Multimedia content

Viacom's departure from Hulu comes with a bite

Hulu on Tuesday announced on its blog that partner Viacom would be pulling its content from the service, and noted that shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" would only be available through the beginning of next week.

Though an inconvenience for Hulu users who had relied on the service's subscription tools and new episode notifications, Hulu noted that most of the content that's being pulled will still be available back on ComedyCentral.com.

But, as the Hollywood Reporter has discovered, it may not be such an easy transition for users and … Read more

Vimeo pushing out HTML5 video player

It's HTML5 week in video land, and the latest entrant is Vimeo. Less than a day after competitor YouTube announced that it would begin rolling out an HTML5 video player to videos on its site, Vimeo is doing the same.

Beginning Thursday, the site will be offering its users the option to play videos without the need for Adobe Flash--a plug-in that was previously required to watch videos on its online player. The new option to switch to the HTML5 player will appear as a link below each video. The site will then remember a user's preference from … Read more

YouTube begins HTML5 rollout

As if the news about the upcoming video rental program weren't enough, YouTube on Wednesday announced that it's finally going live with support for HTML5 video.

HTML5 video is the Web standard that allows users of most modern-day browsers to play hosted videos in their browser without having to rely on Adobe's Flash player.

In order to use the new feature, users will need to opt in to the HTML5 program on TestTube, which is where the company houses a number of other experimental features.

The only browsers that are currently supported include Google Chrome, Apple's … Read more

YouTube gets rentals, starting with Sundance films

YouTube on Wednesday announced that it will soon be offering video rentals on its service, beginning first with five films from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance film festivals.

The rental feature, which goes live this Friday, will apply to the five Sundance films until the end of January. YouTube says that other films and programs will be made available for rental in the near future, but has not yet named which partners will be involved outside of mentioning that the health and education industries will be included.

Going forward, YouTube is inviting what it calls a "small group" of partners that will be able to apply the new rental model to videos they have hosted on the service. And similar to what YouTube did with paid video downloads around this same time last year, owners of these videos will be able to set their own pricing, as well as duration of how long that rental can be accessed.

In order to rent videos, users must have a Google Checkout account. The company has not said whether it will allow other payment platforms, such as PayPal, to be used as as a payment option.

YouTube has long been expected to get into the video-on-demand business, especially since Google removed video content purchases from its (now-defunct) Google Video service at the end of 2007. Also, late last year, reports surfaced that YouTube was in talks with a number of film studios in an attempt to warm them to the idea of renting their films on the service. Notably, Sony Pictures went on the record as having talked with Google about such an offering, although at the time it was looking for a way to boost the brand image of its Crackle video streaming site.… Read more

Old but awesome: The YouTube piano

This is nowhere near as cool as that Nintendo Wario game ad/video hybrid, or the Honda headlight ad/video that surfaced on Vimeo last year. But it is more useful than both of them combined.

Meet the YouTube piano, a video of piano notes that has on-screen annotations that skip to that particular part of the video and thus the corresponding note. In practice, you could play a song, as some YouTube commenters have done with deep-linked comments. But to be honest, it can't (and won't) sound close to the real thing.

Still, this is about the … Read more

Vimeo's videos get iPhone, Android-friendly

Video host Vimeo on Wednesday is launching support for users on iPhone/iPod Touch and Google Android devices. The company has re-encoded the entirety of its staff picks and HD video showcase, both of which are the most heavily trafficked areas of the site from Vimeo's members, and referrers like Twitter.

"We've been working on it for the last few weeks," Blake Whitman, Vimeo's director of community told CNET News. "This is sort of the prelude of offering Plus members iPhone support; and in the future, an app," he said. In the meantime, … Read more

Jelli's crowd-sourced radio opens up to the U.S., Australia

Jelli.net, a Total Request Live-esq Internet radio station, is coming out of beta on Monday night and is expected to announce that it's inked a syndication deal with Triton Digital Media that will get it played in actual terrestrial FM radio stations across the U.S. beginning next year.

The service revolves entirely around a playlist of songs that's managed by users in real time. Users can vote songs up or down before they ever hit the air, as well as when they're playing. If enough people downvote a song while it's in the … Read more

Facial recognition face-off: Three tools compared

Last week's Picasa software update from Google brought with it a neat trick--facial recognition. But it wasn't the first free consumer photo-editing software to find faces. In January, Apple unveiled the latest version of iLife, which included an updated version of iPhoto that could detect and recognize faces in your photos. And this time last year, Microsoft released an updated version of its Windows Live Photo Gallery desktop software that could find faces inside of photos, though it couldn't (and still can't) recognize who's in them.

So, how do these three stack up? To figure that out, we put them to the test. Using 500 sample photos on fresh installs of each program, we tracked around how long each of the tools took to process all the photos, as well as some notable hits and misses from each.

To be fair, our results may not scale, or match the experience you will have. For one, we're using a test bed of photos that's almost entirely 12-megapixel JPEG files, whereas some people may be shooting smaller or larger files that may be in different formats and contain large groups of people--something that can slow these programs down. You're also likely to have a whole lot more than 500 photos sitting around on your computer; we certainly do.

Note: Adobe's PhotoShop Elements software (for Windows | Mac), which also includes a facial recognition feature was not included in this roundup since it's a paid application. Technically iPhoto is as well, but we included it since it comes free on all Macs.

The apps and workflows

iPhoto

iPhoto is the only product of the bunch that's Mac-only. It comes bundled with all new Macs, but the latest version (which includes face detection) must be purchased as a software upgrade if you've got iPhoto '08 or lower. We've included it in this roundup as a free product since it comes bundled with all new Macs.

Face scanning in iPhoto happens automatically, but it's largely a manual process, requiring users to "train" the system to recognize certain faces. The program took around nine minutes to scan through our 500 test photos and when it was done it didn't offer up any suggestions of photos with faces in them.

Instead, users are required to click on a photo with a face in it and hope the program picked it up. If it has, users can simply type the name in--which will auto complete if the person is in your Mac address book. If someone's face was not found, but you can see it in the photo, you can manually contain the face inside of a box, then tag it with their name.

After you add names to just few photos, iPhoto's system begins to piece together others that look the same--although it doesn't learn as fast as it does for photos where it already found the faces. In my testing, it only took two photos to get it to offer up some more suggestions. If those suggestions are correct, continuing to add them was just a matter of a few clicks.

iPhoto's system for doing this isn't perfect though.… Read more

Trendsmap maps Twitter trends in real-time

Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot and PDFMeNot, have a new tool called Trendsmap that hasn't been designed to solve any productivity problems. Instead, it does just the opposite and serves as entertainment. It tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location by combining data from Twitter's API and What The Trend. It then sticks it onto a Google Map where users can sort by city or general region and see trending topics in real time.

All of this information is organized into something resembling a tag cloud, which floats around without any specific, or pinpointed location within each … Read more