Several years after the first version was released, the open-source video and audio player VLC has finally turned version 1.0.0. And it is getting good critics among video experts, and, as you can imagine, a great acceptance on the open-source community: 3 million downloads three days after been released.
It runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and is capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac ...), as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
It can also be used as a media converter or a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6.
This major release introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC multimedia framework, and fixes a very high number of bugs that were present in the 0.9.x or 0.8.6 versions.
It can be downloaded from here.
The VLC project only lives with volunteers.
Qik Gets Another $5.5 Million from Venture Capitalists
Despite not being able to broadcast through the iPhone, Qik has secured another $5.5 million in funding. Quest Venture Partners and CampVentures led the round, along with several unnamed investors.
This Redwood City-headquartered start-up had previously raised $4 million in funding through angel investors including Salesforce.com founder Mark Benioff and Internet poster boy Mark Andreessen.
Competitors include Kyte and Bambuser.
Screenjelly: Scnakable Screencasts
The owner company of ScreenToaster has launched Screenjelly, “a sort of snackable screencasting service”, as NewTeeVee.com describes it.
Screenjelly is a browser-based tool that lets users create short recordings of what’s happening on their computer screens and instantly share them via Twitter, Facebook, email and other social media outlets.
This is what their creators say:
“Screenjelly differentiates from Screentoaster, which is for producing a tutorial or demo meant to be hosted on a blog or web site. Screenjelly focuses on the communication/sharing aspect, not on the ‘production’ aspect, and its interface is simpler and designed for that. Main use cases are sharing software tips, bugs, or anything on your screen that would take too long to describe via text.”
See a sample here.
Blogs and websites, not email or search, drive video views
Blogs and websites with embedded video and links, but not email referrals or search, are the single largest referrer of video views, according to TubeMogul.
