Multimedia, AV Archive

I followed the hype: Reddit, Slashdot's front page, months of thumbs up on my blog and various video forums by Linux users for OpenShot. Given that I'm longing for a usable Linux video editor since 2003, and given that OpenShot version 1.0 had just been released, I naturally gave it a go, by also downloading its provided dependencies on my Ubuntu Linux 9.10.

Songbird, the open source iTunes alternative (which we reported on earlier), has landed a big deal with Philips. The Dutch electronics manufacturer will bundle Songbird with its GoGear line of .mp3 players as the music management and sync tool. While this is good news for Songbird, there are is a catch.

The GeeXboX project has announced the first stable release of Enna (version 0.4.0), an open source media center application. It features a simple user interface, based on the Enlightenment Foundations Libraries for its graphical user interface and the GeeXboX libraries for multimedia playback (libplayer) and information retrieval (libvalhalla and libnfo).

"Today's video-rich Internet wouldn't be possible without highly efficient compression. Ars rewinds the history of digital video compression to help understand how we arrived at the land of YouTube and Hulu."

Today we feature a mini interview with Hongyu Chi, president at Nexvio Inc., the company that brought us the very first true video editor for the iPhone 3Gs, the ReelDirector. Check in for more!

Adobe announced recently the November release of its Premiere Elements 8 package, their consumer video editor. Here's what's new.

Adobe and various members of the OpenScreenProject announced today news about the upcoming release of Flash 10.1, the first Flash version to get released as a full browser plugin for various smartphone platforms.

"There are no current European standards on volume controls for MP3 players, though under French law personal music players must be limited to an output of 100 decibels (db). The Apple iPod, which can reach 130db, was briefly withdrawn from sale in France in 2002 until Apple updated the software to reduce the maximum volume. All iPods sold in Europe are now limited to an output of 100db. The European Commission’s new proposals call for the default setting on all personal music players to be 80db. This would apply to MP3 players and mobile phones that are capable of playing music. However, the proposals apply only to the default setting, not to the maximum setting for the device."

Remember those magical speakers with invisibility cloaks? They're back, and they reek more of "awesome" than ever. Though not available to the public quite yet, these handy dandy speakers are planned to be implemented into your everyday flat-panel televisions, desktop monitors, laptop screens, and mobile devices. They're a slim technology made from a membrane and little micro motors embedded into the screen. The motors vibrate the membrane on each side of the screen and bring about what we call sound directly from the screen itself, eliminating the need for miniature crummy speakers planted in leftover space on our ever-smaller display technology. Anyone who doesn't integrate them into their products when this technology becomes available is foolish. In my mind's eye, I see people not needing to buy those funny portable iPod speakers anymore as well as me not needing to put my head on my netbook in order to hear the sound played on it. Glorious.

While we at OSNews often talk about desktops, laptops, and netbooks, there is another "form factor" which is making inroads into various households: the home theatre PC, or HTPC. There are a lot of software packages out there that will aid in turning a computer into an HTPC, and since I've been testing three of them extensively over the past months, I figured we'd talk about what you use.

"Since the last update from around the time of 1.1alpha2, Thusnelda has moved to the SVN trunk where work has concentrated on final features, cleanup and testing for the Theora 1.1 (Thusnelda) final. We're very close to the complete 1.1 and have already released two 1.1 release candidates. We'd optimistically scheduled final 1.1 release for last week, however we're taken some additional time to do more testing/tuning of the two-pass rate control."

Sony Pictures Imageworks has released five digital image-manipulation software tools under open source licenses. Imageworks (the unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions that handles visual effects and digital character animation) has contributed other open source software in the past. However, the release of five tools at once brings its involvement in open source to a new level. The new effort includes a Web site aimed at keeping open source developers up to date on the projects. All five of the tools are licensed under the new BSD license, and are hosted on Google Code.

In a recent interview, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller talks about the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. "Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback. The linked article also indicates that there are other video sites (apart from Wikimedia and Dailymotion) that are moving to the open standards format for video, noting that "hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format".

After an 8 year long development process, the team behind the VLC Media Player has released version 1.0.0 of their popular and capable media player. Even though previous versions weren't necessarily unstable, reaching version 1.0 is still somewhat of a milestone.