FireAnt
Before telling you about fireant, want to quickly apologize for not posting anything yesterday, I was so much into designing my surprise widget for the next article that completely lost track of time and Kaly to my knowledge conveniently fell a sleep. So to make up I decided to write about fireant.tv along with 2 CRAAAZY tweaks, which will leave you speechless.

So, fireant.tv is a directory for video blogs, something very similar to odeo which is a directory for audio podcasts. It lists variety of video blogs and lets you easily subscribe to them with a single click. From the home page you can easily browse through top rated and most viewed shows and episodes. Among most watched channels I can see recently reviewed rocketboom and some other popular video blogs like the show with zefrank. To get something specific you can browse through shows by tags, for instance pressing on ‘comedy’ will get you sorted list of all episodes along with the channel that were tagged with the word ‘comedy’.

To use fireant you need to download and install fireant player, it may take some time but it’s totally worth it, just keep reading. This browser integrated player is a tri-panel(pic below) program which is a doorway to fireant.tv and some popular video sharing sites like Youtube and Google Video. Right from it you can browse fireant, watch videos, subscribe to channels on fireant or any other video blog, download videos for later viewing, and take full advantage of web video wonders like Youtube and Google Video(still keep reading). Below you can see a screen shot of fireant in action

- download/store and watch videos - watch any type of video regardless its format - download files by one or in bulk(by channel,by search results) - for video switch between viewer mode or full screen - set time for automatic downloads(set it to the night and in the morning it’s all there) - integrated yahoo video search, search for video and download it right from fireant (searches are saved and automatically updated) - integrated browser(browse fireant to find new channels) - adult filter on/off - tag downloaded stuff to easily find it later - connect/synchronize media btw PC and portable video players(Sony PSP,iPod and more) - download audio podcasts and updates from favorite blogs - import/export OPML files - supports BitTorrent and Streaming

So How Do I get stuff from YouTube and Google Video right on my desktop?

For Youtube:

• You can setup fireant to download videos from youtube based on ‘tag’, videos that have been tagged with a particular term (ex; funny,comedy,ronaldo etc). To get videos by tag simply press add channel button and enter address in the following format; http://youtube.com/rss/tag/TAG-YOU-WANT.rss (ex. for videos tagged as funny use http://youtube.com/rss/tag/funny.rss). If it’s a multiple word tag like ‘comedy central’ use http://youtube.com/rss/tag/comedy+central.rss.
  
• To subscribe to videos published by a particular youtube user use; http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/USERNAME/videos.rss (ex. http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/ZoomProductions/videos.rss)
• also you can subscribe to publicly available feeds offered by youtube here

For Google Video:

• to subscribe to a particular ‘tag’ on google video enter the address in the following format; http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=TAG&output=rss (eg. to subscribe to videos tagged as ‘ronaldo’ you need to use http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=ronaldo&output=rss)
• you can also subscribe to a particular category but it’s little tricky. If you are up for it then you can do following, 1)check the list of hidden google categories here, 2)click on the category you need and copy the of the landing address of the page , 4)attach to it &output=rss and add it as a channel.

If for any reason you are not able to download stuff, make sure that you can access and view video using your browsers. In some case you may be required to download latest macromedia flash player or enable javascript in your browser.Well that is mainly it, Convinced? Download fireant player from here (Windows/Mac). If you found this article useful then digg it below.

Technorati Tags: fireant, youtube, google video, download video, internet tv, vblogging, vblog directory

Tagged: online videos • Youtube