On your laptop or connected to an HDTV, Boxee enables you to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music, and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.
You can vote for them -- if you agree they deserve it -- in lifehacker.com's five Best Media Center application contest.
Also - see my next post on the 21st about Netflix coming to Tivo, AppleTV, and ... Linux! Would you believe that???
Flektor is a new Flash-based content mashup tool. You can pull in images from several photo sharing sites like flickr, MySpace, and Photobucket to make slick-looking, embeddable slide shows and videos for your blog, web site, and social network pages. It's a lot like Mixercast, and other media mashup services like RockYou and SplashCast.
Flektor's "Web 2.0" interface is drag-and-drop, which makes for a very short learning curve. To add media to your show, just drag your image and video files down to a timeline at the bottom of the screen, where they can be rearranged or removed at any time. There are also "Flidgets" which can be inserted into your show to add live chat, a live broadcast from your webcam, or special effects like color bars or static. What's really neat is the ability to edit any picture with some easy-to-use sliders that let you do simple, on-the-fly alterations to your photographs--something you'd find on Picnik.
There are nearly 100 transitions, effects, and filters to add a little flair to your show. You can also edit each effect and change its appearance. Out of the many transitions I've seen on some of these Flash editors (Photobucket's Remix in particular), Flektor has some really snappy and good-looking effects.
The main hindrance in using Flektor is how long it takes to communicate with the some of the third-party services. Flickr in particular takes quite a while to sync up photos from various albums. On the upside, the MySpace integration is very simple; just give it a username and it will pull up photos members have uploaded in addition to any images that have been embedded in user comments. Cool! It is also very easy to embed your Flektor player on a number of services, with a handy export page that provides special embedding codes for a dozen services, including Google's Orkut. You can customize the embed code, like specifying the player size.
Here is a "Flek" from abby-normal called Plastic Perspective. Makes you think twice about throwing away your plastic bottles … that is if it loads for you. I let it stream down in the background for some 10 minutes with no success.
Neither could I get the embed code. All this great production capability lost in the shuffle ... NOT a good omen for Flektor!
Cooliris, a startup that’s been developing dynamic and immersive new ways to browse the web, continues to roll out new features for its PicLens browser plug-in. Most promising of the new features is the search capability for video site YouTube.
When PicLens launched last June, I was impressed by its ability to browse photo sites like Flickr. Since then, it looks like the service has gotten a lot more sophisticated, creating an image browsing interface that The New York Times describes as “a three-dimensional space that feels like an unending hallway of images.” In essence, your browser disappears and you fly around in front of a wall of content. Sort of like the Apple’s Quick Look and Cover Flow.
This interface moves PicLens beyond other online slideshow companies like Slide and Rockyou, into a much more useful service. And its YouTube compatibility — which seems to be the first of a number of new multimedia search features in the works — PicLens is starting to live up to its promise.
PicLens’ 3D YouTube search can be accessed direct from the video site, as well as via the PicLens button in your browser toolbar. Here’s a video demo:
The plug-in’s latest release includes other new features like Firefox 3.0 support, an improved user interface that lets you zoom in much further than before and optimized media RSS support. Great job, Cooliris!
Google's popular video sharing site is now giving away tools that let you tap its underlying database functions, in effect allowing you to build your own YouTube. They call it "YouTube Everywhere."
You now have full access to YouTube's extensive video library, global audience, and the underlying video hosting and streaming network that powers YouTube. The move goes significantly beyond the current access to videos in which any Web user can copy and embed selected videos onto their own Web pages.
YouTube says the new offerings allow anyone building a Web site or application to upload videos straight to YouTube. Also, you can fetch video feeds, comments, responses or playlists from YouTube.
What YouTube is offering parallels an earlier move by Yahoo to open up the ability of its Flickr photo-sharing site to provide deep access to Web developers in order to embed underlying features of Flickr in other sites.
Developers can build in functions to let users rate videos or add them to a favorites list embedded within their own sites. They can customize and control the Adobe Flash video player through which videos are viewed. The APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces) let you build a so-called "chromeless" Flash player -- a video-viewing window that is stripped of formatting such as title bar, browser buttons or status bars, meaning that you can create your own player.
These free customization features can be used in conjunction with the existing APIs which launched last year and which provide the ability to view videos on other sites and to search for videos on YouTube.
COOL! Upload videos directly from mobile phone devices:
One of these features and functions enables you and your site users to publish videos directly from their mobile phone devices or encourage new users to share videos to the Web site, as if they were on YouTube itself.
The number of possible new applications is endless. Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly to YouTube. Here are a few scenes from the highly anticipated game:
The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube. Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube. Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television.
