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.

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.