10 Open Source Ways to Improve Your Online Video Mojo

by Sam Dean - Jul. 31, 2009Comments (3)

All of us are viewing, collecting and streaming video online much more than we used to. Video content has proliferated on the web, and creating online video is no longer the work of just an isolated group of skilled technocrats. Anyone can become a video broadcaster online, and there are countless tools that can help you collect and consume video content. In this post, you'll find 10 resources for making your experience with online video better, and more efficient.

Open source media center applications have matured substantially, and can now bring tons of premium content to your TV. Here are four excellent, free applications that can quickly start entertaining you. Boxee is one to definitely check out, and MythTV is too.

 

Are you under the impression that BitTorrent downloads are illegal or DRM infected? There are plenty of sites out there that offer free and legal torrent downloads to save bandwidth and make file sharers happy. Here, you'll find sites such as Legit Torrents, where you can get free video, games and Linux distros, plus nine other legal torrent sites worth checking into.

If you haven't tried out some of the many open source utilities and apps focused on video, take a gander at this post. It introduces XVid (a utility that can compress video files at a ratio of 100:1), and many more useful titles.

We've covered VLC Media Player a number of times, and it is now out in a new version 1.0.0, dubbed Goldeneye. You can download it here. It's available for the Mac, Windows and Linux, and has long been one of the best of all media players. It supports nearly every video file format under the sun, and you can also use it to broadcast video.

 

Open source media player Miro is out in a new version 2.5, downloadable for Windows, the Mac, and Linux. Miro has long been well-liked as a way to collect and view timely video content, as well as manage video libraries. There are many enhancements in the new version, detailed here, but two of the new features that really stand out are audio podcasts available through Miroguide (a really nice way to navigate to content from all around the web and sample offerings that you may like), and smarter handling of BitTorrent files.

If you're on a Mac and want to encode video in a variety of formats, check out a tiny open source app called Simple Theora Encoder. It's footprint is small, and it installs quickly on Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. You can encode multiple video files concurrently, and it's very easy to use.

MPlayer is a popular video player for Linux, Windows and the Mac. It supports a large number of formats, and can save streamed content to files with ease. Check it out here.

 

 

 

 

Video editing software for Linux can be quirky, but the PiTiVi editor shows lots of potential. Check out Kristin's thoughts on where it's headed, here. Also check out this collection of 10 video editing tools for Ubuntu.

 

Prism is a free application that will let you convert video from one format to virtually any other popular format. You can preview the output to gauge whether you have all the encoding right, and it's also easy to do batch conversions. Download it here. 

 

 

 

 

Blender is not only one of the best animation and graphics programs from the open source world, it's one of the best open source applications of any kind. Widely used in the video and animation communities, it's great for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and playback. You can also use it on Windows, Mac or Linux systems. Look at the character in progress at left. You can also get a solid free online book on Blender, as we discussed here.

 


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3 Comments
 

I really like Mplayer for XP. If you build your computer they dont give you any software to play DVDs. Luckily that software is free .


0 Votes

@anon - It IS free on Windows and the Mac. (http://www.nchsoftware.com/prism/prismmaci.zip). It is currently not available on Linux.


According to the Prism website, Linux does not seem to be listed as a supported platform.


It is however proprietary source and Free.


0 Votes

Thank you for sharing the information about how to Improve Your Online Video Mojo..the ten open sources given are awesome and useful..Nice information..Thank you..The Mplayer is really a good player and a free and legal software to download..


0 Votes
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