Desperate for a deal after sleeping right through Wal-Mart's early-morning Black Friday frenzy? You're in luck. The best deal this holiday season may be just a download away.
(Credit:
Handbrake)
And boy, is it beautiful.
Handbrake has long been my go-to choice for ripping DVDs to my hard drive (saves battery life when watching videos while traveling and ensures my kids won't ruin the DVDs), but this particular version exceeds my expectations. Why? Because it delivers over 1,000 new enhancements while delivering better picture quality at a smaller file size and faster.
Or as the Handbrake developers say:
There's an old proverb in the video encoding world: "Speed, size, quality: pick two." It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.
This isn't hype. In my own use of the software during the past week, performance is noticeably faster, and picture quality is awesome.
Importantly, while the Handbrake developers have been hard at work over the past year to update the venerable video transcoder, the team owes a lot to developers from the x264 project:
A large portion of these speed, size, and quality improvements come to us for free, from the x264 project. The past year, like every year, has seen some massive improvements for that video encoding engine. As always, it has been further hand-optimized for better performance. But it has also gained new features like macroblock tree rate control and weighted P-Frame prediction.
This is how open-source development works: Handbrake focuses on what it does best (User interface, features like live preview, etc.) while leveraging the best of other project's strengths.
It's a recipe for a supereasy and very powerful transcoding experience. And at a 100 percent discount now through forever (Handbrake is open source and costs nothing to download), now is a good time to download it and let 'er rip, whether you run Mac (Intel 32-bit and 64-bit, plus PowerPC), Linux, or Windows.
VideoLAN VLC's logo
VideoLAN's VLC media player, arguably the world's best media player, hit version 0.9.9 in early April. Three months and more than 78 million downloads later, VideoLAN has announced VLC 1.0.0, or "Goldeneye."
Your media will never be the same.
In fact, with VideoLAN's VLC media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it doesn't have to be. One of the amazing things about VLC is that it can play anything that you've ever even thought about playing. That random media format that one site in Ecuador requires--VLC likely plays it, while Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. likely will not.
This is, in part, a natural result of VLC's open-source heritage. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, VLC attracts a diverse array of developers with disparate media interests. Those interests translate into a media player that really can play every obscure media format I've ever thrown at it. (And in my hunger for Arsenal videos, I've found many different video formats that Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. didn't know what to do with.)
Here are a few of the features now available in VLC 1.0.0:
- Live recording
- Instant pausing and frame-by-frame support
- Finer speed controls
- New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, ...)
- New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, ...) and major improvements in many formats
- New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
- Video scaling in full screen
- RTSP Trickplay support
- Zipped file playback
- Customizable toolbars
- Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
- Better integration in Gtk environments
- MTP devices on Linux
- AirTunes streaming
I regularly use VLC to transcode media files, including files I originally streamed from the Web:
VLC can transcode virtually any media file.
(Credit: Matt Asay)If you don't have VLC, I encourage you to download it and give it a try. It really is an amazing media player, one that has far more tricks up its sleeve than the proprietary media player that came with your computer.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.
Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?
Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."
Cisco gets this. At least, groups within Cisco get this. That's why Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline's WebEx team has been adding presence and instant messaging through Jabber, e-mail through PostPath, and more to its Web-conferencing suite.
It's also why Cisco will almost certainly add some form of office productivity suite to WebEx, despite protestations to the contrary from Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. (Apparently, Hadden-Boyd didn't see the memo from his boss, Dennerline.)
Zoho, anyone?
Zoho is a leading competitor to Google Apps and, in many areas, actually surpasses Google Apps. While some of Zoho's applications directly overlap with Cisco's current products, the sheer breadth (and, in some cases, depth) of its office productivity and collaboration story must be intriguing to acquisition-hungry Cisco.
Some suggest that Google will struggle to make it in the enterprise due to security concerns with Google Apps. Cisco doesn't have that problem. Its brand oozes "enterprise." As such, it may well be Cisco that changes the face of enterprise computing...by initially changing the way we communicate and collaborate within the enterprise.
Just don't hold your breath for video to part the waters. Video has its place, but it's a highly verbose form of communication, and the Web's most popular technologies increasingly teach us to speak sparingly.
Indeed, I think that we'll see Cisco acquire Control Yourself, the company behind open-source Twitter lookalike Identi.ca, before it changes the world through video.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
It's not exactly the Sundance Film Festival, but Red Hat's new Red Hat Stories film series is setting the standard for technology marketing through film.
These aren't product pitches. Instead, they pitch "the Red Hat way" of doing things, attempting to broaden the appeal well beyond bits and bytes of operating systems and application servers.
While you'll find the films on YouTube, Red Hat doesn't want you to label them as "videos." As Red Hat's Chris Grams explains:
I use the word "film" rather than video on purpose because it better captures the spirit of what we are trying to do with digital media at Red Hat. Films are what you make when you are capturing stories. Videos are what you make when you are selling your stuff. So we aspire to film, certainly with our most strategic work, but sometimes settle for video when the project demands it.
Red Hat is careful to pitch product strategy when positioning its products: you're buying freedom and its attendant value, not simply Linux. These short films do much the same: they're surprisingly interesting to watch, and they push the audience to think beyond the simple questions "will it run?" and "how much does it cost?"
See for yourself:
Grams suggests that "the combination of a talented group of internal storytellers and a passionate group of smart employees with something to say can create some pretty effective communication." He's right. Red Hat continues to set the standard for how an open-source company--or any company--can reach and potentially inspire its audience.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
If you've ever struggled to play a file you downloaded from the hinterlands of the Web, you clearly didn't try opening it with VideoLan's VLC media player, a free, hugely popular, and open-source media player. VLC can open anything.
VideoLan released on Thursday version 0.9.9, a bug fix release that corrects a few issues with the previous version.
The best media player just got better and is rapidly approaching 1.0 status.
Version 0.9.9 adds the following improvements to the feature-packed VLC player:
- Fullscreen behavior on Windows with multiple screens.
- Workaround bug with libxml2 >=2.7.3.
- Video performance on Intel-based Macs.
- Various decoders updates on Windows.
In addition:
An experimental native decoder for Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 using FFmpeg has been added and many fixes happened in our Real Media demuxer. This should improve Real Media Files support on all platforms.
VideoLan's logo
(Credit: VideoLan)If you're an existing VLC user, you might opt to skip this release if you haven't noticed the problems above. But on my Mac, I did notice an improvement in video performance, to the point that in my non-scientific test, the VLC felt like it performed slightly better than Apple's QuickTime and certainly plays a much wider range of video formats. That update alone made the download worth it.
If you've yet to try VLC, do so. Whether you just want to play media files or also want to convert them, VLC can handle just about anything you throw at it. When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver.
You can download VLC media player 0.9.9 from Download.com for Windows and Mac. It's open source, but that's not why you'll want to keep using it. You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers--by a long stretch.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
It used to be said that open source is purely a commodifying force in the software industry, that open source can't innovate. While we've had Mozilla Firefox and other projects to demonstrate open-source innovation, the impression nonetheless persists.
One way to crush the idea completely is for open source to help shape a new market, rather than influence an old market. Online video, despite 14.3 billion videos watched online in December 2008 in the United States alone, according to ComScore, is a nascent market with no 800-pound gorillas building the industry in their image.
Online video is up for grabs.
Shay David, co-founder and chief technology officer of Kaltura, an open-source video company (disclosure: I am an adviser to Kaltura), believes that open source is the key to creating a robust, innovative online video market:
For anyone who is part of the video universe, the key question that remains open is what drives value in this brave new world. How can publishers, advertisers, and technology enablers make money in a world in which delivery (CDN) is commoditized, display opportunities are abundant (driving CPMs for video advertising down), and audiences expect to get everything for free? The short answer, I believe, is to focus on innovation--of formats, user experiences, content, or delivery.
And here is where open-source video enters the picture: It is a development methodology and distribution strategy that allows each company in the ecosystem to focus on what it does best, instead of replicating the efforts of others. Open-source video...is being adopted at every level of the ecosystem by industry leaders such as Akamai, Mozilla, and Wikipedia.
Its premise is simple: Video is too important of a medium to be controlled by a single player. By espousing the principles of openness at all levels, including formats, technology, and content, and by collaborating in the development process, video can enjoy the force multipliers that we have seen in other areas of open-source software. The result is a better user experience, a reduction in the total cost of ownership, and a focus on innovative value-driven results.
I agree, and I believe that Kaltura and other open-source video companies and projects, some which have banded together to form the Open Video Alliance, have the opportunity to prove that open source can not only innovate, but also surpass proprietary software and proprietary standards in innovation.
It's a bold ambition, one that also could be applied to OpenX in online advertising, MySQL in Web-centric databases, and other areas. I don't know that open source is necessarily the best solution to every problem, but it certainly seems to be a viable, free-market alternative to how our industry has traditionally formed: one big vendor corners the market, and we spend decades trying to get out of its grip.
In open-source video, we have the means to foster an open industry, one that lets individual developers focus on their respective core competencies, while customers get lower costs and reduced lock-in. Sign me up.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Kaltura.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Kaltura is an open-source video application server that competes with the likes of Brightcove. In a nutshell, it helps companies put video on their Web sites.
Kaltura recently released an integration of its product for Drupal, which was a great way to quickly enable its technology for broad distribution. Of more interest to me, however, is that Kaltura was recently selected to power the video on Footbo, a dedicated social network for soccer (football).
With more than 1 billion soccer fans on the planet, Kaltura couldn't do much better than to tap into this passion, starting with Footbo. From the press release:
Footbo has integrated Kaltura's video management platform, allowing Footbo admins to manage and moderate video content, create playlists based on tags, ratings and other criteria, track video statistics and usage, and more. Kaltura's platform also enables users to upload videos and photos and import them from leading social networks and content sites. Kaltura's platform enables Footbo to easily add over time more advanced interactive functionalities such as content discovery, subtitles, remixing and editing tools.
It sounds awesome. It also sounds like a copyright train wreck waiting to happen. I should know. I was booted off YouTube for posting some video I took at an Arsenal match.
But that's not Kaltura's problem to solve, and I was excited to give the Footbo service a try, starting with that most divine of teams, Arsenal. Watching the video of Arsenal's last good season (2003-2004), I nearly broke into tears, all enabled by Kaltura.
My Arsenal fetish satisfied, at least for the moment, I'm back, and I'm impressed by the Kaltura technology. As an end user, it makes for seamless video integration into an existing site. As a publisher, it promises to be much the same. This is an open-source project worth watching.
Much is made about YouTube and the democratization of content, but if the top-20 YouTube videos of all time are any indication, the future of YouTube is corporate, as The Guardian reports.
A look last week at the site's current 20 most viewed clips of all time--all with more than 50m hits--offered a snapshot of the corporatizing effect. A good half of them were professional music videos...Even among actual user-generated content, many of the most popular clips are based on bestselling pop culture.
So, while Hulu has been winning the profit war against YouTube because of its focus on quality, corporate quality may end up propping up YouTube before long, and pushing out eyeballs for user-generated content in the process. Nick Carr has long pilloried the glorification of the "amateur class," and has derided YouTube's staying power as a bottoms-up phenomenon. It looks like he may be right.
We keep wanting to tell ourselves that the Internet and the "mass collaboration" it engenders has changed everything. But this appears to be more aspirational than actual. It still costs a lot of money to consistently create great content (and software). It still costs a lot of money to market it.
The only cost that appears to have gone down is that of distribution. On the Web, distribution is (largely) free, which is both a blessing and curse. It facilitates piracy (making The Dark Knight perhaps the most pirated movie of 2008, for example) just as much as it facilitates distribution.
Until we come up with ways to manage content online that don't unduly impede distribution while simultaneously safeguarding content for its creators, YouTube will be stuck with cats falling off TVs rather than higher-quality content like The Office.
Over at All Things Digital, Peter Kafka has some interesting news for those that believe YouTube won the online video war: it's actually losing.
Hulu.com, that stodgy competitor created by News Corp. and NBC, is beating YouTube, at least in terms of profit: Hulu is making roughly $12 million in profit, while YouTube is bleeding cash, according to Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel, with whom Kafka spoke:
Amel's model assumes that while Hulu is showing far fewer video streams to many fewer people than Google, it is able to sell ads on most of them-perhaps 80 percent of all streams have a paying advertiser, he thinks. Google, meanwhile, is thought to be able to sell ads on just 3 percent to 4 percent of its views.
Just as important, but not widely discussed: Amel believes that YouTube's costs are much more significant than most observers guess. That's because YouTube isn't just paying massive bandwidth and hosting costs for all those clips. It's also paying out huge licensing and content fees to copyright owners like music labels. Amel thinks YouTube is paying more for those fees than it does for infrastructure/bandwidth.
Perhaps we should be blaming the entertainment industry for charging such high fees and for withholding its content from YouTube, but this misses the mark. The entertainment industry wants to make money, and apparently feels that YouTube doesn't adequately protect its intellectual property. There is no reason that YouTube couldn't displace Hulu: it simply needs to show equal care for the industry's IP.
It also needs to improve quality. This is, of course, possible, as Monty Python's recent foray into YouTube suggests.
This will be hard as long as YouTube's model thrives on user-generated content, a significant portion of which turns out to be user-pirated content. (I should know, I was booted from YouTube for uploading a video that I shot at an Arsenal game last year. I didn't have broadcasting rights....)
This isn't to suggest that YouTube should become Hulu. It just means that YouTube needs to find advertising models that are suitable to its content...like user-generated commercials.
I never expected Hulu to work out, but according to ReadWriteWeb's review of a recent report from LiveRail, it may actually be doing better than YouTube in terms of online video monetization.
Why? Because Hulu is apparently able to sell ads against 100 percent of its video inventory, while YouTube is struggling to hit 3 percent. User-generated video content, it would appear, is not nearly as lucrative as selling advertising against professionally-generated video content....
Hulu has better content, and higher quality of video, even though it has far less overall content. According to LiveRail, Hulu hosts 88 million videos, compared to YouTube's 4.2 billion. When I want a Saturday Night Live sketch, however, I find it on Hulu, not YouTube (at least, not for long on YouTube).
Less content, but better, seems to pay, at least in the video world.
Even so, is it just a matter of time until higher bandwidth commoditizes video, as well, to the point that it will be as "worthless" as text? Maybe. At that point, it would make a lot of sense to bundle in pricing for video with my monthly ISP subscription. I'm happy to pay. I just don't want to have to think about it. Make online video payment as easy as paying my cable subscription.
