Category Archives: Multimedia

Spotify opens to US users

Posted by on July 14, 2011 No comments

Finally Spotify has opened its service to U.S. users.

How software patent broke the system

Posted by on May 18, 2010 No comments

The issue of Software Patent has been around for a while, but unless you really  have the time and drive to try to understand all that is involved you will be left like most of us, just wondering. The guys at Patent Absurdity have made a great documentary about this issue.

Patent Absurdity explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy. The film is based on a series of interviews conducted during the Supreme Court’s review of in re Bilski — a case that could have profound implications for the patenting of software. (extracted)

The whole documentary was made with free software.

  • Cinelerra for video editing
  • Audacity for audio editing
  • Inkscape, Python and Blender for animation
  • Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs
  • Edited on GNU/Linux machines

Watch the Patent Absurdity documentary here.


MovieStorm create 3D animated movies to share

Posted by on December 8, 2008 No comments

Movie Storm ThumbnailMoviestorm consists of a suite of easy-to-use movie-making tools which underpins a Web 2.0 social media service targeting both movie creators and viewers with support from major media and consumer brand owners.

  • The Moviestorm base engine gives content creators the ability to make 3D animated movies quickly and easily, using machinima technology.  The base engine is available as a free download from the Moviestorm Web site, bundled with some free content (characters, props, sets, animations, etc).
  • Movie-makers will be able to expand their movie-making capabilities by purchasing additional content packs which we produce.  We are developing a marketplace to allow third party content creators to produce content packs and sell them through us, and we are working with leading brand and IP owners to produce branded content packs and engage in an innovative form of product placement within user-generated video content.
  • Moviestorm includes a high-quality video hosting service which can deliver user-generated videos to the Web and in due course, mobile, and an online community where movie-makers can talk about their movies, find collaborators, and organise online events. (from the MovieStorm About page)

Only available for Windows and Mac, it has apparently been developed in Java, so I wonder why not a Linux version yet. You might get it to work under Linux using Wine provided that the sound libraries are properly installed.

The BBC technology programme Click presented MovieStorm in one of its programmes, see BBC Click.

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Enable DVD & Multimedia support in Ubuntu Linux

Posted by on December 4, 2008 No comments

Full DVD support on Linux is an old issue. It has to do with the Linux distros not being shipped with the w32codecs and the libdvdcss2, for legal reasons in some countries. The users must then download and install them by themselves with no clear guidance.

Here are the simple steps for installing these libraries under Debian based distributions.

The GUI Route: (CLI users forgive me but if there’s a GUI, users diserve a choice.)

1 – Download the w32codecs

2 – Download the libdvdcss2

3 – Double click on the packages, one at a time and use the Package Installer to install them quickly and painless

The CLI (Command Line Interface) route

cd Desktop

wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/w/w32codecs/w32codecs_20071007-0.1_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20071007-0.1_i386.deb

wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/libd/libdvdcss/libdvdcss2_1.2.9-0.0_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.9-0.0_i386.deb

See this relared post about OpenSuse and SLED10

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