Adobe today released new beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, which has built-in P2P features and is able to save files to the local drives. This could have a big impact on the world of video in particular and other web apps in general.

Because of Adobe’s distribution strength, it can easily upgrade its Flash clients and instantly become owner of one of the largest P2P services. What that means is that now anyone can contemplate a Joost-like service that works within a browser. Using AIR to extend those P2P abilities to the desktop would be fairly easy as well. Continue reading at GigaOM.

Streaming web video is great and all, but every once in a while you find something that you just want to save and cherish for always. If your home Internet connection is as unreliable as mine you’ll understand what I mean. There are a bunch of web sites and little apps to help you save hard copies of web videos, but perhaps due to their teetering on the edge of violating video hosts’ TOS, they are less than user-friendly. So yesterday I decided to go through them all and figure out which ones are the best.

To start with, I tried to eliminate services that spew out overwhelming ads or restrict themselves to YouTube. After that, the tools fells into one of four categories: URL-entry sites, Firefox extensions, userscripts and software downloads. Among them, the trade-off seems to be convenience vs. power.

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A Korean software company called NomadConnection has released Chameleo, a pretty-looking open-source video player with a focus on extensibility and widgets. The software, based on GStreamer and other open-source projects, supports a wide variety of codecs.

Chameleo doesn’t come pre-packaged with any content but will play a channel of local BitTorrent downloads or anything else on your desktop. What it does come with is a variety of sample widgets, giving video watchers the ability to take screen captures, blog what they’re watching, use video tags and subtitles, open new files, and browse the web. Embedded below are a couple of videos showing how the widgets work. (By the way, Joost also welcomes widget developers, but its platform and its media library are not so open.)

capture widget for chameleo from KyoungJune Eee on Vimeo.

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Check out TimeTube, a mashup from San Francisco startup Dipity, which makes an interactive timeline out of any YouTube keyword. Videos are embedded directly into the timeline on the dates they were added. I’m a little unclear on what garners more emphasis within the timeline– it doesn’t appear to be number of views. Anyways, then you can grab whatever you make and embed it directly in your blog.

Would have been great to have this for our Rickroll timeline last month!

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is holding its big trade show in Vegas this week, and I’m not sure there’s enough caffeine to help me keep up on all the news — but here’s a round-up, so far, from day one:

NAB president David Rehr kicked off his keynote with clips from YouTube, a far cry from last year, when the Internet was little more than a footnote. Lost Remote live blogged the speech.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar will be delivering a keynote address on Wednesday, but he gave a preview of his TV 2.0-themed “Video When, Where and How You Want It” speech to TV Technology.com. And Signiant announced that its software is being used by Hulu to manage automated uploads from content providers.

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It’s been a great week for the BBC’s iPlayer project: The Beeb has just announced that the iPlayer is now attracting 550,000 daily views on average. The iPlayer is also now officially available on the Wii, making it the first streaming service by a major broadcaster on any of the three consoles.

BBC Future Media and Technology Group Controller Eric Huggers explained that the broadcaster ended up choosing the Wii instead of the PS3 or XBox 360 because Sony and Microsoft had too many demands about the iPlayer implementation. “They want control of the look, the feel and the experience; they want it done within their shop, and their shop only,” he told the BBC’s own dot.life blog.

Playstation users apparently couldn’t care less about these conflicts. One of them just developed an unofficial iPlayer implementation for the PS3. His PS3iPlayer.com hack was made possible by the fact that the BBC has quietly abandoned streaming media DRM.

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Adobe today launches its Adobe Media Player, a product we’ve been following closely. AMP channels RSS feeds for streaming and download of online video from partners such as MTV and CBS. The Adobe Air-based software has a simple UI that feels a bit like a file organization system.

The player is meant to be customized by content owners, rather than programmed by Adobe. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re CBS or Beet.tv — you can do your own branding on your own content,” AMP product manager Ashley Still told us last week. While only Adobe partners can get into the program index, individual users can also bring in any show they wish if it has an RSS feed and Flash or MPEG-4 videos. Everything is free and/or ad-supported.

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Today I stopped in on the ambitiously named “1st Annual Video Search Summit.” I was somewhat surprised to find just sixty or so people tucked away in one of the most drab hotel conference rooms in San Francisco. I mean, I wasn’t expecting the hottest ticket in town, but nothing much seemed to be going on in a space that should be ascending to its rightful throne right about now. In a panel where many of the major video search startups were included — Pixsy, ClipBlast, Truveo (owned by AOL), CastTV — the conversation was stunted and boring. Moderator Stephen Chao of WonderHowTo’s attempts to spice things up by pressuring the panelists to disclose the size of their indexes and dish about adult video search only made the discussion more awkward.

So what’s going on in video search? Well, Dabble didn’t even show up to the panel, despite being listed on on the program. CastTV is still in private beta (though it is being less sparing with those beta invites), with a launch time frame yet to be determined, according to CEO Alex Vikati. AOL’s Truveo was represented by Pete Kocks, who said Truveo founder Tim Tuttle (the company’s usual public presence) has moved to more of a consulting role on the project, though he hasn’t yet left AOL.

Meanwhile, Google has screwy messaging about whether or not it thinks its own video search service can compete with YouTube. YouTube has 35 percent of videos viewed online, at least in the U.S., making off-site search irrelevant to many users. And the stuff that’s off YouTube tends to be on a branded web site that true fans like enough to remember how to type out askaninja.com or ABC.com. Thus, no video search provider has anything close to name recognition with the hordes of people who watch video every day. Anyone have a different take?