The VideoBlocks giveaway of 3×1 month unlimited-download accounts has just ended, winners are selected and announced below.

What is VideoBlocks?

It is a website that offers unlimited downloads of 30,000+ stock videos, motion backgrounds, sound effects, production music, etc. to its members for a good price.

There are videos/sounds on almost anything from explosions to nature, locations/places to animations or door sounds to dog barking ones that will help adding a twist to the footage being worked on.

Also there are other categories like looping videos, slow motion, time-lapse or nature and animals with each having their own sub-categories.

These resources can be used in any type of projects (TV, web, radio..) and a free 7-day unlimited downloads for any sign-up is offered to text the system.

The winners

Here are the winners of this giveaway:

• stay (comment #400600)
• torn (comment #399944)
• PavelM (comment #401357)

Congratulations and thanks to everyone for joining it.

VideoBlocks, a fresh website offering professional footage, is giving away "3 Accounts with unlimited downloads for 1 month" to WRD readers.

Joining the giveaway is a very easy process, just check the details at the bottom of this post.

What is VideoBlocks

Using videos when presenting a product, web app or almost any other content in the web is becoming more and more common each day.

Although a production-from-scratch to make such videos attractive can be pricey, using VideoBlocks can help minimizing these costs.

It is a website providing unlimited downloads of 30,000+ stock videos, motion backgrounds, sound effects, production music, etc. to its members for a good price. And, these resources can be used in any type of projects (TV, web, radio..)

VideoBlocks regularly adds new clips to their database and the ones presented are very well-categorized/tagged which makes searching pretty easy.

There are videos/sounds on almost anything from explosions to nature, locations/places to animations or door sounds to dog barking ones that will help adding a twist to the footage being worked on.

Also there are other categories like looping videos, slow motion, time-lapse or nature and animals with each having their own sub-categories.

The footage presented is being used by well known companies like ABC, The History Channel, Discovery Channel and much more.

P.S. VideoBlocks offers a free 7-day unlimited downloads for any sign-up.

How to join the giveaway?

Just comment to this post and the winners will be selected on 28 September 2011 (1 week later) with the query below:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=2474 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck.

Few days ago, FitText, a jQuery plugin that auto-arranges the size of fonts according to the size of the element wrapping them -so they don't break-, was shared at WRD.

And now, it is FitVids.JS, again a jQuery plugin and a similar solution but, this time, for videos.

It automates the Intrinsic Ratio Method by Thierry Koblentz to achieve fluid width videos in your responsive web design.

Usage is simple, just call the fitVids function by targeting a video and the element will be auto-wrapped with a <div> and CSS for resizing it will be applied.

Currently, it is compatible with major services like Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.TV or Viddler.

FlowPlayer, which is an amazing video player for websites, has a new version: FlowPlayer 3, with powerful features.

The player has a JavaScript API (with jQuery support) that enables you to control almost every aspect of the player. This makes the player so flexible & easy to transform into any form.

FlowPlayer is totally skinnable & every part (component) of the player can be removed or re-positioned.

It can display images besides the videos (& audio-mp3 support will be added very soon).

And, with a plugin support (implemented in JavaScript and Flash) there are even more features like playlist support, displaying content over the videos & more.

FlowPlayer has both free & commercial licenses where free license has a logo & commercial licenses are totally unbranded.

Chance To Win 3 Commercial Licenses

FlowPlayer is running a contest: "most creative use of Flowplayer". They are simply asking you to use FlowPlayer in an innovative way & 3 best ideas will win commercial licenses ($95/value).

To join the contest, post your URL where you used FlowPlayer to here (contest is running until the end of the year).

Want to get inspired? See the beautiful demos here.

TimeLiner is an open source application which enables users to contribute to videos, audio & slides with text.

This texts are time-specific, which means: when the media is played again other users will be seeing the messages at the exact moment they were posted.

The application is very easy to use; users just click "respond to timeline", the media pauses and a message can be entered.

TimeLiner uses JW Player (see WRD post) and is also offered as a hosted widget.

Shadowbox is a cross-browser, cross-platform Lightbox-like media viewer which supports all the commonly used media types like images, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Flash, Flash video, and even external web pages.

Shadowbox can be used easily with the popular JavaScript frameworks as it already has adapters for jQuery, Prototype + Scriptaculous, Ext.js & Yahoo! User Interface Library.

Flash Video is supported via JW FLV Player. Although many types of video are supported, for compatibilty reasons, Shadowbox advises that Flash Video to be used.

Zenphoto is a php – mysql image & video gallery script which has all the features an image gallery must have. It is built with simplicity in mind, this makes Zenphoto is a very easy to use  gallery script both for users & admins.

Some features of Zenphoto:

• Image & video albums + sub-albums
• Ftp or admin panel uploading of images, videos
• Commenting
• Tags
• RSS feed
• Powerful search
• Plugins support (WordPress plugins, Facebook integration & more)
• Themes support

Zenphoto has an active user community where support can be found for this nice php mysql image & video gallery script.

As there are very nice flash & ajax image galleries, this flash gallery application is a bit different from the others as the galleries are created from a desktop application and then uploaded to your website.

Slideroll Gallery AV (formerly Picklish), is a flash image & video gallery tool that lets you create your galleries from a simple drag and drop interface. PC users can also record their own narration with their galleries.

Snarf photos feature of Slideroll Gallery AV lets you to download any images from a website or a rss feed directly into your gallery.

Look and feel of the galleries can be customized and after uploading the image & video gallery to your website, html editing is possible for any tweakings needed.

Videobox is a 6kb script, which shows your videos in the page with an overlay. It was inspired from Lightbox.v2 and uses some of the Slimbox‘s code. It’s written for the wonderful mootools library. And used swfobject to embed flash.