Miro has been offering its video converter as a standalone, one-click conversion tool for some time. However, previous versions only supported the conversion of one file at a time, which made it pretty much unusable if you had a larger collection of files. The new version makes it possible to drag and drop a number of videos onto the app and then simply start to convert them all with the same settings.

Of course, Miro Video Converter isn’t the only tool helping you to tweak your videos to play on mobile devices. Recently, Plex added an option to sync videos onto iOS devices for offline playback, which includes automatic transcoding, and apps like doubleTwist support similar functionality for Android users as well.

However, the beauty of the Miro Video Converter is its simplicity: If all you want to do is convert a few videos, it doesn’t get any easier than this.

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Miro just rolled out an update to its video conversion and syncing software that makes it ultra-easy to encode and transfer video and audio to the Kindle Fire. To do so, a user just needs to:

• Install the latest version of the Miro software.
• Connect the Kindle Fire to his or her computer via USB (it will appear in the “Connect” tab), and;
• Drag-and-drop any videos he or she wants to transfer to the Kindle Fire in the Miro sidebar.

That’s it. Miro will do the rest, automatically converting videos into the correct size and file format for the device. Once the videos have been transferred, they will be available in the “Gallery” app on the Kindle Fire, rather than the “Video” tab (where Amazon places videos that have been purchased on the device).

Miro is available for OS X, Windows and Linux, and can be used to convert files for many other devices, including iPhones, iPods, iPads and Android phones.

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Of course, Mixd.tv isn’t ignoring social networks completely. The application, which is currently being tested in private beta, offers users a way to quickly create playlists of their favorite videos and share them with other Mixd.tv users online. Dawn-Hiscox said via email that this kind playlist sharing is “a central part” of Mixd.tv’s future, which will be built out further in the months to come.

Users can also share their favorite videos on Facebook, but the social network isn’t essential for Mixd.tv. “Those who want to see video that their ‘friends’ are sharing, should also have the ability to do so,” he said.”However, this is very much an opt-in part of the service.” He also said that the hopes others pin on the power of the social graph for discovery are “optimistic at best,” given the fact that most Facebook users have hundreds of friends with widely varying interests.

So what does Mixd.tv offer its users? Aside from the playlist sharing feature, it puts a big emphasis on branded channels. Users can browse and subscribe to channels from publishers like TED, Revision3 and Vimeo. There are also a large number of German-language channels, simply because Mixd.tv is developed in Berlin. Dawn-Hiscox said that the company is working on an API to allow third-party developers to add their own channels even for content sources without RSS feeds. Publishers will also able to brand these channels with themes.

I have to admit I thought of open-source video player Miro a few times while testing Mixd.tv, both in terms of the functionality as well as the fact that the app is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. I asked Dawn-Hiscox about it, and he had this to say: “Mixd.tv aims to be the one stop solution for video discovery and consumption.” Miro’s focus seemed much broader and less focused, he mused, joking: “Video, music and apps — they only need to add books and they will be the next Amazon.”

Check out a few screenshots of the Mixd.tv app:

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The new update also includes a home sharing feature that makes it possible to play any Miro library content on any computer in the home network. The software uses the iTunes DAAP protocol to facilitate this kind of networking, which means Miro shares will also be available to any other DAAP client and play media from other DAAP servers, including network attached storage (NAS) drives in your home network.

Another notable feature is the inclusion of the Miro Video Converter, making it possible to convert any video file to make it playable on most handsets and other devices. And finally, Miro continues to include a BitTorrent client to download media from various torrent sites.

Miro is published by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation as an open-source project, and it has been trying to compete with iTunes and other media players for a long time. The makers of Miro told me in March they’ve been clocking about two million active users per month and a total of five million downloads of the application over the last year.

The Participatory Culture Foundation has long pushed to empower independent content makers to find new audiences online, which has been reflected in Miro as well. The software includes a media guide that showcases audio and video podcasts. This is the first time Miro has actively embraced mobile devices.

The new update squarely focuses on Android, but the makers of Miro aren’t ignoring iOS entirely: They’ve been working on a Miro app for the iPad, which should be available in about three weeks, according to Participatory Culture Foundation Co-Founder Nicholas Reville.

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Miro is developed by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), whose co-founder Nicholas Reville gave me a first preview of the upcoming version this week, saying that Miro 4 is going to be “by far the biggest update we’ve ever done”.

The most notable new feature in Miro 4 is device syncing, which makes it possible to automatically download media to connected mobile phones, tablets or even plain old hard drives. Miro converts media for a number of devices, utilizing the same code that has been implemented into the stand-alone Miro Video Converter. The PCF is still asking users to submit device profiles and has a generic fallback system in place for unknown devices.

Another important new feature is home sharing, which makes it possible to stream and download media between multiple computers running Miro within the same network. Miro utilizes the iTunes DAAP protocol for home sharing, which means that your Miro shares will also be accessible through other DAAP clients.

Other features include an extensions API, bigger emphasis on audio content and a revamped search functionality. Reville told me that Miro currently has about two million active users per month. The PCF tracked about five million downloads of the software last year.

Of course, Miro isn’t the only application targeting users of iPads and other devices, and apps like Doubletwist have been trying for years to establish themselves as iTunes competitors. What can Miro offer that others can’t? Said Reville: “There’s a big unfilled need for a great audio and video player that can sync with Android devices, and we believe Miro 4 will be the best in the world for this.” He added that the PCF is currently in talks with device manufacturers to bundle Miro with mobile devices.

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Miro Community does not offer video hosting on its own, but relies on feeds from YouTube and other sources, which can be imported in a matter of minutes. “Our feeling is that there’s a lot of great free (or) low-cost hosting options out there,” explained PCF-co-founder Nicholas Reville when I contacted him via email yesterday, adding: “The usage we’re targeting is people and organizations that want to bring together video from various places into one well-designed experience.”

Some of the sites that are using Miro community include the public broadcaster WDET Detroit, Duke University and the auto enthusiast community SkiddPlayer, and Reville told me that the group is in talks with other public radio stations and newspapers. “Folks who submit the best videos will tend to already have a video hosting account that they post to,” he said. Miro Community would make it possible to aggregate those videos instead of forcing people to re-upload each and every clip.

I played a little bit with the platform yesterday and today, the results of which can be seen here, and importing video feeds really does work like a breeze. The Miro Community Engine gathers embed codes and all relevant metadata from the source site. Admins then have a chance to curate these feeds, rejecting or approving each and every clip — an approach that is particularly useful if one would, for example, aggregate a feed of YouTube videos tagged with a certain keyword. However, trusted feeds can also be auto-approved.

Miro Community’s hosted version is free for non-commercial use, but users that want some advanced features, including the ability to run advertising need to apply for a premium account, which costs $99 per month after a three-month test period.

The platform has been built with the help of a $589,000 grant by the Knight Foundation, which aimed to enable “a new low-cost model for community civic media.” Reville told me that the Participatory Culture Foundation is looking to supplement foundation grants like this one with earned revenue though projects like Miro Community to establish long-term sustainable funding.

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The Miro Video Converter, which is available for Mac and PC, makes it easy to convert videos with a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows users to output their files to any number of preset formats. The converter tool, which we previewed here, can output files to work on the iPhone, as well as various iPods, Android mobile devices, and even the Sony PSP. In line with its open source roots, the Miro Video Converter also outputs to the Ogg Theora format, and now Google’s VP8.

The tool comes just a few days after Google released the VP8 codec with an open source, royalty-free license for anyone that wants to use it. However, it might be a while before Miro users will actually be able to showcase the videos they encode in the new format. While Google’s new WebM Project, built around VP8, has received support from Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome, it will be a while before those browsers make VP8 support generally available in stable releases.

The new version of Miro Video Converter is available at www.mirovideoconverter.com.

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PCF co-founder Nicholas Reville told me that the group plans to release a first public demo of its tools in four to six weeks. He said that the group received an initial grant from the Mozilla Foundation to build Universal Subtitles, and that it is actively looking for volunteers through Mozilla’s new Drumbeat community.

The PCF has been building a subtitle widget that will allow volunteers to transcribe videos from pretty much any web site, sync them with the video in question and then publish the results online. Universalsubtitles.org will host these subtitles in a Wikipedia-like fashion, complete with different versions for each video and various ways for people to collaborate.

Subtitles will be saved in a format like .srt, which is supported by many video players. Reville told me that the site wants to enhance this with a new protocol that can be used by video players, web sites and various devices to query the Universal Subtitles site or any other subtitle repository and download the correct subtitle in the appropriate format. “We want to work with other organizations to create a new open standard that anyone who hosts subtitles or make a video player can use,” he said.

Universal Subtitles isn’t the only one working on enhancing web video through subtitles. YouTube recently rolled out site-wide closed captions through voice recognition. Reville said that Universal Subtitles can be complementary to YouTube’s efforts. “There are lots of things that speech recognition and machine translation can’t do well now,” he explained, adding that his group is also looking at options to incorporate voice recognition to make human subtitling even easier.

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Tools to convert videos have been out for a while, but many of them used to be fairly complex, asking for detailed settings about bit rates, audio codecs and interlacing. However, there have been a number of new applications released in the last couple of months that make converting and even transfering clips and movies between devices much easier. Here are five great free tools to check out.

Miro Video Converter: Video conversion doesn’t really get any simpler than this. Drag any video onto the Miro Video Converter, select one of several output formats via drop-down menu and hit convert to get things going. The Miro Video Converter comes with preset conversion settings for Apple’s iPhone as well as various iPods, a number of Android phones, including the G1, the Nexus One and the Droid, as well as Sony’s PSP. Videos are automatically scaled to the right screen size, while preserving their original aspect ratio.

Also, this is one of the few easy-to-use tools that offers conversion to the open source video format Ogg Theora that is used by Wikipedia and other open source projects. Miro’s video converter doesn’t feature any way to transfer your videos, so you’ll still have to rely on iTunes or other tools for that, depending on your device of choice. (Windows, Mac)

DivX Plus: The most recent version of the DivX video player makes it possible to convert video files for playback on DivX-certified devices, which means that you’ll be able to play your videos on the PS3, as well as many DVD players (just take a look for the DivX logo), pretty much any Blu-ray player, and a number of TV sets without having to figure out the settings to do so. DivX Plus offers the ability to transfer the converted video files to USB flash drives or burn them to a CD or DVD right within the application. Check out our recent review for more details. (Windows, Mac version in the works)

doubleTwist: This is the most comprehensive solution to convert video files and transfer them to mobile devices, with doubleTwist boasting a list of more that 200 compatible devices that range from Apple’s household names to almost any Android phone you can think of to Nokia handsets and even to the PSP. Oh, and did I mention Blackberry and Palm? doubleTwist also offers a range of additional features, like the ability to subscribe to video podcasts. Basically, it’s like iTunes without being restricted to the iPod or iPhone. (Windows, Mac)

RealPlayer: Real’s software doesn’t have the best reputation among online video veterans, but the most recent version, dubbed RealPlayer SP, actually has some decent conversion options to prepare your videos for mobile devices like the iPhone, various Blackberry phones and game consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Users can also download videos directly from YouTube and even use simple editing tools to trim them before converting and transferring the resulting clips to the device of their choice. Read our recent review of the software here. (Windows, Mac)

Vuze: This BitTorrent client not only offers access to a ton of content, but it also converts any downloaded video for playback on iPhones, iPods, the Apple TV, Sony’s PS3 and PSP, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and even newer Tivo DVRs. Files can be transferred or streamed through your home network, based on the playback device of choice. (Windows, Mac)

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The site is built on Stack Overflow, an open-source CMS that combines Wiki-like functionality with a collaborative Q&A approach. In other words, anyone can post questions, provide answers, and vote on both — and everything can be edited to perfection. Stack Overflow has become really popular with programmers ever since it launched about a year ago, and the Miro folks believe that this format will be useful to video makers as well.

To be sure, there’s hardly a shortage of places to go and geek out about the technical aspects of making video. Any Google search about specific formats or gear will lead you to dozens of specialized forum posts from sites like Doom9.org or DVCreators.net. However, chances are that the answer you’re looking for is hidden somewhere in a passionate back-and-forth that spreads over 40 forum pages. And usually the answer is from 1999, specific to an application or camera that hasn’t been available for ages. It’s a frustrating experience. Trust us, we’ve been there.

VideoWTF tries to avoid this by relying on Stack Overflow, which features more of a Wiki-like approach to problem solving. Questions as well as answers can be edited, and ideally, the best answer gets voted up, so you won’t have to read through dozens of replies before finding something useful. Stack Overflow is developed by Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame and Coding Horror blogger Jeff Atwood. “They just started making it available as a service to other organizations for other topics, so we jumped at the chance to create a similar resource for video creators,” explained Nicholas Reville from the Participatory Culture Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Miro.

The site is still in its infancy and currently only features about a dozen or so questions, ranging from licensing options for documentaries to the best encoding settings for iPhone videos to the pros and cons of wireless microphones. Reville hopes VideoWTF will eventually grow into a strong community for online video makers. He said the site aims to be complementary to Make Internet TV, a site launched about two years ago by the same team that features text and video how-tos.

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