video.Maru 2.0 is now free to use to build custom video interfaces. Actually, It’s always been free.

• You can use it for free on your own personal projects.
• You can use it for free on your freelance projects.
• You can use it for free if you work at a design agency.
• You can use it for fee to build video skins that you sell to others.

I’m trying to think of a situation where you can’t use it for free . . . I’m drawing a blank here. Wait, I’ve got it: if you are using video.Maru to design a video interface for Microsoft then you have to buy me lunch sometime.

There are a handful of features that I would like to add to video.Maru and then I’m going to publish the code and release it to open source. I have a lot that I’m working on right now but I’m hoping to go to the Adobe MAX07 in Chicago and release the update and open source while I’m there.

Are we clear here? I want you to use video.Maru and I hope you make mounds of money in the process. Either for you or your company.

If you see me at a conference someday you can buy me a glass of wine. How’s that?

Update: video.Maru has been open sourced under the MIT license.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS ORIMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

Much has been made of Silverlight getting into the RIA space mainly so that Microsoft would have some tool to make themselves a player again in web based video space. As Scoble said,

Perhaps the hottest debate in my circle today centers around the technologies we’ll use inside, or outside, the browser to build a new kind of rich Internet application. We’re talking mostly about video, because that’s where the action is, …

What makes news is when a major player - like Major League Baseball or Netflix - picks Silverlight to deliver video. The perception becomes that not only is Silverlight a contender but maybe Flash is in trouble.

But the perception is misleading. Because someone like Netflix might use Silverlight we perceive it as a major victory. But in reality, Netflix is only one source of video content. How much would Adobe had made if Netflix had chosen Flash? A few dozen copies of the Flash authoring tool at best. It’s a drop in the ocean.

The ocean of designers and developers who make video content for the web is huge. Take youTube, all the major news channels, entertainment channels, basically every brand name you can think of with a web video presence. Add them all up and how much of the total volume of developers and designers in the world do you think they represent? I’m sure it’s a fleetingly small percentage whatever it may be.

On the other hand think of all the freelancers, design firms big and small, and IT departments that you’ve never heard of. That group comprises the vast majority of boxes of CS3 sold. That’s where the money is.

I’m not saying that the big companies that we hear about don’t matter. Of course they do. But they don’t have the impact we might think at first glance. By far their biggest impact is the influence they have on others to follow their lead do to a mis perception of their importance.

So how many of those small bands of designers/developers do you think are going to jump on the Silverlight bandwagon and start publishing video to the web?

A few percent? At best.

Anyone who has already used Flash to deliver video already knows how easy it is. And if they’ve used video.Maru they know how powerful and simple it is.

Contrast that with Silverlight and you end up with a lot of questions. Have you deployed a web based video with Silverlight? Do you know anyone who has? What’s the workflow like? How do you do it?

By the time you answer those questions you could already have a functional video interface in Flash ready to deploy.

Adding captions to online video is becoming a hot topic. If you are a designer/developer working on a video interface and are requested to add captioning then you have to figure out a way that ties the playback of the video to an external file - probably XML - that describes when and for how long a caption should be displayed.

It isn’t a trivial problem.

So when I was updating video.Maru to version 2.0 I made sure that I made it just as easy to add closed captions to your video interface as it is to create the interface with video.Maru in the first place.

Watch a video tutorial covering how to use captions with video.Maru.