And Now Miro 1.0...from the Painter's Apprentices

Update, update to my post of August 16, 2007!!!

For a open source project, the Miro folks have been doing an amazing job. Here are the main features of Player 1.0, now officially off the beta threadmill:

* Watch Full Screen
Since Miro works so well for HD content, you'll find lots of video that looks beautiful in fullscreen on even the largest displays.

* Resume from Where You Stopped
Miro will remember where you stopped watching a video and will start at that point when you play it again.

* Play Almost Anything
Forget about the format wars. Miro can play MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format.

* One After Another
Set your Miro preferences to either play videos one after another (in the order they appear) or to play a video then stop. If you have Miro set to play videos one after another, you can always right-click on an individual video and have it play then stop.

Congrats and lots of luck!

Tickle me Picklish 0.5b

I'm always on the lookout for quick - and preferably clean - Flash video conversion tools. Came across this one today:


Instructions read: Creates great-looking, customizable Flash photo and video galleries. Just drag and drop your photos and videos onto the creator. I did in a flash...and my 2 minute trial and error session ended in error after draggin'-droppin' just one small video file into the image well. Verdict: This incarnation most likely works well with images...do NOT use it with videos!

Created by Geoff Gaudreault, the mastermind behind SlideRoll™, the aptly named photo slideshow maker that you use to create slide shows with your photos. Publish your slideshows on the web, put them on MySpace or YouTube, or e-mail them to friends. Best of all, you can try the Slideshow Creator Demo on Geoff's site free.

Pop-up Video Is So Yesterday

Confession - no, not about pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-anything. I have another blog, exactly like this, at MakeiTV.com. I use it to learn the capabilities of blogs and blogging software to create video blogs. (vlogs for you, acronymistas).

MakeiTV.com is built with WordPress, a very innovative, beautifully designed, and modular blogging software from, you guessed, WordPress.org. I installed an inline Flash video plugin to see if it can consistently deliver flash videos. Why Flash? Because it is the de facto video format on the web. If it works, we'll be well on our way to producing a real video blog. Obviously, I have not been able to make this work on Blogger as yet.

The song video you should see there was written and sung by our favorite author-artist, June Marshall. It's part of her album, "Booby Trapped: Men Beware the Dirty Seven Sisters!" Being an equal opportunity gender-basher, she also made another album, "The Dirty Seven: Ladies Beware!" about the kind of men women should avoid. We'll feature a song video from that album too, hopefully soon. Ouch!!!

P.S. You can get the best deal on her albums, books, and ebooks from Newmedia Publishing. Or download her songs from iTunes, AOL Music, MSN Music, Yahoo Music and a host of other sites.