If you're here reading Gizmodo, there's a good chance you have a hard drive full of video somewhere. And you also probably have a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii. If those two things aren't working together for...

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/ps3_video.jpg" width="800" height="494" style="display:block;float:none;" /If you're here reading Gizmodo, there's a good chance you have a hard drive full of video somewhere. And you also probably have a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii. If those two things aren't working together for you in beautiful symbiosis, allowing you to watch all of your downloaded or ripped video on your TV instead of hunched over a laptop screen, well, this is the guide for you./p pNow there are two general strategies you can take: physically copying your files to a USB drive, memory card or CD/DVD, which is pretty straightforward, or streaming your video over the network, which is where things get more fun and interesting. So let's dive in./p pFirst things first, codecs. Now that you're all learn-ed on the ways of video encoding thanks to a href="http://gizmodo.com/5093670/giz-explains-every-video-format-you-need-to-know"Matt's Giz Explains from this week/a, the issue of codecs will make a lot more sense. Thankfully, it's not something you have to worry too much about here, because all three consoles can handle a large number of the codecs you will find commonly: AVI, MPEG (1, 2 and 4), H.264, DivX/XviD, and WMV—and if a particular format you want to play isn't supported, it's often possible to convert it to work on the fly. The PS3 also supports AVCHD, a format used by many HD camcorders. Not all formats are supported with every streaming method though, especially in the 360's case, which we'll get to in a second. Now, for getting all those files on the TV./p pNote: if you need to re-encode a video in a different format because it won't play, nothing beats VLC's transcoding wizard. a href="http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch02.html"Here's a guide./a/p pstrongXbox 360: Streaming (PC)/strongbr img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297019303_tversity_01.png" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="494" height="403" style="display:block;" /In typical Microsoft fashion, there are tons of different ways to pull of streaming your video to the Xbox 360—and the only one that's truly comprehensive, in our opinion, comes from a third party. a href="http://tversity.com/"TVersity/a is a free UPnP media server that can manage your video and music files anywhere on your PC and stream them out to your 360 over the network. It will also kindly transcode just about any video you can throw at it into a codec your console can definitely read. You might have to install some additional codec packs here and there for Windows but for the most part, you can forget about worrying about codecs with TVersity. This also allows TVersity to handle files not officially supported by the 360, like MKV containers./p p1. Grab a href="http://tversity.com/"TVersity here/a and install it.br 2. Click the giant plus sign in the top left corner to "Add Your Media Source" - namely, the folder on your PC with all of your videos.br 3. Under advanced options, set your transcoding preferences: "When Needed" will make sure most all of your files play.br 4. In the main TVersity menu, select "Start Sharing"br 5. On the Xbox 360, TVersity will now appear as a source in the Media blade or under My Xbox -gt; Video Library in NXE./p pThe other three options via Microsoft's own various software solutions all have their own drawbacks, which we'll cover here briefly. Our advice? Use them only if you already use the Zune software, Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center to manage all of your video./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297041777_windowsmediaplayer_01.png" width="494" height="432" style="display:block;" /strongWindows Media Player 11/strong: WMP 11 can stream out to the Xbox 360 pretty easily. Here is an a href="http://paininthetech.com/2008/01/03/stream-video-to-xbox-360-with-windows-media-player-or-winamp-remote"in-depth guide/a. strongDrawbacks?/strong Somewhat clunky format support. In our tests we could not stream Quicktime video at all, and had inconsistent experiences with MP4 files. MPEG-4 and H.264 support are technically supported via third-party WMP codec add-ons, but even with those, we still had trouble—MP4 files tended to play fine on the WMP 11 end, but not show up as browsable on the 360. Somewhat unbelievably, the Xbox 360 team actually recommends you a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2007/11/30/december-2007-video-playback-faq.aspx"manually rename your unsupported MPEG-4 and H.264 files/a, adding the ".avi" container extension to fool WMP into playing them. This worked occasionally, but not for every file and was generally inconsistent.br clear="all"/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297025800_zune_01.png" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="494" height="338" style="display:block;" /strongZune Software 3.0/strong: Zune offers a much nicer interface than WMP (Settings -gt; Sharing -gt; Add is the extent of the setup), and thankfully supports MPEG4 and H.264 much more consistently. strongDrawbacks?/strong No DivX or Xvid support, which means a huge chunk of your Torrented video probably won't work.br clear="all"/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297876080_360_MCE.jpg" width="494" height="308" style="display:block;" /strongWindows Media Center Extender/strong: If you already have a Media Center setup honking on your network, there's a good chance you won't need this guide, but the Xbox 360 can of course stream your MCE content to your TV seamlessly (a a href="http://features.teamxbox.com/xbox/1392/Xbox-360-Windows-Media-Center-Setup-Guide/p1/"complete guide is here/a). The interface is really fantastic. strongDrawbacks?/strong The gimpiest codec support of the bunch: only MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV are supported. So unless you're converting everything you have into those formats, you'll still need something like TVersity to play most files you'll find up for download.br clear="all"/p pSo, in the end, TVersity wins hands down as the easiest and most elegant streaming setup for the 360. But do keep in mind—if you're playing a format that your Xbox can't handle (MKV being the most common of these you'll find), TVersity will have to transcode, which means you will lose a bit of quality./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297010629_connect360_01.png" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="494" height="378" style="display:block;" /strongXbox 360: Streaming (Mac)/strong: UPnP support—the networking standard used by both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in various flavors to play network-streamed video, music and photos—is not natively supported by OS X yet. And unfortunately, there isn't a stellar all-in-one free package like Windows' TVersity.br clear="all"/p pNullriver, however, makes an incredibly slick piece of software called a href="http://www.nullriver.com/products/connect360"Connect360/a, which easily streams all of your iLife libraries or any folder full of video on your Mac to the 360. Unfortunately, it'll cost you $20. There is a free trial version that supposedly shuts off after 30 minutes of sharing, but sometimes it seems to forget and lets you play longer. But even so, $20 isn't bad for the convenience factor here. No transcoding, but it will handle every codec the console itself can play back./p p1. Download and install the Connect360 preference pane.br 2. In System Preferences, start up Connect360 sharing. Here you can also add folders for more sharing.br 3. Access the Connect360 source on your Xbox in the usual way. Done./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227301048351_xbox_video.jpg" width="494" height="329" style="display:block;" /strongXbox 360: Physical Media/strongbr 1. If streaming isn't for you, and you don't mind hauling a storage device back and forth between your computer and Xbox, then this is super easy: Insert Flash disk/USB/CD/DVD and browse it with the Media blade or the Video Library section of NXE (under "My Xbox"). Enjoy.br clear="all"/p pstrongPlaystation 3: Streaming (PC)/strongbr strongTVersity/strong: Again, Tversity is your friend. It works just as well for the PS3 as it does for Xbox 360 (see above for setup)./p p1. With Tversity set up and sharing turned on, just browse to COMPUTERNAME: TVersity in the XMB and you'll see a listing of all your shared files./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/ps3_wmp11.png" width="500" height="371" style="display:block;" /strongWindows Media Player 11/strong: Just like for Xbox 360, you can use WMP11's built-in DLNA/UPnP serving capabilities to stream to the PS3, too—but with the same codec funkiness as noted above.br clear="all"/p p1. In the Media Sharing preference box with your PS3 powered on and connected to the network, select "Unknown Device"—that's your PS3.br 2. Your library should now show up in XMB./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297942918_Picture_26.png" width="494" height="405" style="display:block;" /strongPlaystation 3: Streaming (MAC)/strongbr Mac: Nullriver didn't just hook up 360 owners—Media Link is the version especially for PS3. It costs 20 bucks, but will give you totally seamless and painless streaming of all of your iLife libraries (photos and music too) as well as files in any folder you can access with your Mac, whether it's on a network or local.br clear="all"/p p1. Operation is just like Connect360—with sharing enabled in the Media Link preference pane, just browse through all your files under the "Media Link" source in XMB./p pstrongPlaystation 3: Physical Media/strongbr 1. Easy as pie. If you're using a USB flash or hard disc or an SD or CF card, just dump all of your videos into a folder named VIDEO on the root of the drive and they'll show up automatically in the XMB.br 2. You can also browse the entire drive or disc by pressing triangle and choosing "Display All" to find videos that aren't in the VIDEO folder./p pstrongWii: Physical Media/strongbr img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/wiihomebrew6.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" style="display:block;" /For playing video on your Wii, physical media is the way to go, which is easy to pull off with some a href="http://gizmodo.com/5096150/a-complete-guide-to-playing-video-files-on-your-ps3-xbox-360-or-wii-/?op=postpreviewrefId=5096150"homebrew hacking/a. There are lots of services that will transcode your video and ouput it in a Flash player that you can view through the Wii's Opera browser (like a href="http://orb.com"Orb/a), but you'll take a hit quality-wise and it's not as easy as just playing the source files directly with Mplayer.br clear="all"/p p1. Install the Homebrew Channel and Mplayer on your Wii. We've got you covered here with our a href="http://gizmodo.com/5096150/a-complete-guide-to-playing-video-files-on-your-ps3-xbox-360-or-wii-/?op=postpreviewrefId=5096150"complete Wii homebrew guide/a—but hopefully you haven't installed the latest System Menu update. In that case, you'll have to wait for a workaround, but it probably won't be long./p p2. Install Mplayer via the Homebrew Browser (also a href="http://gizmodo.com/5096150/a-complete-guide-to-playing-video-files-on-your-ps3-xbox-360-or-wii-/?op=postpreviewrefId=5096150"covered in our guide/a)./p p3. Now, you can use Mplayer to play files off or even an attached USB drive (as long as its formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, which most are). The interface is not nearly as nice, but it gets the job done./p p4. Mplayer for the Wii covers a ton of codecs, but sadly, the Wii's processor chokes on HD content. If you've got HD files, you'll need to transcode them into a lower resolution with VLC./p pAnd that's about it. Now, no more huddling around your laptop screen or fiddling with TV and audio-out cables. Welcome to the good life./p pemAdditional reporting and testing by Seung Lee. See more a href="http://gizmodo.com/tag/how_to"Giz how-to guides here/a. And as always, if you have anything to add to our findings, please let us know in the comments./em/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=a5f8e7e6b714214c9acf57feb2a23015p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=a5f8e7e6b714214c9acf57feb2a23015p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=a5f8e7e6b714214c9acf57feb2a23015" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=2Sprc4If"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=B7Ld3MDr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=FGGqQmpb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=FGGqQmpb" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=ihusyPJE"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=ihusyPJE" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/7dHhmHJCNb8" height="1" width="1"/

Collection of tools for converting video files

MovieStyles sleek and intuitive interface makes it easy to start converting your video clips for your favorite device! To convert your video, simply select your device(iPod, AppleTV, Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP, PS3, DivX, PDA, Xbox 360), then drag and drop your video file into the drop area. Thats it! MovieStyle will automatically start converting your video.

iTunes is a digital media player application for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also an interface to manage the content on Apples popular iPod digital media players.

POSITION VACANCYbr / ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, Full-time, Tenure-trackbr / PHOTOGRAPHY/NEW MEDIAbr / br / The University of Delaware Department of Art (UD/ART) seeks an innovative artist and educator whose practice investigates the implications of lens-based culture in the twenty first century. This person will lead the discussion exploring the vast creative possibilities and the cultural concerns surrounding photographic media. We are interested in lens-based media’s relationship to representation, surveillance, mechanical reproduction, and the nature of the image or imaging in the “information age.” br / br / The ideal candidate will technically and conceptually address the way that the image/information is captured (input), edited (processed), and presented (output), and should have specific expertise in one or more of the following areas:br / · developing or exploiting mechanisms for capturing images br / · manipulating visual information through digital software and programming, experimental analog processes, or a hybridization of digital and analog br / · investigating modes of display and distribution from printing, projection, and the “screen,” to digital transmission or 3-D formsbr / br / Qualifications: The artist we seek will teach a full-time load of beginning to advanced undergraduate courses in our photography/new media area and be an active faculty member in an interdisciplinary MFA program. The ideal candidate should have an interest in addressing the aesthetic, historic, and ideological implications of lens-based image production while leading our photography/new media area. This person must be enthusiastic about and open to the broad range of work produced in an interdisciplinary department, which includes Fine Art and Visual Communication. S/he will also oversee, help maintain, and guide the discussion about the development of a comprehensive lens-based media facility. br / br / We require an MFA or equivalent, college level teaching experience, and a serious commitment to personal creative practice. The salary is competitive and commensurate with experience.br / br / Starting Date: September 1, 2009br / br / Application Deadline: January 25, 2009br / br / Application Procedure: Our preferred method for application and portfolio submission is online via: http://udart.slideroom.com. br / Include: letter of introduction, curriculum vitae, three references with contact information, artist statement, teaching philosophy, and up to twenty still images and/or up to 5 minutes of video: (.jpg), video (.mov, .wmv, .flv) or PDF documents. For good image quality and fast upload, images should be sized no larger than 1280 x 1280 pixels @ 72 dpi. Video files must be kept under 20MB. br / Indicate availability for CAA Conference interview. Interviews at CAA by appointment only. The curriculum vitae and other application materials may be shared with departmental faculty.br / br / br / To send your application by mail, or for further information contact: Professor Lance Winn, Photography/New Media Search Committee, Department of Art, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716. Enclose a SASE if you send materials you wish to be returned.br / br / General Information: The University of Delaware is a research land/sea grant institution with 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The main campus is located in the residential town of Newark, a suburban community of 60,000 about 15 miles from Wilmington, Delaware’s largest city. We are situated midway between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Newark is also about two hours by train or car north to New York City or south to Washington, D.C. Wilmington provides Amtrak service to all points along the eastern seaboard.br / br / The Department of Art has 400 undergraduate majors pursuing either the BA or BFA degree. Our undergraduate Fine Arts core includes Ceramics, Photography, Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, with upper-level, self-directed study. We also offer an undergraduate program in Visual Communications, which includes courses in Graphic Design, Illustration, Advertising Design, Applied Photography, New Media, and interdisciplinary electives. We offer several study abroad opportunities, complementing department and interdisciplinary programs. The department’s two-year, discipline-integrated MFA program fosters a communal teaching model where students dialogue with faculty, professionals and other graduate students outside of their perceived “field.” The department’s facilities and resources can accommodate a maximum of 30 graduate students. br / br / Currently the department has a lighting studio, 15-station color darkroom, 20-station black and white darkroom. and 6 private darkrooms. UD/ART maintains four studio buildings, including a new facility housing Ceramics, Printmaking, and Sculpture. The department also maintains a gallery in its main building. In addition, UD/ART has a state-of-the-art Macintosh-based computing facility with over 30 separate workstations, and a digital output center. The university library also houses a Student Multimedia Design Center which lends video and still cameras and provides studios and advanced workstations for digital editing.br / br / The University has recently completed a new strategic plan, which focuses on innovation, among other goals. UD/ART is proactive about the university’s mission “to be recognized around the world as one of the great public institutions of higher education in America.”br / br / Please visit our website at: http://www.udel.edu/artbr / br / The University of Delaware is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer who encourages applications from minority group members and women.img src="http://rhizome.org/syndicate/nothing.gif?f=announce" border="0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/rhizome-announce/~4/460417077" height="1" width="1"/

This class can be used to perform image manipulation operations with the ImageMagick program. It calls the ImageMagick program passing parameters to process several types of operations on image files. Currently, it can resize images, create thumbnails, darken or brighten images, add watermarks, rotate, flip, crop, convert to greyscale and invert images, create text images, and generate thumbnails from PDF or video files. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QqyE_LPW01uHIWNmhpy-o7Y0QRc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QqyE_LPW01uHIWNmhpy-o7Y0QRc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/aDnYcm-gwEk" height="1" width="1"/

This class can be used to perform image manipulation operations with the ImageMagick program. It calls the ImageMagick program passing parameters to process several types of operations on image files. Currently, it can resize images, create thumbnails, darken or brighten images, add watermarks, rotate, flip, crop, convert to greyscale and invert images, create text images, and generate thumbnails from PDF or video files. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/rR4VbywuL5EQbUMFqOj7ZkS7v6A/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/rR4VbywuL5EQbUMFqOj7ZkS7v6A/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/aDnYcm-gwEk" height="1" width="1"/

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/13/cc/0009cc13.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/13/cc/0009cc13_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_642067"//a/divbr/ div class="center"bTMPGEnc XPress 4.6.3.267 Retail | 28.8 MB/b/divbr/ TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress gives you the freedom to take almost any video file and encode it to your desired file format including DivX, AVI, QuickTime, MPEG 4-ISO, H.264, DVD-Video, DVD-VR, HDV camcorder, Blu-ray Disc and much more. This powerful software provides you with functions and features ranging from a simple cut-editor tool to multiple powerful video filtering and effects. Now with NVIDIA CUDAâ„¢ support!

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/codecsarentgoodlkepancakes.jpg" width="807" height="414" style="display:block;float:none;" /Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they're trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or just trying to grab last night's episode of Dexter because they, uh, forgot to renew their Showtime subscription that'll work in their media player. It's messy and annoying, but we're here to clean it up. Take a deep breath./p pYou might recall our discussion about a href="http://gizmodo.com/5048025/giz-explains-why-hd-video-downloads-arent-very-high-def"video bitrates earlier/a, or how much data is packed into a file. As a general rule, more bits per second translates into more betterer quality audio and video. The variable in thatmdash;the other part of the equationmdash;is how the content is compressed and de-compressed. Better compression techniquesmdash;the zen of knowing what bits of data to pull out to make big data chunks smallermdash;make for better quality video while taking up less space on your hard drive. Basically, the part you need to know is that codecs are the software that make that magic happen./p pstrongStandard Standards/strongbr bull; strongH.261/strong is not a term you have to worry about, but it's the technology a href="http://www.javvin.com/protocolH261.html"that most video standards and codecs/a were originally based on. Originating in 1990, it's the first major digital video compression standard, and like other "H" standards, it was developed by the International Telecommunication Union. This one was primarily for teleconferencing over ISDN lines, and as such, it looks like ass./p pbull; strongMPEG-1 Part 2/strong is another oldie, developed by the a href="http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/"Movie Picture Experts Group/a and approved in 1991. (All of the MPEG codecs we talk about, btw, will have an associated layer, since the video section is only part of the full standard, which includes audio and other stuff. MPEG-1 Layer 3, you probably know, is MP3.) Based quite a bit on H.261, a href="http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/frame/research/mpeg/mpeg_overview.html"MPEG-1 was designed to take VHS quality video/a and squeeze it down to a bit rate of about 1.5Mbps, optimized for CD transfers. No surprise, it's the standard used for all VCDs (which can play in most DVD players), but not a standard you would see hanging around today./p pbull; With strongMPEG-2 Part 2/strong, approved in 1994, we're finally talking decent vid. Also known as H.262, since it was developed jointly by the ITU-T and ISO, a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/papers/paper_14/paper_14.shtml"MPEG-2 is an extension of MPEG-1/a that delivers better resolution and higher bit rates (3-15Mbps for standard def and 15-30Mbps for HD). It's the video codec used by DVD and digital television, though now it's slowly being replaced by the more efficient MPEG-4, except on DVDs, where it'll ride out that disc format's lifetime./p pbull; bH.263/b is a href="http://www.phonescoop.com/glossary/term.php?gid=197"designed for sending video over crappy connections/a. So it's used to encode most Flash video and to send video over mobile networks./p pbull; strongMPEG-4/strong is where we really stand right now. It has a much broader scope than past MPEG standards, aiming to tackle both the low end (crappy cellphones on a crappy network) and the high end (Blu-ray). It's still developing, so it's not-so-coincidentally a href="http://www.m4if.org/mpeg4/"where this whole story gets messier/a. There are two relevant parts of the MPEG-4 standard for our myopic video purposes: Part 2 and Part 10mdash;which is also known as H.264 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC). To be clear though, even though they're both part of the MPEG-4 standard, they're itotally different formats/i. Nevertheless, both are more efficient at compression than past MPEG codecs, delivering better quality using less space./p pbull;Okay, so if you've ever frequented a Torrent site, you've actually watched tons of videos that use strongMPEG-4 Part 2/strong, though it's not like they would've had a flashing sign telling you so. MPEG-4 Part 2 actually a href="http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:2-AcZvq6F8YJ:www.mpegif.org/public/documents/vault/m4-out-30037.pdf+mpeg-4+profileshl=enct=clnkcd=4gl=usclient=firefox-a"has different "profiles"/amdash;the two that matter being Simple Profile, for low bitrate, low-res stuff, and Advanced Simple Profile. The latter profile is what's used by movies you would download in formats like DivX or XviD or 3ivxmdash;which are all codecs that are essentially just differing implementations of the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard./p pbull;strongMPEG-4 Part 10/strong, the other part, was actually co-devopled by MPEG and the ITU-T, so it's also knownmdash;in fact, more commonly knownmdash;as H.264. It's more efficient than MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2, delivering the same quality video in as little as half the space, making it suitable for the low and high-end. Because of this, it's quickly becoming a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC_Products_and_Implementations"the standardest standard/a. It's part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray spec, replacing MPEG-2 in digital TV (like with satellite services and ATT's U-Verse IPTV) and supported by pretty much every portable video player on the planet from the iPod to the PSP. Apple has a decent, if Kool-Aid flavored, a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/faq.html"FAQ about H.264/a./p pbull;strongVC-1/strong is essentially a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/vc1techoverview.aspx"Microsoft developed alternative video codec/a to H.264 released as a standard by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, though it descends from the same H.26X/MPEG family. (It essentially started life as WMV9, but then a href="http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=50500181"Microsoft shopped it to the SMPTE/a to make it an industry standard, and now it is.) It too, is part of the mandatory Blu-ray and HD DVD spec, and is the official video codec of the Xbox 360. It's pitch is the same as H.264'smdash;trying to deliver better quality using less space, like HD video in 6-8Mbps./p pstrongFree-Floating Codecs/strongbr Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of emall of those/em, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (a href="http://www.divx.com/"proprietary/a) and a href="http://www.xvid.org/"XviD/a (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/xbox-360-divx%5Cxvid-test/xbox-360-divxxvid-tested-it-plays-almost-everything-329769.php"Like the Xbox 360/a, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common. Same deal with H.264: Some well known codecs that use it are Apple's Quicktime H.264, x264 and Nero Digital. You've also got Windows Media Video (WMV) codecs, which are Microsoft's proprietary twists on industry standards./p pstrongContainers aka Wrappers/strongbr Alright, well you've probably noticed that none of your video files have the extension .h264 or .vc1 or the like. That's because videos are packaged in a href="http://www.doom9.org/glossary.htm#Container"containers or wrappers/a that stuff things like the audio, navigational info, etc. along with the video in a single pretty file. Naturally, there are about as many of them as there are codecs. To be clear, you would take a video encoded with, say, H.264, and wrap it up as a .MP4 file./p pThe majors ones are:br bull;AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is a href="http://www.jmcgowan.com/avi.html#Definition"Windows' standard multimedia container/abr bull;MPEG-4 Part 14 (known to you as .mp4) is the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4"standardized container for MPEG-4/abr ·:FLV (Flash Video) is the a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/"format used to deliver video through Flash Player/abr bull;MOV is Apple's QuickTime a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/"container format/abr bull;OGG is an a href="http://www.xiph.org/"open standard container/abr bull;MKV (Mastroska) a href="http://www.matroska.org/"is another open specification container/a that you've seen if you've ever downloaded animebr bull;VOB a href="http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/vob.cfm"stands for DVD Video Object/a. Guess what? It's DVD's standard container, and what you get when you rip a DVD.br bull;ASF is a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/asfspec.aspx"Microsoft format designed/a for WMV and WMA. (Files can end in .wmv or .asf)./p pSo, in order to play a video file, your setup has to be able to handle both the actual video codec, and the container. It's why you can try to play an AVI file and Windows Media Player laughs at you, even though it totally played one a minute agomdash; the container was no problem, it didn't have the right codec. Or conversely, even though an iPod could play back an H.264 encoded video, if it was wrapped up in MKV, it couldn't read it./p pOkay, my brain hurts. Hopefully this will make yours hurt less when it comes to dealing with pesky videos. If you'd like to do even more homework, Wikipedia, as always, has a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codecs"a more in-depth discussion/a. And Doom9 a href="http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-final-105-1.htm"is always an amazing resource/a for all things digital video./p pemSomething you still wanna know? Send any questions about codecs, kitties or pad thai (but not RealMedia) to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line./em/p p[Image: a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siebeneinhalb-de/2385134555/"ME/a@Flickr]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1" border="0" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=FxSbpUqh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=6oQdGflA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=qLBnOvuS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=qLBnOvuS" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=pIR4dxIP"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=pIR4dxIP" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/q1B1QOVLsx0" height="1" width="1"/

Windows only: Create and mix your own file and media playlists with Freepath. Users can create file playlists from a variety of sources: files from their own computers, video files found on YouTube,...

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/2008-11-20_022550.jpg" height="153" width="158" align="left" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2"/Windows only: Create and mix your own file and media playlists with Freepath. Users can create file playlists from a variety of sources: files from their own computers, video files found on YouTube, photos from Flickr, nearly anything you can drag and drop from the web or your own computer can be dumped into Freepath. Once the files are placed within a playlist, users can opt to keep the list as spartan or create a slideshow complete with transitions and extra effects. One of the more unique features of Freepath is that files remain editable once they are embedded into the playlist. If you added an Excel document at but noticed you needed to edit the file, you can do the editing from within Freepath without the hassle of removing the file, editing it, and replacing it. Once you have a mashup of media and files you can opt to share with a single contact, a private group, or public group. The only potential restriction on sharing, is that the recipient needs to be using Freepath to view the playlist file. MyFreepath, the companion online file sharing site for the Freepath software comes with 100MB of free online storage for the playlists you create. Freepath is Windows only, freeware. div class="related"a href="http://www.freepath.com/"Freepath/a/div/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1f5c6ee99c140f7070a9c4cad6c0bf9ap=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1f5c6ee99c140f7070a9c4cad6c0bf9ap=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1f5c6ee99c140f7070a9c4cad6c0bf9a" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=yf2siukD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=hH12Rx5U"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=eQODWV00"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=eQODWV00" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=r00c5NKs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=r00c5NKs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/ZsJ1Ubh4hVs" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/11/2008-11-20_022550.jpg" height="153" width="158" align="left" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2"/Windows only: Create and mix your own file and media playlists with Freepath. Users can create file playlists from a variety of sources: files from their own computers, video files found on YouTube, photos from Flickr, nearly anything you can drag and drop from the web or your own computer can be dumped into Freepath. Once the files are placed within a playlist, users can opt to keep the list as spartan or create a slideshow complete with transitions and extra effects. One of the more unique features of Freepath is that files remain editable once they are embedded into the playlist./p pIf you added an Excel document at but noticed you needed to edit the file, you can do the editing from within Freepath without the hassle of removing the file, editing it, and replacing it. Once you have a mashup of media and files you can opt to share with a single contact, a private group, or public group. The only potential restriction on sharing, is that the recipient needs to be using Freepath to view the playlist file. MyFreepath, the companion online file sharing site for the Freepath software comes with 100MB of free online storage for the playlists you create. Freepath is Windows only, freeware. div class="related"a href="http://www.freepath.com/"Freepath/a/div/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1f5c6ee99c140f7070a9c4cad6c0bf9ap=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1f5c6ee99c140f7070a9c4cad6c0bf9ap=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1f5c6ee99c140f7070a9c4cad6c0bf9a" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=yf2siukD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=hH12Rx5U"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=eQODWV00"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=eQODWV00" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com:80/~f/lifehacker/full?a=r00c5NKs"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=r00c5NKs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/ZsJ1Ubh4hVs" height="1" width="1"/

Thuxu's shared video file.

Author: Thuxu Keywords: intro Added: November 20, 2008

br /In their own wordsbr /br /“Convert online YouTube videos direct to PC, iPod, iPhone, PSP and Mobile.”br /br /Why it might be a killerbr /br /It is a simple yet effective tool that can be used freely.br /br /Some questionsbr /br /How could this web-based solution be improved?br /br /What it doesbr /br /There is a fair number of online applications that aim to make the experience of using YouTube a more realized one. Preeminently among them are the tools for capturing and converting video files stored at the popular hosting service. The one we are discussing right now falls squarely into that category. br brIn general terms, all you have to do is cut and paste the corresponding YouTube URL into the provided box and hit the “Convert Download” button. It is really as easy as that. There is not a lot to worry about, but there is not a lot to configure either. In a certain sense, I guess that is the idea of the site. And the one aspect that can be modified is actually the one that should not be bypassed, namely the file extension. This is important if only because it will enable you to rest assured the converted file will be viewable in different setups (like PCs and Macs) and devices (like iPods and iPhones). br brAt the end of the day, it is always nice to know that there are free services like this one available on the WWW. You always end up needing them when least expected, and that is a fact. brbrbr /br /Link: a href='http://www.convertmytube.com'http://www.convertmytube.com/abr /Our Review: a href='http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/convertmytube-com-convert-youtube-videos'http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/convertmytube-com-convert-youtube-videos/abr /br / nbsp;div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=gNGNK3Ra"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=rArBE2Z2"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=79UMZzlk"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=79UMZzlk" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=gzdFawfF"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=gzdFawfF" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=9k99Hu94"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=43" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=orZRfZ77"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=orZRfZ77" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/killerstartups/BkQV/~4/zyXbqRmdbEU" height="1" width="1"/

I'm getting the 5DII next month and wondering if I can do use photoshop with the HD video files. I just want to do some Levels and Curves adjustments. I'm an old photographer but new to video (I've never even used iMovie). Thanks.