Cooliris changes browsers to media centers

Browser Extensions for browsing images and videos Cooliris bring about a series of updates, including support for browsing local media files, special file metadata, and Facebook Image Browsing that displays user tags. The bigger change is that Cooliris supported Linux for the first time.

Cooliris, formerly PicLens, is a free plug-in used in browsers. It enables your browser to become a beautiful full screen slideshow when you browse a website with a large number of images (such as Picasa, flickr, and Google image search.

Now, both Windows, Mac OS, and Linux users can browse local images and videos on the 3D media wall of Cooliris.

This basically turns your browser into a media center, delivering a consistent experience on different platforms. For example, if you are a Mac computer, it will connect to iPhoto. If you are a PC computer, it will organize the "my images" folder.

Local files are displayed in the content source list. The page is similar to iTunes.

The new visual effects engine will better play the role of your video card. In Mac, OpenGL is used, while in Windows, Direct 3D is used. Developers say that most of the hardware running in the past five years should have no problem. I ran it on my computer three years ago, and there was almost no jamming, but on another machine with a more powerful video card, the effect was obviously smoother.

In addition, the tool displays more metadata from some media files on some websites. When you browse Picasa online albums, Google Image Searches, or Youtube videos, you can view the browsing times, user scores, exposures, aperture, and resolution. However, unfortunately, this feature does not currently support pictures on the Internet, as well as videos on the Internet and Facebook (which may be available in the future ). This allows Facebook users to view tags and titles on the Cooliris interface.

You can also obtain metadata support on the shopping website. You can view the full product description on Amazon.com without entering the website. In fact, it is similar to the 3D shopping WindowShop launched by Amazon in last October.

Among all the new features, reading local content is the most important highlight.

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