Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Music Tuesday: Your guide to discovering music on YouTube

Posted: 22 Mar 2011 04:44 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Music Tuesday: Your guide to discovering music on YouTube

Today we're launching a weekly blog series in which we discuss the music we're featuring on youtube.com/music -- and why. We'll share the videos that have us tweeting obsessively, playlists which delve into all the great new (and old!) music scenes percolating on the site, and even the occasional streaming album premier. Sure, we're only scratching the surface of YouTube's vast musical universe -- but you've got to start somewhere, right? Welcome to the first edition, and we hope you discover some great music with us!

Dig for Fire's SXSW Lawn Party Highlights
We had a big presence last week in Austin. Besides our excellent party, we were also psyched to partner this year with the taste-making New York record store Other Music and indie videographers Dig for Fire to present their two-day Lawn Party. The list of performers was stellar: James Blake, !!!, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and many more. Dig for Fire has graciously put together some exclusive videos for us, featuring live performances and backstage interviews. Kick back and watch; now's your chance to feel like you had a VIP badge.

Music Discovery: The '80s are back...again!
This week also sees the release of a new Duran Duran record and The Cars' first single in 24 years. Yes, you read that right: it seems the current love affair with the '80s is not just inspiring indie bands anymore; it's actually resurrecting iconic '80s bands themselves. Which is, let's admit it, kind of awesome. Who doesn't want to hear more from Ric Ocasek?

Why the '80s obsession, why now? The '80s were a disposable, plastic era that celebrated artifice, and two hallmarks of the '80s -- cassette tapes and VHS -- were precursors of the portable entertainment era we now find ourselves in. (It's no accident both have attained a sort of nostalgic chic in recent years. In the age of the iPod, cassettes are undeniably cute and lo-fi.) But the long, slow boil of this retro trend is actually cooking up some great music, whether you're listening to the well-known Daft Punk or lesser-known acts like Tape Deck Mountain. We feature both bands -- and oodles more -- in our playlist "The '80s Are Back...Again!"

Full Album Premiere: Pharoahe Monch's "W.A.R."
If you haven't heard of Pharoahe Monch, now's the time to jump on the bandwagon. This underground emcee is one of the lyrical princes of hip-hop, the kind of lyricist others turn to for inspiration. He's an unflinching truth-teller with a political edge, and his deft, literate lyrics will stun you with their sound as much as their sense: the man is a master of the internal rhyme. Monch returns this week with his third full-length, "W.A.R. (We Are Renegades)," and we're streaming it to you, in its entirety, this week.



Stay tuned and check back next week to discover more music.

Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched "Ducktails - Killin' The Vibe (ft. Panda Bear)."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/iPpi04i3Y3g/music-tuesday-your-guide-to-discovering.html

[G] Lights, Camera... EDIT! New Features for the YouTube Video Editor

Posted: 22 Mar 2011 12:01 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: Lights, Camera... EDIT! New Features for the YouTube Video Editor

Nine months ago we launched our cloud-based video editor. It was a simple product built to provide our users with simple editing tools. Although it didn't have all the features available on paid desktop editing software, the idea was that the vast majority of people's video editing needs are pretty basic and straight-forward and we could provide these features with a free editor available on the Web. Since launch, hundreds of thousands of videos have been published using the YouTube Video Editor and we've regularly pushed out new feature enhancements to the product, including:
  • Video transitions (crossfade, wipe, slide)
  • The ability to save projects across sessions
  • Increased clips allowed in the editor from 6 to 17
  • Video rotation (from portrait to landscape and vice versa - great for videos shot on mobile)
  • Shape transitions (heart, star, diamond, and Jack-O-Lantern for Halloween)
  • Audio mixing (AudioSwap track mixed with original audio)
  • Effects (brightness/contrast, black & white)
  • A new user interface and project menu for multiple saved projects
While many of these are familiar features also available on desktop software, today, we're excited to unveil two new features that the team has been working on over the last couple of months that take unique advantage of the cloud:
  • Stabilizer - Ever shoot a shaky video that's so jittery, it's actually hard to watch? Professional cinematographers use stabilization equipment such as tripods or camera dollies to keep their shots smooth and steady. Our team mimicked these cinematographic principles by automatically determining the best camera path for you through a unified optimization technique. In plain English, you can smooth some of those unsteady videos with the click of a button. We also wanted you to be able to preview these results in real-time, before publishing the finished product to the Web. We can do this by harnessing the power of the cloud by splitting the computation required for stabilizing the video into chunks and distributed them across different servers. This allows us to use the power of many machines in parallel, computing and streaming the stabilized results quickly into the preview. You can check out the paper we're publishing entitled "Auto-Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths." Want to see stabilizer in action? You can test it out for yourself, or check out these two videos. The first is without stabilizer.



And now, with the stabilizer:



  • 3D - When we first launched our 3D product one of the hardest parts turned out to be actually building our makeshift 3D camera to film our introductory 3D video (two flip cameras mounted to a flat metal bar 10 inches apart and using $8 worth of bolts and brackets we bought at the hardware store). Although the side-by-side compositing needed for 3D uploads isn't complex, it's unavailable in free editing tools. This was frustrating because although users could film using a pair of cameras, the 3D feature was still out of reach. And synchronising the two cameras is an added challenge. If you've used a pair of cameras to capture stereographic video, but need the two streams to be synchronized and laid out in a way compatible with YouTube's 3D feature, this new tool will do the work for you. Feel free to try it out.
One of the great things about YouTube is being able to launch products quickly with a small team of engineers that impact hundreds of millions of users from around the world. In this case we had seven engineers and one designer who've contributed to this product. We look forward to announcing more Editor enhancements down the road. Let us know what you think and paste links of your stabilized or 3D-ified videos in the comments below.

Sam Kvaalen, software engineer, recently watched "PANGEA The Neverending World - 3D Animation" and Tom Bridgwater, software engineer, recently watched "Die Fantastischen Vier - Danke (Official Video)"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/TPRCC-pvTHg/lights-camera-edit-new-features-for.html

[G] Firefox 4, bringing WebM support to the web

Posted: 22 Mar 2011 09:49 AM PDT

The WebM Open Media Project Blog: Firefox 4, bringing WebM support to the web

Today we released Firefox 4, the latest browser from Mozilla. There's a lot to love in Firefox 4 - better performance, hardware acceleration and a streamlined interface. All of that is great, but I'm here to talk about WebM support.

This is our first release to include support for WebM. We've been involved with WebM since it was launched and have contributed to its development. It's been in our Mozilla Nightly builds for many months. As part of that, you'll find WebM all over our sites. For example, the Firefox 4 What's New video is in WebM. WebM Video is part of many of our awesome Firefox 4 demos. And if you're part of the Youtube HTML5 beta, a large percentage of the videos you view will be delivered with WebM.

To understand why this is really important you need to understand global market share numbers for browsers. According to StatCounter, Firefox accounts for about 30% market share - or nearly a third of all browser users. When you combine that with Chrome and Opera it means that about 50% of internet users will have access to the high-quality WebM codec over the next few months, following the Firefox 4 adoption curve.

We've supported HTML5 and standards-based video since Firefox 3.5 with Theora and Vorbis support, and we're happy to add WebM to that mix since it offers an even higher-quality option for the web.

--Chris Blizzard, on behalf of Mozilla
URL: http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/firefox-4-bringing-webm-support-to-web.html

[G] Broadband data maps, brought to you by M-Lab

Posted: 22 Mar 2011 09:38 AM PDT

Google Public Policy Blog: Broadband data maps, brought to you by M-Lab

Posted by Tiziana Refice, Network Researcher, and Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

In 2009 we helped a group of researchers and industry partners launch Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform for broadband measurement tools. Over the past two years, M-Lab has grown significantly – more than 300 terabytes of data from over half a billion tests are now publicly available.

M-Lab tools help an individual understand the performance of one's own broadband connection, but making sense of that much data in the aggregate is more complicated. That's why we're happy to announce that, working with M-Lab, we have developed a set of maps to help investigate such a huge dataset using Google's Public Data Explorer.





The visualizations show measured median upload and download speeds as measured by M-Lab tools across the United States, Europe, and Australia, and you can drill down to city-level aggregates. You can also view to what extent speeds are limited by problems with users' network connections or with their computers (or other devices).

The maps are built entirely on open data collected by Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT), an open source tool developed by Internet2 and widely deployed. The platform, the tool, and the data are all open – which means the Internet community can vet the measurement methodology, perform independent analysis of the same data, and build their own visualizations. In fact, the M-Lab data provide much more information that what's presented in these visualizations, and we hope that our effort will help drive future research in this area.

On Wednesday, the Open Technology Initiative will be hosting a panel discussion on M-Lab in Washington, D.C. In a keynote, Vint Cerf will explain how M-Lab is helping analyze broadband performance and promote good science. For those who can't attend in person, the event will be live-streamed via the web, starting at 10:30am, EST.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/03/broadband-data-maps-brought-to-you-by-m.html
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