Web site Academic Earth is like Hulu for academic lectures, pulling free lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale into one attractive, easy to navigate site. It’s incredible.
The site clearly takes its cues from Hulu and iTunes on its design, but it’s ten times better than either, because it’s open. The videos can be embedded anywhere or downloaded and enjoyed wherever you want to take them. It’s easy to use, has tons of great content, and it doesn’t cost a dime.
We’ve highlighted these free courses before individually, like MIT’s OpenCourseWare or Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere, and we rounded up even more of them when we showed you how to get a free college education online, but Academic Earth takes the idea to an even better place. We love it.
If you have some videos in the .MKV format you’re itching to play on your PlayStation3, check out this simple tutorial for converting them using mkv2vob. 
A few weeks back my company offered a free online webinar on LINQ technologies to help developers more easily make the transition to LINQ. While there was a great turn out at the webinar, I received several emails from people who couldn’t attend asking if I could provide a video recording of the webinar. It turns out that the audio for the recording wasn’t up to my standards so I put together a 
Windows only: Sure, almost all the offerings on NBC Direct can be watched at streaming site Hulu. But if you’re an HD fiend and want offline access, NBC Direct’s player might be worth checking out.
Once the installation starts rolling, you’ll be asked to close down your browser. NBC Direct downloads and plays its shows through your browser, and it plugs in a rights-restricted media handler to do so (pictured at right).
Even when you’re “offline” to watch a show, though, you’re getting some ads. The one complaint I’d make about NBC’s video site, versus Hulu, is that they take “fullscreen” to mean something less than literal. Here’s an episode of The Office, in HD, set to “Fullscreen.” There’s actually a bunch more space at the bottom and right-hand side, but I clipped it for Lifehacker page constraints:
If you’re a frequent viewer of Netflix’s streaming fare, you’re probably numb to how inefficient the rental service’s browsing and search pages can be. InstantWatcher is a soothing balm of clean, fast movie browsing.
YouTube has made it easy for anyone to easily download clips as MP4 video files, if a creator allows it, as well as purchase the videos you want to bring with you.
If you’re living without a seriously trustworthy mechanic, or you just like to bust out the wrench and fix your own wheels, 
Windows only: If all you want is computer-playable video off your DVDs, bitRipper is the most simple, click-one-button-and-you’re-rolling solution we’ve seen. You can change your rip’s audio and video parameters, but you don’t have to.
