Free Tools for Online Video Mastery
Now that video runs rampant on the web and our mobile devices, it's more essential than ever to be flexible and skilled at working with online video. The good news is that there are many free, incredible resources for doing so. In this post, you'll find some of our best collections and guides aimed at the budding online video master. There is something for everyone here.
8 Free, Open Source Tools for Video Playback and Encoding. Video has truly arrived online, where it was once kludgey and unworkable. There are many media players, editing tools and encoding tools worth knowing about from the open source world. Here are eight great examples.
Over 45 Essential Open Source Resources. This post, in different incarnations as the collection within it has grown over time, has been one of the most popular here on OStatic. You'll find lots of tools in it relevant to working with video and multimedia content.
Mastering Ogg Theora. Ogg Theora is legendary as an open video codec, and we've covered it many times here on OStatic. Anyone who works with video should check out the Ogg Theora Cookbook, which is a complete introduction to working with it and even developing around it.
Don't Forget Handbrake. The open source video transcoder project HandBrake is very widely used and is especially popular as a tool to rip DVDs. If you don't already use it you should. You can get going quickly with it by getting this free guide to Handbrake.
The VLC Advantage. In case you don't already use it, VLC Media Player, available for Windows, the Mac and Linux, is one of the best open source applications of any kind. And, it's essential if you work with video. For one thing, it almost never fails to play any video file that you throw at it. We delivered five free resources for mastering VLC Media Player in this post.
FLOSS Manuals Gives You A Free Education. At OStatic, we're big fans of FLOSS Manuals, an effort to gather free, online documentation and tutorials for many kinds of open source platforms and applications. Quite a few of the free guides that you'll find at the site are dedicated to working with video. Look into these to add to the tools available to you, and your knowledge of them.