Multimedia, AV Archive

We've got news from the MPEG-LA, regarding any possible H264 license changes they might institute at the end of this year. More specifically, they've put out a press release stating that they will not change one specific aspect of the license that governs the AVC Patent Portfolio (to which h264 belongs): MPEG-LA will not collect royalties for internet video that is free to end users. The press release is highly confusing, so let's de-construct what's going on here.

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.

My favourite media centre software, Boxee, has just launched the highly-anticipated new beta version of its XBMC-based media centre, complete with a redesigned user interface. On top of that, Boxee launched its very first piece of hardware during CES, the Boxee Box, together with D-Link. It's an impressive little device.

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).

"The Video Electronics Standard Association officially issued its Mini DisplayPort standard Tuesday, based on the technology licensed from Apple. VESA said that all devices using the Mini DisplayPort connector must meet the specifications required by the DisplayPort 1.1a standard, and cables that support the standard must also meet specific electrical specifications. It's a formal confirmation of the news from earlier this year, when VESA announced the Mini DisplayPort connector would be included in the forthcoming DisplayPort 1.2 specification."

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!

Hulu has finally released a Linux client, in both .rpm and .deb, 32bit and 64bit. "Hulu Desktop for Linux is currently built on Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04. The packages should also work on any Linux distribution with glib2.16 (such as Ubuntu 8.04+ and Fedora 9+). Other configurations have not been tested." Only useful inside the US, us peasants in the rest of the world will have to resort to torrents.

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.

"We are pleased to announce a new stable release of libtheora, the Xiph.org Foundation's reference implementation of the royalty-free Theora video format. This new release, version 1.1, codenamed Thusnelda, incorporates all of the recent encoder improvements we have been making over the past year, though some of the code had its genesis all the way back in 2003. It also brings substantial speed and robustness improvements to the 1.0 decoder." For a more visual run-down of the changes, check out Mozilla's excellent article.

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.

I had no plans to write a mini-review for the Canon SX200 IS which I bought recently, but I can't contain my excitement about its video mode, so I had to share. The story behind it is that after testing various digicams in its class, I concluded that this is the best HD video P&S digicam in the sub-$500 price range (not counting digi-recorders like the Sanyo Xacti). Read on for more info, and for some directly-out-of-the-camera samples to download and scrutinize yourselves.

"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."

Geeks.com, home to many Kodak digital cameras, sent us in the Kodak V1073 10MP digicam, one of the first touchscreen digicams in the market. Naturally, we had to put its user interface under some scrutiny, and compare it to the UI of the non-touchscreen Kodak cameras.

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".