With so many sites video aggregation sites out there, wouldn’t it be nice if you could search for videos across all of them from one place? Chime.tv lets you do just that and throws on a clean user interface to top it off.

Blip TV, Break.com, Daily Motion, Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh, & YouTube are all used as sources for Chime.tv’s content. The killer feature of this video site is it creates dynamic playlists based on your search term letting you sit back and enjoy the fruits of your not-so-hard labor. The experience is on par with the popular video on-demand application Joost, from the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Chime.tv offers a far better experience, in my opinion, for a few reasons.

1) Chime.tv is in the browser. There is no application to download and you can access your saved videos from any Internet-connected computer that has Flash.

2) All the content on the Internet is available not just select partners. Joost provides a wide variety of content but once you have seen it all the only thing you can do is wait for Joost to add more shows. Meanwhile, the Internet will never run out of things for you to kill hours of time watching. This is also a plus for content providers to offer a new way to distribute content to an audience and not be shut out by the big wigs at Joost.

3) No annoying ads. The ads on Joost, while short, become bland and annoying very fast. Chime.tv offers only the stuff you want without interrupting you for something don’t give two hoots about.

The video quality on Chime.tv is on par with YouTube videos; heavily compressed with visible artifacts. Joost is slightly better but for all the other advantages Chime.tv offers it earns my recommendation over Joost.

I must have spoken too soon as Internet video giant YouTube has released their embeddable flash video player. Try it below…

All of these features are available in the embedded player and not just on the YouTube page.

If you were thinking that all you had to do was just make your video available to an online audience, think again! Now you have to make it as easy as possible to keep them entertained giving them more control over their viewing experience.

(via DownloadSquad)

Last night Break.com launched a new video player with some unique features. The video of the player in action can be seen below.

Some of the new things are…

• Clicking on the bottom right corner allows you to resize the player as a video is playing.
• You can also elect to center the player in the middle of your browser, make it full-screen, or bring it back to normal size while a video is playing.
• Clicking on the picture and dragging it right or left while the mouse is still pressed down grabs the video and fast-forwards or rewinds it. (Very cool!)
• Controls for brightness, contrast, saturation, and smoothing can bump up and overlay the player.
• Slo-motion
• Keyboard shortcuts — A for fullscreen, S for slow-mo, V for preferences, up and down for volume, right and left for fast-forward and rewind.
• If selected, a guide overlays the entire screen with more from this user, top-rated, most-viewed, and related video scrolling through.

Of course to play with the new features you will have to view a video on Break.com’s pages not an embedded version like above.

(via NewTeeVee)

Browsing the headlines at CNN today I noticed a link to preview their new beta look. Here is a look of the current design followed by the new beta look…

As you can see, CNN is trying to better organize their information as well as web 2.0-ifying their look with rounded corners and brighter colors. Under the shiny hood they have ditched all table-based layout elements (<table>, <tr>, <td>) and have instead gone with a 100% standards-based layout (<div>, <p>, <ul>, <li>). For the laymen, CNN has made their layout lighter in code and easier to maintain.

The bad news is CNN is relying on a lot more JavaScript files; 15 total scripts on the new homepage compared to 9 on the old. For a comparison, other news sites like MSNBC.com uses 12 and USNews.com uses 10. The more scripts a page needs to call the longer the load time as the browser has to download the complete JS file before the page continues to load. Below is a table outlining some other technical stats between the previously mentioned news sites.

With the technical bits aside, the new design greatly enhances usability, especially in the article pages. Thanks to AJAX a reader can interact with photos and video on the page without being forced to reload or pop-up a new window. This makes things like their in-line photo displays a joy to use. But photos are not the only thing that have been made easier to use; CNN’s new YouTube-inspired Flash video player has its own little tab that comes into view when needed and tucks neatly away when not in use.

Flash video players are universal and can be used on any system with the Flash plugin. This is a big step up from the former Windows Media only video option that came in a pop up player on the old CNN. Not only is video more user friendly but it is also bigger making it a much more enjoyable experience.

Conclusion
The new look provides several necessary improvements as CNN looks to focus more on multimedia driven content in the future. The changes that I have seen today are a big step forward and I look forward to checking back as CNN remains my top spot for national news. I look forward to seeing whatever else they may have in store.

Him: hey, my class had to read an article you wrote
Him: it was a blog about typography you did
Me: a blog about typography?
Him: yeah
Him: dvguru was the website
Me: o gotcha
Me: do you have the url?
Him: let me get it
Him: Fonts and resources to spruce up your film or DVD

Wow, I’m flattered. Who ever thought something I wrote would become required reading? All I can say is the good folks in the interactive multimedia program at Ohio University sure have a good taste in material.

Thanks Brett Phillips!