This year’s MacWorld keynote has brought several interesting product releases, including the long rumoured iPhone and the rebranding of the iTV as the Apple TV. My colleague Peter at GizBuzz has posted a more in depth roundup of Steve Jobs’ speech.

For YouMakeMedia readers, this isn’t terribly relevant news (though it is certainly exciting). DV Guru has promised to post a bit about how this all is relevant and I’m sure we’ll all be nodding in agreement when they do. For now though, I’m taking the opinion that sure, it’s all cool, but the major impact is on the consumer end. It won’t change how we deliver our media - except perhaps to encourage further delivery in HD thanks to the Apple TV. The iPhone has no greatly enhanced media features, in essence we still will treat it like an iPod.

I’m very excited about the new products, but from a media creator aspect, there isn’t a lot of excitement. I’m expecting more toward NAB (Final Cut Pro 6 with Silicon Color’s FinalTouch enhancements!).

I’d argue that the biggest impact is what wasn’t announced. Apple made the change from Apple Computers, inc. to Apple, inc. (they announced that, but really, who called them Apple Computers?) - this implies to me that they certainly aren’t done. The iPhone could have easily been branded as a pocket computer and they would have been able to maintain an Apple Computers name. What other consumer products should we expect? They haven’t crossed into games yet…

They also had a huge stock boost. Stockholders are obviously content with Apple’s decision to expand outside their original area of expertise and are willing to put forth what they can to help the business expand. This will be an interesting year.

In what is now the first episode of the YouMakeMedia podcast (this episode is shared with GizBuzz.co.uk), we interview Nicholas Reville, a co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation. The Participatory Culture Foundation is responsible for Democracy Player, VideoBomb, and a full suite of video publishing and promotion tools.

Discussed in the interview:

• The Participatory Culture Foundation and its goals
• Old media + new media = ?
• Long tail’s role in the foundation’s work
• Running an open source project as a staffed, funded effort
• The Participatory Politics Foundation, where does media fit into the political spectrum?

Feel free to listen to the interview over at Odeo.

VLC is not your average media player.

In addition to supporting every single format known to humans, it has more features than you ever thought you’d need. VLC (which stands for VideoLAN client) just released a new version, 0.8.6.

I’ve always been a loyal user of the application, but in celebration of the release, I decided to learn more about VLC and figure out why it’s unchallenged in its field. Here’s a rundown of three features offered by VLC that bump it up from “average media player” to “uber media player”.

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I was alerted to Twango by its co-founder, Randy Kerr. Kerr described his site as a “new media sharing service”. Twango though, seperates itself from other media sharing sites like YouTube or Odeo. It doesn’t just handle one type of media — it handles them all.

The site is organized similarly to other “Web 2.0″ video sharing sites, like YouTube or Revver. There are tabs along the top where you can select your type of media (they only show audio, video, and photos, however the site also has other types permitted such as Word documents or Flash video). Click into a tab, and you’re given a page of thumbnails - now you can choose a bit of media and enjoy it.

The similarities stop there though. When Twango says it’s for sharing, they really mean it.

Read how, after the infamous jump…

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Rocketboom (the controversial video podcast that made headlines when a catfight between the founders ousted the host) has a page on its website outlining the tools that they use to produce their podcast.

Their cocktail of tools includes everything from Quicktime Pro to Movable Type. They use Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and Audacity to edit. Rendering and delivery is a bit more difficult for Rocketboom because they have to deliver in so many formats. They have mobile deals, a deal with TiVo, the usual internet site - I imagine it gets crazy it times.

On the web, they render MOV with 3ivx compression (though it’s noted that they offer WMVs thanks to Flip4Mac). They note that they aren’t moving to H.264 because of the slow compression speed and slower adoption rates.

Capturing content on a screen is an important part of Rocketboom (their Mac laptop is probably the second biggest prop, next to the map). To capture the Laptop’s content the Rocketboom team uses Snapz Pro, and boasts of its efficiency and ease in capturing not only simple websites but video onscreen as well.

There are more details about their architecture over at the page. It’s an interesting look into the tools required to make a massive video podcast work!

Adobe have released a beta of their Soundbooth application.

Soundbooth is best described as being comparable to the open-source favorite Audacity. It’s simple and to the point (they say “in the spirit of Sound Edit 16 and Cool Edit 2000″) - not too much in the way of in depth control. It’s designed for a more video-oriented audience though, rather than the audio professionals who are likely to jump to Audition or an even more dedicated environment such as DigiDesign’s Pro Tools.

I won’t stick too much commentary here, it’s already been blogged to death by the likes of DownloadSquad, DVGuru, etc.

You can find Soundbooth at Adobe Labs.

Linux users are often slighted when it comes to media tools. Macromedia/Adobe’s shameful implementation of Flash 7 is one example (though Flash 9 is due out in January). When trying to watch a YouTube video this makes for some very difficult viewing, because the video and audio become out of sync.

Fortunately, we have a fantastic tool in FFMPEG. FFMPEG is a collection of free software for recording, transcoding, and streaming digital video and audio. It is a fantastic tool for Linux users who need to convert.

Of course, being able to convert to MPEG only works if you have an FLV. If the video is natively in SWF form (e.g. it doesn’t use an FLV embed) you are out of luck, Linux users. To download your FLV, use a site such as VideoDownloader. You can also usually tell if the video is an FLV if it uses a player similar in style to the one available at Jeroen Wijering’s site.

I’m on Ubuntu Linux (6.06) and FFMPEG is already installed. It’s best to check again though. You can open up the Synaptic Package Manger and search for “FFMPEG”. If it’s checked, you’ve got it. If not, install it! While you’re there, you’ll want to install nautilus-open-terminal as I reference this in the tutorial.

Now navigate to your home folder (using Places > Home) and create a new folder for “My Videos” (or whatever you want to call it). This is important because Nautilus-open-terminal won’t pick up your standard home folder. Move your downloaded FLV into this folder, and make sure it has a good name (I recommend video.flv for ease). Note that YouTube videos always are named get_video.htm, but you’ll want to change this to an flv extension!

Now right click somewhere in the folder and select “Open in Terminal”. This will launch a terminal specific to that folder. Edit the below code to suit your needs, paste into Terminal, and press enter.

Ubuntu users might need Sudo, might not. I usually use it out of habit so I’m not positive if it’s required or not.

ffmpeg -i video.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 test.mpg

The script, in this order:

1. Launches FFMPEG
2. Opens your FLV (change to suit yours)
3. -ab : Sets the audio bitrate. Without this, it’ll be set to the default of 64kbps
4. -ar : Sets the audio samplerate. Default is 44100hz
5. -b : Sets the video bitrate. Default is 2000kbps
6. -s : Sets the size. Default is 160×128px
7. Outputs to the filename you enter (change to suit your needs)

When I tried this, I changed nothing and got fairly decent video quality but the audio lacked. I’d definitely recommend tweaking the settings a bit to improve quality.

This is a far more stable method of converting video (in my testing) than the most dominant free Windows alternative, RIVA FLV Encoder. I plan on utilizing FFMPEG in the future, and hopefully looking into Windows implementations!

Searching for video on the web can be a pain. There are so many video hosting/sharing sites on the web that finding the right video you need is like finding a single needle in 500,000 haystacks.

There are several contenders in the video search field though, notably SingingFish and PureVideo Search. Yeah, you can search within the interfaces of other sites such as YouTube or Yahoo! Video, but these sites are different in that they aggregate the results of other sharing sites in one interface.

I decided, for kicks, to put these sites to a bit of an informal test, after the jump that is.

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The Celtx team has released version 0.9.8 of the fantastic Celtx pre-production program which I reviewed roughly a week ago.

The team lists all sorts of improvements at the official forum topic, most of which I went into detail over.

Read the press release

Editor’s Note (again): I’ve been pretty sick the past few days, hence the slow posting. I am still working on my Edit For Free article though and am about half done. I sincerely apologize for the delay and hopefully things will be picking up relatively soon.