There were a bunch of stories a while ago about TorrentSpy and the bunch of seemingly mixed signals that were routinely being sent from the site to its users.

At the time, no-one knew whether or not it was safe to venture there any more.

This was after rumors about alleged records of visitors IPs being kept and forcefully transferred to the lovely folk over at the MPAA.

You may also be aware of the many still unanswered questions floating about the blogosphere about the torrent-site-vs-Big-Media battle waged oh-so-unscrupulously in weeks and months past.

Well, yesterday Wired.com was so kind as to publish a story by David Kravets about a major component of the TorrentSpy debacle. 

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The massively popular video streaming site TVLinks was last night shut down by British authorities and the owner, a 26 year old man from Cheltenham, England was arrested on copyright violation charges.

TVLinks started as a small niche site offering links to other sites on the Internet where you could watch television programmes and movies. As is always the case with a great idea, word soon got around until the site became too popular for its own good.

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Camtasia Studio was already at the top of the screen recording software tree, and now Version 5.0 has been released and is even more comprehensive and fully featured.

There are many other options available when looking to make a screencast - a movie recording of your desktop or browser-based applications - but you’ll be hard pushed to find one that matches Camtasia Studio, with it’s performance and feature set.

If you’re looking to create a quick five minute demo of something on-screen to share with a friend, there are plenty of free or cheap options available to you, including Jing Project, which is another Techsmith product, reviewed here back in July.

However, if you want an all-in-one solution that will let you record, edit, add titles and interactivity, create a soundtrack and optimize your resultant video for web delivery, Camtasia Studio is clearly as good as it gets.

New Features

Version 5.0 adds some very welcome features to the already well-stocked selection previously on offer. Among my favorites are:

• SmartFocus, which will automatically pan and zoom your videos for maximum legibility, even if you change from a very high-resolution format to much smaller dimensions
• Improved editing functionality that allows for high precision cuts, something that wasn’t previously possible in Camtasia Studio
• Easy-to-use project settings that make it really easy to create videos just right for iPod video, YouTube and blogs
• Screencast.com integration, making it really easy to get your video uploaded and embedded into your blog in a matter of seconds

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If I sound excited about this, it’s because I am.

Here are the details:

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If you are a budding screencaster, then there are a number of tools which can help you in your quest.

Some are free, some cost money, some are quite complicated to use, and some are simple.

Today, we’ll be looking at one of the best free and easy alternatives out there.

The Jing Project, TechSmith’s free-to-download, cross platform screen capture and screencasting tool, has just received some welcome upgrades that make it even easier for anyone to get started in the world of screen recording. 

Useful Functionality Added

I reviewed Jing when it first reared its head back in July, and since then the Techsmith team have added some useful functionality to this already useful tool.

If you haven’t encountered it before, Jing Project lets you make screen capture still images of your desktop (or anything on it), or movies of up to five minutes long of the same. 

This can be really useful if you are trying to show a friend how to do something on your computer, or need to get a point across quickly to a client without laboriously putting it into words and pulling out your hair.

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Azureus, has today unveiled news that Vuze, their high definition online video service will be opened up to independent video and film producers.

Azureus are the guys behind the very popular BitTorrent client of the same name, and launched Vuze in January. Since inception it’s been downloaded and installed 10 million times.

You can read a fascinating interview between Brad Linder and Azureus CEO Gilles BianRosa over at Download Squad, which covers Vuze and his general thoughts about online video distribution.

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Many of the traditionally impenetrable television networks are dipping their toes in to online content on the web. Most of this seems to be on a trial and error basis.

Many are now providing full episodes of their big shows online, but CBS seems to be going further than that, and has noticed the shorter attention span of its web audience compared to television viewers.

In what seems like a step backward, CBS has now launched EyeLab, a service with a collection of short clips from several hit shows that air on the network.

The videos will appear to be more along the lines of the user-generated content on YouTube, which CBS is hoping will keep viewers entertained and serve marketing purposes.

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DEMOfall has some great debuts on show this year including a YourTrumanShow widget called VideoMap. This little tool links friends and their videos across several social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

The intuitive, embeddable widget is a graphical relationship map that renders a graphical representation of video collections. The new widget can be placed and accessed by anyone on the Web and it allows video producers and fans to share content from inside the widget.

Your Truman Show

YTS was founded last year by Arturo Artom and Luca Ferrero. The San Francisco company is a video blogging enterprise that helps everyday people distribute great stories in their video diaries. 

The beta version allows anyone to create a personal channel, share life stories and view other people’s lives. This latest widget promises to connect people even more closely via what is essentially a mental map to their YTS presence.

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