Online videos are highly popular and get posted in two forms on third party websites. Videos can be embedded on the page so that they can be watched directly on the page or posted as a link that redirects the user to the video portal to watch it there. The second option can become annoying [...]

We have just reviewed one of the first video converters that is supporting the new webm format. The conversion creates videos with the extension .webm and it is only natural to try and play it on the installed video player. Chance is the video player does not support webm out of the box, at least [...]

There have been an increasing number of internet censorship instances in the last couple of years including China blocking access to news sites during the Beijing Olympics to that terrible opponent of free-speech, Australia.  Now Pakistan is on the case, blocking YouTube for what it calls “growing sacrilegious content” the BBC has written.

If you haven’t experienced Pandora radio you don’t know what you’re missing. Pandora can stream music to your web browser specifically tuned to your tastes. Imagine having that ability right on your desktop – always at your fingertips? Pretty cool eh? Well as of now there is no stand alone Pandora client for Linux nor [...]

Have you ever wondered what the trends of tomorrow will be? What people will be talking about? You can now get a headstart with Zoofs, a brand new service that scans Twitter for video links and aggregates them into a most popular listing on their website. According to information posted on the service’s website more [...]

Many video content creators want to make sure that they videos reach the largest audience possible. To achieve this they upload their videos to multiple video hosting services such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Facebook or MSN Video. Doing that manually can take quite some time. It would involve accessing the service’s website, logging in, selecting the [...]

Lately I have been going on and on about the Ubuntu Music Store. So much so, it would seem I have forgotten the other music store that is friends to Linux. Not so. I am still a fan of the Amazon MP3 store and last night I took the opportunity to purchase something. I was [...]

Countries all over the world, especially those that claim to be democratic (when in fact we all know that they are not), plan to introduce various control mechanisms to increase their control over the content that is published and shared on the Internet. Cleanternet is satirical website that tries to educate Europeans (and users from [...]

I had recently been on a roll with the Ubuntu One Music Store. In that series I spoke a lot of Rhythbox, because that was the “default” player supporting Ubuntu One Music Store. But Rhythmbox isn’t the only player in town. Oh no. In fact, another outstanding player gets plenty o’ lovin’ from the Ubuntu [...]

I’m on a roll with Ubuntu One Music Store and I thought I would finish it by showing you how to burn those purchases songs/albums onto CD. Of course, if you haven’t already, you will want to check out the previous two articles: Manager your Ubuntu One Account, and Ubuntu One Music Store has arrived. [...]

Yesterday I wrote about the Ubuntu One Music Store (see my article “Ubuntu One Music Store has arrived“). This little feature is starting to drum up a lot of excitement throughout the Linux community. Although this feature is also drumming up a lot of anger from other distribution communities, it is an outstanding new service [...]

This morning I woke up to write an article for Ghacks. I was searching around for inspiration while I was updating my Ubuntu 10.4 beta install. Near the end of the update I thought “Let’s just check to see the status of the Ubuntu One Music Store”. So I fired up Rhythmbox and, to my [...]

The video hosting website Youtube hosts all kinds of videos from movie trailers to music videos, from educational videos to personal ones. We all know that it is possible to download videos from Youtube so that they can be watched locally without additional bandwidth costs. Furthermore, it is possible to copy the videos to devices [...]

The music streaming service Last.fm announced earlier today in a blog post that they would retire their on-demand track streaming for customers in the UK, US and Germany. On-Demand playback on Last.fm was restricted to some countries and basically allowed users from those countries to listen to full-length previews of those songs. Last.fm radio streams [...]

The Internet has made it easier to discover new music. This is actually not limited to music as it is also possible to find new book authors and books, video games or movies that you have never heard before. We are concentrating the discovery in this report on music, more specifically music from artists that [...]

If you have been playing around much with the Alpha releases of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx you may have noticed something special that was announced some time ago is actually coming to fruition.  Announced soon after the release of 9.10, the Ubuntu Music Store is a new addition to the Ubuntu Linux desktop and promises to [...]

If you think radio you either think of the good old fashioned radio or Internet radio, both with little to no interaction and user contributions. Jelli tries to change that by offering Internet radio stations that are run by its users. It basically works by allowing users to vote for songs with the most voted [...]

Find, Mix and Watch. That is the slogan of Youtube’s newest addition Youtube Disco. The new feature is basically a music exploration service. It begins by entering an artist, band or song in the search form on the start page. Youtube will then crawl its vast database and display a results page that consists of [...]

I have a ton of various music files on my machine that are in various states of migrating from .mp3 to different formats. The primary reason for this is because of the issue of licensing between Linux and the MP3 format. And although there are GUI tools to do nearly every job you need, there [...]

All too often the musically inclined seem to feel a bit left out of the Linux, open source community. At least that was the way for a long time. And then came along a few new tools and a few recording-specific distributions (such as 64 Studio and Linux Multimedia Studio) and the open source music [...]

I have a number of large music directories on numerous drives. The files in these directories have been added (over the years) from various sources. The biggest problem with my collections is the tags on the files aren’t all correct. Because of this, some music players won’t list the information for the file which means [...]

I’ve used a lot of music players over the years. Pretty much they all take the same tact on organizing your music – you have a library and you have playlists. Pretty cut and dry. But today I came across a music player, Aqualung, that went about things a bit differently. And not only does [...]

Youtube has been one of the prime locations for music buffs around the world to view music videos and listen to music. Many record companies and individual artists use Youtube to promote their products. Users who have been searching for music that is distributed by the major record labels Universal Music Group, Sony Music and [...]

I have been working with the Acetone ISO manager and have been in awe at how much this tool can do. The creators of Acetone call it a CD/DVD image manager, but from my perspective it is much more than that. Acetone is more like an emulator for different types of ISOs that can allow [...]

Q: What is a “brasero”? A: A Spanish oven that is placed under a table in order to heat those sitting at the table. Correct, but not in terms of Linux. A 2.0: A GTK+ front end for cdrtools, growisofs, and (optionally) libburn. Correct! If you have used a modern Linux system then you know how [...]

Jamendo is a music community where artists share their music with the rest of the community. Users can download and play the songs without having to pay money to do so. The service has an index of more than 27000 albums to chose from and the social networking elements like tagging and reviewing make it [...]

Do you have a massive MP3 collection that contains files with problems? Don’t you wish you had a program that could search through that collection, find problems with those files, and fix the problems? Fortunately for all of your MP3 horders, there are programs for just that task. One of those programs, for the Linux [...]

For most lovers of music on the go, the default seems to be the combination of iTunes and iP* (where * is either hone or od). This is great for Apple and Windows users. But where do Linux users get their new music? Oh sure you can purchase the CD, rip it, and copy it [...]

Seems that the Youtube developers are finally starting to implement new features at the popular video hosting portal. After the announcement of 1080p video support which began rolling out in the last 24 hours. There does not seem to be an option just yet to search for those 1080p videos on Youtube. Youtube videos that [...]

Youtube users experience a wide variety of problems and difficulties on the popular video hosting portal. Probably the most common for most users are playback problems while playing Youtube videos. This can be that a youtube video is not loading at all or – and this seems to be more common – that it stops [...]

Youtube and other video portals on the Internet have come a long way since the beginning of the online video boom. What started with low resolutions has now grown over the year to keep pace with the high definition development in the TV, digital camcorder and media market. Youtube announced yesterday in the official Youtube [...]

Do you have multiple machines around your house that would like to share a centralized server for multi-media? Having such a server for music allows for consolidation, ease of use, and space saving on client PCs. Of course to many users, the idea of setting up a multi-media server sounds like it would be a [...]

If you are looking for music chance is that you find it at Youtube. It really does not matter if you are looking for something new, old, rare or popular as Youtube provides access to millions of different songs from artists from all over the world. Several online services have already used that vast repertoire [...]

The Xbox Media Center arrived in 2004 and became popular so quickly that it became clear more ports would be needed. So the XBMC team allowed this tool to evolve into a cross platform media center that would run on just about anything you can think of.  But, of course, the purpose of this article [...]

Recently I finally managed to get rid of my iPhone for a much more Linux-geek friendly mobile – the HTC Hero. One of my issues with the iPhone was that, in order to do ANY syncing, you had to use iTunes, which I really didn’t like. And although the HTC Hero has yet to be [...]

I’m sure by now everyone here knows about Hulu. If not, Hulu is a rather huge collection of television programs that can be viewed on line, for free, with few commercial interruptions. It’s brilliant. You can watch old reruns of What’s Happenin? or Mork and Mindy or Alf! Yes, Alf! But many of you may [...]

Spotify has been in the news lately and it is likely that the music streaming service will become highly popular once they open registration for users in additional countries of the world. The service is currently limited to streaming music to a few countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden or France. Only users from the [...]

When I switched to a Mac, I did not purchase an iPod for a few months. I previously had a Creative Zen Vision M media player. Unfortunately, this device was not mass storage, but utilised ‘Media Transfer Protocol’. Whilst several pieces of software on Windows provide the facility to move music to the device, OS [...]

It sometimes happens that I discover a need for another software program while reviewing an application. This happened during the review of DVD Slideshow Gui which is an excellent tool for creating DVD photo slideshows. The problem that I encountered during the review was that the program only allowed only one mp3 file for the [...]

What is the name of the song they are playing now in this movie? I guess everyone has asked that question at some point in time only to find out that it was very difficulty to get an answer unless a movie soundtrack was released with the song in question being on the record. Most [...]

Over the past month I have made it my goal to stop using the proprietary MP3 format for audio in favor of the free, open standard Ogg Vorbis format. The primary reasons for doing this is 1) Modern Linux distributions do not ship with mp3 support built in (due to licensing constraints) and 2) My [...]

After reading Martin’s fine article “Download Youtube Videos” today, I had to give a bit of a Linux perspective and show how to do this in the Linux operating system. Inititially I assumed this would have to be done via the command line, because that is how I have always done conversions. But I have [...]

Microsoft and Reverbnation are currently running a promotion that is offering 1000 songs for free download. The songs are available in mp3 and m4a format and can be downloaded directly from one of the websites the promotion is running on. This includes the Windows Myspace page and a special Windows directory at Reverbnation. You find [...]

So you went ahead and purchased that System 76 laptop or you decided to finally install Linux on your laptop. You now have a Linux based laptop with a webcam. But how do you take advantage of this hardware? You want to be able to use that web cam to upload photos to facebook (or [...]

If you remember my last media entry, The best Linux media players, you’ll remember I left out one very important entry – Songbird. At the time I really hadn’t given this relatively new entry to the media players a try. But recent “upgrades” to Rhythmbox and Banshee which left either 1) much to be desired [...]

If you don’t know, the Bubba 2 is a piece of hardware, driven by the Linux operating system, created by ecXito. The Bubba 2 can stream media, serve files, share printers, and more. How? The Bubba 2 uses Samba to share out services and files. Because it uses Samba, connecting to the Bubba 2 is [...]

Streamtuner is one of those Linux applications that would most likely go unnoticed without mention. That is a shame considering how easy it makes finding and tuning into various music streams without having to touch the command or even google your favorite types of music. With Streamtuner you will find plenty of music genres at [...]

Almost everyone has a mobile phone today and phones themselves have gone beyond just devices to use to talk to people. Today’s phones come ready with a whole bunch of bells and whistles for their owners to play with. One of these includes support for video. One of the best resources for an owner of [...]

Recently I have had a lot of people asking how to play various media files in Linux. Since most users are migrating over from either Mac or Windows, they are either used to one single application handling their media files or at least knowing exactly what apps handle each media type. When they migrate over [...]

If you are looking for an easy to use music encoder you might want to give the latest version of winLame a try. Beta 1 of the 2009 release has just been made available on the official homepage of the project adding several improvements to previous versions of the lame frontend for the Windows operating [...]