A few quotes:

“DV Kitchen, from DV Creators, costs little more than a budget video encoder, yet offers a host of professional features.”

“SampleLab allows bitrate data size/quality trade-offs to be gauged quickly and accurately. It’s simple to use but incredibly useful, and therein lies its genius.”

“The Bitrate Calculator is a useful, foolproof way to calculate the applicable bitrate for encodes.”

“Timefreezer… is another simple, effective and welcome tool.”

“While other encoding tools have attempted FTP upload functionality, none has got it quite right until DV Kitchen.”

“Our overall impression of DV Kitchen is very favourable. Encoding is quick, extra tools such as the SampleLab are excellent and the program facilitates virtually every encoding eventuality we can think of – and all at a bargain price.”

We are overjoyed with Ben Frain’s incisive, intelligent review. And the Brits once again show they are a bit ahead of the curve- reviews in major U.S. publications are still forthcoming!

Read the entire review here.

Yep, when you see the revolutionary breakthroughs we’ve made in web video publishing, I think you’ll agree it merits a full number upgrade.

We have completely redesigned and rebuilt the Publish Room so that you can:

• publish simple Quicktime embedded movies or whole HTML pages
• publish Quicktime embedded movies with default poster frame or whole HTML pages
• publish Quicktime embedded movies with custom poster frames you choose
• publish Quicktime H.264 or FLV in Jeroen’s Flash Player* with:
  • choice of custom skins*
  • custom poster frame
  • custom watermark
• publish Quicktime H.264 or FLV in ShadowBox*
• as well as publishing images and easily copying remote media file URLs.

As you look at these amazing web video publishing options, you’re bound to think, “Hmmm, I’ve already encoded and uploaded movies to web servers for years, wouldn’t it be great if I could republish them using some of these cool new players!”

Well, now you can!

We’ve also added the revolutionary ability to choose a movie from your remote server with a remote media file browser including preview!

You could spend hundreds on other encoding programs but you won’t find these immensely valuable features anywhere else.

We’ve also improved a few other things, the whole list is here.

The 2.0 upgrade is FREE. That’s right, FREE as in just click your “CHECK FOR UPDATES” button and DV Kitchen 2.0 is yours. People think we’re crazy to sell this enterprise-class professional media publishing powerhouse for $79.95, which is true, it should be at least $200 – $300. But we resisted raising the price for now, I think we can hold on just a little longer before it goes up, so if you haven’t purchased yet, now’s the time.

Learn more about DV Kitchen here.

* use of Jeroen’s Flash Player or ShadowBox on a commercial site requires purchase

This movie shows how to add a folder on your remote server to DV Kitchen, as well as showing some tips and shortcuts along the way.

For more info on DV Kitchen, click here.

Allan Tepper, ProVideo Coalition.com, just posted this great article explaining why DV Kitchen is still a necessary tool for the digital video creator even with the latest new features of Final Cut Studio 3!

Here’s an excerpt:

FCP7 brings many welcome exporting/sharing features, but we still need DV Kitchen for the following reasons:

Final Cut Pro 7 fortunately now offers many inboard “sharing” features which were very weak or non-existent before. Now FCP7 allows us to export to multiple formats and destinations in a single job (called “Back-End Batch Capability” in my DV Kitchen review of March 2009). FCP7 even allows us to export “in the background”, so we can keep on editing if we’d like. Thanks to FCP7’s improved integration with Apple’s Compressor, some of the encoded formats can be published directly to web destinations, whether they be MobileMe, YouTube, or even your own FTP server (after you’ve previously made a preset destination for it in Compressor). These are all welcome improvements, which are directly accessible from FCP7. However, DV Kitchen is still a vital tool (especially if you’re encoding for MobileMe, your own web server… or your client’s web server), because it includes the following unique and must-have features not included in FCP7/FCS3 . . .

Read the whole article here:

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/atepper/story/after_fcp7_fcs3_we_still_need_dvkitchen/

Average U.S. Viewer Watched 6.4 Hours of Online Video During the Month, According to comScore Video Metrix

RESTON, VA, June 4, 2009 – comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released April 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, showing that U.S. Internet users viewed 16.8 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 16 percent versus March. A significant increase in video viewing at YouTube during April contributed to the month’s sizeable gains.

Google Sites Accounts for 41 Percent of U.S. Online Video Market

In April, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with 6.8 billion videos viewed (40.7 percent online video market share), a 15-percent increase versus March. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 513 million videos (3.1 percent), followed by Hulu with 397 million (2.4 percent) and Yahoo! Sites with 355 million (2.1 percent).

*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

Google Sites Reaches Record Video Audience

Nearly 152 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 111 videos per viewer in April. Google Sites reached an all-time high of 107.9 million video viewers during the month. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 58.8 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (45.4 million) and Hulu (40.1 million).

*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

Other notable findings from April 2009 include:

• 78.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 385 minutes of video, or 6.4 hours.
• 107.1 million viewers watched 6.8 billion videos on YouTube.com (63.5 videos per viewer).
• 49 million viewers watched 387 million videos on MySpace.com (7.9 videos per viewer).
• Hulu accounted for 2.4 percent of videos viewed, but 4.2 percent of all minutes spent watching online video.
• The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.

Neilsen recently released a report on U.S. household video viewing habits. The survey reported viewers spent slightly more (2%) time watching TV in the first quarter of 2009 compared to the first quarter of 2008, while time spent watching video on the internet increased 53%.

Still, viewers spend an average of only 3 hours watching video on the internet, up from about 2 hours last year, vs. 153 hours watching TV, vs. 151 last year.

The number of people who watch video on the internet increased 13%, from 115 million to 131 million.

What can we conclude from this survey?

• Well, it’s impressive that almost half the number of people who watch video on TV also watch video on the internet, I would have guessed less.

• I was also surprised that TV viewing increased… I would have thought this number was declining.

So what does the future hold? It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that internet video viewing will continue to rise dramatically every year. Even though internet video’s been around for a long time, many people have only just discovered YouTube, and don’t realize many of their favorite TV shows are available online on demand.

Few people have a computer connected to their TV, but growth here is exploding as well.

Even after 15 years, internet video is still in its naissance. Old habits die hard, and people have been watching TV for more than half a century.

Still, if faster internet becomes more widely available, after the next 5 years, I expect people to be watching as much video on the internet as on cable or satellite TV.

All the numbers in the report are here.

“DVKitchen is unique in helping you to determine your ideal settings… very quickly…”

“No other program on the planet has all of these time-saving features ”

“As you play with any of the five sliders, the recommended bitrate budget number updates dynamically! I don’t know any other software tool, at any price, that offers this. ”

“DVKitchen’s TimeFreezer is a tool which very simply and easily helps you to select and then export a still frame from a video clip, in JPG, PICT, or PNG.” – maybe

“Thanks to the built-in FTP client, DVKitchen doesn’t have to stop after encoding your video. The built-in FTP client will memorize all of your FTP servers (or even particular directories/folders) along with their respective passwords. Once that’s memorized, you can assign each encoding job to be FTPed to a particular server when it’s finished. The FTP function also allows you to create new directories/folders, and even examine and delete files that are there.”

“DVKitchen has an amazingly simple user interface, considering how much it does… DVKitchen is really a must-have tool.”

“Even if for some reason you must encode with another tool (I can’t imagine why, but just in case), it still makes sense to purchase DVKitchen if only for the other features.”

Read the whole review here:

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/atepper/dvkitchen_has_become_a_must_have_video_encoding_publishing_tool/

Ten years ago I sat down with a VP of Cisco Systems and told him the future was video on the internet. At the time, he thought video would always be a minor, though growing element. He said “people don’t want to watch video on their PCs, they want to watch video on their TVs.”

I disagreed, and told him that in a few years it would be the #1 highest traffic driver on the net, and the #1 reason for people to upgrade their (Cisco) routing systems.

As I predicted, internet traffic is skyrocketing, propelled by video.

“The majority of the traffic growth is occurring in the consumer space, driven by consumer Internet or video, whether it is IPTV or frankly even video over the Internet,” said Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president of the service provider routing technology group at Cisco Systems, who provided the following data:

Now let’s look at what type of video is fastest-growing:

Though growth of 300%+ is nothing to sneeze at, what jumps out from this chart is that internet video shown on a TV screen, presently a paltry 332 PB (petabytes), by 2012 is estimated to be 3,458 PB- an increase of over 10x (1,000%) over the next three years.

This means, by the end of 2012, internet video watched on a TV will be more than half the traffic of internet video watched on a computer. If this trend continues, after another few years TV will overtake the computer as the main screen people watch internet video on.

That is not a huge surprise, but what does it mean? Since by 2012 almost everyone will have 1080p widescreen TVs, people will demand far higher quality internet video. No one’s going to watching YouTube video on their 52″ LCD… at least, I hope not!

This bodes very well for the world’s best web video publishing tool, DV Kitchen, and the world’s best “video vending machine”, the MOD Machine.

Some quotes:

“DV Kitchen is a finely crafted application, very easy to use and stable.”

“DV Kitchen has ‘TimeFreezer’, a much better way to make still images from video.”

“…you can have DV Kitchen add the ‘Shadow Box’ effect to movies that you create. It does this with one click and writes the html code for you automatically, sweet.

On SampleLab™:

“This is simply the best way I have ever seen to visually check the quality of your encoded video.”

While writing the review, Ken was annoyed at a couple of things: not being able to name or edit QuickSpecs settings, and the fact the SampleLab window always opened at fullscreen size. He stopped working on the review and went to work adding the features to DV Kitchen.

Now, thanks to Ken Stone, a free update gives you the following features: a lightning bolt icon in SampleLab and the Main Console so you can now name, save and edit QuickSpecs settings, and a preference for SampleLab.

Thanks Ken!

You can read the whole review here.

Shadowbox is an online media viewer application written by the genius Mike Jackson.

When a link or picture is clicked, it veils your web page like dimming the lights in a theatre, then opens a window with a cool animation and plays your movie.

You can now shadowbox your Quicktime or Flash movies from DV Kitchen with just a few clicks, since the code is all written for you!

Watch the movie to see how easy it is:

For more info on Shadowbox, visit Mike’s site.

For more info on DV Kitchen, click here.

What just happened to video on the web?

We are extremely excited to announce that DV Kitchen, the ultimate solution for publishing professional quality video on the web, is available immediately!

Click here to find out all about it and watch the new movies!

DV Kitchen’s primary focus is encoding and uploading broadcast quality, internet-friendly-bandwidth video to a website, blog, forum, or for a video podcast. You can import movies, encode them, and upload them in as few as two clicks!

Features:

• Spectacular quality video encoding
• Integrated FTP uploading
• SampleLab™
• TimeFreezer™
• Bitrate Budget Calculator
• Batch image resizing, encoding and uploading
• Automatic HTML tag and complete page generation
• 20 day free trial, purchase from within the application

Download the free trial and you’ll be cookin’ up some delicious video within minutes!
[display_podcast]
dvcCast! is discontinued, and we are very happy to say DV Kitchen is a FREE UPGRADE for all owners of dvcCast! No typo, that’s FREE as in NO CHARGE. (Hey, no one ever said we don’t take of our customers  )

(To upgrade, just download the free trial and run it.)

DV Kitchen has all dvcCast!’s features, then adds a bunch. Check out the FAQ for the highlights.

Click here for the main DV Kitchen page, with the overview movie, and links to all the other pages and movies.

This movie shows how easy it is to encode to any size, any bitrate FLV movie, upload it, then have DV Kitchen create an entire HTML page for you with window title, page title, movie caption, and Jeroen’s FLV Player, the most popular on the web.

Watch it in Jeroen’s player here.

The DV Kitchen Bitrate Budget Calculator is a sophisticated modeling algorithm that takes five factors into account to help you determine what your movie’s bitrate limit should be based on your particular situation.

When Flash first incorporated video in version 6, they chose the “Spark” Sorenson 3 codec. A good choice, that was the best encoding quality at that time. In the following years, several companies developed encoding algorithms that were clearly higher quality.

Flash 8 then added the On2 VP6 codec, which again delivered higher quality at lower bandwidth.

Because of so many viewers had the Flash plugin, a couple years ago web video encoders found they could encode video into Flash rather than the triplicate of the past (Windows Media, Real, Quicktime).

But with the release of the H.264 standard there was still one more shoe to drop. H.264, as we predicted when we first saw it, will become the standard for web and DVD encoding, due to its unprecendented quality and low bandwidth. Apple talked YouTube into re-encoding videos into H.264 for compatibility with the AppleTV and iPhone.

Adobe has now announced that Flash will handle H.264 video, allowing web encoders both the advantage of the highest possible quality and compatibility with the widest number of viewers on all three platforms. Flash will also play AAC audio, a higher quality codec than MP3.

Adobe is smart- Flash is still everywhere on the web, but if they took a course of ever more proprietary non-standards, Flash would eventually go the way of Real and Windows Media- still out there but I doubt we’ll see any in a couple years. This keeps Flash as a good choice, often the best choice for authoring rich media web experiences.

Tinic Uro, an engineer on the Flash Player, shares some insight here.

Flash Player 9 beta is available now, here.