OStatic

Researchers and developers at the University of California, Berkeley are working on open source software to help distribute audio and video files of classroom lectures to media services like iTunes and YouTube. The university already publishes full-length videos of classroom sessions on YouTube, but recording, editing, and posting these videos is an costly undertaking. Now, new grant money will pay those expenses and help expand video distribution worldwide.

Known as the Opencast Matterhorn project, an international team of developers from universities in Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and the UK will draw from a coffer of $1.3 million to create the software platform that's scheduled to launch next summer.

Late last year I broke down and picked up Rock Band for the resident game console, a Nintendo Wii. From this statement, astute readers can safely make the assumption that neither I, nor other members of my household, are big into gaming. I am, however, better with balance boards and nunchuks than I am any musical instrument, be it a stylized controller or the real deal.

Given the humbling experience Rock Band (continues) to be for me, I wasn't exactly eager to try out the open source rhythm game, Frets on Fire. However, the open source aspect and the advantages that brings to the game's genre, the Guitar Hero-esque focus on one instrument, and the project being chosen as SourceForge's March Project of the Month, I figured my ego might benefit from a slight bruising.

My fingertips aren't raw, but this confirms I won't be joining a band, real or virtual, any time soon. Frets on Fire on an easy setting makes me long for the simplicity of kernel recompiles and the soft whir of a rebooting system.

The Audacity audio editor is a great program. Take that as you will: It's truly functional software. It's a great illustration of the power and versatility of open source. Audacity has been an active project for some time. But because it provides an esoteric service, it was only recently I had reason to sit down and use it.

Due to microphone-support issues in Linux, and a Windows machine that has trouble with its own weight, never mind throwing sizable files in the mix, I've used Audacity 1.3.5 on two of the three supported platforms. There are differences in feature set-up, not function. After a learning curve of two hours came weeks of declaring my undying love for the project to anyone who'd listen.

Do you work with video and audio files a lot? Especially if you use a lot of open source applications to do so, you probably run into situations where you're not sure what codec you need to get a file to run or you need to know about the encoding bitrates that apply to various files. Codec incompatibility can be a big bugaboo with open source software as can getting a hold of good open source utilities that can tell you everything you need to know about rich media files. Whether you're running Windows, the Mac OS, or Linux, a good tool for solving these problems is MediaInfo.

Whether you do some blogging, operate an e-commerce site, or simply have moving pictures in the back of your mind to work with, web-based video and animation should probably be on your radar.

Miro, nee Democracy Player, released its version 1.0 Tuesday, officially leaving beta behind. The open source video subscription, download and viewing client from the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) hopes to be not just more open, but more popular than other online video services.