Jaris is an open source and JavaScript controllable FLV player that comes with many features.

It has the most standard controls like play/pause, volume, full-screen and users can switch between multiple aspect ratios.

The player supports both HTTP pseudostreaming + RTMP streaming and can communicate with the Youtube API.

For further customization, a poster image can be shown on initial load, any logo can be permanently attached and control colors can be changed.

Also, Jaris can be managed with the help of keyboard shortcuts.

Last week, CS Review, a service to get feedback easily for creative jobs by Adobe, was shared at WRD.

And, with that service, a giveaway of 10 Adobe gift bags and 2 months of Lynda.com subscriptions was announced. Today, winners are selected but, before that, let's remember:

What is CS Review

It is a part of Adobe CS Live (a series of services for designers and developers) which makes creative reviews so simple.

For any number of JPG, PNG, .F4V and .FLV files, a new review process can be started directly from CS5 softwares or online, and e-mailed to friends, colleagues to get feedback for them

They can write their comments for each file and you or other reviewers can reply to each other's comments.

After all, you have all the feedback organized and stored under your hands.

Just like any other CS Live services (including the Adobe BrowserLab), it is free for 1 year once you sign-up by April 30, 2011.

And, the winners:

Here are the winners of 10 Adobe gift bags and 2 months passes to Lynda.com tutorials:

• Djurre (comment #218155)
• Alex (comment #218264)
• Johan du Toit (comment #219843)
• Rob (comment #218212)
• Federico (comment #218148)
• Jeremy (comment #218693)
• Eko Priyanto (comment #218472)
• saurabh hkirwal (comment #218206)
• Rogier (comment #218163)
• Yogeshnb (comment #218552)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.

After completing (or during) a design process, it is so common to ask friends, colleagues or the customer: "what they think about it?".

Adobe CS Review is an online service that helps you get an easy and organized answer for that.

It enables you to start a review online or directly from the CS5 series of Photoshop , InDesign , Illustrator or Premiere Pro.

You can add any number of JPG, PNG, .F4V and .FLV files, add your comments to each and share them with anyone via e-mail to get feedbacks.

It is even possible to let other reviewers invite others for a feedback with a bigger community.

Every invited user can reach the creatives by clicking a link in the e-mail and share their thoughts + reply to other's comments.

Within the application, it is possible to switch between creatives quickly and zoom in/out to them.

Adobe CS Review is a non-complicated service that is easy-to-use and gives you the feeling that "feedbacks are under control".

Just like any other CS Live services (including the Adobe BrowserLab), it is free for 1 year once you sign-up by April 30, 2011.

Giveaway of 10 Gift Bags By Adobe – How to Win Them?

Adobe is kind to giveaway 10 bags where each of them includes a $25 Best Buy gift card, laptop skin and a tumbler.

Also, Lynda.com, an online tutorial service that has detailed content on Adobe products too, is giving away two-months passes for their tutorials to all the winners.

All you have to do is to comment to this post with what you think of the Adobe CS Review service and winners will be selected randomly on 21October 2010 (1 week later) with the query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=1890 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 10

Good luck to everyone.

There are various video sharing services, like Youtube or Vimeo, in the web that can host and serve the files for us which is great.

However, there are cases that these services may not be a good fit like "unbranded videos", "custom sizes", a custom player, etc. This is when we usually need to convert/encode our videos to make them ready for the web.

And there are multiple formats like the popular FLV or HTML5 video formats like OGG, h.264 and WebM where you may need multiple versions of the same video for maximum compability.

Here are free video converter applications that support these formats to help you complete this process easily:

Miro Video Converter (Windows & Mac)

A very simple but powerful application to convert any video into MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora, or for Android, iPhone, and more.

Miro Video Converter is open source and has presets to convert videos into selected device with the right size + format.

Freemake (Windows)

Freemake is a feature-rich video converter that supports too many formats from avi, wmv, flv or swf to mp3, ogg, aac, wma and much more.

The program also has built-in video editing, photo slideshow creation and burning the outputs to DVD.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, many projects are built around real-time communication (text, voice or video) like collaboration tools, chat applications and much more.

Adobe® Flash® Media Server is probably the most widely used solution for streaming video and real-time communication. It is a stable product that has been experienced for years and used by many companies.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a free solution to stream your media, there are so few alternatives that you can rely on.

And here are 2 of them (if you know any other free and solid ones, please share):

Red5

Red5 is an open source Flash server that is written in Java and supports:

• streaming audio/video (FLV, MP3, F4V, MP4, AAC, M4A)
• recording client streams (FLV only)
• shared objects
• live stream publishing (Sorenson, VP6, h.264, MP3, AAC and more)

It has installers for OSX and Windows. Also, it can be downloaded as a zip file to be used in any OS.

Mammoth Server

Mammoth is also an open source Flash streaming server that is built with C++ and can run on Windows and *nix OSs.

It can stream all Flash codecs like h263, h264, mp3, vp6, speex, nellymoser, etc.

By using FFmpeg it has has container support for most formats: mov, flv, mkv, mp3 and more.

The server is still in alpha phase but very promising.

If you know any other free and solid alternatives, please share and we'll be happy to add them to the list.

With the rise of HTML5, formats like H.264 or OGG is being used much more everyday besides the well-known FLV (and yes, there is HD too).

In order to be compatible with every device and browser, you may need to serve multiple formats of the same video (like Youtube or Vimeo does).

And, with new videos being uploaded every minute, this can be a complex situation.

Panda is an online platform that enables you to convert videos into multiple formats in the cloud.

With a REST-based API, the platform not only helps encoding the videos, but the uploading process as well.

How Does It Work?

It is actually pretty simple and you can be up & going within hours (including the uploading and encoding of them).

1. create a form on your site which includes the provided Flash file upload component
2. user starts uploading the video (Panda displays a progress bar) and, once uploaded, it is added to the encoding queue
3. Panda submits you the ID of the video being encoded and puts it to your S3 bucket + updates you back when it is completed
4. That's it, you're ready to stream.

The platform offers ready to use codes for integration like a jQuery client uploader, PHP, Python libraries and a gem for Ruby.

Rather than pricing the service on a per-video basis, Panda provides you a dedicated cloud where you can encode an unlimited number of videos.

It is currently in public beta and free during this period. After that, a dedicated cloud of any size can be chosen depending on the processing power required.

P.S. This is a sponsored post.

f4Player is a free and open source Flash video player that can play .fly, .f4v or .mp4 files in websites or within AS3 projects.

It is lightweight (8kb) and has a skinnable interface (few skins are included with the download).

The player supports progressive downloads (ability to play the downloaded portion of a file while the download is still in progress) and fullscreen display.

MediaCore is an open source platform for publishing audio, video & podcasts which makes distributing media on any website so easy.

The platform supports many media formats like FLV, M4A or MP3 which can also be played via the integrated FlowPlayer.

It can pull media from any source (Youtube, Vimeo, Google Video, etc.) & a site-owner can publish media from the administrative interface or let users create the content via the upload interface.

MediaCore has RSS feed support for iTunes & Feedburner.

It can display the page views, comments or how many viewers “liked” a video to th eend users like Youtube.

And, a powerful admin panel helps controllingall the system from managing media to approving comments & much more.

The application is built with the TurboGears Python Framework and MooTools Javascript Framework.

JCPlayer is a free Flash video player component for displaying/streaming FLV files easily.

It works both with Flash CS3 & CS4 or as a widget object directly in HTML without Flash.

The player has fullscreen option & can be customized completely (includes ready-to-use skins).

P.S. JCPlayer is free to be used in personal websites & requires a license for commercial ones.

FLV Player is an open source & free resource to display FLV files on websites.

It is compatible with FLV version 1.1 & comes in 5 types:

• mini: player with a start/pause button & timeline control
• normal: mini + stop button
• maxi: normal + sound & fullscreen buttons
• multi: maxi + multiple video display option
• JavaScript: a player with no graphical interface but can be totally controlled via JS

The player can be controlled with keyboard for a better accessibility.

P.S. Download links can be found inside the "details" page of each player version.