Like to share your photos on Flickr, your videos on YouTube, and your music on whatever the audio equivalent is, but tired of uploading files manually? iGliss is a media sharing site that lets you upload photos, videos, and music. You can load your media the old fashioned way by uploading and tagging your files one by one. Or you can use the handy little iGliss PC client that can monitor any folders on your PC for new media files and upload them to your account automatically.

One your files are online, other users can browse your iGliss folders, or you can use the sharing tools to embed your files on any web page. Users get up to 100MB of online storage space for free. There's no such thing as a premium account yet, but the iGliss FAQ says that the company could decide to start charging for additional storage in thefuture.

[via Mashable]

Last week, we walked through installing Ubuntu Linux. It's not a particularly hard process, and Ubuntu is great because it clearly illustrates the basic steps every Linux distribution goes through when it installs on a hard drive. Even if you don't use Ubuntu or a derivative, just looking at the installer screenies gives a nice story arc to a generic Linux install.

New users often find the first time they log in to their shiny new Linux desktop that not only are many things they need installed and ready, but a few things they really want aren't. They'll have a browser, but the Flash plug-in won't be activated. They'll have a media player, but it won't play .mp3 or .wma files. It won't play DVDs. What's up with that?

The main reason this happens is due to licensing, copyright and distribution issues. It will vary from distribution to distribution a little bit (Puppy Linux usually includes Flash with its browser, and Xandros usually peppers in a few media codecs), but for the most part, the free (as in speech) aspect of the software is kept separate from the proprietary. Legality is the major player, but there are quite a few open source folks out there who like to keep their machine free of the proprietary stuff on principle.

That's totally fine, we say. To each his own. But we have this movie we want to watch right here, right now.

MediaInfo Mac is a Mac utility for displaying information about audio and video files. Similar to GSpot for Windows, MediaInfo can provide codec information, bit rate, resolution, frame rate, and aspect ratio.

The program displays a URL to the codec used (in case you don't have a capable player), and you can export all of the information to a text file.

If you open a file in VLC and press Apple+I ("Get Info"), you can get similar (though limited) functionality by clicking the "Advanced Information" tab.

[Via Apple Downloads]

Getty, the stock image company, has launched a music extension to their popular photo placement products called Soundtrack.

Soundtrack, the new Getty music licensing service was developed to give multimedia producers the ability to quickly drop songs in to projects. The service blossomed through the acquisition of a leader in music licensing, Pump Audio, in June and will start things off with 20,000 original tracks.

This is only the start of Getty's entry into the music business. They will reportedly be partnering with major labels and publishers.

An Ubuntu-based Linux distribution designed for creative types has been released. Ubuntu Studio was originally due out last month, but some last minute glitches caused the developers to delay the release date by a few weeks.

Ubuntu Studio is designed to prove that Linux is just as good as OS X or Windows for creating and manipulating media files. Of course, if you're not an ubergeek, installing audio, video, and image editing applications can be a bit of a hassle.

That's where Ubuntu Studio comes in. The distribution comes with some of the most popular and powerful free multimedia software available, including:

• Ardour2 and Audacity for audio editing
• Pitivi for video editing (Cinelerra will be available after license issues are worked out)
• Gimp and Blender for image editing
• And a boatload of other packages designed for creating digital media

Sure, you could configure your own Ubuntu or other Linux system to run all the same software. But Ubuntu Studio takes most of the pain out of the process.

One thing to note, the ISO is a bit larger than your typical LiveCD, at 860MB. So you'll have to burn it to a DVD. Oh yeah, and it's not a LiveCD... err LiveDVD. You'll have to install Ubuntu Studio if you want to take it for a test drive. Fortunately the installation process is fairly straightforward, and if you have an empty partition on your hard drive Ubuntu Studio can happily coexist with Windows or other operating systems.

The team from Scrapblog is hanging out at the Web 2.0 expo this week, and has some exciting news.

Scrapblog, who officially announced their availability on April 2nd, is a way for people to aggregate social media into an online scrapbook. It's a simple drag and drop way to combine photos, videos, audio and text to create really cool multimedia pages, or online scrapbooks. Material can be uploaded and embedded from Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, Yahoo Photos, and Webshots.

With the Web 2.0 world rapidly shifting towards giving users the ability to access files and applications both online and offline, Scrapblog is going offline, and onto the desktop. They have been working hard to build a version of Scrapblog that runs on Adobe's Apollo platform which shouldn't be hard given the fact that they already employ Flash for their main interface. The release date is expected to be around two months from now, and they will be opening it up for trials with an announcement on their blog at that time.

Check out some samples of what you can do with Scrapblog.

In just over one week, on March 27th at 3:30 p.m. EST, Adobe will be hosting their special Creative Suite 3 launch event in New York City, and the entire event will be webcast from their website for all the world to see.

Alls you got to do is tune into their website at the prescribed time, and then you too will witness firsthand the launch of "the largest software release in Adobe's 25-year history". Their words, not mine, but this is indeed a much-anticipated event, seeing that specific details regarding CS3 have been on the down low, for the most part. So, tune in!

While Mac users have iMovie, Windows folks have a less straightforward choice when it comes to novice video editing software. That's the gap Movavi hopes to fill, with its promise of an all-in-one video post-production suite for capturing, converting, editing, and distributing video over the web or for your iPod. Broken up into six miniature applications for each step of the post-production process, Movavi's list of touted features are pretty simplistic and no-frills, but for users looking for the most basic video editing solution, Movavi might fulfill that need for a price of $59. Intermediate or advanced editors need not bother. Check out the full list of features here, and give the demo a quick spin.

CoreCodec's The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) has long been regarded as one of the best multimedia players for Palm and Windows Mobile devices. But what started off as a free and open source program called BetaPlayer eventually ran into some problems. For example, TCPMP had a reputation for being able to handle pretty much any video you could throw at it, no matter what codecs it used. Of course, some of those codecs were proprietary, and if you really want to include support for them in your program, you have to pay a licensing fee.

So the makers of TCPMP split the project in two. A new commercial program called CorePlayer was released with support for licensed third party plugins, and work began on an open-source stripped down version called BetaPlayer.

But here's the thing, CorePlayer 1.0 had all sorts of pretty new menu buttons. But it couldn't handle all the same files that TCPMP could. And many users reported stability issues on their Palm and Windows Mobile devices.

Apparently many of those problems have been addressed with the recently released 1.04 update to CorePlayer. The update adds features that had been missing since the last TCPMP release, hot key management and playlist functions. And there've been a number of bug fixes. But it seems like if you want a stable multimedia player than can handle most any type of audio or video file, TCPMP is still the better option. Hopefully by the time CorePlayer gets to version 1.5 it will be worth updating. But if CoreCodec really wants users to pay $20 for the program, they may have to stop offering TCPMP.

Yes you read that right. Free. DAZ Productions is giving away Bryce 5 for free. (The newest version, Bryce 5.5, still goes for around $100.)

Eagle117 tipped us off to this amazing offer from DAZ Productions, and its no hoax. Simply visit the DAZ Bryce special offers page, and visit the corresponding link to securely download the application on Download.com in either Mac or PC format. After downloading, click on the installer. When the installation prompts you to register you will be forwarded to the DAZ site, where you must set up a user profile first. When this is complete, you are given a serial number for your version of Bryce. Very simple! I was completely finished the whole process from downloading to using it in under 10 minutes! Faster if I didn't get up to get a bottle of water.

Bryce is a pretty powerful 3D landscaping and animation tool, available for both Mac and PC platforms. Traditionally the software is used for multimedia, video and web work. You can really create some amazing pieces of artwork through this application. It just might take a while to play through the many features that Bryce offers the designer.

One of the only things that keeps some people using a Mac, or even buying Macs for their business, is the whole "Macs are better for graphics/multimedia" mantra. I'll leave that debate for the Digg Holy Wars, but it is definitely interesting to see someone ditch OS X for Linux in an art/design class. Linux is not typically considered tops in this area, and I don't think anyone would debate that. So turning a bunch of Mac boxes into Ubuntu machines for the sole purpose of teaching open source Linux apps to a class of art students is a gutsy move. Yet that's exactly what Gurdy Leete did, and supposedly it worked out just fine. In fact, Gurdy converted one Mac-based media lab into an Ubuntu-based media lab with apparently stellar results (not to mention much lower software costs). Granted, Gurdy sometimes had to fall back on OS X (for printing to their AppleTalk-based printers for instance), but for the most part the lab functioned the same as before. Some students really enjoyed being able to tweak their OSS tools, while others relied on the application repository and Leete's expertise. Again, it amazes me to see all the open source alternatives out there, some of which are nearly as mature as their profit-based cousins. Leete's experiences are worth a read to anyone considering a switch, and also serves as a good list of alternative apps. I hadn't heard of Scribus, but had been looking for just such a tool. Leete's next move is to replace Maya with Blender, and move away from Avid and Final Cut Pro to some OSS replacements. Hopefully he'll report how that goes as well... My only problem with all this is that in the "real" world, you're a lot less likely to find these tools being used. So if I were a student, I'd be a little interested in learning Photoshop as well as GIMP.