Awesome Techs

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Supported Sources:

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (unencrypted–protection methods including CSS are not supported internally and must be handled externally with third-party software and libraries), and some .VOB and .TS files
• Most any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.

Outputs:

• File format: MP4 and MKV
• Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora
• Audio: AAC, CoreAudio AAC (OS X Only), MP3, or Vorbis. AC-3 pass-through, DTS pass-thorugh (MKV only)

Misc features:

• Chapter selection
• Subtitles
• Integrated bitrate calculator
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
• Live Video Preivew

Mac OS
	Mac OS X 10.5 / 10.6 – GUI Download (32bit Intel) Download (64bit Intel) Download (Power PC)	Mac OS X 10.5 / 10.6 – CLI Download (32bit Intel) Download (64bit Intel) Download (Power PC)
	Intel based Macs: If you have an Intel Core 2 Duo / Core i5 or i7, you can download the “64bit Intel” release. If you have the older “Core Duo” or “Core Solo” processors, you should download the “32bit Intel” release.
Windows
	Windows XP/Vista/7 – GUI Download	Windows XP/Vista/7 – CLI Download
Linux
	Ubuntu 9.10 deb – GUI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)	Ubuntu 9.10 deb – CLI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)
	Fedora 12 rpm – GUI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)	Fedora 12 rpm – CLI Download (32bit) Download (64bit)
Other
	Useful Links Checksums Source Code

According to All Things Digital, Google is currently in negotiations with the networks and studios to make such a service available to users of its video-sharing site in 2010.

Fox News also reports the same, ie., Google is negotiating with the media industry to stream individual TV episodes via YouTube, for a fee.

Youtube allow us to view some TV episode now only but ads are there. So if this rumor comes real, then it means TV episode without ads.

So I dont think its just a rumor, but still its not confirmed. Anyway I don’t know whether to say this is good or this is bad. This is because, Youtube will not allow us to download and keep it legally. But we are paying for it 1.99 USD per TV episode. There are people who want to keep it to watch it over and over not everyone, but believe me there are people.

Well this is not a good news for iTunes. The thing about iTunes is they allow us to download what we are paying for. Will Youtube add an option like this. MAn then this is going to be huge. I mean REAL huge.

The sources say negotiations are still in preliminary stages but that both sides “seem optimistic”.

According to founder Chad Hurley, YouTube now gets over 1 billion hits every day, three years after Google purchased the video sharing site for $1.65 billion USD.

Says his blog:

Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We’d just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world’s information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.

Looking back at those early days, we were committed to some basic principles that have since become fundamental tenets in the world of online video:

* Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
* Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
* Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.

Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we’ve started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we’ve brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business. We’re working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world’s largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.

These parents are obviously doing something right, as their son not only drives a Power Wheels Mustang, but can drift it into a parallel parking space like a parking challenge champ. Someday we want our kids to drive this well.

The movie used in the screenshots below is Big Buck Bunny—a completely open-source generated and Creative Commons-licensed short movie.

Media Player Classic (Windows, Free)

Media Player Classic started out as a project to preserve the simplicity and lightweight playback of the old Windows Media Player while keeping codecs and features current for the present generation of video. The outcome is an extremely lightweight, free, portable, and self-contained video player that has built-in codecs for a wide variety of media playback. The upside of such a design is you can use it on a machine that doesn’t have the proper codecs installed for the video you want to watch. The downside is in some instances—although rare—it can conflict with an updated codec you have installed on your machine.

MPlayer (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Originally designed to fill the void of a lack of adequate Linux media players, the development for the robust media player MPlayer has branched out and now includes versions for Windows and Mac, among others. MPlayer supports a wide variety of content and, perhaps owing to its Linux roots, pays extra close attention to hardware and hardware optimization to squeeze the most playback power out of your system.

GOM Player (Windows, Free)

GOM Player is another entrant in this week’s Hive that, like VLC, excels at playing damaged and incomplete video. Originally designed as the streaming media player for GOM-TV, a Korean TV network, it is available outside of Korea with the GOM-TV streaming functionality disabled—although folks outside Korea still have access to the live streaming of StarCraft matches (StarCraft is so wildly popular among Koreans playing it is practically a national sport). GOM Player also includes a wide variety of sub-title tweaks, an important feature for a player from a country that consumes a lots of foreign media.

VLC (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

VLC is a media player with far-reaching appeal. It is available for over ten operating systems including systems as obscure as BeOS. Built with open-source code and fueled by free decoding and encoding libraries, it has a history of innovation and performance; it was, for example, the first player that could play back encrypted DVDs on Linux. VLC allows you to play incomplete or damaged videos, so you can decide if it is worth finishing a download or repairing a video file. VLC can also play a variety of formats not commonly supported by media players, such as a raw DVD ISO file or AVCHD—a format currently used by many HD camcorders. VLC is available as a portable application.

KMPlayer (Windows, Free)

If you like all your media player’s settings at your fingertips, KMPlayer has a lot to offer. The right click context menu is absolutely enormous and gives you nearly instant access to all manner of settings, including screen ratio, playback speed, video bookmarking, filters, and other effects. You can set KMPlayer to change its skin based on what media type you’re playing or if you’re running it on a media center you can use an overlay skin to provide easy remote-based navigation. KMPlayer supports an extensive number of formats including DVD playback and is easily customized to your specific needs.

Although video has been on Wikipedia in a limited way for the past two years, it is poised to take-off with the recent introduction of Firefox 3.5 along with other imminent developments, we have learned.

Over the next few months there will be the introduction of server-side transcoding technology, a new Wikipedia video player, and a set of collaborative editing tools which will allow community members to amend videos.

Videos on the site are uploaded and watched in a format called Ogg Theora.  It is a Flash-like program which is completely open-source.  Video producers can render Ogg files in FinalCut and other editing programs by using various plug-ins. Once in Ogg, these files can be uploaded to Wikipedia.

Later this year, Wikipedia will allow uploads of popular file formats directly with server-side transcoding to Ogg.  This plug-in is called FireOgg.

For some time, these videos have been viewable with certain Java and other plug-ins.  The release of Firefox 3.5 is the first time that Ogg videos can be viewed “natively” on a browser.  Opera and Chrome will support Ogg soon, but not Explorer or Safari.

Credit:Beet.TV