Back in February I wrote an article, 4 Youtube Tools You Probably Don’t Know About. Today I am going to do a follow-up on it. Although we all use Youtube on a regular basis there are plenty of awesome things about it most of us have no idea about. Here are my current 6 best things about Youtube.
As you probably know some Youtube videos can be watched in higher quality. For all such videos Youtube displays ‘watch in high quality’ link right below the menu. Clicking on it will refresh the page and start playing high quality version.
Who doesn’t love watching videos online ? Whether it’s a video of a recent live concert, your favorite song or a tutorial on something, you name it and you’ll find the video on the popular video sites. This is the reason why YouTube is one of the top 3 websites on the internet. It just seems to have all your favorite videos and hence you love spending time on it.
I got a rather strange request this morning in my AskTheAdmin inbox. It sounded strange to me at first but after thinking about it, I realized it wasn’t that odd. The request was for a way to rip the audio from a YouTube video… wait there’s more!
So the ripping method could not involve any downloaded or installed applications and had to be done online - and of course for free. The end result had to be a MP3 that could be played on a Windows Mobile phone.
Having recently bought a shiny new camcorder and then having uploaded my first YouTube video, I am now enthusiastically looking to see what new developments YouTube are working on. Their equivalent of Google Labs is called Test Tube and right now, there are four experiments that they are working on. In my opinion, only two of them are really worthwhile - Video Annotations and AudioSwap, and that is what I will be looking at today in this article.
It seems like everyone these days is downloading, watching, and sharing videos from video-sharing sites like YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Veoh, Break, and a ton of other similar sites. Whether you want to watch the video on your iPod while working out, insert it into a PowerPoint presentation to add some spice, or simply download a video before it’s removed, it’s quite essential to know how to download, convert, and play these videos.
Here you go, a quick internet TV round-up: Top Internet TV players for your desktop, major directories to watch popular TV content for FREE, and a bunch of websites to stream live TV channels.
(1) Internet TV Players
Joost (www.joost.com)
Over 100 high-definition TV shows (Comedy central, Punk’d, Super Cars, Nat geo, etc.) and channels from various categories (Cartoons, Film, Comedy, Music, Documentary, Entertainment, Sports, and Liefstyle). More Joost screenshots here.
Zattoo (www.zattoo.com)
Zattoo provides excellent picture quality and viewing experience. Service is mainly focused on European channels and offers almost 50 live TV channels (some channels are limited to particular geographical locations.)
Whether you need basic tools that let you easily cut-off desired scenes, add background music, integrate animations, etc. or something more powerful, it’s all here. While each service offers different editing features, functionality is the same everywhere, i.e. (1) upload your video either from your PC or grab it directly from the web (i.e Youtube, Metacafe etc…), (2) edit/mix/enhance it, and (3) share it with others.
+++ PART 1: Web-Based VIDEO EDITING TOOLS +++
(1) JumpCut
Supported Video Formats: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .avi, .mov, .wmv, .flv, .rm and 3GP
Max File Size: 100 mb
They are free and yet have a lot to offer…
Zamzar
zamzar is free and all-inclusive(video, music, images, documents) file conversion service. In 4 quick steps you can convert almost anything to anything else; (1)simply enter a file you want to convert by pointing to its location on your local drive or address on the web(ex; youtube video), (2)select output format(eg. PDF, doc, 3GP mobile, iPod, PSP…), (3) enter email address where it should send converted file and (4)convert it.
Special features;
Democracy player is an excellent entertainment tool designed to solve all your video needs, both on your PC and on the web. It’s a powerful all-in-one program combining multi-format video player, A+ video manager, internet TV guide, video search and downloader and more. It’s a video application for present. On top of that, it’s fast, user-friendly and absolutely free.
Features:
Videoronk
In the last 2 weeks I’ve published 2 posts mentioning tools that can help you download videos from popular video sharing websites; once in the article about youtube tools and once here in the post about greasemonkey extension for firefox. In both cases it was about how to get videos on your comp once you find them. Since, I never really mentioned anything regarding that ‘find’ part, I decided to do some digging and see if there is any unusual video search tools I can write about.
And voila!, after checking out several goodies I came across videoronk; an ordinary search tool with some extraordinary features;
And after 8 days break extra series back on track again …
In my last post I have mentioned that we have a bunch of really cool posts lined up, I really meant it. And below is the first of them, it lists a) different tools that let you download desired videos from popular video sharing websites(incl. youtube, googlevideo, metacafe, myspace, dailymotion…), b) flash media players to view and manage these files on your desktop and c) tools to convert these files from one format to another so that you can transfer them to your Ipod, PSP, Mobile phone and whatever portable device you want. Ooh, and most of these tools are free, all non-free ones are clearly specified.
Couple of month ago I wrote about StumbleUpon, an amazing service for discovering new websites. (quickie on stumbleupon) The idea behind it pretty simple, you need to install browser plugin and select website categories you find interesting, once done you can instantly start discovering websites through new stumble (
) button on your browser toolbar, each stumble takes you to some website that was recommended by other members with matching interests. You have an option to rate any website by either giving it ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’. There is much more to stumbleupon, check it out here.
Tv-links is very similar to recently reviewed peekvid, a website where you can freely stream popular TV shows, cartoons, anime, standup comedy shows and etc. There are 4 categories on TVLinks: tv shows, cartoons, anime and not so easily located truly impressive movies section. Aditionally, TvLinks hosts forums, where users can request new stuff, report broken links and discuss whatever series or episodes they wish
Similar to Peekvid, tvlinks doesn’t host any video content directly but simply provides you with link to the file hosted by one of the video sharing monsters(youtube, dailymotion, etc). I am not sure whether anything is wrong about it, however web users are damn happy about such sites. Both of these sites are relatively new and already got quite popular.
I am excited to announce new experimental ‘makeuseof extra’ series of posts; additional daily posts that will list some of the cool websites and software discovered during the previous day. See how it goes and let me know what you think. enjoy
# 1
GoogleSightseeing - blog about weird, interesting, fun, silly and etc. things people see on google earth
…Top 10 Naked People on Google Earth
Unspun - community maintained website with all kind of user submitted lists(best, worst, top, etc)
…..Top Vodka Brand, Best Lines from Sein Field
Zamzar - free web-based file conversion tool
Thanks to so called web TV aggregators now we have convenient online access to thousands real TV channels such as NBC, ABC, ESPN, BBC1 and many more, organized in categories and in some cases even ranked by users, and all completely free. These directory like websites that do nothing more then collect and organize free to access channels from tv networks, started to get quite popular. And since what’s popular belongs here I selected some of the major ones and briefly compared them below
Peekvid is a very simple website where you can watch lots of popular video content like TV shows, cartoons, movies and more. There is a little you can do here, you won’t see any register, search, my account or even contact links, actually the only thing you can do is browse down through categories and watch whatever is there. Any video you see on peekvid is either from Youtube or some other video sharing website. So all that Peekvid does: it finds and categorizes all popular video for you. For instance, If I browse down to Cartoons/Simpsons category I get most of the Simpsons episodes that were uploaded to one or the other video sharing site.
Don’t you think that most satisfactory results to web search are usually in top 10 form? Whether you’re looking stuff to download, things to buy or even websites to read intelligently made top 10’s are always favorite, I love them. One of such sites that video fans will enjoy is Purevideo.com, it shows top sites for popular video categories and top 10 daily videos in each of them. On the homepage you can only see Top 10’s from 10 popular video networks, but once you go further down each category you’ll realize that there are top 10’s from allmost 35 video networks. I find this categorization quite useful as it gives a summary of the top rated stuff for the day. Check them out below
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.
Well well well, while I was missing for a couple of days I see Aibek has reviewed bunch of services including some of his favourites like the9 show and rocketboom. I guess we are in entertainment week then, so let me jabb it up little more with web comedy king JibJab.
Youtube is another web application that has stormed the web and created a whole new global community. Youtube.com is the biggest online video sharing site, serving more then 100 million videos views daily. Around 65.000 videos added to the database daily.
So what can you do with it?
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