One Tip A Day » Videos

Stream Online Videos Faster with SpeedBit Video Accelerator

Umar — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:10:59 +0000

There are hundreds of thousands of Video streaming Website that leaves you with the option of watching almost anything you might have missed on television. Millions of users log on to these websites and enjoy their favorite music video, tv shows, live concerts and more. The problem sometimes occur is when your internet really doesn’t act the way it is suppose to and takes a lot of time to load these videos.

This is where SpeedBit Video Accelerator comes in action. It is a free utility from the creators of Download Accelerator Plus or DAP that makes videos from over 150 sites stream faster and play smoother by reducing buffering problems and video interruptions. Some of the popular websites include Youtube, ESPN, NBC, Facebook, Vimeo, Aol and Break.

Key features include

Reduces “movie freezes” and “buffering” problems!
Accelerates streaming videos from YouTube and over 150 sites!
Bookmarks videos you’ve recently accelerated, for easy replays!
Includes cool search tab feature for finding videos to watch around the web, right from your desktop.

Download SpeedBit Video Accelerator

Download Videos From Any Video Site

Tony Williams — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:25:09 +0000

Downloading videos from sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Metacafe, Dailymotion, iFilm, Videoegg, Veoh, Blip.tv is easy if you are a Firefox user. Just install the NetVideoHunter FireFox add-on and follow the following instructions:

Download the NetVideoHunter FireFox add-on.
Once the add-on is installed you will be able to see a blue icon at the right bottom of the page
Now go to the page where you want to download the video from.
While the video is loading you will see a number next to the blue button which will indicate that the video is available for download
Click the blue button now to open the NetVideoHunter window

Tip Source: Connected Internet

Never Ask ‘How Do They Do That?’ Again With WonderHowTo.Com

Tony Williams — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:37:08 +0000

How many times have you asked yourself ‘How do they do that?’. For me, nearly everyday. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to find an answer to those annoying questions or problems that just won’t go away?

Well, now there is an answer with WonderHowTo.com, a community powered site with over 90,000 free how-to videos. WonderHowTo provides content from more than 500 specialized sites spanning 36 vertical categories and 403 sub-categories. No longer do you need to be stumped when trying to find the best way to groom your dog, or how to cook the perfect recipe. You could even learn how to perform the perfect striptease!

Just use WonderHowTo’s search engine or site categories to find the answer to your problem.

More: WonderHowTo

Friday Humor: Watch Out For That Diving Board

Tony Williams — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:40:36 +0000

French people are known for their dry sense of humors, so it was refreshing to watch this video.

Not content with looking ludricrous in a pair of black speedos, this joker decides to demonstrate to the watching crowds a hi-board dive. Not suprisingly, things didn’t quite work out as he expected. Luckily for us, their was a camera there to capture the special moment.

At least we can be thankful the Speedos stayed on!

Download Windows Vista Codecs

Tony Williams — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:11:59 +0000

One of the annoying parts about downloading videos in particular off the internet is ensuring that you have the correct codecs. Not having the correct codecs installed can mean that your videos won’t play, or even worse in my view, play with audio but no video!

Finding the right codecs can be difficult if you don’t know where to look. Luckily there are some great codec packs out there for Windows Vista users. These packs contain all the codecs you could ever need, and once installed you don’t need to do anything else.

The packs are so good, that if you are a Windows Vista MCE user then you will be able to watch DVDs, DivX and Avi files inside MCE without having to change any settings. If you are a 64 bit Vista user you need to install both the files below.

More: 32bit Vista Codec Package and 64 bit Vista Codec Package

Download NBC Pilot TV Shows For Free From Amazon

Tony Williams — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 22:02:13 +0000

Looks like the winner from NBC removing their TV shows from iTunes, is going to be the consumer.

As part of the new deal between NBC and Amazon, you can now download pilot episodes of 4 of NBC’s fall top shows for free from Amazon Unbox.

Here are the TV shows you can download for free:

Bionic Woman
Chuck
Journeyman
Life

To download and watch the TV shows you need to install the Amazon Unbox player to watch these videos.

More: Amazon Unbox

Friday Break: Stevie Wonder Drum Solo

Tony Williams — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 22:12:32 +0000

I love watching this video of Stevie Wonder playing the drums. As if it wasn’t enough that he’s an insanely talented pianist and signer, just watch him playing the drums! Apparently, he plays most of the instruments on his albums.

Videos like this really inspire me, as it proves we can achieve anything, even when there appear to be obstacles in our way.

Download Videos, Music and Games – Legally!

Tony Williams — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 02:29:18 +0000

I feel a bit guilty sometimes when I promote online video or download services, as these could lead to my readers ending up on the wrong side of the law. Well today I’ve found a way to download videos, music and games that is 100% legal!

Vuze is a BitTorrent client, that has a wide selection of legal content available for download. The content is provided by big name partners like Showtime and the BBC, and most of it is HD so it looks very sexy.

The content is grouped very nicely into categories like Travel, Documentaries, Fan Films etc making it very easy to browse. One of my favourite channels is the Ministry of Sound channel, which brought back memories of some great nights out in London.

The only catch is is that you can only keep the content for 30 days, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people as how often do you watch a video more than a few times?

uLinkx: Dedicated Video Search Engine

Tony Williams — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:10:29 +0000

A number of dedicated search engines have been launched this year. The latest one I have discovered is uLinkx that allows you to search for videos from multiple (Youtube, Myspace, Google Video, Yahoo etc) in one place.

One of the nicest features of uLinkx is that video results can be watched within the site, without having to click away. An RSS service is available, so you can easily monitor your favourite searches. Results can also be bookmarked and grouped into playlists for easy retrieval.

More: uLinkx

YouTube History Bleach: Remove YouTube Viewing History Automatically

Tony Williams — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 23:46:40 +0000

YouTube automatically keeps a history of all the videos you’ve watched recently. Not a problem usually, but there are times you may not want your boss for instance to see what you’ve watched recently, or maybe if you are using a shared computer.

You can clear your history manually, but there is a way to clear your YouTube history automatically if you’re a Firefox user. The YouTube History Bleach extension will automatically clears your YouTube history every time you view a video.#

Yet another reason to switch to Firefox if you haven’t already done so.

More: YouTube History Bleach

Free Online Video Conversion

Tony Williams — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:01:23 +0000

Movavi is a cool website that allows you to convert your videos online to other formats for free. Very useful if you’re on the move and you want to watch a video quickly, or at work and can’t watch certain formats.

Videos up to 10 minutes long or 100MB in size can be converted, and up to 5 videos at a time. Once you’ve chosen your output format (Flash, MOV, MPEG etc), then Movavi will convert the video for you and send a link to the finished video to your email inbox.

More: Movavi

Stop YouTube Videos Playing Automatically

Tony Williams — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:18:39 +0000

If you are a Firefox user you may occasionally open multiple YouTube videos in separate tabs to queue them up for viewing. The problem is that by default YouTube videos autoplay.

A way to stop this is to install the new TubeStop Firefox extension. The TubeStop firefox extension disables the autoplay feature of YouTube videos, as well as videos on other sites like MySpace and Blogger.

More: TubeStop

300 Spartans On A Plane!

Tony Williams — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:35:03 +0000

Time for some Friday Fun!

I watched 300 a few weeks ago and I thought it was a brilliant movie, and did a decent enough job of telling the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans held back the army of the Persianking Xerxes for 3 whole days.

Well, if you’ve watched the movie you’ll love this short movie:

How To Get An Invite For Joost

Tony Williams — Mon, 07 May 2007 13:57:55 +0000

Joost is the new cool new way of watching TV online and is rightly creating a major buzz. Rather than watching poor quality videos in a tiny window, Joost, offers high quality full-screen videos. There’s a huge amount of legal high-quality programming as well with hundreds of full-length shows.

Joost is currently in Beta and you can only get access if you are invited by a friend who is already using Joost. A quicker way to get a Joost invite is to head on over to Connected Internet, where the readers are working together to share Joost invites. All you have to leave is a comment with your email address and someone will send you an invite. I got mine within 15 minutes. Once you’ve got an Joost invite then you have to share a minimum of 2 invites with other readers, so that eventually everyone will get an invite.

While you are there you should check out Everton’s site and subscribe to his feed, as he runs one of my favourite blogs.

Windows Media Player Plugin For Firefox

Tony Williams — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:28:03 +0000

The popularity of the internet browser Firefox continues to grow by the day, but it still has a few annoying quirks. One of these is that it can be difficult to watch Windows Media Player videos within Firefox.

Luckily, thanks to Port 25, who are the team at Microsoft who look after interoperability, there’s a new Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox. Once installed this plugin will improve support for embedded Windows Media Player videos.

I haven’t installed it myself as there are issues (as always!) with Vista, which I now have running on all my machines. But, it is good to go for all other operating systems.

More: Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin

Install K-Lite Codec Pack To Solve Video Playback Problems

Tony Williams — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:10:39 +0000

Sometimes playing videos on your PC isn’t easy, particularly when they have been downloaded off the internet. This is normally because your PC doesn’t have the necessary codecs installed to play the video file in question. Codecs and DirectShow filters are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video formats.

The quickest way to ensure that your PC can play all video files is to install the K-Lite Codec Pack. The K-Lite Code Pack is a collection of almost every codec under the sun, that will allow you to play all your video and audio files.

To download K-Lite Codec Pack click here

Soundpedia: Play Music Albums For Free

Tony Williams — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:43:29 +0000

If you’re looking for a free online music jukebox then you should check out Soundpedia.com, that allows you to listen to music and watch music videos in an internet browser. There’s a wide selection of music available and even complete albums are available. Ideal, if you want to try before you buy, or if you just need something to work to.

The layout is very simple and easy to, and Soundpedia features only minimal advertising which is always handy. The range of music available is very broad ranging from MJB, Lloyd and Timbaland to Oasis. Music and videos can be searched by genre, and if available, lyrics can even be displayed whilst the tracks are playing.

To try out Soundpedia click here

Tools And Addons For YouTube

Tony Williams — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:35:01 +0000

YouTube has become one of the most popular sites in the world in a very short time by providing a simple way to upload and share content.

However, there are a number of services available now that will make it easier to upload videos, find deleted videos, make videos play even smoother etc. Here’s a review of some of the best YouTube tools you may find useful.

Delutube – Find Deleted YouTube Videos

Every now and then YouTube deletes a video, normally because of copyright issues. But, there is a way to still watch the deleted videos which is quite clever.

Delutube have put together a script which will allow you to watch deleted videos. All you have to do is enter the ID of the YouTube video that has been deleted by YouTube, and it will magically start playing. Most recent videos will work, but you may have problems with older videos as YouTube eventually physically deletes videos.

YouRipper – Download YouTube Videos

There are many tools for downloading YouTube videos but I find YouRipper to be the easiest to use. YouRipper also has its own video player that makes it easy to add YouTube videos to a blog or a website.

YouTube Uploader 1.1 -Convert Any Video To YouTube Friendly Format

Although YouTube can handle most file formats, optimizing your video before you upload it can pay dividents. YouTube Uploader 1.1 is a free tool that will convert any video to a YouTube friendly video format with optimal size and quality, so that anyone watching your videos will see your work in its best light.

Speedbit Video Accelerator – Smooth & Speedup YouTube Videos

Speedbit Video Accelerator works on a similar principle to popular download managers by opening multiple connections to YouTube videos as soon as you start playing. The benefits of this is it that if you are on a slow connection or even a dialup connection, then you videos will start playing quicker and the the playback itself willl be smoother.

TubeSock – YouTube On Your iPod

TubeSock will download YouTube videos and saves them to your video iPod, Mac, or PlayStation Portable. It’s not free ($15 – but the trial version will do 30 secs for free), but I don’t know of a free app that will automatically convert the video using the codecs and bitrates best for each device. It even allows you to preview the video before it does the conversion.

Search The Tube – Find YouTube Videos For Your Site

The YouTube search engine is pretty good, but the Search The Tube service is a good way to find YouTube videos for your website, blog or profile. This service is dedicated just to finding videos and provides about 100 thumbnail results very quickly.

UserScripts.org – Scripts For Improving YouTube

If you’re a bit more technical then you may find this collection of scripts from userscripts.org useful that perform useful tasks like improving YouTube embedded code, allow you to view Yahoo Music videos in YouTube, removes ads etc

PODZINGER – Search Within YouTube Videos

By day, PODZINGER is a speech-to-text search engine that uses this functionality to search YouTube videos for terms that are actually mentioned inside the audio. The service also allows you to setup an RSS alert so that if a new video is uploaded which includes those words, then you will get an automatic alert!

I hope you found this list if YouTube tools useful. If you did please remember to add it your favourite bookmarking sites so that you can find it easily later.

Download Music, Movies And TV Shows From iTunes For Free!

Tony Williams — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:39:46 +0000

I’ve stopped buying music and movies from iTunes as I hate the DRM issues. However, if you follow these great tips from Amit you will be able to download free Music and Movies From iTunes. I would move quickly on this one as I’m sure iTunes will close the loophole soon!

Step 1: Start iTunes software and open the iTunes Store by pressing Ctrl+Shift+H or click here.

Step 2: Open the Music Videos, Movies, TV Shows or Music link depending on the stuff you plan to download from the iTunes store.

Step 3: Create a new playlist in iTunes and name that as “_Phobos__Dnldstr_36c_” [replace the underscores with spaces, there's another space at the begining and one at end]

Step 4: Drag-n-drop all the music videos, films and TV episodes that you want to download to the above folder playlist in iTunes.

Step 5: Export the above list as an XML file which will have links to download the shows from iTunes without paying any fee. If you don’t see the download links in the iTunes XML file, make sure that you have created the playlist in Step 3 correctly.

How To Watch Deleted YouTube Videos

Tony Williams — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 00:39:21 +0000

Every now and then YouTube deletes a video, normally because of copyright issues. But, there is a way to still watch the deleted videos which is quite clever.

Deltube have put together a script which will allow you to watch deleted videos. All you have to do is enter the ID of the YouTube video that has been deleted by YouTube, and it will magically start playing. Most recent videos will work, but you may have problems with older videos as YouTube eventually physically deletes videos.

More: deltube

Combine/Split Large Video Files

Tony Williams — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 10:02:00 +0000

I’ve noticed that more and more files are being transferred in small chunks, particularly video files. The best app I’ve found for breaking large files into more manageable chunks, and to also re-combine them is HJSplit, which of course is free. The real beauty of HJSplit is that it can handle the HD DVD files that are starting to appear, that are bigger than 10GB.

The program is very simple to use. All you have to do is navigate to the folder where the file you want to split or re-combine is stored, select it, and the program automatically does its magic.

To download HJSplit, click here.

Search Inside YouTube Videos With PodZinger

Tony Williams — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:48:03 +0000

I discovered Thilak’s site by looking at the My Blog Log images that are displayed on my site, and I saw an interestig feature he wrote last week about PodZinger, which allows you to search inside YouTube videos.

PodZinger – a speech-to-text search engine announced a new feature which could search YouTube videos, besides simply searching on the metadata of the video files, PodZinger can also search for terms that are actually mentioned inside the audio.

The service also allows you to setup an RSS alert so that if a new video is uploaded which includes those words, then you will get an automatic alert. Whatever will they come up with next?

Convert YouTube Videos In One Click

Tony Williams — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 20:34:18 +0000

Youtube is fast becoming one of the best and most exciting sources of content. There are so many videos, you can quite easily spend hours watching videos.

Downloading them isn’t as easy though. There are several tools available to download videos but they tend to be quite clunky, and also use the flv file format that isn’t the easiest to play.

Downloadsquad.com have unearthed Zunemytube which is a plugin for Internet Explorer. when you find a video you like on YouTube, Google Video or MSN Soapbox, all you have to do is click the “Zune It” and the file will do downloaded and converted into a windows media video file.

More: Zunemytube

WordPress Video Plugin

Tony Williams — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 23:02:39 +0000

Embedding videos in WordPress can be quite difficult. Daburna.de have created a plugin that should make problems embedding videos from Youtube, MyVideo, Google video and Clipfish a thing of the past.

To use the plugin do the following:

Download the plugin and extract it to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it
Afterwards, you can include a video on your posts or pages by writing this (without quotes):

Youtube: ["youtube" id]
MyVideo: ["myvideo" id]
Google Video: ["google" id]
Clipfish: ["clipfish" id]

You’ll find the necessary id in the address of the video. A typical address looks like this, the id is highlighted in bold:

youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DHOZW_8OPk
MyVideo: http://www.myvideo.de/watch/366128
Google Video: http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=5024787479139933029
Clipfish: http://www.clipfish.de/videoplayer.swf?as=0&videoid=NDE2fDM0&r=1

More: Video Plugin

Make Your Own FREE Video Screensavers

Tony Williams — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:01:46 +0000

Want to jazz up your desktop? Well there are two great apps that allow you to make your own free video screensavers.

The first one is ‘My Video Screen Saver‘ which supports the following features:

Plays AVI, MPEG, WMV video files as a screen saver
Displays videos randomly
Allows the volume of each video to be adjusted
Allows videos to be previewed from the settings window
Adjust videos to 100%, 150% or 200% for each file
Runs on all Windows operating systems

The second one was discovered by gHacks. The Windows XP Video Screensaver also allows you to adjust the playback size (Fullscreen or 50% – 400%), play a random file, loop the file, mute the audio and alter playback speed (from 0.1 to 3.0). Most file types are supported, the most common ones are of course avi, mp3 and wmv – the tool basically supports all file types that the windows media player is able to play.

How To Combine Video Files

Tony Williams — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:34:35 +0000

Here’s a great tip for re-combining video files, if a website has split it into smaller parts to make it easier for people with slow internet connections to download them. It’s so simple, it’s beautiful.

The method is different depending on the type of movie that you are playing. If the movie consists of multiple mpg movies you can use the windows command line to merge them.

Start the command line by pressing the windows key and R. Enter cmd in the prompt which will start the command line window. Enter the following line into the command line, make sure you enter the right filepath to the movie. I suggest you move the files to the top of a hard drive to ease the amount of typing that needs to be done.

copy /B “C:\movie1.mpg” + “C:\movie2.mpg” + “C:\movie3.mpg” “C:\completemovie.mpg”

This joins movie1.mpg, movie2.mpg and movie3.mpg into completemovie.mpg. You can add more movies to join more parts without problems.

Combining avi files is a bit more complicated. If you want to learn how to do this then visit gHacks

How To Capture Screenshots From Windows Media Player

Tony Williams — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 14:35:02 +0000

Whatever you may think about Microsoft, they do make some good software. One of their best is Windows Media Player which is free and is installed on all Windows PCs. Capturing screenshots from your favorite videos can be difficult, but here’s a quick way to do it:

Open Window Media Player
Then go to ‘Tools | Options’
In Options, select the Performance Tab
Click the Advanced Button
Untick ‘Use Overlays’
Click ‘Ok’

Once you’ve finished these steps all you have to do to capture a screenshot is to pause your video, and press the ‘Print Screen’ key on your keyboard. Then go to your favorite image program and paste the image or press ‘Ctrl’ and ‘V’ together.

Useful Windows XP Tips Direct From Bill Gates!

Tony Williams — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:07:17 +0000

if you want the right answers, go direct to the source. This scene from Frasier is so funny as Bill Gates hijacks his show, and starts dishing out (some actually useful) advice about how to use Windows XP.

Now back to more serious matters. If you are looking for a quick way to give your XP one last boost before switching to XP then you can’t go wrong by reading Everton’s 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows XP