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"I've been finding Kino handy for capturing from VHS and Hi-8 because the auto-split avoids sync issues with large files. Cinestream (Windows NLE) can't seem to keep long captures in sync when I use my Sony DVMC-DA1 box but capturing in Kino has been a simple un-attended workaround. Now that it captures in Quicktime, it's even better because I can feed the Quicktime files directly to Cinestream with no pre-processing, and the quality is very good.

If you also install Cinelerra, you can also view some types of Quicktime in Linux. Cinelerra is an awesome multi-track NLE with several supplied effects/transitions/filters, but it also includes "X movie," which plays DV files captured with Cinestream as well as some other types (but nothing with Sorenson).

Both Cinelerra and Kino can open and edit Quicktime files from Cinestream.

Oh, what about audio? I've been trying a program called " Ardour" which is a real-time 24-track hard-disk recorder on Linux. Of course it's useful for "simpler" things too like a precision audio editor.

Check out the screenshots.

So Linux is coming a long way as a viable platform for high-quality editing (with nice interfaces too). And since it and the apps are free, that goes a long way. Microsoft said in a recent filing that it may be forced to lower prices due to competition from free software. Maybe one day the only people who pay for an editing package will be those who need support or buy it preconfigured with hardware."

And you don't want your database being a Flipper. MySQL has finally announced the name of their logo dolphin, and the winner is... Sakila! The name, submitted by Ambrose Twebaze of Swaziland, was chosen from 6357 entries "because it represents the global reach of MySQL as well as the friendly, open nature of the company." Slashdot covered the contest back in January, and MySQL listed some of the more popular names submitted back in April.

Perverse incentives are the most fun. Mark Barnett writes in reference to the ongoing pets.com lawsuit story Update: 10/04 00:18 GMT by T : Sorry, that's "PetsWarehouse," not "pets.com.":

"I was one of the settling parties. I did not settle out of fear. I settled because he wanted me to run his banner on my website for 120 days. The settlement did not say anything about the number of times it had to run. I ran it once per day at about 4 AM EST for 120 days. It was my joke on him. I think I got the better deal. I ran the defense fund banner about 1.5 million times versus his 120 times."

Wings for a lizard. Espectr0 writes "Phoenix 0.2 has been released!. Improvements include the return of the sidebar, extensions management and web form autocomplete. It's also a little smaller and faster, and 0.3 will be released in about a week. Get the scoop here."

Unsolicited testimonial. boomerang_56 writes "Wanting to see what the fuss was about, I just installed Red Hat 8. For me, working IEEE1394 features are a must. It was nice to see that now I don't have to recompile the kernel just to have Firewire working. So I downloaded and compiled Kino, and was able to capture from my camcorder, and even control it, without the major tweaks I used to have to do. Then I found out that Cinelerra has been released at version 1.0!!! So I downloaded and installed it via RPM (Pentium II binaries). I had to install an old version of libstdc++-3, but that was easy. No "--force" or the other hassles we used to have to go through. So the first time I fired up Cinelerra, after changing the preferences for IEEE1394 capture, I was impressed to see it actually captured on the first try. I guess the bottom line for this submission is as a user I wanted to say "thanks" for all the developers working on this kind of thing. We all know that besides gaming, video editing is the big killer app. It's really nice to be able to have this kind of power in open source software and not have to boot to Windows just to edit video now. It's not easy enough for my mom yet, but the way things are going, it won't be long. Oh, links... get Cinelerra here (check out the screenshots too). Get Kino here."

Blinkenlampen ueber Paris. fluxdvd writes "In celebration of the Nuit Blanche art festival in Paris, Project Blinkenlights has transformed Tower T2 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France into what is claimed to be the world's largest computer screen. The system used to drive the display runs an embedded version of Linux.

Read the story at Linuxdevices.com. They have live streams of the building at night (Paris time) and replay the previous night's display druing the day. It's quite impressive :)"

We mentioned the plans for this display a few weeks ago.

Don't you hunger for a patent-free, royalty-free, better-at-identical-bitrate alternative? The release of Red Hat 8.0 included the notable, intentional ommission of MP3 software, a decision Red Hat made on the basis of possible patent and royalty problems.

Now SnowDeath writes "After two days of trying to get my ALSA install to work correctly in RedHat 8.0 (Psyche), I finally headed over to the xmms website to see if there were any known bugs with ALSA. Low and behold, the first thing my eyes read tells how RedHat Software decided to not include the mp3 plugin in their xmms install in Psyche in fear of pending patent problems. So, do not despair, there is an rpm "update" for this particular problem on the xmms site."