Video

On Crossfade TV this week, the Download Music crew checks out a cool new set of previously unreleased recordings and interviews from the late jazz/blues/gospel/soul artist Nina Simone called Protest Anthology; a few new songs from electronic artist UFO! (not to be confused with the Brits who brought you the classic-rock staple "Too Hot Too Handle"); and the brand-new album from Sun Kil Moon, the name Mark Kozelek seems to be sticking with (after long-ago retiring his previous band name, Red House Painters).

Crossfade TV is a collaboration between Download Music and CNET TV.

The CD may be on its way out, but music and concert DVDs are doing just fine, thank you very much! Late last year I wrote a feature for Home Entertainment magazine running down some of my favorite music DVDs of all time. They were all "live" recordings--there wasn't a single MTV style "music video" in the bunch. This is an abridged version of the article, check the Home Entertainment website to check out the complete article. Oh, and I've added a few DVDs that didn't make the article.

Led Zeppelin

With a … Read more

KMPlayer lacks a help file but makes up for it by being one of the most powerful freeware video players we've seen. It includes a vast array of video- and audio-capturing options, as well as skins, a plethora of playback controls and tweaks, and broad DVD support. You'll have to learn the ropes yourself, but if you're familiar with where things ought to be, and willing to patiently wait for the mouse-over label to confirm your suppositions, KMPlayer has the potential to be immensely rewarding.

It supports nearly every file format we could think of testing. It … Read more

Clarification: Adobe TV is one of many channels available from the Adobe catalog.

Adobe Systems on Wednesday plans to release Adobe Media Player (AMP), a free download for playing Flash-based Web videos on Macs or PCs. (Get it from Download.com for Windows or Mac.)

Written with Adobe's AIR, AMP is a hybrid online/offline application that lets people subscribe to different video Webcasts. Adobe has signed on some initial partners including CBS, PBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group, CondeNet, and Scripps Networks. (See my colleague Rafe Needleman's review of AMP on Webware.)

The videos are either streamed … Read more

The age of video distribution over the Internet has just begun, and open-source and DRM-free Miro for both Mac and Windows is perfectly poised to take advantage of the still-growing, still-unsettled paradigm.

Along with standard multicodec video playback, Miro supports torrents and completed torrent playback, watches to manage both old and new content in user-defined folders, resumable playback, video sharing and hosting, and assistance in creating videos. One of Miro's most compelling features are the channels that organize video feeds by topic--integration with Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and other search engines and video Web sites makes discovering favorites and new … Read more

I'm looking at a cell phone screen and four faces are looking back. It's CTIA 2008, the biggest wireless and cell phone trade show of the year, and the CEO of iVisit, a multiparty video conferencing app for PCs, Macs, and mobile phones, is demoing the product, iVisit Teleport. I must say, the slick, feature-rich app looks pretty cool on Orang Diamaleh's large-screen smartphone.

The simplest way to think about iVisit Teleport is as a P2P social network that lets you call, chat, video conference, and transfer multimedia for up to 8 contacts at a time. You … Read more

In case you haven't noticed, the Download Music crew is back in San Francisco after a massive week of music at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. We've been posting like crazy to Crossfade about some of our favorite shows; we picked a handful of top artists for our Best of SXSW playlist; and we cut a special SXSW episode of our weekly music show Crossfade TV as well, highlighting great performances by the likes of Duffy, Lou Reed, Ice Cube, Explorer's Club, These Are Powers, Enslaved, and Guilty Simpson.

Slide on over to CNET TV for … Read more

I guess it was impossible to shake off that South by Southwest geek-turned-rock-star fever. On Wednesday night, New York's new-media nerds had no problem taking center stage at a Chinatown karaoke outing.

Case in point: this video of two dudes and an unidentified female rocking out to Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Those guys, in case you don't know 'em, are a pretty big deal. The skinny one who looks like he should be fronting a garage band is Tumblr founder David Karp, and the Jimmy Kimmel lookalike is Silicon Alley Insider reporter Dan Frommer (whose bosses are loving the fact … Read more

Torrent-watching Web site TorrentFreak is reporting a major security hole in the popular open-source media player VideoLAN, also known as the VLC Player (download for Windows and Mac. "The reported vulnerability makes it possible for a malicious user to run arbitrary code, potentially taking remote control of the host machine," according to TorrentFreak.

The hole gets exploited from a subtitle file buffer overflow, and it's platform independent--meaning it could strike users of Mac and Linux operating systems, as well as Windows fans. VLC users who avoid subtitle files won't face any problems. Another solution is to … Read more