Articles about Video

If you want to get any more work done today, read no further! Google unveiled the "Peanut Gallery" a fun, silent-move-making tool showcasing the Web Speech API released with Chrome 25 last month. You could fritter away hours creating and sharing funny clips.

"We thought it would be fun to demonstrate this new technology by using an old one: silent film", Google's Aaron Koblin explains. "The Peanut Gallery lets you add intertitles to old black-and-white movie clips just by talking out loud while you watch them. Create a film and share it with friends, so they can bring out their inner screenwriters too".

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Instagram has become wildly popular for sharing pictures, thanks, in part, to its filters that allow the user to alter the appearance on a particular image to get just the right look. Now Vimeo wants to add that same functionality to your videos. Today Ryan Hefner took the wraps off of Vimeo Looks.

Looks debuts with a large set of filters -- more than 500, according to Hefner. Customers can cruise through them and quickly try out different ones to find what they think will showcase the video in the best way. Hefner points out that "you can also check out recommended Looks tailored to your specific video, or browse by genre, mood, location, color, time period, even holiday".

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Today HP announced Live Photo for the iOS platform -- an app that claims to bring the user's photos to life using "augmented reality". The company claims the app will bring "a new consumer printing experience by embedding short video moments into printed photos".

According to Annie Weinberger, a general manager at HP-subsidiary Aurasma, "augmented reality is the new medium for bringing the physical world to digital life and HP Live Photo puts the power of this technology into the hands of everyday consumers". The free app purports to merge still images and short videos utilizing Aurasma. Once the app has been downloaded from the iTunes App Store the user can choose a video of up to 45-seconds in length and then select an automatically generated still image. From there it is a matter of choosing a template and sharing the new creation. The new photo/video can be shared via email, Facebook or by printing to any AirPrint-enabled printer.

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UK supermarket chain Tesco is set to launch a free online video streaming service called Clubcard TV.

Currently being internally beta tested by employees and set to launch officially this spring, it will (as the name suggests) be available to all shoppers with a Tesco loyalty card. And the really good news is it will be entirely free. According to Tesco, the new service is a "thank you to our customers -- there are no charges, contracts or subscriptions". Rumors that

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AVCLabs has released Any Video Converter Free 5.0.2 a major new version of its freeware video transcoding and conversion tool for Windows. The new build sports a radically overhauled and simplified user interface, plus promises faster, more powerful performance.

AVC Free promises to effortlessly convert videos from over 60 formats, with presets for popular mobile devices such as Android and iOS phones included. It’s also capable of downloading YouTube videos and includes limited video-editing tools.

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Eleventh in a series. Microsoft has updated two of the native apps that Windows 8 ships with this week. The News and Finance apps have received updates that enhance performance, improve network connectivity and add support for additional regional sources.

A total of 24,749 apps are listed in the US Windows 8 store this Friday. Of those, 20,019 are free to download and install, while 4,730 are paid applications. That's an increase of 961 apps this week.

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Everyone’s looking for that magic one-click solution to digitizing their personal video and movies collection. Often you find yourself having to jump through a number of hoops before you can get the movies in a format you like, but if you’re looking for a perfect 1:1 rip in MKV format, then MakeMKV 1.7.10 Beta is the tool for you.

MakeMKV 1.7.10 runs on Windows and Mac, and lets you simply select your DVD or Blu-ray disc, pick an output folder and click a button to rip it. Better still, it produces a 1:1 copy in much less time than other tools, and is completely free to use while in beta.

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If you’ve ever explored the world of Windows video players then you’ll almost certainly have come across Media Player Classic (compact, easy to use, but a little dated now) and its spin-off Home Cinema project (more powerful, plenty of features).

What you might not have noticed, though, is the latest addition to the family, Media Player Classic-BE (for “Black Edition”, apparently). It’s a recent offshoot from Home Cinema and looks almost exactly the same, but already has one notable addition and plenty of smaller tweaks to enjoy.

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There has been a great deal of enthusiasm about making indie movies on Digital SLRs (and even some television -- Joe Wilcox of this parish reminds me that an episode of “House” was filmed on a Canon 5D, as was one of the BBC’s “Wallander” episodes). There are two main reasons for this enthusiastic adoption -- firstly, both camera body and lenses are incredibly low-cost compared to a conventional digital TV or movie camcorder, and secondly, they have full-frame (35mm size) sensors to give that shallow depth of field “film-look”.

While I’ve followed all this with interest, I’ve never personally been fully convinced.

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The SZ Development released Free Music Downloader 1.30, the latest edition of its MP3 download tool, and the update is mainly about extending its list of supported sites.

The program provides a simple, free and portable way to search a number of sources for music. This update adds support for BandCamp, Hypem and Xiami to the existing list of sites and services, which also includes www.last.fm, vkontakte.ru, goear.com, GrooveShark.com, SoundCloud.com, mixcloud.com, ProstoPleer.com and 8Tracks.com. Elsewhere, a bug fix sees LastFM searches and downloads working again.

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Remember that Googlezon video from a few years ago? The one that predicted Google and Amazon would take over the world with, perhaps, apocalyptic results? Well, none of that has come to pass, but both companies continue to grow and expand. Amazon, increasingly becoming as much of a content delivery system as a product retailer, made several bold moves to get its media out to even more platforms, today.

For starters, Amazon moved to bring its Cloud Player music service to both Samsung Smart TV's and Roku set-top boxes and made its Instant Video service available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Both services are essentially cloud interfaces for your media.

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Anonymity serves an essential purpose; it allows us to speak without fear of persecution. But two-way anonymous communications are inherently antisocial, and are often counterproductive when trying to establish a certain level of discourse. This is the root of the comments section dilemma, and an issue online news sites like BetaNews think about quite a bit. We want you to be able to speak freely. We hate having to censor anything, but we also want civilized conversation.

Text-only communication is viewed as an "impoverished" form of social exchange, lacking all of the nonverbal nuances that help us share information on a deeper, more human level, and anonymous text-only communications are even weaker, stripping out most of the ethos of the speaker.

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Sixth in a series. Every seven days we look at some of the best new app releases for Windows 8. This week's releases include Amazon and Nascar official applications, as well as a selection of mostly media-orientated offerings.

Microsoft has added a top-paid category to select localized stores that displays top-rated paid applications. It is likely that this will be rolled out eventually to all stores.

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Whether you are looking at how to best capture and share a video of baby’s first Christmas or the excitement of a marriage proposal this holiday season, cell phone, digital camera or camcorder often isn't enough. Some editing is required to tell a compelling and concise story.

I've prepared a list of 10 tips based on frequently asked questions from the more than two million consumers on CyberLink's DirectorZone social media site. Please add your own in comments, or sharing story about successful video-editing project.

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Google unveiled two major iOS app updates with the release of Gmail -- email from Google 2.0 and YouTube for iOS 1.1.0. Gmail 2.0 is completely rebuilt from the ground up, debuting a brand new look and feel, the promise of better performance and a number of major new features.

YouTube for iOS adds native support for both iPhone 5 and iPad, plus the capability of streaming videos via Apple’s AirPlay wireless technology.

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