Embedding YouTube videos is a pretty useful feature, but it only gives you basic player controls. With EmbedPlus, you can start your videos at a certain time, skip self-defined chapters, add annotations, zoom, and more to tweak the video to your liking. More »
If you’re looking for a simple, one-click, solution for converting and downloading YouTube videos sans software, DownloadTube is a free tool for web-based YouTube file conversion. More »
Whether you finally decided to shed sassyhacker957@gmail.com for a more professional handle or you want to swap Google accounts for less embarrassing reasons, Google doesn’t have a built-in system for migrating your data to a new account. So we figured it out. More »
Windows: Planes, trains, and automobiles—a long trip in any of them calls for some portable video. Any Video Converter, a tool we linked long ago, is still being updated and working strong, recently adding 1080p YouTube videos to its repertoire. More »
YouTube – Windows – Video – Video Converter – Operating system
Having a ball playing around with the just-released GoogleCL tool, which offers command line access to Google Calendar, contacts, Docs, Picasa, Blogger, and YouTube. With Python-based GoogleCL installed, you can do things such as list today’s events on your GCal right in the terminal, like so:
$ google calendar today title Coffee with Michael and Samir Dozing off Lunch at Flingers
Instant use case: Add echo "Next 24 hours:";google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you’ve got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.
If you just type google at the command line, you launch an interactive terminal that lets you try all the various commands. In the interactive terminal, type command-name help to see its options, like help calendar.
Each command has several parameters that aren’t immediately apparent. For example, in calendar, you can omit the long and hairy event URL by using the title parameter. You can list events for a particular day using the data parameter (--date 2010-06-16), and you can get events from a particular calendar and by keyword search term.
For example, to see all my trips to NYC on my TripIt calendar, I’d use the command:
$ google calendar list --cal TripIt --query NYC
Remember the beauty of the command line: you can easily chain commands together with the pipe, so you can sed, awk, and grep output to your heart’s content, and then write it to a file if needed, using >. Before I discovered the title parameter on the calendar command, I was planning to use sed to filter out the calendar URLs from the output. (Thanks to lightening-fast sed and awk experts on Twitter, I was prepared to do just that.)
What I’d love to do is create a Todo.txt CLI add-on that inserts an event on your Google Calendar when you add a task with a due date. Here’s the discussion about that going on now on the Todo.txt CLI mailing list. It’s pretty much a no-brainer.
While I’ve mostly only played with calendar, the Docs access is pretty useful, too. With it, you could easily schedule cron’ed backups of your Google Docs, or push data into a new doc on a regular basis. Same deal with Picasa and YouTube. I like the idea of cron’ing a job that backs up my Google contacts to a CSV file on my local computer weekly, too. I don’t see myself ever blogging from the command line, but it’s neat that you can.
How are you using GoogleCL? Post your favorite command combos in the comments.
Tools that help you download videos from YouTube and other video sharing services on the web are old hat, but BenderConverter is a simple-to-use web-based solution with a wide variety of download options.
At BenderConverter you can not only perform the basic conversions available at most conversion sites—like turning a web-based video into an MPEG or AVI file—but you can also download it as an audio file (MP3 and WAV) or a variety of video files like 3GP for phones, MOV, MP4, and WMV. You can even download it converted to an animated GIF or have BenderConverter convert the frames into JPEG images.
Have a favorite web site, bookmarklet, extension, or other tool for grabbing video off the web? Let’s hear about it in the comments.
If you're running Chrome or Safari as your main browser, Google's now offering up YouTube videos without Flash. That's right—fewer system hangs, browser crashes, and other issues, and just straight-up video through HTML5 standards.
Google has previously allowed Chrome, Safari, and Internet-Explorer-using-Chrome-Frame browsers to try out a few HTML5 video demos at its site, but now Google's given you the option to always play videos through the h.264 codec, if they're available. If they have ads, or aren't available in h.264, YouTube will serve up the standard Flash player—though that's been upgraded, too, with a nice video format chooser in the lower-right corner.
The notable missing piece here is Firefox. Firefox does support HTML5′s video streaming through Ogg Theora, a non-patented, license-free codec that its makers consider more free, while Google, and Apple, have moved their sites and browsers toward supporting h.264 streaming.
Enough web politics! If you’re rocking Chrome, Safari, or Chrome Frame inside IE, head to YouTube’s HTML5 page to sign yourself into the beta. If you’re signed up for other YouTube lab projects in the TestTube section, you might want to sign yourself out of them—except for Feather, which works fine with HTML5 and makes it even lighter and snappier.
Is HTML5-powered YouTube a better fit for your browsing? Like the Flash player better? Tell us your take in the comments.
Chrome only: Firefox users can already use the VidzBigger Greasemonkey script to tweak and customize popular video sharing sites like YouTube, and now the script has been ported as a full Google Chrome extension.
After installing the extension, you simply can browse to any YouTube, MetaCafe, or DailyMotion video to see the layout changes—everything on the page is rearranged to show the video in a bigger size, and it keeps the video in place while you scroll the page to view suggested videos, so you can keep watching while looking around.
The biggest set of features is hidden in the preferences menu, where you can change dozens of options including disabling auto-play, skipping warnings and advertisements, tweaking the layout further, or even enabling a set of download links so you can keep a copy of the video for later.
Firefox with Greasemonkey: The YouTube Auto Buffer Greasemonkey script tweaks the popular video sharing site to fix some of its most common annoyances. Specifically, it stops videos from automatically playing, turns on HD/HQ playback for all videos, and hides in-video advertisements.
All three of the tweaks YouTube Auto Buffer makes can be toggled, so if you’d really like to get rid of in-video ads but don’t want to always watch videos in HD or prefer that videos play automatically, you can just disable the two unwanted features. Or at least they can be toggled in theory. I had trouble getting my preferences to stick, so your mileage may vary.
Either way, it’s a nice little script that aims to fix some users’ common YouTube annoyances. For some other YouTube-specific tweaks, check out our very own Better YouTube Firefox extension. (With any luck, maybe we can convince Gina to incorporate some of the YouTube Auto Buffer features into said add-on.)
YouTube Auto Buffer is a free download, works with Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.
Hot on the heels of Hulu’s remote-control friendly desktop application, YouTube introduces its own TV-sized interface called YouTube XL.
At the beginning of the year Google unleashed an optimized interface for the Wii and PS3, but YouTube XL appears to be the next step in that progression. The new and improved YouTube XL (presumable the XL stands for extra large) boasts a better interface than the old “YouTube for TV,” though it lacks a few of the features available on YouTube proper. (Namely comments, which is arguably a positive.)
In addition to an all new design offering large text and simplified navigation, YouTube XL offers a continuous play feature, which lets you search for a topic on YouTube and then press “play” once to watch all of the videos sequentially on that topic. Also, getting from one video to the next takes just a few clicks, and you can control the action with a blue tooth enabled remote control, or even some mobile phones.
To give it a try, just point your browser to youtube.com/xl.
