Multimedia, AV Archive

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.

KDEnLive 0.7.5 was released a few days ago, so I installed it on my Ubuntu machine to see how the app has been progressed since the last time I tried it. KDEnLive is the most actively developed, and easiest to use Linux video editor. Its UI resembles Sony Vegas in many ways; if you know how to use Vegas, you won't have trouble with KDEnLive.

De wonderen zijn de wereld nog niet uit. As we all know, Flash is a terrible resource hog on just about any device. Even my quad-core desktop space age computer sees spikes in processor usage whenever Flash rears it ugly head, let alone my poor Intel Atom-based devices. Well, it seems Adobe finally pulled its head out of its behind, and has committed itself to enabling proper Flash performance on Atom-base devices. The catch? You need a Broadcom Media Accelerator, or an NVIDIA graphics chip.

"EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager that automatically changes your sound depending on the current application using it. For instance if you listen to music and a Skype call comes in, the music will fade out (based on your settings) until it's turned off, and the skype sound will be the only one running. Or if you listen to music and then play a YouTube video, the music will be again turned off and you will only hear the sound of the YouTube video. The application doesn't have a fancy interface, it only does what it's supposed to, and does it well."

Chris Montgomery, otherwise known as Monty, is the founder of Xiph.org foundation and creator of the Ogg container format. He has been sponsored by Red Hat for several years to improve the codec quality of Theora and the next generation version, called Thusnelda, is already proving to be better than H264 as bitrate increases. Monty has posted some test results demonstrating the improvements. Chris Blizzard from Mozilla Foundation has some updates as well.

I moved into the realm of digital SLR photography back in 2003 when when I got myself a Canon 10D. The 10D served me very well for 7 years and 14 000 pictures. Then I decided it was time for an upgrade so, I got myself a full frame 21 Megapixel monster, the EOS 5D MkII. It's quite an upgrade, it even does video. These are my impressions after having it for a few weeks.

Over a year ago I posted a (non-OS news) article about this new geeky & underground, grass-root movement in videography -- similar to the artistic explosion digital photography saw a few years ago. We call ourselves "DV Rebels". Given a slow weekend, I decided to revisit the topic today with some newer videos shot with the Canon HV20/HV30 cameras, these $500 gems that have been the catalysts in the said movement. The HV lines of cameras are so popular that over 220 official music videos were shot with them, among other kinds of art. In the old article there has been criticism about the "motion photography without a story" nature of the videos that were sampled, but I think that since then these hobbyist videographers have come a long way. Have a look inside for some of my favorite HV20/30 videos available today, while you can check even more here.

"Firefly" is the best Joss Whedon work to date, but I always try to give the benefit of the doubt on new sci-fi shows. So tonight, as I was watching "Dollhouse" on TV with my ex-Be engineer husband, JBQ (currently at Android, along with many other ex-Be engineers), I noticed something familiar at the Dollhouse supervisor's computer screen. It seems that the Dollhouse's business runs on... BeOS. Click in for some snapshots of the scene. Update: mikesum32 tells us that they used a screenshot of BeOS full screen! In the screenshot BeShare and 'Jabber for BeOS' were open. I recognize quite a few names in their lists (some of them are OSNews readers to this day), so congrats for those who made it to... TV!

iTunes and iPod users can now enjoy the fruits of HD movies as offered by Apple's iTune store. Starting today, HD movies can be bought and downloaded for $19.99 apiece, and Apple's also promising movie rentals for $4.99 within 30 days after new releases. Downloads include both the standard HD file as well as an iPhone/iPod-ready SD file. The store already had 1200 "stunning" HD videos for rent, now has a growing arsenal of ones for purchase, and Apple intends to steadily add to that arsenal as time goes on. The press release is really pushing that vampiric film "Twilight" for pre-order, so go out and purchase your favorite tale of a spineless teenager with less emotion than a stick (no offense to sticks) today, now in flying HD colors.

Geeks.com, known for their cheap digital cameras, sent us in the Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS, a 14 megapixel digital camera with a 720p HD video recording capability. Geeks also threw in a Peak 8 GB Class 6 SDHC card to properly test the camera's HD capability. We are taking the camera for a spin, and we have a small HD video shot for your own evaluation.

Calm down, calm down. It was simply a manner of speech. No, they haven't developed the all too popular garments that render the wearer invisible, but we are about to take a look at some pretty spiffy technology that will doubtlessly save you some space in the family room as well as give you something to brag about to your somewhat less technologically inclined friends: "invisible" speakers.

Sometimes, as you're walking through a crowded street, or as you brush by people, you catch a glimpse of the conversations they're having - a few words, a single sentence at most. Whenever this happens, I can't help but extrapolate the rest of the conversation, the subject, what the people in it are like. It seems like I'm not the only one, as two Dutch film makers have used the accidentally leaked search query records of 2006 as inspiration for a series of short films. Tantalising voyeurism.

I am personally a big proponent behind the idea of the Creative Commons movement, which tries to create a free-er multimedia society where listeners, users and remixers build upon original works and freely exchange that information. The Creative Commons culture features the biggest amount of free music (22,000+ high quality albums), it's easy to find, and they usually have the right license for the job (ported to the legal systems of most countries). In other words, it's your best bet to find a music piece that will fit your video without potential legal consequences.

Adobe recently released their 11th major version of Photoshop, along with the rest of the gang: Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Premiere, After Effects and more. Here's a peek at CS4's video-related tools, which are closer to the technologies I use for my Creative Commons videography work.