Hot on the heels of LibreELEC follows a test of OSMC. The nice thing about this little board is that you can have as many operating systems as you like and just swap them out as easy as loading another Micro SD. So your device can go from media center to OpenWRT router in a flash, for example. And because they are tiny you can always have a whole collection of them handy for the various roles the Pi can perform.

OSMC is another specialist operating system whose aim it is to provide just enough an environment to run Kodi. As such Kodi is the only graphical interface you get and not only its own settings but also all system configuration options have to be accessible through the Kodi interface.
The web site claims that "OSMC can play all major media formats out there and supports a variety of sharing protocols so you’re guaranteed to be able to stream from other devices. OSMC can stream media and serve files to other devices as well!"
The media center being extremely themeable, OSMC in its current iteration has a refreshed and really nice looking but still functional skin that I wished would be available as a free version for general download but it seems the main developer is guarding his logo and distiguishing features jealously so this may not be possible.

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You can then install this repository from the file manager like any other and add the plugin from here (see instructions). The advantage of this plugin is that it has a huge pre-populated list of VPN providers and their locations which you can easily switch within the app.
OpenVPN needs to be installed first with „apt-get install openvpn“ as unlike LibreELEC it is not part of OSMC by default.
Unfortunately despite doing this and OpenVPN being up and running the VPN plugin did not connect for me. Odd, as OSMC like its cousin is based on Debian Buster. This points to some other underlying incompatibility in OSMC with the VPN manager plugin. I'm not willing to troubleshoot this when there's another solution that works equally well and better in this case but there are other, more traditional OpenVPN plugins for Kodi around like this one that let you import configurations if you really want to stay with OSMC.

If you got yourself a remote like this one it's easy and fluid to navigate around the interface once everything has been set up and your plugins imported or set up from the media repositories. The choice of add-ons in the included repo is not great and probably not enough to satisfy most users. If you thought OSMC might distribute more than just some of the basic free add-ons from the Kodi repository you will be disappointed. Not even the BBC iplayer. Ok, that one is broken anyway. If you're serious about streaming you'll have to install your own but with ever more websites like the BBC breaking plugins with redesigns on purpose and Youtube requiring an API key to stream the future might lie in the browser.

Avidemux, the free, open-source and multi-platform video editor used for cutting, filtering and encoding videos has a new major release, Avidemux 2.7.6, which comes about 10 months after the previous release, so you can imagine that it packs quite some changes.

First, the big ones. Avidemux gained an AV1 decoder based on the libaom library, as well as VP9 encoder based on the libvpx library, and support for FFmpeg 4.2.3. Only for Linux, it now features a hardware accelerated deinterlacer and resizer based on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API).

Also new in this release is the ability to detect cut points in HEVC video streams that could result in grave playback issues and warn the user about it, as well as the fact that the maximum supported video resolution was bumped to 4096×4096.

Furthermore, a 2-pass mode and extended configuration options were added to the NVENC-based H.264 and HEVC encoders, HE-AAC and HE-AACv2 profiles were added to the FDK AAC encoder plugin, and support for OGG Vorbis and LPCM audio was added to the MP4 muxer.

Avidemux now supports external audio tracks in DTS format and MPEG-TS files with duration in excess of 13:15:36, uses DTS core from DTS XLL audio in MPEG-TS files instead of rejecting the track, and correctly detects mono MP3 audio tracks in MP4 files.

Also: LMMS 1.2.2 Released! How to Install in Ubuntu 20.04

Mentioned in my last tutorial, PeerTube is able to mirror YouTube videos. This means we simply copy the video addresses instead of reupload the files and video is instantly published on PeerTube. It is a cool feature. It is thanks to the tool used behind the scene named youtube-dl. Now it is the time to discuss how to do that more precisely. In this tutorial I explain mirroring several videos from that Google-owned site. I use examples from our Free Libre Open Source Software community. Enjoy!

Jean-Baptiste Mardelle and team are happy to announce the release of Kdenlive 20.04, this version marks the one year anniversary release of the code refactoring. The highlights include major speed improvements due to the Preview Scaling feature, New rating, tagging sorting and filtering of clips in the Project Bin for a great logging experience, Pitch shifting is now possible when using the speed effect, Multicam editing improvements and OpenTimelineIO support. Besides all the shiny new features, this version comes with fixes for 40 critical stability issues as well as a major revamp of the user experience. Kdenlive is now more reliable than ever before.