Video

Twitter goes to the MTV Video Music Awards

Could this finally be what breaks Twitter out of the early-adopter geek set and into the population at large? The microblogging service has partnered with the inarguably mainstream MTV for its upcoming Video Music Awards (or VMAs), according to an e-mail sent to Twitter members by founder Biz Stone.

So far, the partnership isn't totally clear. A Twitter account has been set up for the VMA "Moon Man" mascot, the pop-culture awards' equivalent of the Oscar statue. In Stone's e-mail, he elaborated that the VMA Twittering will expand, too: "(MTV has) some fun ideas which … Read more

Download streaming videos with RealPlayer 11

The new beta version of the classic streaming-media app RealPlayer lets users record both audio and video streams to their hard drives. In this Quick Tips video from CNET TV, Tom Merritt shows you how it's done.

Google ties YouTube videos to news stories

Google is combining YouTube videos with Google News to offer users what it hopes will be greater perspective on news stories.

The company announced on its blog that visitors to Google News will see a "Video" prefix next to news stories. Clicking on these links will take them to a YouTube page where they can watch video about the subject.

Google is still testing the offering with news sources such as CBS, Reuters and local TV stations owned by Hearst.

"Today, viewing news videos or other content types on the Web can be a frustrating experience," … Read more

Coming to a Flash video near you: high definition

Adobe Systems intends to add support for a video compression standard that will bring high-definition video to Flash-based streaming content on the Web.

The company on Tuesday announced the release of a beta version of its Flash Player, code-named Moviestar, that adds support for H.264, the video compression portion of the MPEG 4 standard.

The updated Flash Player also will be able to take advantage of hardware acceleration in most PCs' graphics cards and is optimized for dual-core processors, said Mark Randall, chief strategist for dynamic media at Adobe. It will support HE-AAC version 2, a more efficient audio compression standard that is also part of MPEG 4.

The new features will be made available in the fall as part of an update to Flash Player 9.

Support for the H.264 standard will lead to more Web video content being available in high definition, Randall said. He said Adobe chose to support the standard now because it is being adopted more by content producers and media distributors like cable companies. It also used in DVD formats Blu-Ray and Hi-DVD.… Read more

Coming to a Flash video near you: high definition

Adobe Systems intends to add support for a video compression standard that will bring high-definition video to Flash-based streaming content on the Web.

The company on Tuesday announced the release of a beta version of its Flash Player, code-named Moviestar, that adds support for H.264, the video compression portion of the MPEG 4 standard.

One-hit wonders: Simple downloads we love

Sometimes less really is more, and software that does a single task well is better than a feature-rich app that bogs down performance, clogs system memory, or over-reaches its abilities. Here are seven programs that were built to do a specific job, and succeed. These downloads may not have all the fixin's, but they taste great all the same.

UPDATED: We asked for your favorite picks and you responded. Here are five fresh one-trick ponies of the software world that you just love to bits.

MediaCell Video Converter This multiformat video converter makes the list thanks to a three-part, one-pane interface from which you browse for the video file, select the mobile device you'll be watching it on, and click the large, bubbly "convert" button. No need to concern yourself with file formats, bit rates, and sound quality. While users certainly can tweak the volume and settings themselves in the app's "output" section, MediaCell Video Converter's preset optimizations per device make it unnecessary for most.… Read more

Off-topic: Thank goodness we have YouTube!

Where else would we find all those funny videos featuring people getting hit in the crotch? And that is, in fact, the source of a fair amount of YouTube's traffic, according to WebProNews. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like my day is complete without watching a cat fall off a TV, seeing people dancing on treadmills, and such.

YouTube is the new central repository for crotch-smashing, according to the article:… Read more

Quick Tip: Drag, drop, and download with BitComet

BitComet is one of the most popular BitTorrent applications on CNET Download.com, but did you also know that it can also work as a regular download manager. Rich DeMuro shows you how to drag, drop, and download with the P2P file-sharing app.

AOL's Truveo re-launches, takes on Google Video search

I'm a big fan of simple search tools, and one of the areas that's been booming lately is video search. There are dozens of popular services for hosting video, but few for crawling all of them at once. Video search service Truveo, which was quickly gobbled up by AOL after launching in late 2005, has been fairly quiet for the last year or so. Their technology powers video search for AOL, Windows Live Search, Metacrawler, and CNET's own Search.com tool, along with many other services you're likely to recognize. Today they're re-launching Truveo.com, in hopes to compete with Google, Yahoo, and Blinkx's video search tools.

Truveo's claim to fame is that they crawl and index both user-generated video sites, along with ones that put out professional media content like NBC and CBS. For example, searching for an episode of The Office will pull up results from YouTube and Google video (what hasn't been taken down at least), along with links to "official" video hosted on NBC's various video pages, and links to various episodes for purchase at online stores like iTunes. It will also list videos from other video services like BBC News, Blip.tv, and Metacafe. The key emphasis, however, isn't on user generated content, as much as professionally produced video content.

A good number of the videos indexed through Truveo will play right in the engine, except for ones that have rights usage restrictions. A big change old Truveo users will notice with the re-launch is that videos play much larger than they used to--many now appear twice as big. There's also an increased emphasis on sharing, and community features--including a way to build your own widget containing a hit list of clips you've bookmarked.

A great use for services like this is for finding recent video clips from news stations. Google's video search is great for finding the most popular content on YouTube and Google Video, but head-to-head, Truveo did a much better job at finding recent clips, and avoiding the "backyard" handicam videos you tend to run into. Blinkx on the other hand was just as capable at finding similar content, although I prefer Truveo's static result pages to Blinkx's visual overload of moving thumbnails and auto-playing videos.

I've embedded an example of the video playlist widget after the jump. There are also several more screenshots. To see them, click the "read more" link below.… Read more

LimeWire going legit?

LimeWire is best known as the latest in a long chain of software that makes it easy to find and download music for free, replacing Napster, Grokster, eDonkey, Kazaa, and all the other applications and networks that shut down or cracked down on the sharing of copyrighted material.

Lime Wire LLP, the company that makes the LimeWire software application, has also been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), but has so far refused to cave, saying that it only manufactures the software and has no control over how users choose to employ it. Moreover, it filed a countersuit in September 2006 on antitrust grounds, calling the RIAA an illegal cartel that conspires to destroy any distribution channel that the recording industry doesn't control.… Read more