VIDEO

Brian Tong brings everything from the Crave blog with his special guest iJustine. LG comes out with a "faux" skin phone, a slash-resistant t-shirt that will keep you safe on the streets, Photos the size of your wall, and some love for Flip Video.

Veeple is a new video-captioning service that lets you add small moving notes or links to Web videos. It will host clips up to 100MB in size, or you can simply access the ones you've got hosted on other sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.

The one standout feature is how incredibly simple it is to add the various types of annotations. All you have to do is click your mouse to start recording, then once again to stop. The note will follow your cursor, so if you're dealing with a moving subject, you're not limited to placing a note in one spot and having it lose placement.

There are several types of captions and annotations to use, from basic speech and thought bubbles, all the way to text overlays and links to off-site Web pages. There are also links to eBay, MySpace, and Facebook--the latter two effectively let you live-tag any of your social-networking buddies. For instance, in one video I tagged one of my friends with his Facebook profile, and the other to his MySpace page. A person watching the video only needs to click on that link to get jumped right there, but will know what they're clicking on without having to read a description because of the little site logos that are used to represent the links. In theory, Veeple could add many more services down the line, or plug into those site data APIs to let you search through your buddies to make tagging easier.

Another service that's been experimenting with live tags is Asterpix, which recently released its auto-tagging service. I prefer Veeple's tagging system to Asterpix's despite the fact the entire process is manual; however both offer a huge leg up to YouTube and other's standard captioning offerings.

Check out the video embedded after the break to see it in action. Keep in mind there's already a lot going on in this video, so the amount of visual overload from these live captions depends on how much self control the Veeple author has.

[via VentureBeat]

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Don't count out VideoEgg just yet.

Rumors have circulated that the San Francisco-based company is on the verge of a shutdown, but that's not the case, said Matt Sanchez, the company's CEO.

The rumors no doubt were churned up by the e-mails the company has sent notifying users of its decision to stop hosting videos uploaded to the site by the public and to scale back hosting services on the VideoEgg Publishing Platform.

"What we're doing is focusing on efforts around our ad network brand, the EggNetwork brand," Sanchez said Wednesday. "We want … Read more

In a recent column over at the The Times online, a guest contributor named Giles Whittell wrote one of the most ridiculous articles I have ever read on the subject of video games. And while he may be entitled to his opinion, his belief that video games are the root of all evil and on par with "heroin and teenage parents" is not only sickening, but ludicrous.

In his piece entitled, "Video games: I'll never buy one", Whittell outlines his hatred for video games and his utter lack of knowledge about what the form of entertainment really means to children and society.

"I hate video games, on or offline," he spewed. "I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time. I hate being made to feel hateful for saying so, and I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them."

Whoa. Calm down, Giles. Smack and teenage pregnancy? That's a new one. Not too sure about you, but where I come from, smack usually involves a nose or a syringe. Oh and pregnancy, yeah, that usually involves something a bit more intimate than pressing buttons on a piece of plastic.

But I digress. What is wrong with this character? Obviously this is a man that's both misguided and misinformed about what's really going on in the world of video games.… Read more

There's a good piece by Saul Hansell over on The New York Times' "Bits" blog.

Hansell describes how Comcast is being criticized for low picture quality on certain broadcasts. That's interesting, especially in light of the contention between Comcast and DirecTV on this very issue, but it isn't the most important point in Hansell's post.

Hansell goes on to give a reasonable explanation of the basic issues involved, and mentions the likely future of cable TV: digital video distributed over Internet-like network switches. Instead of always sending every TV channel to every house, a … Read more

Imagine being able to watch movies or TV shows in high-quality, full-screen glory on your computer and being able to jump directly to a particular place in the video based on the transcript and click on a word in the transcript to pull up more information.

That's what Blinkx BBTV (Broadband TV) promises when it launches on Wednesday.

Blinkx is bringing the world of TV and DVD entertainment to the PC, but incorporating the interactivity of the Web to make it a richer experience. The service, which requires a small software download, is free of charge and free of … Read more

Howcast is a great new how-to video service that launched back in early February. This morning I met with co-creator Sanjay Raman to talk about what they've been up to in those two months. The site already has a wonderful, and fast growing collection of videos that teach you how to do all manner of things in just a few minutes, and has some really great features just around the corner.

Part of the site's success is due to the novel approach to the somewhat tired medium of how-to videos. People can still throw up their 5-minute shaky cam footage of how to plug in speaker cables, or cut up onions the right way, but Howcast is doing something very different from the rest by building itself up as a platform for fledgling self-proclaimed experts or videographers who want to put together slick, professional looking videos that don't suck. It's also got some great video player technology that blows the competition away.

The crux of the service revolves around the directors program. Howcast provides reasonably credentialed enthusiasts with a zip file full of goodies to create how-to shorts that follow a certain format. Included are overlays, bumpers, templates for Apple's Final Cut Pro, and voiceovers. There's also a growing repository of over 100 tracks to use as background music. Directors get paid $50 a pop for the videos they create, and have the option for further revenue sharing if their clip gets over 40,000 views. Raman says no video has yet to reach that height yet, but that they'd be offering something similar to YouTube with the creators getting a fair percentage cut.

Going forward Raman alluded to moving away from Final Cut and giving people a way to create videos using alternate tools. My guess is that it's a Web based video editing tool the likes of JumpCut or EyeSpot. Such a feature would let people create content without the need to shell out a few thousand dollars on hardware and software. Raman said the feature was coming in the "near future."

The second component to Howcast is the video player, which has been designed like a DVD player with chapter markers to separate the steps. Users can skip back and forth between each steps, and read little tool tips that gives them a bird's-eye view of what they're about to see without actually having to watch it. Raman walked me through how content creators add and edit these markers in the video, and the process is dead simple. You can play around with it yourself with the video embedded in this post.

In addition to video content, Howcast has an integrated wiki. Right now there are more wiki posts than videos, but that's because they're far simpler to make. Every video starts out as a Wiki, and that the ones that go into production are fact-checked in house by a Howcast staff member and linked up to the video post. One big thing that differs from Quamut, which I checked out last week, is that these wiki guides are printer friendly, so you can take them with you when it's time for semi-complex tasks.

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As I reported here a few weeks ago, professional video gaming leagues and organizations are hoping that, over time, their industry can be seen as a sport on par with soccer, baseball, football, and so on.

Now, one of those leagues, the Championship Gaming Series, has decided to up the ante by creating a training facility and a dedicated game playing arena in the booming Chinese city of Wuhan.

I talked to Andy Reif, commissioner of the CGS, the other day, and he explained that the idea behind building the training center is essentially that you can't build a … Read more

vTap, one of my personal favorites for video search, has a new feature that I think video junkies will find immensely useful. It's a new recommendation service that will pull in videos related to whatever keywords you give it, and maintain them in a simple feed that's updated constantly. As a user you can keep tabs on new videos that pop-up on the feed either through vTap's site, on your mobile phone, or social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

Best of all is that adding keywords to your feed is natural. Since the service revolves around … Read more