Back in the days when the first DVD players were introduced, I was employed by Europe’s biggest audio-visual facilitator. So naturally, we dove right in, and I even worked on the menus for a few major movie releases. I remember being blown away by how hours of great image quality could fit onto such a small disc. But recently, those same discs have started to really annoy me. They scratch, they’re easy to misplace and they take up a lot of space if you’ve got many. That’s why I’d been looking at the latest generation of network media players. I got one this weekend for the person in my household who has the most DVDs, my six year old daughter .
More WD TV Live first impressions

Moblin 1.0 made the headlines because it promised to boot really quickly. But startup times alone will probably not be enough to lure Windows users into trying Intel’s purpose-built netbook operating system. That’s may well be why the brand new Moblin 2.0 beta looks really slick. It’s definitely still a little rough around the edges, but the user interface is impressive.

More Moblin 2.0 is pretty impressive

I’ve been meaning to convert some of the output of my TIME/SPACE experiment on YouTube for a while now. Unfortunately the current incarnation of that project is a Flash movie, and Flash doesn’t let you simply save the images you generate. At least not very conveniently.

I’d been looking into complicated stuff like mmsave, when it dawned on me that there are plenty of tools out there that let you simply record whatever’s on your screen. I ended up using Windows Media Encoder to grab these and VirtualDub to crop and convert them. Took just a few minutes.
More TIME/SPACE experiment on YouTube

Igor A. Melekhine recently sent me a modified version of my Youtuber plugin that adds a ‘high quality’ checkbox to the options page. When checked, Youtuber will attempt to play all videos in the superior MP4 format. Not only will this improve video quality, it’s also the only way to get stereo sound. I’ve incorporated Igor’s changes into a new version, 1.4. Available from your local wordpress.org now.

Thanks Igor, Novastar sounds so much better in high quality.

I’ve updated my Youtuber plugin to include an options page. This allows you to much more easily adjust the display size of YouTube videos to match your blog’s layout. This required a bit of hacking in the previous version. Youtuber generates valid XHTML and is extremely easy to use. If you embed all you YouTube video’s using this plugin, changing a few values in the options page will allow you to adjust the display dimensions of all the videos on your blog. This might come in handy if you ever upgrade or change your theme.

More info (as well as a download link for the new version) in the original post.

By default, embedded YouTube videos are 425 pixels wide, which is wider than the content column on Choking on Popcorn. To be able to easily resize and add cool videos to that site I copy-pasted together a very basic plugin for WordPress. It allows you to simply use something like [youtube ]xxxxxxxxx[/youtube] to embed the video. The ‘xxxxxxxxx’ bit needs to be replaced with the actual video’s ID of course. I know there are tons of plugins that do similar things and are vastly superior, but this one suits my needs perfectly.
More WordPress plugin: Youtuber