I am very proud of my wife, Bonnie, winning water treatment lab analyst of the year for northern California. Congratulations!

The aim of this post is to point out there has been a definite, not-so-recent uptrend in writing to use the phrase "aims to" or "the aim ... is." This follows other trends of using "That said," preceded by a trend of "All in all" preceded by beginning most posts or lines of speech with the word "So." Don't 'cha know?

I think that Google Wave looks fantastic, and I requested an invite with this message that you might find interesting:

I am an open source developer very active in the video editing space. I am interested in exploring how wave and its protocols can be used for collaborative video editing. I am thinking about not just professional usage, but casual sharing that naturally morphs into a more composed and published result. Imagine some family, club, sporting, or business event where afterward people share feedback and their media resources and then some continue on to participate in a mashup-like process to chronicle the event.

The Open Video Conference is happening now. My earlier post about Ogg Theora was intended to be somewhat objective about one corporate perspective regarding patents. In truth, I have been rather indifferent about Theora. However, with the adoption of Ogg Vorbis+Theora in HTML5 <video> implementations, the adoption by major sites, and the major improvements to the encoding library Thusnelda, I have become a fan. Also, I do have confidence that Fluendo and Red Hat legal consultations have vetted potential submarine patent issues.

Therefore, in this spirit, and in the spirit of the Open Video Conference, I am giving support for Ogg Theora a greater priority in MLT and therefore Kdenlive. In the releases thus far,  there was a major memory leak in the MLT avformat encoding plugin when encoding to Ogg Theora with Vorbis. This is now fixed, and the fix will become visible to most users in the Kdenlive 0.7.5 release. Next, I need to work on a new plugin to provide better support for Ogg source clips.

Made with Kdenlive 0.7.4

MobiTV is in the March Madness mix with our first offering for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It’s in the iTunes store now for $4.99
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=307864832&mt=8

Take a look at some of the key features on this app:

• Live WiFi coverage of all tournament games (up to 4 games simultaneously
• Audio coverage if you’re on 3G and EDGE
• Video highlights
• Game recaps
• Real time graphical bracket with updates on game match ups, regions and scores
• Exclusive CBSSports.com Edge Matchup game previews, including team-by-team analysis and matchup comparisons
• Breaking tournament  news coverage
• Box scores and team stats

And, check out our ink in USA Today:
http://blogs.usatoday.com/technologylive/2009/03/live-sports-are.html

While MLT has always had the ability to composite image sequences of PNG or Targa files containing alpha channels, creating these animations is not so easy. There are a number of good 3D tools like Blender, but there are not many options that are easy and when 2D is just fine. One of the most popular tools is Flash, not just for web graphics, but also for broadcast and post-production. Today, I played around with swfdec to generate images from Flash .swf files. For a long while, I was under the impression it would not export the alpha channel, but I was wrong. Today, I made a proof-of-concept with some standalone code using swfdec and MLT. I made a very short video to show a result: mlt_swfdec_demo.mp4. I have yet to make the MLT module, but it should be easy.