Adobe releases Flash Player 10

Adobe has released Flash Player 10, which has improved 3D support, enhanced streaming of video/audio, and performance boosts on all platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux).

Download Flash Player 10!

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Legally producing videos

Whether you’re a YouTube content producer, or someone who likes to create videos to be distributed on social networking sites, there are some tips you must keep in mind. Failure to do so can jeopardize your ability to publish your own works in the future, and could lead to legal action.

Inside this article:

1. Legally using music
2. To license or not to license
3. Watch your mouth

(More after the jump.)

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Use H.264 for videos

I’m going to categorize this under “Technology”, since I don’t have a section on Geekie.org dedicated exclusively to multimedia.

H.264 is a really good video compression standard. It’s also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding. You can read more about the technical details on Wikipedia.

The benefit of H.264 is that the resulting output files are substantially smaller as a result of significantly reduced (low) bitrates. Yet, H.264 is able to do so without sacrificing image quality; the output video quality is often comparable to an uncompressed AVI. Trials have shown that H.264 outperforms DivX and Xvid, in terms of quality, thanks to the new features in MPEG-4 Part 10.

Apple QuickTime is one of the major video players (and encoders) which supports H.264 and is proud of it. Their page about H.264 has the following description:

H.264 uses the latest innovations in video compression technology to provide incredible video quality from the smallest amount of video data. This means you see crisp, clear video in much smaller files, saving you bandwidth and storage costs over previous generations of video codecs. H.264 delivers the same quality as MPEG-2 at a third to half the data rate and up to four times the frame size of MPEG-4 Part 2 at the same data rate. H.264 is truly a sight to behold.

Standard definition video (ie. 640×480) is imperceptibly encoded to only 1 to 2 mbps, while maintaining the same degree of quality. HD support also exists, at amazingly low bitrates (comparatively).

Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t embracing H.264 in the same way, and neither Windows Media Player nor Microsoft Silverlight (at the time of writing) support H.264 or MPEG-4 Video. They have chosen, instead, to create “Microsoft MPEG-4″, a semi-proprietary implementation of an open standard. Shame!

If you want to distribute H.264 media, the best containers are MP4 (MPEG-4 Video), MOV (Apple QuickTime Movie), and very recently, FLV (Adobe Flash Video). Each of them can carry a H.264 stream. For instance, here is a QuickTime Movie encoded with H.264.

Software that can be used to create H.264-encoded video include:

• Apple QuickTime Pro and other programs like Camtasia which use the QuickTime toolkit
  
• MediaCoder (free and open source!), using the x264 library (also free and open source!)

You, too, can create high quality H.264 videos. Read Apple’s instructions (for QuickTime Pro) or blip.tv’s how-to. (Did I recommend blip.tv as a place to upload your videos? It’s really good.)

(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)

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On improving PersonalLog

With the rising demand for blogs on PersonalLog, such as the new blogs started up recently (including A Blog Title and Nikola’s Muzik), I’m starting to see posts on virtually every topic, whether it’s gaming, other sites, life, politics, or music.  All of this means more stress on the infrastructure itself, which is why I’m starting to integrate services like ImageShack and YouTube into the software.

Recently, I’ve enabled PersonalLog-network-wide features, such as ImageShack integration in the Write Post page, easy insertion of videos from the top video sharing sites (including YouTube, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, MyspaceTV, and so on), and added a few optional plugins including NoIE (which shows a warning to Internet Explorer users and helps them move to Firefox), Counterize II (which tracks site visitors and details about them in real time), and a FeedBurner redirection plugin. These and more are being installed, adapted, and perfected every day.

The first two features that I’ve mentioned, ImageShack integration and video embedding, will help people improve their content while not placing any additional burdens on the PersonalLog server. By encouraging people to upload pictures and graphics to ImageShack, I am indirectly causing them to use more graphics, which improves the experience for the visitors. By encouraging and making it easy to embed videos, I am indirectly influencing them to use and incorporate more videos, thus attracting user interaction. At the same time, the videos aren’t hosted on PersonalLog and won’t drive up the bandwidth consumption.

For the ImageShack integration, you can take a look at some screenshots or a video tutorial. For the video embedding, read this post at PersonalLog.

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Downloading YouTube files

How to download YouTube videos without installing any software, even when the entire YouTube domain is blocked

There is a simple process, one which results in a downloadable video file. Every step of the way, if you find that you can access the video you want, there is no need to complete the process unless you want to actually download a video that you can store and keep on your own (or school/corporate) computer.

Here is a scenario in which you might want to follow this guide:

You are on a corporate network which blocks YouTube and all of its subdomains. Any time that you attempt to access it, you receive a warning screen.

You cannot use proxies because anoonymizers have been blocked as well.

You know the URL of the video you want to watch or download.

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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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