By Nels Johnson, September 30, 2008
For those who think, life is comedy; those who feel think different. Or something like that, depending on your freedom and inclination to install new software and mess with your well-tuned systems, production techniques and daily workflow. If you are so inclined (and freedom = time + spare hardware), the following products, tools and technologies for Web video may be of interest.
VLC Player
videolan.org/vlc/.
This open-source powerhouse has been around for a while but is vastly underrated and ill-utilized by media wranglers in general. You know all those video clips you download that QuickTime, Windows Media and even RealPlayer can’t render? The VLC Player usually can with a much quicker load time. Even if there’s an occasional warning (technical, due to file corruption) or error message, you just click it away and keep enjoying the stream. Nice to have in your arsenal when a client hands over a mystery clip that you, the DV expert, can’t seem to open with anything else. What other major player do you know that can play back VOB and ISO files natively?
Where I’ve found it especially useful is in transcoding files that QuickTime can’t handle into high-res H.264 MP4 clips that QuickTime then plays normally. If the audio is out of synch, VLC can extract the audio track (at high quality) from the original, which you can trim and add back into the file containing the transcoded video track. I mostly use it on a Mac, but the Windows version is equally excellent and good for handling media files with exotic file name extensions such as MKV (animation) and OGG.
Also valuable are VLC’s Web streaming facilities. The player itself can be used as a server and a client to stream and receive network media streams. The VLS (Video LAN Server) can stream MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestrial television channels and live videos on the network in unicast or multicast. All this for free from some wickedly ingenious French dudes (and their worldwide dev club). No wonder this app gets much more appreciation and use in Europe.
The Silverlight Expression Encoder Version 2
microsoft.com.
When Windows Media 9 launched in 2004, setting in place the ASF container format for Microsoft video on the desktop and on mobile devices, a new encoder was also introduced. It was good at what it did but didn’t change much over the next four years. Now we have Silverlight and the new Expression Encoder. Version 2 is a standalone product but still part of the overall Silverlight production suite.
New features include simple cuts editing (but only by removing sections of the original loaded file), smart recompression — preservation of as much of the original compressed stream as possible — better Timeline UI (with zooming for greater precision with cuts and markers), an MPEG-2 decoder and better multi-core utilization. It’s all about production of high-quality VC-1 files — as good or better than H.264, depending on who you talk to. And it’s a free download.
Kinoma Media Browser
kinoma.com.
The original Kinoma Player was Palm-specific and generally unknown outside that world despite its rich feature set and lean/mean codebase. As of August 2008, President Peter Hoddie (elder QuickTime statesman and the brains behind Generic Media) and his development team have taken this product well beyond the next level.
 What we have here is a media discovery and presentation tool that does for all other Web-aware smart phones (depending on the OS) what iTunes does for the iPhone/iPod without the complicated pruning and synching
. Yes, it’s a mobile device app (for now), but the focus on media-mining and compiling all the audio and video available on the Web (from Audible and SHOUTcast to YouTube and your own private video darknet) is refreshing indeed compared to the likes of Rhapsody and Sprint TV.
Currently targeted for devices running Windows Mobile 6 (i.e., the Palm 800W) the $30 KMB will soon support Symbian, PalmOS and eventually Linux on Linux-based cellies. Even on a $50 phone with a sub-200-meg processor, the app executes smoothly and intuitively (even better with a 3G Web connection). If credentials for fee-based media services are required, KMB can manage them for you seamlessly across multiple services.
I asked Mr. Hoddie what DV media producers need to know to target the KMB platform, such as it is. He replied that all major file formats are supported (QuickTime, Flash, WMV, MPEG-4, etc.) regardless of codec or whether a specific OS-specific player is installed. This is huge when you think about it, but not surprising given management’s collective CV. I’ve got to say that, while I’m still hooked on the endorphin-generating iTunes/iPhone experience, the KMB does a lot more media-wise even better.
Download YouTube FLVs with RealPlayer 11
real.com.
I had removed RealPlayer from most of my machines until a month or so ago, when, while extolling the virtues of Flash 8 to a potential client, I added, “And it’s really hard for the average user to save an FLV to his or her desktop.” To which the potential client responded, “What about that button that says ‘Download This Video’ when I go to YouTube?” “Must be a new YouTube thing,” I sputtered.
Turns out it’s a Real Player 11 thing (I missed the announcement at All Things D in June), and what a thing it is. Yes, the RP install is still a pain and the post-install nags are still frustrating, but once you get past all that, you just point, and click the button at the top of the video window (or right-click the video window itself) to start downloading the FLV (not the SWF). You could do this in the past with QuickTime, Windows Media and MPEG-1 assets (using various player controls), and now Flash is finally vulnerable unless you apply DRM, which I guess all those Flash-powered adult sites will now have to do.
Flash Media Server 3
adobefms3.com.
Until recently, a valid Flash question was, “Why do I need a dedicated Flash server?” The usual answer was that your expectation level was set for progressively downloaded desktop video performance, not television on your laptop, desktop or big-screen smartphone.
For $1,000, Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 3 offers dramatically improved performance, more secure streaming, live streaming enhancements, support for industry-standard H.264 and HE-AAC, and streaming delivery to mobile phones with Adobe Flash Lite 3 and Adobe Media Player software, not to mention live video support, logging and bandwidth detection.
For secure content delivery, you can invest a few more thousand dollars on the Flash Media Interactive Server, which supplies RTMPE, an enhanced version of Adobe’s Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), with higher performance and 128-bit encryption to help secure streamed media and communication. A new verification feature protects SWF files from being reused, modified or hosted in unauthorized locations. The new plug-in architecture can also be used to create custom authorization adapters, such as validation with an external LDAP server.
The competition (Microsoft, Apple — and don’t forget the VLC server) all cost less and make similar claims from slightly different angles, but if you’re already invested in Flash media production, it seems a small price to pay considering the durability of the overall platform.
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