Popular open source news - Media Players and Editors

Myka has launched a new open-source media player which is designed to compete with the Apple TV. The Myka Media player comes with up to 500GB of storage, a built in BitTorrent client, wired and wireless connectivity, a USB port and HDMI, composite and SPDIF inputs.

Obi, an open source audio recording tool released by the DAISY Consortium, enables a broader audience to produce accessible, navigable information for people with print disabilities. DAISY audio books created with Obi can be produced with chapters, sections, sub-sections and pages, providing navigation to the content. Obi is fully accessible through assistive technologies such as screen readers.

Apple's getting flack from the Electronic Frontier Foundation due to its heavy-handed response to a group attempting to untie iPods from the iTunes software. Apple sent a DMCA take-down notice to the Wiki-based site Bluwiki regarding a discussion group known as "iPodhash". The group is trying to reverse engineer the encrypted hash used to secure an iPod's media database.

These are clearly not the easiest times to secure financing for a startup, but Boxee, which makes an open-source media center application that works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and the Apple TV, just announced a $4 million investment from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Bijan Sabet from Spark and Fred Wilson from Union Square will join the Boxee board.

The second beta of the open source Amarok 2 music player was released earlier this week with significant architectural enhancements and many bugfixes. The Amarok team says that development is accelerating as the final release approaches and the program is already stable enough to meet the needs of many users.

We all love the iPod, but sadly, Apple is still not kind enough to provide an iPod manager for those of us who use Linux. However, this is not really a big issue nowadays as there are other means to manage your iPod under Linux. Thanks to these excellent free and open source media players that are certified to handle your iPod the way iTunes can.

After two years in development, VLC, the universal media player, has moved from the 0.8.x versions to version 0.9.2. The release, named "Grishenko", is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other operating systems, is available to download from the Videolan web site. The most visible new feature in the Windows and Linux versions is a new user interface.