Select a livelihood that reflects your ethics by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org
Tonight, I returned to the BCUG Graphics focused sub-group, for maybe the 4th time. I always enjoy the professionalism, humor, and attentiveness of this very special group and its memorable members. In the past, I’ve talked about open source concepts, Picasa, Sketchup, Inkscape, and other technologies.
In this visit, I came to talk about two great open source video projects, VideoLan Client (VLC) and Miro Media Player. VLC is a swiss army knife of video tools. You can play almost any codec out of the box, transcode videos from one format to another, clip portions of videos to new files, create playlists, stream video to others on your network and elsewhere, and all in a simple, configurable interface. I described VLC as being for geeks and tweakers, but it would also be apropos to say that it is a video geek’s heaven. I demonstrated a few of its more useful features, and also introduced VLC’s side project, a video editor (VLC Movie Maker) which by their own admission is pre-alpha, and not highly usable yet, but the work that they’ve done so far is amazing and delicious. I can not wait until this tool is more well-developed, so I can stop using WIndows Media and Quicktime based tools. VideoLAN is an amazing project, and I love what they do.
I also demonstrated Miro. Miro is a video player too, but a whole lot more than that. Miro is based on VLC, and so it has all of those features and then some. With Miro, you have a built in torrenting client, podcatcher, RSS manager, auto-transcoder, music cataloging, video cataloging, and video search with configurable search engines. When you do a search, you have the ability to save the search as a podcast, e.g. auto-downloaded video set. Miro also has a side project that I showed called Miro Video Transcoder. This tool is a simple one window interface that allows you to drag a pile of files onto it, and have it save them all in a format that you choose. The list of available formats is long and it does quick work.
I hope that my sharing has helped the folks at BCUG Graphics workshop to enjoy their video half as much as I enjoyed myself tonight.
Related articles
- VLC App For Android Nearly Ready For Release (techfleece.com)
- VideoLAN confirms VLC Media Player coming soon to Android (androidcommunity.com)
- Converting your Videos – Miro (macstarter.com)
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