www.skiddplayer.com, powered by Miro Community

We’re delighted to announce a new version of Miro Community (0.9), which brings a host of new features and themes to the table. The software is incredibly powerful for bringing together video from all over the web into a cohesive website that can have a look and feel that suits a community or organization.

Miro Community is currently powering over 250 video sites and continues to grow—the software is free and open source and we offer hosted versions here.

A few highlights:

Enhanced Performance - Miro Community now checks for new videos from your sources more often, and we’ve made a variety of changes to make the sites run more smoothly.

New blog-like theme (”blue theme”) offers editors the ability to do blog-like commentary for video items and highlights user activity such as recent comments.

Categories hover menu in navigation bar – You no longer need to be in Category theme to have the categories accessible on the front page.

Increased Chrome Support - Site thumbnails now look crisp and clean in Chrome as well as other browsers.

Custom Themes for Premium Users – Premium users can now upload their own Django templates to the site, allowing them more flexibility in site design.

reCAPTCHA and default comment moderation – reCAPTCHA is now included on all video pages, making it much more difficult for spammers to leave comments.

Reorganized Administrative Area: We’ve pared down the administrative area to make it easier to navigate.

These are just a few of the many improvements.

To try out Miro Community, go to http://www.mirocommunity.org/signup/ and create a site today.

From the Womoz blog:

The Women & Mozilla Video Website is live and you can help it grow!

We’ve recently added a video website to our WoMoz project tools. This Website has been created mainly in order to:

• give everyone access to online video tutorials about Free Software and Mozilla
• publish interviews of women contributors and portray their outstanding work inside FLOSS communities
• display video content about the women in computer science / FLOSS subject
• publish existing conferences done by women in FLOSS and IT

You can all help by uploading video content onto this new site!

If you feel like a video makes sense in regard to the list above, please feel free to submit it directly from the site’s main Home page. (no account necessary to upload videos, just click the “Submit A Video” button and a site administrator will approve them).

This is for a new PCF project that will let communities of users subtitle any video on the web. You’ll be responsible for web design and branding, and probably a lot of fun user interface design as well. Send samples to nicholas (a) pculture.org.

Making Your Media Matter is put on by American University’s Center for Social Media, and the Media that Matters Film Festival, put on by Arts Engine, is calling for video submissions. See their announcements below.
—

Making Your Media Matter

Washington, D.C., Feb 11-12, 2010

Join established and aspiring filmmakers, non-profit communications leaders, funders and students working to learn and share cutting-edge practices to make their media matter, February 11th and 12th 2010 at American University in Washington DC. This year marks the Center for Social Media’s sixth annual Making Your Media Matter conference. Visit the Center’s website to view partners and sponsors www.centerforsocialmedia.org/mymm and sign on to the social networking site www.makingyourmediamatter.ning.com. Registration $100, Students, $50. Register now!

MYMM is presented in partnership with the Media That Matters Festival, which is a project of Arts Engine, Inc.

–

Media That Matters 10

OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS!

Deadline: January 22, 2010

Media That Matters: Screen. Act. Impact.

Arts Engine celebrates ten years of Media That Matters — the premier
showcase for short films with big messages.

“We no longer have to rely on major corporations for things to be seen — we have Media that Matters to distribute new material and new voices and new points of view.”
— Tim Robbins, Actor

Submit your film for the chance to work with us in creating social
change through film. If selected, your film will take become a part of
Media That Matters — an international, multi-platform campaign
streaming and playing to thousands of people at screenings across the
globe. Media That Matters creates discussion guides and screening
materials to promote conversation and encourage educators, activists
and organizers alike to Take Action around these films. Join us in our
TENTH year and submit your film now!
http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/submit

CRITERIA:

* Short films — the shorter the better—no longer than 12 minutes
max, but 8 and under would be great!
* Social issues — Any and all issues will be considered. This year
we are focusing on Media Literacy, Human Rights, LGBTQ & Sexual
Identity, Youth Activism and International issues in particular.
* The film should encourage the audience to be engaged and take
action around the issue.
* All genres — Documentary, animation, public service announcement,
narrative, music video, drama, comedy. Creativity is encouraged — but
your film must focus on a social issue.
* Open to all ages — Youth-produced projects encouraged!

Version 0.8.5 has some exciting new features and has cleaned up some bugs both above and below the surface. Some of the changes include:

*Updated Category Pages – You can now see a list of subcategories within a category, and see all videos in a category in chronological order, regardless of subcategory.

*Updated Submission Process - We’ve worked to make the video submission process a little smoother, by adding some explanatory text and breaking up the process. We’ve also added the opportunity for those submitting a video to leave their email address so that administrators can contact them with any questions, or just know where the videos are coming from. Users should be aware that if a user is logged in, Miro Community will automatically record which videos they are submitting.

*Guiding Signs for new sites – There are now cards for newly created sites that lead you through setting up your Miro Community site.

*Automatic User Creation – When videos are submitted to the site from YouTube, blip.tv, or Vimeo, a user is now automatically created based on the username of the video host, allowing users to track videos by a certain user across sites, whether they’re individually submitted or added via a feed. If these users want to access the Miro Community site, you only need to add a password for their account.

*Date Listing Option – You can now choose to have videos dated by the time they were submitted to the Miro Community site, instead of the time they were posted online. This option is available on the Design Settings page.

*Get Notified of New Videos – By popular request, we have added the option to email admins when there are new items in your queue, and/or when a new video is submitted by a user. You can find this option on the Design Settings page. Be aware that all administrators/Super Users will receive an email if this option is checked. There are also RSS feeds available for submitted items and items in your review queue, the links for which are available through the To Be Reviewed page.

*Increased Ogg Theora Support – Miro Community has always supported Ogg Theora (as one of the founders of the Open Video Alliance, we’re very committed to it!), but we’ve added a few extra pieces of support, including notifications on Ogg Theora videos in unsupportive browsers.

We’ve also fixed a variety of bugs and continue to work hard behind the scenes to support all the great Miro Community sites that are flourishing!

So, if you could change or improve one thing about Miro Community, what would it be?

As always, please feel free to email me with any questions about your Miro Community site at anne[a]pculture.org. You can find out more about Miro Community at http://www.mirocommunity.org, and take a look at the code itself at https://git.participatoryculture.org/localtv.

In particular, this release fixes some data issues, including a case where invalid torrent files could cause database problems.  Additionally we have updated to vlc 1.0.3 which addresses video quality issues on Windows 7 and we have updated libtorrent which should greatly improve torrent performance on all versions of Windows.

The complete list of bug fixes is available in the release notes.

You can download this version directly from our website.  We will turn on the automatic updates for windows and mac in a few days.

We strongly recommend that all users update now.

Even many of our users do not realize that PCF, which makes Miro and Miro Community, is a non-profit organization. We are! And if you don’t already know, our mission is to make tools that push media in a more open and democratic direction. We think having a few small companies control online video with proprietary technologies and huge centralized video hosts hurts free speech and limits innovation.

We are looking for someone with at least 3 years of experience and experience with multiple organizations.

We currently work with the following software and platforms:

* Ubuntu and Fedora
* Amazon Web Services
* MySQL and PostgreSQL (both maintenance and performance)
* Apache and lighttpd
* Squid cache
* Version control w/ Git and Subversion
* Nagios
* Litmus/Selenium
* Subversion
* Trac
* cgit
* Bugzilla

We need a teammate who is professional and extremely reliable. We are all passionate about the work we do and want someone who feels the same way.

Please send a brief introduction, a resume, and at least two references to npr[at]pculture.org.

Update: I neglected to mention that most of the staff works remotely from home from various places on the globe and we don’t need you to be in a specific location.

Thanks!

NSIS has a page on their wiki which they keep updated.  You can find it here: NSIS False Positives.

We’d appreciate it if you could take the time to download and test out the build for windows, os x, or source.

Release notes and the roadmap for 2.5.4 provide more details about the changes.

If you could help us test, that would be invaluable.  We’d like to be confident that the database update changes work for a large number of people with a variety of different usage scenarios.

Testing is also good excuse to spend some time getting through your podcast backlog or spend some time looking for new content on the Miro Guide!

There are also regression testcases for anyone who wants to participate in the more formal testing process.