Posts Tagged ‘video’

Today is retirement day for Bill Gates.  Now his focus will shift from Microsoft to giving away more than 99% of his money.  In case you are wondering, 1% of 50 billion dollars will still leave 500 million dollars.  Most people could scrape an existence out of that for a few thousand years.

Here is the video from CES earlier this year.  I imagine it will get a lot of air time today.

Here is the (slightly more serious) video tribute from Microsoft’s site.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/videos/

I have moved into high definition video recording.  Through a mini-grant I have received a Canon HG10 hard drive based video camera.

I can record about five hours of 1920 x 1080 video on the 40 GB hard drive.  Putting that video online is going to be a bit of a trick right now.  At more than 100 MB per minute, I won’t be streaming HD for a while.

While I wait for a free HD streaming site, I can upload the huge pictures snapped with the camcorder.  Normally pictures from movie cameras are awful.  The resolution is typically 320 x 240, or if you’re lucky they are pixel-doubled to 640 x 480.  The HG10 can snap pictures at full HD resolution.  Click the picture insert to see the higher resolution version on Flickr.

For the last few years, I have used a classic media player that I downloaded from freshmeat.  Since I switched to Vista last summer, the media player has been quirky.  Last week I heard someone mention GOM Player on one of the podcasts I listen to and I decided to give it a try.

http://www.gomplayer.com

To me, there are two important components to a good media player.

1 - it plays everything (audio, video, whatever)

2 - there must be simple keyboard controls (preferably configurable)

There are many players that will handle that first requirement.  With a little work, you can even get Windows Media Player to do everything.  But the second requirement isn’t always available.  For example, if you want to pause the Windows Media Player the keyboard command is Control-P.  That’s crazy. 

I want it to be the space bar because every media player I have ever used has been that way.  Besides, why should I ever need to press two keys (Control-P) to perform a basic function of a media player?

GOM Player plays everything right out of the box.  I installed it on a fresh system and it brought all the necessary codecs in automatically.  If you don’t like the default keyboard shortcuts (which are good), you can change any or all of them in the preferences menu.

I like this media player so much I have switched all my machines to GOM for both audio and video.

Here is a free, web-based, easy to use movie creator that doesn’t have a lot of options.  The emphasis is on ease of use.

Give Animoto a few of your pictures.  Select a song from the techno-pop list available on the site and Animoto will put in the effects and transitions for your very own movie.

Your kids (if they are very young) and your parents (if they are older) may think it is cool.  The lack of a creative component doesn’t make it useful for many educational purposes, but if you don’t know how to create a movie and have a few pictures… it’s pretty easy to use.