Linux for Designers

The Gnome video editor PiTiVi 0.14 is released. This version comes with a lot of bugfixes and tons of new features: http://www.pitivi.org/
A PPA for Ubuntu Lucid and above can be found at:
https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-developers/+archive/ppa

This year Gran Canaria hosted both the Akademy and GUADEC conferences. The most important hackers from KDE and GNOME were for the first time at the same place.
Now the videos of a large amount of talks are available. My favorite one is Matthew Paul Thomas about Common interface bloopers - really true, very funny

The easy to use video converter and GUI for FFmpeg - WinFF - reaches the stable state. Version 1.0 is now available for download. If you are using Ubuntu Linux you can get via the WinFF PPA at Launchpad.

The free video codec Ogg Theora reaches now the final state. Ogg Theora is open source and based on the VP3 codec of On2 Technologies. Ogg Theora includes a new and faster decoder and will be used for the OLPC project too. Upcoming versions of the browser Firefox will support it by default.

Adobe published now the final Flash Player 10. This version brings a lot of improvements to the Linux platform. Now the Linux Flash Player has the same features as on any other platform. For more details check out the feature page.
Best of all Adobe provides now a Deb archive for Ubuntu 8.04 but they use their own file structure and it seems there is no 64bit build again

To enjoy Flash Player 10 without smashing your Ubuntu:
- extract the Deb archive (do not install it)
- extract the data.tar.gz
- copy as root the file "install_flash_player_10_linux/usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so" to "/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree"

Adobe published again a release candidate of the Flash Player 10. This version brings a lot of improvements to the Linux platform:
* optimized sound sound API and sound buffer
* windowless overlay mode now working (Firefox 3 required)
* new embedding modes (explained by the developer Tinic Uro)
* support for the Video4Linux 2
All details about Flash Player 10 can be found at the release notes. And of course the beta 2 is available for Linux too.
Download it and copy the binaries as root to "/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree". Shutdown your browswer and restart it, open the url "about:plugins" to make sure it's available.

Adobe released a second beta of the Flash Player 10. This version brings a lot of improvements to the Linux platform:
* optimized sound sound API and sound buffer
* windowless overlay mode now working (Firefox 3 required)
* new embedding modes (explained by the developer Tinic Uro)
* support for the Video4Linux 2
Older details about Flash Player 10 can be found in my older post or at the release notes. And of course the beta 2 is available for Linux too.
Download it and copy the binaries as root to "/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree". Shutdown your browswer and restart it, open the url "about:plugins" to make sure it's available.

Adobe released today a first beta of the Flash Player 10. This version brings a lot more hardware acceleration to Flash and makes it more, more powerfull. Now raster images, video overlays and effects will be rendered with OpenGL 2.0 directly on the graphics board.
With the new Pixel Bender language it will be easy for designers to create own effects too. Best of all this beta is released for Linux too.
Download it and copy the binaries as root to "/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree". Shutdown your browswer and restart it, open the url "about:plugins" to make sure it's available.

Those who looking for a solution creating video tutorials or screencasts should try out Salasaga (formaly known as Flame Project). A Deb package for Ubuntu Linux is available too.
Or download the binaries of Wink 1.5 for Linux. Both solution will creating suberp Flash videos and allowing more then a simple capturing like xvidcap does.
UPDATE: Check out recordMyDesktop too.

Adobe is working on an update for its Flash player 9 that will bring DRM to Flash. Since the popularity of Flash video and the support for H.264 the music and film industry like to get back control of the streamed content. This step could stop the development of Gnash and SWFdec, two alternatives to Adobes Flash player, too.
Read more about the dark side of Adobe at the EFF.org.