10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Kitschy soundtrack, good voiceover and an intensely thorough demo add up to one cool re-imagining of our conventional human/computer interaction. In other words: this looks as close to the UI in Minority Report as I've ever seen. The key seems to be rewarding the user for having 10 fingers, and using all 10 to do a high number of operations in clever ways. This is really, really clever, too, just check out the name: 10/GUI. Check it out, you won't be disappointed. Well, if you hate using your fingers you might.

It's amazing how expensive cradles are for mobile devices. Most users realize that there is a big premium being charged for what amounts to a formed piece of plastic, and it makes them less likely to pony up the big bucks for a device that holds their phone. Luckily, this is an area where a little DIY creativity can help.

A Download Squad tipster pointed us to their YouTube video describing how to take a cardboard coffee cup sleeve and with a few careful cuts, turn it into a perfectly serviceable cradle for holding a mobile device in landscape orientation. The video could have been shorter, but it is very well put together. I've embedded the video after the jump at the end of this post.

Alternatively, there is an iPhone dock papercraft project that Lifehacker pointed to that is a little more complicated, but results in a cradle that can hold an iPhone in landscape or portrait orientation, and allows you to plug in your iPhone's sync cable while in portrait orientation.

Is it worth skimping on a cradle and trying to make it yourself, or are you willing to pay the premium that hardware makers charge for their sturdier versions? Do you know of a different set of DIY cradle plans? Let us know in the comments.

According to an unsourced story from the Telegraph, Twitter's founders have been throwing around the idea of bringing live video posts to the site. The post describes mobile video uploads posted directly to users' profiles, as opposed to posting links to short videos, a la Tweetube or Twiddeo, but there's not much more to the story. If the rumors are true, it's going to bring some speculation about whether this is the best use of Twitter's resources.

Twitter still has spam problems to deal with, as well as at least three other major new features that are rolling out right now: geolocation, user lists and a new format for retweets. Without more details, we don't know where the storage space and bandwidth are going to come from: will video be a drain on the Twitter experience? Now that the service is pushing between 10,000 and 25,000 tweets a minute, there's a lot to consider when building out new features.

So, Download Squad readers, would you use a Twitter video service? Let us know in the comments and the poll below.

UPDATE: Looks like the folks at Mashable got a quote from Twitter founder Biz Stone, denying any plans for video features: "Haven't read the piece but no video hosting. 140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill!"

Jinni is a movie recommendation engine that helps you find films based on a number of factors. You can sort by genre, plot, mood, time/period, target audience or other factors. Probably the coolest feature is the "more like it" function which helps you find movies that you'd probably like based on the movie you're currently looking at. It's kind of like Netflix recommendations without that whole Netflix movie rental part.

Last time we checked out Jinni, the service was still in private beta. The Jinni team recently removed the "private" portion and launched a public beta. That means anyone can use Jinni without registering or signing in. Registered users do get a couple of perks like he ability to add titles to your favorites or wish list, create profiles, and connect with other users. You can also view your "movie personality" based on your preferences.

Users can also share their Jinni actions on Facebook and Twitter. Jinni isn't an online video site that lets you watch videos. Rather, once you find titles you like, Jinni directs you to sources where you can purchase or view the films including Netflix, Amazon, and Jaman.

Video sharing site Vimeo has just announced some major improvements, including a Desktop Uploader and new, more detailed statistics pages. The desktop app will offer a lot of features that Vimeo's web interface doesn't, like uploading multiple videos at once, and pausing/resuming your uploads. Vimeo hopes the Desktop Uploader will also increase stability and avoid timeouts on large uploads. The app will be cross-platform, built on Adobe Air, and should hit public beta soon.

The new stats pages will roll out by the end of the year, offering advanced data on all your videos, both individually and in the aggregate. You'll be able to see who's playing your videos, where your traffic is coming from (both in terms of referrers and geo stats) and whether people are watching in HD or SD. Many of these stats features will be for Plus users only, but Basic members will get a new stats view too.

The BBC iPlayer allows UK residents to watch a wide variety of BBC programming including news and entertainment programs. The service is available in the UK at no additional cost, because UK residents basically pay an annual license fee to support the BBC. And that's why the iPlayer isn't available to viewers outside of the UK: No matter how much we want to watch the latest Doctor Who episodes online, we haven't paid for that right.

But it looks like we may soon have the option of paying to access an iPlayer-like service. PaidContent reports that BBC Worldwide plans to launch a global video portal. It's not entirely clear to me from the article whether users would be expected to pay for each video they want to watch or whether you'll be able to pay a monthly or annual fee to access the content. But I'm a bit concerned about one quote from a BBC official stating that Torchwood fans might be willing to pay $10 per episode rather than the $2 per episode you'd pay to watch the same show from iTunes.

What do you think? Would you pay $10 to watch a single episode of Doctor Who or Torchwood, or at that rate would you just sign up for a cable or satellite provider that carries BBC America? Or you know, resort to other, shadier means to get your fill of BBC Science Fiction programming.

Adobe Flash has become the standard protocol for web video over the last few years. And while Flash is capable of some pretty excellent video quality, it's not exactly light on system resources. In fact, it's kind of a CPU-hog, which is why some computers with slower processors (and most netbooks) struggle to play high quality of high definition video from YouTube, Hulu, and other online video sites.

But that's about toe change. Kind of. Adobe has announced that Flash 10.1 will support GPU acceleration for NVIDIA graphics, which means that if you've got a computer with NVIDIA GeForce, ION, or Tegra graphics in it, you should be able to watch high definition Flash video in fullscreen mode even if you have a slow processor like an Intel Atom or ARM-based chip.

What's more, Adobe is going to bring Flash 10.1 to Smartphones, ending the separate but unequal era of Flash Lite. Flash 10.1 will be available for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Google Android, Palm WebOS, and Symbian phones. The iPhone's not on that list because Adobe still hasn't worked out an arrangement with Apple to add support for Flash 10.1 to the iPhone's Safari web browser, but that could still happen.

Flash 10.1 is due to hit the streets in the first half of 2010. But there should be beta versions available before the end of 2009.

You can check out videos of Flash Player 10.1 on the Palm Pre and Toshiba TG01 at Adobe Labs.

Just in case you had any doubt that Google had a heck of a lot of server space, the company has increased the file size limit for uploads to Google Video. A few days ago, the max was 1GB. Today, it's a whopping 16GB.

In order to take advantage, you'll need a few things:

• A Google Apps Premier or Education Edition account
  
• Google Gears
• A fairly speedy internet connection (unless you're cool with your videos taking a year or two to upload)

The change only affects Google Video, not Google's other video site. YouTube uploads are still limited to 2GB. Google also killed uploads to Google Video for the general public a while back, limiting the feature to Google Apps users. So it's doubtful that the company really expects to buckle under the pressure of all those 16GB file uploads.

[via AppScout]

YouTube may be an online video site, but that doesn't mean you can't use it to distribute podcasts, audio interviews, music (which you own the rights to) and other audio files. In order to upload an audio file to YouTube, you'll need to convert it to a video format by using software to add your audio to a video track, photo slideshow, or a static image.

But if you don't feel like taking the time to edit a video using desktop software, you can convert an MP3 file to a video file quickly and easily with MP32Tube, a web-based service that will create a video file for you and even upload the finished product to your YouTube account.

All you have to do is sign in with your Google Account (using Google's API), choose a background image, pick an MP3 file, and hit convert. A few minutes later the file should be available on your YouTube page.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Some YouTube videos are really only worth it for the audio portion. I've seen tons of songs posted to YouTube with still images instead of real videos, and often wished I could just download the audio in one step. Dirpy lets you easily save the sound from a YouTube video as an mp3 for later listening, or save the whole video if you really want to.

One of Dirpy's best features is the ability to specify the portion of the audio you want to download by entering start and stop times, which really helps when you come across a video with a long intro. Dirpy also lets you set ID3 tags for your ripped audio files, so they're probably labeled in iTunes and other players. You can find videos to rip by searching on Dirpy or using the bookmarklet on any YouTube video page.

[via Lifehacker]

12seconds.tv is extending its bite-sized video service - 12 seconds per video, as the name implies - into the mobile universe, with a nice-looking video messaging app for the iPhone. 12mail [app store link] lets you send short video messages to your contacts, which it can pull from your Facebook or Twitter accounts, if you like. Recording a new video (if you have an iPhone 3GS) and sending a saved video are both supported. You can even take a still picture and record an audio track instead of going for a full video.

If your friends have 12mail, they'll get push notifications when they receive your messages, and they'll be able to watch them using the iPhone's built-in video app. If they don't, the messages can be posted on their Facebook walls or sent privately via Twitter direct message. The 12-second time limit really works in 12mail's favor on the iPhone, considering the limited upload speeds on 3G and EDGE. 12Mail is also free, in case you needed another reason to give it a shot.

Epix is a new premium TV channel that's a partnership between Viacom, Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate. Today the company is announcing that Verizon is the first distributor to sign the channel, which means that Verizon customers will be able to watch thousands of movies in the channel's library. Now here's where it gets interesting: Epix isn't just a TV channel. As part of its offering, the group is also beta testing a web-based video service where users can stream thousands of titles. And today Epix announced it would be adding 3,000 HD videos to the lineup.

The problem is that Epix Megaplex (the web component) won't be open to the general public. It'll only be available to payng subscribers of the TV channel. And in fact Verizon hasn't even committed to making Megaplex available to FiOS TV customers yet, which means that not a single TV distributor is currently promising to make use of the Epix web video offering.

There are two problems with Epix Megaplex as a I see it. First, the company is using old paradigm thinking and making the web component available as a value added feature for TV subscribers when Epix could probably convince a fair number of domestic and international users to sign up as web-only subscribers or pay-per-view users.

Second, as TechCrunch's MG Siegler points out, why is it that you can walk into a video store and grab virtually any new release the day it's available, but you might have to visit a dozen web sites to find the same content available for download or streaming online -- if it's available at all? Wouldn't it be nice if Viacom, Paramount, MGM, Lionsgate, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and all the other companies offering online video would come to some sort of agreement that would let you find all of the videos you want in one place while making sure that the appropriate rights holders get paid?

Believe me, I'm as shocked as anyone to be writing this post, but RealPlayer SP ships with a substantially reduced amount of suck compared to previous versions. Yes, the new version sucks so much less that I'm actually ok with using it to download and convert web video.

There are still glimpses of the past, of course. The installer does offer a toolbar (at least it's Google and not Ass...er, Ask). It also offers the pro version and a 14 day trial of something, but I can't tell you specifically what it was. Instead of reading, I quickly located the "leave me the hell alone" button and closed the screen.

Shiver me timbers! It's been a swash-buckling week here aboard HMS Download Squad, but if you've been off plunderin' other shores and missed the maelstrom of news here's a fair summary of what's been happening..

Over the past year or so Hulu has quickly become one of the most popular online video sites even though it's only open to US viewers. Hulu's success likely comes from a number of factors including a focus on high quality professionally produced content including network TV shows and movies, a simple user interface, and relatively unobtrusive advertisements that are much easier to put up with than the 18 minutes of ads in every hour of US broadcast television.

But Hulu's focus on advertising supported content has likely prevented some premium content owners like HBO and Showtime from making full length content available. Now it looks like Hulu is testing out a subscription-based service.

I really hope any subscription service would offer content that's not currently available to Hulu customers. I'd hate to see some of the content that's currently available for free disappear behind a paywall. But at this point it's too early to say exactly what the service will look like, or even it will ever appear.

[via Business Insider]