The Liveside blog discovered all download links prior to the official announcement by Microsoft, which is expected to hit the official website later today.

Below are the web and full download links for all supported languages of the beta. As you can see, seven languages next to English are available: French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.

• English: Web – Full
• French: Web – Full
• German: Web – Full
• Dutch: Web – Full
• Portuguese (Brazilian): Web – Full
• Spanish: Web – Full
• Japanese: Web – Full
• Chinese (Simplified): Web – Full

The full installer comes at a size of about 151 Megabytes, the web installer is considerably smaller, but requires an Internet connection during setup to download additional program packages.

So what’s new in the new beta version of Windows Live Essentials?

This new version of the suite, incorporates new icons, new features, many bugs fixed since version Beta releases and what more important… The incorporation Windows Live Language Setting with all language packs (MUI) & (LIP) for example Catalan and Euskera for Spanish version.
This program brings new features like the ability to change languages or install (automatically for the web) the additional languages.

Additional information will become available once Microsoft announces the new beta version official on their Windows Live blog.

Update: The post is live, and it contains lots of information about the Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh:

Performance and quality of service improvements

A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
More efficient video chat – Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
Better facial recognition – Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
Larger movie uploads – Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480×640 vs. the previous 320×480).
Higher bit-rate movies – Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
Better spell-checking – Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
Better integration with Office – Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
Faster web filtering – Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

Facebook chat in Messenger

Many of you have been asking for Facebook chat, and it’s finally here. More than half of all Messenger customers also use Facebook. With the previous beta, you got a rich social view that brought together all your updates (including those from Facebook) and gave you one place to see and comment on them. With the new Facebook chat integration, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. And if you use Facebook but don’t use Messenger today, you now have an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.

New Facebook chat integration

Connect to Facebook and Windows Live

Quick previews and improved tree view in Photo Gallery

One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. With the beta update today, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.

Flickr video publishing and Snapshot in Movie Maker

With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.

In addition, because we know many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, we’ve extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Gallery to Flickr too.

Several of the improvements and new features improve the user experience a lot. Facebook chat integration will appeal to a lot of users, the new option to upload movies and photos to Flickr is plain awesome, the improvements in movie maker that now supports higher quality content, coupled with the increase in movie resolutions that can be uploaded to SkyDrive show that Microosft is on the right way.

We suggest to download the Windows Live Essentials Full installer which offers several advantages including the possibility to distribute it to several computer systems without having to download the program packages over and over again.

Have you tried the second beta of Windows Live Essentials? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Update: The beta releases are outdated and have been removed. You can download the latest Windows Live Essentials release from the official website now.

Windows Live Movie Maker in its current form is a stripped down version of Windows Movie Maker. It lacks features like overlaying text on video or timeline and audio edits.

Windows 7 and Windows Vista users do however have an option to download Windows Movie Maker. Microsoft has made available Windows Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista users. And this Movie Maker version is also compatible with Windows 7.

Windows Movie Maker 2.6 can be downloaded from the Microsoft servers. Windows 7 and Vista users who want to give the new Windows Live Movie Maker a chance can download it as part of the Windows Live suite from the Windows Live homepage.

It should be theoretically possible to download and install both movie maker versions to directly compare them on the computer system.

Have you been working with Windows Movie Maker or Windows Live Movie Maker? If so, which do you prefer and why?

The updated Windows Live Movie Maker is part of Windows Live Essentials and can therefor be downloaded by downloading the Windows Live Essentials installer from the Microsoft website. Microsoft’s main focus was to make the Windows Live Movie Maker as easy to use as possible. One of the project manager demonstrates that it is possible to create a movie that includes photos, video clips and a sound track in less than 30 seconds.

Microsoft has added new features to polish movies that are created in Windows Live Movie Maker. This includes more transitions, effects and video editing features. A total of 60 transitions, 18 pan and zoom options and 20 visual effects are available in the latest version. Video sharing and has also been made easier. The new version of Windows Live Movie Maker features an import to Youtube link right in the main menu. It is also possible to publish to Facebook and Microsoft promises to add other popular services later on as plugins.

Videos can also be burned directly to DVD or saved in high definition format to be played on computer systems and high definition TVs or low definition formats for mobile devices and email. Windows 7 users do get some extra features like increased capabilities for creating HD movies and additional file format support.

Windows Live Movie Maker offers an easy way to create movies in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The reason why Windows Live Movie Maker is not available for Windows XP:

You’d like to use Windows Live Movie Maker on Windows XP. Given the technical requirements, unfortunately we won’t be able to support Windows XP at this time. But Windows Movie Maker 2.1 for Windows XP is still a great option if you’re still using Windows XP. As we mentioned in our initial post about Windows Live Movie Maker last October, we’ve built a new engine for Movie Maker that makes use of some of the latest and greatest technologies available on the Windows platform. Introduced in Windows Vista (and supported in Windows 7) is a new graphics driver model, which brings more reliable and stable support for high-end graphics. We’ve also built our new engine on top of DirectX, which improves speed and enables even more advanced capabilities over time. Finally, we’ve also built Windows Live Movie Maker on top of the new Windows 7 Scenic platform (and have brought it to Windows Vista as well) which makes our new user interface possible.

There are two major differences between Jumpcut and local video editing programs. The first is that you have to upload the raw video file before you can edit it. This can take some time depending on your upload speed. The second difference is a file size limitation of 100 megabytes which means that you either have to cut your raw video file into 100 Megabyte pieces or forget about editing it online at Jumpcut.

Jumpcut supports most of the commonly used video files including avi, flv, mpg and mov and uploading multiple files at once. It is also possible to upload pictures and audio files or import them from Flickr or Facebook. I tried the service today and somehow was not able to upload videos at all. The videos would stop at about 50-60%. I did try different videos and formats which can only mean that they have some problems at the moment.

The functionality that Jumpcug offers is pretty basic and thus easy to learn. You can slice, cut and duplicate the videos that you have uploaded, add titles and sounds to them, apply all kinds of nice effects (butterflies, invert and rain for instance) and apply actions to the video.

One thing is however really bothering me. There is no obvious way to download the created movie. You can publish it (public or private) on the Jumpcut website but I was not able to find a download link for the movie. This means that you have to use a download manager like Orbit, a plugin or extension to download the newly created movie.

Publishing the movie on the web does have some advantages. Instead of burning x movies for everyone who wants a copy you simply send everyone a link that points to the movie on the Internet.