It seems that while we were busy celebrating, everyone at Opera Software were hard at work. Opera released a new Evenes (Opera 10.50) build earlier today. We featured the major changes in Opera 10.5 and benchmarked its JavaScript rendering speed, in earlier articles. Go through them if you want to catch up with what’s new in Opera 10.5.

The big new feature in the latest build is support for HTML5 video element. Opera had demonstrated the <video> element, as far back as 2007. Now, the feature has been integrated in a mainstream build. In the meantime Firefox, Safari and Chrome have also added support for native video playback.

Opera will be supporting the open source Ogg formats: the Vorbis audio codec and the Theora video codec. Safari remains the only browser which is backing the proprietary H.264 codec. Additionally, Opera will be utilising the GStreamer media framework to ensure smooth playback. Opera will use its own implementation of GStreamer on Windows and Mac. However, it will be using the system-installed version on platforms where GStreamer is natively available. In other words, Opera will be able to playback videos out of the box on Windows and Mac. However on Linux and BSD, you would need to install at least the GStreamer “base” and “good” plugins for the video element to work. The GStreamer plugin for Mac isn’t yet ready; hence support for video element is missing in this Mac build.

As mentioned earlier, the UNIX build has undergone fairly major changes. Opera is dumping the QT framework and hopes to provide a more native interface with Evenes. The KDE integration is still not very usable. Hence, this UNIX build only contains GTK integration.

[ Download Opera 10.5 for Windows, UNIX and Mac ]

John Yerhot primarily a Ruby on Rails developer, has come out with a series of screencasts for Unix, Linux and Open Source Software users at FOSSCasts, something like Channel 10. Only, these videos are released as free and Open Source.

You can subscribe to the screencasts through RSS feeds for different formats, namely Ogg Theora and  Quicktime videos. You can also get the screencasts directly in your iTunes.

Each of these videos is less than 10 minutes in playtime and covers open source software and tips and tricks in general. The screencasts have a weekly release and are released every Friday.

It would have been better if the site allowed playing the video as well. Right now, we need download the videos to play them. Otherwise, the screencasts are very helpful and are for both novices and experts.

Anyone who has had some experience working with Linux would have heard, if not used PuTTY. For those unaware, PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Windows & Unix platforms and it comes with an xterm emulator. It is tiny little utility loved by Linux geeks.

Working a lot with Linux servers at work as well as with my blog host, I use PuTTY day in and day out and I have always wondered why it hasn’t changed much over the years.

To my delight, I just came across PuTTY Tray. It is a huge improvement to the current PuTTY and here are the things about it that are geeking me out.

• Minimize to system tray (Ctrl+minimize) – lets you minimize any number of PuTTY sessions to system tray.
• Reconnect on connection failure
• A colorful tray icon that blinks when a bell is received
• Portable – You can choose to store session config files in a USB drive
• Reconnects when computer is waking up from stand-by
• URL hyperlinking
• Load session from file using command line
• Choose to ‘Always stay on top’ – very useful while you want to work but monitor a server

Now, if only PuTTY gets a tabbed interface, I would be the happiest Linux user ever. Currently, I use WinTabber to get all my PuTTY sessions in one window in tabs. I would love to hear and learn from you if you use a better alternative.

If you use PuTTY, what else would you like to see as features in the future?

Technorati Tags: linux,utilities