RealNetworks began public beta-testing version 12 of its venerable RealPlayer today. Like the last version, the free RealPlayer SP (which stands for "social and portable") lets you rip streaming Flash videos from the Web to your hard drive. What's new: you can also transcode them into appropriate formats for playback on portable devices. If you're using an iPod or iPhone, the RealPlayer will even generously insert the transcoded version directly into your iTunes library.
RealPlayer SP adds an unobtrusive "Download This Video" box whenever you encounter a Flash-based video in your Web browser.
Then I remembered that one of the best features of Microsoft's new Bing search engine, which launched earlier this month, is its video search. (The predecessor to Bing, Live Search, had most of the same video search features as well.) There's nothing wrong with Google's video search, but I personally prefer the Bing interface, and I like the way the video is previewed right in the search results.
Using them together was a breeze--once installed, the RealPlayer automatically adds a small pop-up message to any embedded video in your browser (I tested it with both Internet Explorer and Firefox), asking you if you want to download the video. Transcoding takes a few minutes, particularly for long videos, but in the last half-hour I've managed to rip the new Grizzly Bear video, the reunited Pink Floyd's entire Live 8 performance, and a live version of Ozzy's "Crazy Train" with Randy Rhoads into iTunes in both video (H.264) and audio-only (MP3) formats. All came from different original sources, but all were available through Bing.
I'm particularly impressed with the RealPlayer's video-to-audio transcoder--my 8GB iPhone is way too small to fit a lot of videos on it, and transcoding video to audio files has been a bit of a hassle in the past. Now I can do it on the fly, as I download them. Kudos to RealNetworks on a nice piece of software.
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The rumor mill has been all atwitter about a link from Seeqpod's newly sparse home page to the search page for Microsoft's Web site. (Not to be confused with Live Search, Microsoft's Internet search engine.)
Seeqpod was a playable search engine for music files--essentially, its crawlers scoured Web sites looking for MP3 files, then it transformed those MP3s into streamable audio files. It offered its own user-facing Web page, as well as APIs for third-party sites, and was used as the back-end for Songerize (which no longer works) and Bandloop. After being hit by copyright infringement lawsuits from several of the major record labels, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy last month. Now, the company is apparently seeking some big player to buy up its assets, and apparently Microsoft has expressed interest.
Microsoft is set to launch the next version of its search engine in the next month or so. I've seen some test versions, and I don't think it's giving too much away to say that one area where Microsoft hopes to gain ground on Google is by improving its specialized or "vertical" search in areas such as product search.
The rumors say that Microsoft is interested in Seeqpod primarily for people and technology. But if Microsoft really wants to differentiate itself from Google, it should integrate playable music search directly into the next version of its search engine--just as it did after acquiring Farecast, which predicts whether airfare prices for a particular trip are rising or falling.
But Seeqpod may not be the best bet for integrating music search. I think Microsoft should be looking at Grooveshark. It's delivered almost flawless results in my tests, the interface offers a lot of interesting features such as album cover art and on-the-fly playlists, and so far it hasn't been targeted by the labels for copyright infringement, although I don't know enough about law to say if it's on solid legal ground or not.
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