off on lower end systems to compensate for lack of performance, much like many games do. If you are a desktop user, I would recommend a Phenom II Quad Core and a 4870.
#5 by Henry Ho - April 9th, 2009 at 12:43
What determines how many videos can be played simultaneously?
- efficiency of the codec (e.g. Xvid/DivX)
- GPU
- CPU
- Hard drive
?
#6 by Casey Gotcher - April 9th, 2009 at 21:52
We are still refining that right now, but we take scores from the windows experience index and try and put some logic behind what those scores would translate to as far as videos playing.
#7 by JaY_III - April 9th, 2009 at 17:14
Would really like to try this but it doesn’t like more core i7
Was hoping my 4870 would have been good enough.
This better not end up needing an AMD CPU + ATI chipset + GPU.
#8 by Adam24 - April 10th, 2009 at 11:24
@JaY_III, The app unfortunately requires an AMD cpu. I hope they decide to allow intel users to run the app soon!
#9 by Javabri - April 10th, 2009 at 13:09
@JaY_III, I don’t understand why this should not be an AMD only solution. AMD spends their time, money and resources, provides the app free…why should they make this run on competitive platforms?
It’s an AMD app for AMD products, seems like a good business decision to me.
#10 by JaY_III - April 13th, 2009 at 03:39
@Javabri,
I have an AMD Video Card
#11 by Bob - April 10th, 2009 at 04:13
It’s a very nice application you should consider for fusion media explorer something like the XBMC Live which can boot from CD or USB & can give you a fully fledged media center (or those instant on flash mini-operating system things).
Coupled with an AMD netbook/nettop platform it would be a killer app if it could play 1080p MKV videos.
The problem with XBMC (the best media center there is – no offense) is that it lacks resources and development is slow, so XBMC Live still has major problems with displays and GPU’s trailing behind the versions which run atop Win/Lin/OSX.
Thats what the Boxee company is hoping to capture they use XBMC as their platform and tack on social stuff and internet TV etc but they are still in early development limited to OSX (hoping to use Apple bias in tech journalism to promote Boxee & its working some even compare it to XBMC not realizing its based on it) with eventually deploying actually Boxee hardware.
You could definitely beat them to market with resources behind it and a good marketing push, the killer would be an AMD netbook with such media center software and a means to plug into HDTV.
Oh and the the XBMC linux team (which also means the Live team) will almost certainly develop for Nvidia’s Ion “platform” it they can make it work with enough performance so you don’t want XBMC becoming the Ion killer app either (it cant for Windows because they have no DXVA support).
#12 by spyros - April 10th, 2009 at 10:07
Complete fail! There is not Windows XP version! Just a new set of programmers
#13 by Cosmo - April 10th, 2009 at 11:49
What software technologies were used to construct this? Is this a C++ application? Etc.
Thanks,
Cosmo
#14 by Elvis Cai - April 10th, 2009 at 11:52
Windows XP!!!!!
#15 by Rodislav - April 10th, 2009 at 14:52
Is there some versions for linux ?
#16 by Stuart Halliday - April 10th, 2009 at 16:31
Doesn’t work with Windows XP then?
So what’s the point?
#17 by Casey Gotcher - April 10th, 2009 at 18:27
I wanted to address all the XP questions. Please understand, we didn’t intentionally disable XP without having good cause. There are technical reasons for needing Vista. We will support Win 7 when it releases, if not sooner. Hopefully that will make many of our XP customers happy, as most I have talked to, plan on making the switch later this year. I personally have an HTPC hooked to my 37″ LCD TV in my bedroom, which I would very much like to install FME on, but unfortunately it just isn’t possible at this time.
When we created our Fusion For Gaming application, we made it a high priority to enable XP, as we realize many users still prefer that OS. Fortunately, that application didn’t present us with any technical reasons for not being able to enable XP. This application, unfortunately did. I do apologize, but I hope you can understand.
Casey
#18 by Max - April 10th, 2009 at 22:22
They probably needed WPF, so they went with Vista.
#19 by kodabar - April 11th, 2009 at 13:10
And yet, somehow, someone has got it running on an Intel machine on an XP virtual machine and are now attempting to get it running on a real XP install. It looks like they’re making good progress too.
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/9/updated—how-to-run-amds-fusion-media-explorer-on-an-intel-cpu.aspx
#20 by Casey Gotcher - April 11th, 2009 at 23:34
@kodabar, Yes, I have been following along myself. Quite interesting actually. Regarding Win XP, I am not trying insinuate that it isn’t physically possible to get some basic functionality to work with XP (things like live TV might be more of a problem). What I am saying is we had technical challenges creep up, that would require additional development and test resources, specifically for XP. Adding another OS also magnifies our test matrix significantly. Considering the very aggressive schedule we were given to launch the product, and the resources we had to do it with, we couldn’t fit XP into our plans. We would have liked to, but we had to make a choice on XP or Win 7 (as vista was a given). We decided to look to the future, since this doesn’t officially launch until June, and Win 7 is right around the corner. We are in the process of testing Win 7 now, and addressing issues we find as they arise. More on that later.
If however, these guys get it working on XP (reliably) I will be among the first to give it a try. As I mentioned, I still have XP machines in my house, and would LOVE to run FME on them.
#21 by kodabar - April 12th, 2009 at 14:32
@Casey Gotcher, Yes, it’s a pity you haven’t been given the time and resources to get it running on XP. It’s a real shame to lose so much potential audience for such an excellent program. Windows 7 should hopefully be quite an easy transition from Vista, but I’ll bet there will be all sorts of little complications that arise. Good luck with that.
Fingers crossed that those other chaps manage to get it running properly on XP, but they’re not quite there yet.
#22 by Chen Luo - April 12th, 2009 at 01:02
Thanks for the great product Casey!
Posted this on CGDigg:
http://www.cgdigg.com/story.php?title=amd-fusion-media-explorer
By the way, any chance about a Mac version?
#23 by Kaitian - April 13th, 2009 at 04:42
I’m not able to get this to work so I figure your tech team might need to know about this.
Description:
Stopped working
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: CLR20r3
Problem Signature 01: fusionmedia.exe
Problem Signature 02: 1.0.0.0
Problem Signature 03: 49d6a426
Problem Signature 04: System.Management
Problem Signature 05: 2.0.0.0
Problem Signature 06: 4889dedd
Problem Signature 07: 111
Problem Signature 08: 123
Problem Signature 09: System.UnauthorizedAccess
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
#24 by Casey Gotcher - April 13th, 2009 at 10:57
Sorry to hear you are having trouble. Since this is a beta, we have set up some forums, where people can post problems or suggestions. If you wouldn’t mind, please post there, so our engineers can take a look at your problem. http://forums.amd.com/amdlive/categories.cfm?catid=368&entercat=y
Thanks,
Casey
#25 by Mack Baczynski - April 13th, 2009 at 12:18
Jeez people, give the team a break. XP is way too old for you to demand a new program like this to work on it. Here’s a reason to upgrade your system. XP can’t do everything, get over it. I’m getting sick of this XP cult that seems to have developed. Have any of you actually tried vista sp1, its a good OS, and with 7 right around the corner xp is then absolutely obsolete.
AMD is being innovative here using technologies from today. I don’t disagree with their decision at all.
Great job guys. Now if only i could get a phenom II for free..
#26 by David - April 14th, 2009 at 08:13
Totally a copy of PicLens from http://www.cooliris.com !
#27 by Casey Gotcher - April 14th, 2009 at 16:34
Not true, if anything I could argue they copied our AMD LIVE! Explorer, which was out about a year before Cool Iris. See http://www.amdlive.com for ALE.
#28 by Mark - April 14th, 2009 at 21:23
i did i get to install on my intel machine (i do have a 3870 so im not a complete butthead if you will).
and after using it, its a really cool app. i especially love the mouse over a song and listen to it feature.
I see this app having LOADS of potential in the HTPC market. GJ Casey and team and keep up the good work.
#29 by Mixelangel - April 16th, 2009 at 22:35
Hi! I’ve tried the AMD Fusion Media Explorer, and I think it’s a very good idea, basically, I love the soft. I just have a question, related about the type of files it accepts in it’s library. Specifically about audio files, it does accept the .m4a (acc codec) extension? because that would be awesome, and it’s a format very used this days…
#30 by Casey Gotcher - April 17th, 2009 at 17:24
It isn’t supported yet. We intend to add it in the future though. We know its important.
#31 by Arokia - April 17th, 2009 at 23:24
even though i have the ati 4870×2 but an intel processor i cant use this application……………….
come on! Amd should allow all users to use this applicaiton using an amd video card………….
#32 by Slackin - May 18th, 2009 at 22:23
Wow…Great Intellectual work guyz…The explorer ribbon is tops…Can’t wait to play around with it once I get past the following error:
[quote]Problem signature:
P1: indexedfolders.exe
P2: 1.0.0.0
P3: 49d6a429
P4: PresentationFramework
P5: 3.0.0.0
P6: 48fef62a
P7: 625a
P8: e1
P9: System.Windows.Markup.XamlParse
P10: [/quote]