OStatic

Fresh out of the Mozilla Labs oven this week is a beta version of Prism, a new incarnation of WebRunner that integrates Web applications with the desktop. The idea behind Prism starts with from the premise that as more people move their computing activities to the cloud, users will become increasingly dependent on Web apps designed to replace locally-based email, calendaring, and word processing.

Video editing software for Linux is, to put it nicely, quirky. Some editors only work with specific file formats, some work nicely for basic video editing but can be wildly temperamental on seemingly identical machines, and some are powerful to the point of overkill for the average user.

PiTiVi is a non-linear video editor based on the GStreamer multimedia framework. After hearing some positive comments, and seeing development efforts really picking up on the project, I decided to take it for a spin. It is very much in development, but not in the traditional sense. It feels very stable, and the interface isn't confusing or a hindrance. It is, at the moment, very basic when it comes to functionality. There are not plugins or extensions currently available (though feature requests are welcome). However, the project has taken the time to plan its path forward -- and with the basics down, I can't see why real headway won't come quickly.

Chris Blizzard kindly drew my attention to an update on the improvements being made on the Theora encoder. Though the details given about the advances made are very technical, the end result is visible in the examples shown on the update page.

Blizzard nicely sums up the essence of these updates: Overall, regardless of bitrate, the Theora encoder is showing significant improvement, and is even creating higher quality streams than those encoded with H.264 at numerous bitrates. It's also become evident that at least some of the previous testing that showed Theora lacking were performed with utilities that didn't necessarily mesh well with Theora in the first place (ffmpeg2theora, when linked with a recent version offfmpeg, did not produce the same issues).