Filed under: Software The following is a guest post from Tod Maffin , one of Canada’s most influential web and technology commentators. Thanks, Tod! -Ed. Air Video Server (Free) This is a great little app that for people who have lots of videos on their computer, but want to watch them on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and an iPad. Previously what I had to do was to convert the videos to MP4 (often a very slow process), import them into iTunes, and tweak the metadata. Only then could I watch the movies I have on my iDevices. That still wasn’t a great solution, since those videos then took up space on those devices

Media streamers aren’t exactly new, but there’s another entrant to the field that works so simply and easily it should be nearly mandatory for any iPhone user. It’s called Air Video —and it’s only three bucks. Here’s the scenario: I’ve got a NAS with about a terabyte or so of video sitting on my network. Some torrented files, a lot of DVD rips I made myself, a fair amount of random Xvid and MKV files I’ve kept for years, and quite a few h.264 MPGs that I encoded of my own work. Now, getting videos to an iPhone is relatively easy—if you want to convert them to h.264. Toss the file into Handbrake , fiddle with a few settings, and copy the converted file into iTunes to be synced to your iPhone

People traditionally don’t flock to the movies around the New Year. So far, the biggest grossing movie on New Year’s weekend was Meet the Fockers with $41.7 million. And then, Avatar came and demolished that record with a clean $68.3 million. It’s the best third weekend in history, and – more importantly – when you put all of Avatar’s US and international earnings in its first three weeks, you get 1.02 billion dollars . No movie ever did it that fast, and Avatar is now sure to become the second biggest grossing movie of all time

Even as Netflix adds Criterion movies (yes!) to its burgeoning Watch Instantly library, the studios eye their intentions ever more suspiciously , worried Netflix may be sowing the seeds of Hollywood’s destruction. Which could mean fewer movies for us. The deal with Starz that gives Netflix (and us) streaming access to newer movies apparently arched a lot of eyebrows, and even Netflix admitted it’s gonna have to start getting permission directly for studios—probably paying more for the movies. It’s also gotta fight the entrenched window system, the strange path a movie follows from theatrical release to DVD to HBO to cable, which is how movie studios continue to pull profits out of a movie long after it leaves the big screen. BusinessWeek makes it clear it’s not gonna be easy.

Filed under: Video , How-tos , iPhone , iPhone 101 If you read my recent post about taking movies with the iPhone 3GS , you probably noted that I talked about the lack of editing capabilities on the iPhone with the exception of trimming the beginning and ending of your videos. What if you want to edit your movies, add titles or effects, or combine a bunch of short iPhone video clips? Several of the comments left by TUAW readers asked the same question, and it’s so easy to do that I decided to whip up a quick tutorial showing how this works. You probably have a tool on your Mac that can do the job for you with just a few clicks, drags, and menu selections. iMovie is the perfect easy tool for creating full feature films (just kidding) from individual scenes shot with the iPhone 3GS video camera. Here’s how to do it.

UPDATE: Ellen and Diddy’s Twitter accounts also posted fake death announcements today as part of the same attack. – After a series of tragic celebrity deaths this week – including Michael Jackson , Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon – it was perhaps more shocking for Britney Spears fans to read the following Tweet on her account tonight, accompanied by a Twitpic of a cross: Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come. Both the Tweet and the Twitpic were quickly deleted, but services like Tweetmeme have archived the evidence (below), proving that the message did indeed make it to Britney’s account. Although clearly a hack that’s been quickly cleared up, it’s not yet clear how the perpetrators gained access to the account.

Filed under: Humor , OS , Odds and ends Being the Disney- Pixar fanatics that we are, my wife and I went to see Up Saturday night (in Disney Digital 3D, of course) at our local theater. Remembering the appearance of the Mac startup sound as Wall-E ‘s waking noise in last year’s Pixar epic, and the brief shot of an Apple-themed racer in Cars , I decided to look for Apple-themed Easter eggs in the movie. By the time we were at the end of the film, I was beginning to think that there weren’t going to be any love letters to Apple in Up . The credits, featuring Russell’s Wilderness Explorer merit badges floating by on a typed page, began to look somewhat promising. Sure enough, I spied a stylized and stationary ” Spinning Pizza of Death ,” the dreaded Mac OS X wait cursor, on a merit badge just about at the end of the credits. For those of you who are either Windows users or have been lucky enough to have never seen this infamous Mac icon (seen 3 times lifesize above), it’s the Mac OS X equivalent of the hourglass in Windows. The SPOD (officially known as the Spinning Wait Cursor, A.K.A. the Beach Ball of Death or the Marble of Doom ) appears when an application is not responding to events.

A couple years ago, Netflix began supplementing its DVD mail rental business with movie streams over the Web. for a few thousand select titles. Today, millions of Netflix customers stream their movies instead of waiting for them to come in the mail (or, more often, do both). ComScore Video Metrix estimates Netflix’s online viewership a bit lower at 645,000 unique viewers in March. They watched 6.9 million video streams and the average time spent watching per viewer is an amazing 128 minutes for the month, which is right up there with YouTube in terms of time spent (having full-length feature films helps keep people around longer). You pay Netflix a subscription, and you can watch your monthly allotment of movies any way you want