Which do you feel is the better? Is the Mac dude better than the Uncool PC Guy? Sound off your opinions..

Let the war of the fanboi’s begin

cartoon credit: ageekstoty

Share more videos and cartoons in the comments. I will update the post with more of them in the future.

Meanwhile my personal favorite is the Mac. Doesn’t mean I’m Gay Alright!!

Google has just launched the Indian version of Youtube, which is good news for Indians not only in India but worldwide. Viewing videos online is fast catching up here in India with the growing penetration of Broadband. By offering localized content on Youtube Google has taken one more step to dominate the yet untapped internet video market in India.

Youtube India features all the content from the global Youtube as well, but the difference between the two begins in popularity charts etc.. The top video charts on Youtube India will reflect what Indians are watching now, the featured videos are programmed to cater to an Indian audience, and Google has also signed up local partners to distribute their content through YouTube.

Check out this funny YouTube India promotional video:

YouTube has also partnered with several content creators like Zoom Channel, NDTV, UTV, Rajshri Group, Indiaglitz and Music Today to distribute them on YouTube India.

Visit Youtube India (http://in.youtube.com)

I got an invite email from a friend of mine, and it was for a product named OoVoO. I usually delete all invite emails before marking them as spam. But this time, I opened this one to see what it had to say. After reading the features, I ended up installing he product and now I feel so happy for having opened that email, because I’m now a big fan of OoVoO.

OoVoO also happens to be a Webware 100 Winner and here’s what it does basically :

OoVoo is a free, standalone desktop chat application that has both a text and video chat capabilities. It can handle as many as six people in one video conference as well as a dozen in the integrated voice chat conference. Users can drop in and out of conversations, and the video windows will scale with a similar effect to iChat’s “swoop.”

OoVoo also doubles as a video e-mail service. Users can send each other video messages as long as a minute in length that are available right in the application or via e-mail. Users who get the e-mail are also provided a link that takes them to a live Flash version of the video, so they can access it while away from their home computer.

OoVoO is a real time video conferencing product. We can easily compare it with Yahoo messenger or Live messenger. But OoVoO is far superior, when we compare the video conferencing aspects of the product.

The video and audio quality is really mind blowing. Even when the bandwidth is limited it performs above what you’d expect it to. The video is almost instantaneous and there are no jerks in the voice.

OoVoo supports video conferencing for upto 6 people at a time. Even when all the 6 people are active the conference quality remains the same. The product has a neat interface in which all the 6 videos can be arranged.

One major feature that most of the other products in this niche lack and OoVoO has is the conference record facility. We can record the audio and video conferences that we conduct at the press of a single button. Already many companies here in India are using OoVoO for conducting discussions and recording them to be distributed.

I suggest you give this amazing app a try. You can download it from here.

This post was guest blogged by Kenney Jacob. He is a Successful Entrepreneur and Technology Evangelist. He blogs regularly at I am a Techie and his Personal blog.

Obviously you wouldn’t want to embarrass them,  so read on only if you want to have a good laugh. Well here’s a video guide that shows you to how to build a lie detector for cheap, that really works and is great for catching friends and your spouse red handed.

Give it a try and drop in your comments to let us know if it works for you.. RSS Readers Who can’t see the video click here

The Format wars for the next generation DVD’s are over. Blu-ray backed by Sony Corp. has finally managed to trump Toshiba backed HD-DVD. Toshiba finally gave up yesterday, and the decision that Toshiba took was an “agonizing decision” that Toshiba had to take, says Toshiba president Atsutoshi Nishida. But then this decision had to be taken in the best interests of the company.

The tipping point came when Warner Bros. decided to join Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM, Disney, 20th Century Fox, New Line Cinema and Lionsgate to support Blu-ray as the official format, making about 75% of all new movie releases available on Blu-ray. After that Blockbuster, Netflix and Wal-Mart all dropped support for HD DVD, and Best Buy also said it would favor Blu-ray.

But that battle for HD Video has just begun……

While the commercial and technical superiority of both the formats has long been debated, but with the pullout of the HD-DVD camp, things stand clear for Blu-ray. We would finally see the High Definition Video market take off, with the availability of cheaper  HD TV’s and the market penetration that Sony would achieve with Blu-ray. For most people the format wars are over, and Sony is now effectively the market leader in HD Video.

But things aren’t going to be all that easy for Blu-ray. For sure, Blu-ray is going to be the preferred choice for Disc media in the near future. But isn’t just about everything moving online? Yes HD Video downloads from the Internet are going to be a serious threat to Blu-ray. In the future, we will all be buying and downloading the stuff directly from the Internet, rather than buying Physical Media.

With iTunes, XBOX Live, and Vudu already offering HD Downloads on their services, we might as well see another war on the HD Video format. But iTunes and the other online services are still in their infant stages, so it would take them atleast a year to catch up with Blu-ray. But Apple TV seriously has the potential to tap the HD Movie Market, with its rental service.

With the competition that Blu-ray would face from online solutions, there also lie challenges for services like iTunes, because HD Media demand more storage and bandwidth. Storage isn’t a problem really but Bandwidth will remain a concern. At the current rate of growth, HD Video will clog the pipes.

So the next generation HD Video battle lies ahead.. Who do you think has an advantage here? Lets discuss in the comments.

Amidst all the media frenzy on the Yahoo acquisition, and the protesting Flickr Users opposing the Micr0s0ft takeover, we have yet another rumor from Dan Faber at ZDNet who believes that Flickr would be debuting its video service in the coming months. This isn’t all that surprising, its been there forever in the rumor mills but its timing has something interesting, considering the impending hostile bid from Microsoft.

As I’ve already mentioned before this deal isn’t a good idea for the Web2.0 culture, that Yahoo has given us for the past few years in the form of Del.icio.us and Flickr. Now with this deal looming overhead, Yahoo would do better to launch Flickr Video. Stuart Butterfield (Flickr co-founder) had told TechCrunch last May that Flickr Video would be coming “soon”. This was reaffirmed by Bloomberg in August. But its already February now and we haven’t seen it yet.

What plans Yahoo exactly has for Flickr is unknown, but whatever the plans are, I don’t want to see yet another Youtube clone. I guess Yahoo does what Flickr does best, that is personal stuff and scenery. Maybe Flickr Video could have videos that we would shoot during holidays with our families and friends and stuff like that. Going behind Youtube would be a big mistake IMHO.

I am just keeping my fingers crossed on this one. It depends what the board wants to do with this, should they launch it now, or launch after the prevailing storm? Whatever it is I don’t want Microsoft to mess things up with Flickr, and the picture above conveys it all. And as Fake Steve Ballmer said at the ZDNet blog WMV only!.

[photo: flickr/lopbot]

]]> http://dailyapps.net/2008/02/stealth-mode-yahoo-working-on-flickr-video/feed/ 1 http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/hack-attack-record-video-on-the-iphone/ http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/hack-attack-record-video-on-the-iphone/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:52:10 +0000 Karthik Kastury http://dailyapps.net/2007/12/hack-attack-record-video-on-the-iphone/ Read The Rest →]]>

When the iPhone first came out, many people complained about the lack of Video recording capabilities in the iPhone. Many People including me thought it was pretty lame for Apple to release iPhone without the video editing features in it, because Apple touted the iPhone as a complete Multimedia device, and I haven’t really seen a Multimedia phone that comes without Video Recording. Heck even my Nokia 5300 does it pretty well.

But wait, didn’t I say this post was about recording video on the iPhone. Yes it is about that, and it really is possible to record Video on the iPhone using a third party app developed by drunknbass. Not much is really known about the Application right now, but here are a few details..

The application at present, record only a 5 second video at 10fps and can replay the video after the recording is complete. However, it can’t save the video to the iPhone’s memory. But the final version of the application should be able to do that, as well as record videos for an unlimited time (well, as far as the iPhone’s memory would allow it to), at a 2 Megapixel resolution and a quality of 30 fps. Also, the final release should bring a User Interface too, as the current version does not have one.

To Download the app to your iPhone, you need to register at the developers website. Please tell us how it goes, as I am willing to hear some feedback on this..

Steve Chen said that the high-quality streams will be available in the next months, but only for some of the videos. This is probably the reason why YouTube’s bulk uploader increased the size limit for a video from 100 MB to 1 GB.

YouTube probably has the lowest quality videos on the Web today thanks to the Flash 7 Technology. According to Wikipedia,

“YouTube’s video playback technology is based on Macromedia’s Flash Player 7 and uses the Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec. (…) [The video] has pixel dimensions of 320 by 240 and runs at 25 frames per second. The maximum data rate is 300kbit/s.”

Steve Chen also confirmed that in YouTube’s internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was uploaded it. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with — 320 x 240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn’t going to help much. So expect the rollout of High Quality Videos to be pretty slow from Youtube since the existing setup is working well for them, so this is just an experiment.

I just couldn’t prevent myself from trying it out, so I downloaded it, and trust me, it completely blew me off. I was using Joost till now to watch quality Video content online, but now Miro is going to replace Joost, Believe me, its that good.

Miro is way better than Joost in many aspects, and let me list out some of them…

• It’s open-source
• It’s DRM-free
• It’s friendly to all content creators, professional and user-generated alike
• It’s high definition
• It’s BitTorrent enabled
• It has 2,700 channels listed in the Miro Guide
• Of those 2,700, about 200 are from commercial broadcasters
• It connects you to all the video-sharing sites like YouTube, Revver etc.. 
• Miro uses the VLC video engine to play nearly every video format you’ve ever come across.

Miro beats Joost hands down in just about every department, but one place where Joost really shines is the professionally produced content. There is just no alternative to Joost if you are looking for high quality content.

Here are a few screenshots of Miro that I would like to share with you guys (damn its too sexy!!)  :

Guess what Joost  has finished uninstalling itself on my PC and Miro works like a charm. Thanks Miro team! So go ahead and download yourself a copy of Miro today (Works on Linux, OSX, Windows etc..)..

For the time being the Meebo integration is via Joost Widgets, but over time you can expect it to become more direct and better. Here is a screenshot of the inline Chat in Joost in action :

Its nice to Joost innovating and adding new features. With over 15000 shows and 250 channels Joost is getting ready for the primetime. On a related note, the Joost client has become more stable and faster recently which is good news for a lot of us.

Via Techcrunch