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.
If you're a Mac user with a need for speed, you'll struggle to find a better browser than Mozilla's Camino. Apple's Safari will win a drag race, but it lacks the customizability that comes with an open-source browser like Camino. Unfortunately, both Safari and Camino fall incredibly short against Firefox because both are heavy on speed and light on community.
For those who want a highly optimized, lightning fast browsing experience on the Mac, you can't do much better than Camino, as TechCrunch writes. But most of us want more than that. We want Adblock Plus to filter out ads from our browsing experience. We want Bitly Preview to be able to launch and track tweets from the browser. And more.
Sure, you can "PimpMyCamino," but you won't get nearly the level of detailing that comes with Firefox's impressive community. It's not hard, technically, to migrate from Firefox to Camino, but in the move you're going to end up losing most of the add-ons that make Firefox so powerful.
Camino has ad-blocking functionality built into the browser, and you can find an array of themes to dress it up. But really, the primary reason to use Camino is if you want raw speed. But if that's all you want, Safari is likely a better choice, given the somewhat limited customizations and add-ons available for Camino. Or Google Chrome, which hasn't fully launched on the Mac yet but promises a big speed boost once it does.
Browsing is about more than speed. Firefox delivers a global community with a diverse array of needs and solutions, which is why it remains my preferred browser, even as Camino sprints by, unadorned.
Linux users are known for being a somewhat finicky lot. Despite broader application support for Windows and a better user experience in Mac OS X, Linux "desktop" users swear by the open-source operating system (and sometimes swear at its competitors).
It's therefore somewhat telling that Linux users overwhelmingly choose Google as their preferred search engine, according to data released today by Chitika, an online advertising network. Chitika analyzed data from 163 million searches across its advertising network between July 30 and August 16, and came up with the following:
(Credit:
Dan Ruby, Chitika)
Despite the concerns about Google and privacy and despite Microsoft's rising relevance in search through its Bing "decision engine," Google wins over Linux users 94.61 percent of the time. While it's not surprising that Linux users would shun a Microsoft-sponsored search engine, it is surprising that they so heavily congregate around just one search engine.
After all, this is the crowd that has created (literally) thousands of Linux distributions. For a community so devoted to choice, it's telling that such a disparate community would unify on Google search. Perhaps Yahoo's apparent willingness to prostrate itself before Microsoft has turned off the Linux crowd, but there are other alternatives.
Open source, after all, is all about alternatives. There are open-source alternatives to Google Analytics (Piwik, Open-Tube, etc.), Google Search Appliance (Lucene/Solr), Google Docs (OpenGoo), Google Earth (World Wind), and more.
But for search, the Linux contingent of the open-source community seems settled on Google.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
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.
OpenX, a software company that makes an open-source ad serving product for online publishers, has launched a platform called OpenX Market to directly connect buyers and sellers.
The model is more or less a standard ad auction format: publishers set a minimum, potential advertisers bid, and the highest bid wins. Plenty of platform-oriented start-ups are turning to the exchange or auction format to simplify and speed up the online ad buying process, but OpenX is worth a second look because of its roots in open-source software.
The OpenX software itself is free, but the platform is a way for the company to make a buck or two off it. Up till this point, the company has made money primarily off of service and consulting fees.
"Historically, the online advertising market has been fractured, opaque, hard to participate in and therefore inefficient." OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan said in a release. "In particular, mid-sized and smaller publishers lack the ability to reach a broad set of advertisers. Conversely, advertisers see lots of value in niche sites and audiences, but find it very hard to discover and buy those sites and audiences...The OpenX Market is all about making these connections simple, seamless and scalable."
The company has also issued an update to its ad server software--used by over 150,000 sites that pull in 300 billion monthly ad impressions--so that it integrates with the new OpenX Market.
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.
Recession? What recession?
It may be that the technology and advertising industries are curtailing spending in the current painful economic environment, but one start-up, OpenX, is happy to report progress in establishing its new business.
OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan
(Credit: OpenX)OpenX sells support and consulting services around an open-source software package geared toward publishers that need to serve ads on their online properties. The Pasadena, Calif.-based company also has been expanding online, first by hosting the software on its own site, free to lower-traffic customers, and second through a pilot test of a marketplace that lets advertisers buy ads across a larger group of publishers.
Among the milestones the company is announcing Monday: The OpenX software, installed by customers or hosted by OpenX, currently delivers 300 billion ads per month. About 2,500 customers are using the hosted version now, with a growth rate that sees customers double each week.
"This is some pretty phenomenal growth," crowed Chief Executive Tim Cadogan, a former Yahoo search and advertising executive.
Next comes the more difficult process of converting the free products and services into revenue-generating operations. The vast majority of the ads served by the installed software were from freely downloaded versions, and few of those using the hosted service are premium customers.
But Cadogan said the company has just launched the support products and online services, and that revenue generation is a priority. "We are all over the revenue side and pushing that really hard. I expect more news on that in the next one to three months," he said.
More than 10,000 customers installed version 2.6 of the OpenX software since its July release. The company plans to release 2.7 into beta testing soon, a version that will add a plug-in system that will enable customers to customize the software with specific modules for tasks such as specific targeting, video ads, or mobile ads, Cadogan said.
Open-Xchange announced Monday it landed a $9 million second round of funding, with the proceeds earmarked for furthering its software development and expansion of its U.S., European, and emerging markets.
eCapital led the round, with BayBG and existing investor BayTech Venture Capital contributing to the round. The company has raised a total of $17.8 million to date.
Open-Xchange, which last year named a new chief executive and a new chief technology officer, develops software aimed at taking share from Microsoft's Exchange offerings.
The open source start-up develops software designed to provide e-mail, document sharing, shared calendars, and address books, as well as other collaboration features.
The Google Chrome Channel Chooser lets people get the latest updates to Google's Web browser.
(Credit: CNET News)
Through a new developer program, Google is letting people try the latest versions of its Chrome Web browser, and the first update is available.
Those who want the newest Chrome versions can install the Google Chrome Channel Chooser software from Google's Chrome Dev Channel site. The switcher lets people choose whether they want the latest cutting-edge Chrome builds or the less frequent but more stable beta versions.
"Google Chrome now provides a way for people to get early-access releases automatically: the Dev channel," said Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson in a Chrome mailing list posting late Monday night. "The Dev channel lets you test the latest fixes and get access to new features as they're being developed. We will release new builds to the Dev channel about every week so that you can preview--and provide feedback on--what's coming in Google Chrome."
The 'About Google Chrome' dialog box lets people update to the latest version.
(Credit: CNET News)The first update available through the program, build 1251, is geared more for programmers and willing guinea pigs than for those who merely are curious.
Build 1251 fixes bugs with areas including Microsoft's Silverlight software, tab behavior, video playback with YouTube and other Flash players, and scalable vector graphics, and it suppresses full-text indexing of sites accessed with encrypted Web connections, according to the release notes. It also enables two switches that can be set when the software boots that let users activate two developmental features, new technology for networking and for managing Chrome windows.
How to update
After running the Google Chrome Channel Chooser software, users can find if there's a new version by clicking the wrench icon in the upper-right corner of the Chrome screen, then selecting "About Google Chrome." If a new version is available, users can update there, then reboot restart to enable the changes.
The newest Chrome version is 0.2.152.1.
(Credit: CNET News)My update to version 0.2.152.1 went smoothly--but afterward, the browser couldn't figure out whether another version was available. Instead, it said "checking for updates..." for a few minutes until I closed the dialog box.
Chrome is an open-source project, meaning that Google may draw on other work from Firefox, WebKit, and Microsoft, and that others may help Google. Judging by a couple of "thank yous" in the release notes, outsiders are in fact starting to submit patches.
Such submissions require programmers to extend copyright to Google, which means Google can have its way with the Chrome code, for example changing the open-source license under which it's offered.
Also, either Google is still hiding details of security-related Chrome fixes in the release notes, or some of the links are missing in the release notes.
Time for our semi-irregular roundup of Google items:
• Gmail Labs has produced three new features that people can try, according to Google's Gmail blog. One is a keyboard shortcut, "G" then "L," that brings people to a list of labels so they can show a specific category of messages. Another is the ability to move the Gmail control elements around on the left-side navigation bar, so users can reorder instant-messaging contacts, labels, and other items to put their preferred controls at the top. Last is the ability to pick your own colors for labels, not just rely on Google's choices.
Gmail Labs now has three new options for users
(Credit: CNET News)• Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience, mused about the future of search on Google's main blog. Among various ideas about the potential expansion of Google search to become ever more pervasive and useful is the possibility that we'll be able to upload a photo of a bird to a search engine to identify it, and that search engines will be able to draw upon social connections and other personal information to help understand queries better. Google's working on cross-language information retrieval, so search results from all languages are provided in a user's native tongue. And of course, as Star Trek has trained us to expect (and that Yahoo OneSearch with Voice enables today), we should be able to search with our voices, not just by typing text.
• Themes to customize the appearance of Google's Chrome browser are now appearing, with instructions at LifeHacker. Also handy are some command-line startup options that let power users configure Chrome to block the execution of Java, Flash, or JavaScript programs, or to launch Chrome maximized to fill the whole screen.(Via Google Blogoscoped.)
• Anyone skeptical that Google is building Mac OS X and Linux versions of Chrome can put doubts to rest by looking at the Chrome build system, which shows how well the latest builds are faring for those two as-yet-unsupported operating systems as well as Windows.
• Picasa is mostly a photo-sharing site, but it can house videos, too (as long as you haven't run into any storage space limits at the site). Now Google has opened up an interface that lets programmers better use the feature. Specifically, Google has released an API (application programming interface) for video uploads, according to the Google Code blog, so a programmer could for example create an upload tool that can deal with videos as well as photos. Video API details are available online.
• Google plans to launch a YouTube feature this week called HotSpots that lets video creators see which parts of a video are most watched, according to Advertising Age. The tool graphs activity levels that reflects activity such as viewers rewinding to watch a particular spot more often or dropping off to do something else. (Via Google Blogoscoped.)
• Chrome's Incognito apparently really does work, according to the SurfChrome blog, with a forensics expert unable to find traces of Web sites the browser visited. "There was no trace of cached images, history nor cookies," the blog said.
• Google consumes a huge amount of open-source projects for its own use, and sometimes contributes back to those projects. It did so with MySQL, the Sun Microsystems open-source database, including changes that speed the core data engine, InnoDB, used in MySQL, and that make it work faster on servers with multicore processors, according to the Google open-source blog. "We expect several of these features to be merged into a future official MySQL release, and one of them, semi-synchronous replication, is already available as a MySQL feature preview," Google said.
• Google's Steve Souder, who focuses on high-performance Web sites, has released some statistics about speed-related features that various browsers support. His conclusion: Chrome is tied with Firefox and the latest Safari for the best speed features, with a score of 8 out of 10. His UA Profiler test is available on his Web site.
• SurfChrome and Valleywag both feature some amusing re-captioned parodies of the Chrome comic book from Google and illustrator Scott McCloud.
