Spending the last two days at the Open Video Conference has been a great experience, lots of interesting speakers and I've learned a few things. Perhaps I'll write more in general later, however it's worth mentioning, while still fresh in my mind, today's sessions around royalty-free codecs and the HTML 5 tag.

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

What's new in Avidemux 2.5.0:

VLC (VideoLAN Client) is one of the most popular video players on Linux, together with players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine. It plays many audio and video formats (including Xvid, DivX, H.264, Theora, WMV, Real Video, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, APE, AC3, WAV) together with DVDs and DVD ISO images.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

Fix Blue and Green Tinted Video Problem in Ubuntu: I was having this video problem in Ubuntu that happened after an update. The video images became tinted with blue and green colors, or were having some kind of distorted video hues when played on Totem Movie Player as well as other media players.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE (2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

Despite all its advances, GNU/Linux remains weak in its support for proprietary audio and video codecs. Because these codecs are often encumbered by patents, distributions must choose either to include support of questionable legality or else exclude it altogether.

Medibuntu is a project somewhat similar with debian-multimedia.org for Debian, providing packages which are not included in the official Ubuntu repositories due to legal issues. In order to make use of the packages included in Medibuntu (including the non-free video codecs w32codecs and libdvdcss2 for watching ecrypted DVDs), you will only need to follow several easy steps explained below.