Often when we talk about Linux it is often in the context of a computer enthusiast, a person who enjoys finding out what open source technology can do for them, or maybe people looking to solve particular problems and get up and running with particular software or hardware.
video
Video is a fantastic medium, and the means to make video have never been more accessible. Many people have video cameras, not just dedicated units, but other devices capable of taking video such as digital photo cameras and mobile phones. The software to edit video is available for free with the availability of open source packages such as Kino, and you can make your video available to the world with services such as YouTube. But what about accessibility? It's a question I've heard raised about the use of video, often because people don't realise that you can add Subtitles (also known as Closed Captioning) to the videos that you upload. If you go to the YouTube page for a video you have uploaded you will see an option on the right hand side for "Captions and Subtitles". Here you will see a screen to upload your subtitles file, you'll notice too that you can upload different sets of subtitles for different languages, very handy if you want to provide translations in foreign languages for the dialogue in your video. People might use subtitles for all sorts of reasons, the most obvious might be because they hearing difficulties, but also for many other reasons, for example, they might be learning English, and having a subtitles file might be useful to help them follow the dialogue, or they might be in a quiet environment where listening to audio is not convenient.
The Flip is an attempt to produce a simple to use video camera and last weekend my friend Amanda D'Silva and I took a borrowed Flip (thanks Will!) for a test drive and recorded a short video review of it (while sitting in the pub - so apologies for the background noise). It's not really a device for the hard core geek, but is very simple to use and fun. The whole package is designed to be friendly to those less confident with technology with technical information consigned to the bottom of the box! The device will record sixty minutes of video and to record you just press a big red button on the back and point it at what you want to film. You can see how we found it by watching our video.
You'll notice that the video quality varies, this is because the video was filmed partly on the Flip and partly on a mobile phone (which has a lower resolution). The Flip records with a resolution of 640x480 which is not as good as DVD, but still better than VHS. You can plug the unit directly into your TV, and the results were pretty good. Pressing a catch on the side of the unit makes a USB connector pop out. The software for the device is installed from the camera itself, but unfortunately it only came in Windows and Mac versions, being an Ubuntu user this meant I could not test it,
If you own an Asus EEE PC or another machine running Ubuntu and a camera which is only supported under Video4Linux 2 (V4L2) you will have noticed that it not possible to get your camera to work under Flash. This will hopefully change soon, with V4L2 support in Flash 10. However, as Flash 10 is still a release candidate you might find that you still have problems when using a V4L2 camera.
The EEE does lots more fancy multimedia stuff. One great program that is on board already is Amarok (although it has been renamed Music Manager here). This has got to be one of the greats of the open source world. Through this application you can listen to your music collection, listen to internet radio, subscribe to podcasts and it integrates with last.fm (so you can listen to streams and scrobble tracks).