Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Download YouTube Videos

In this section we will look at ways in which you can download source FLV videos from the YouTube site. Remember, do respect copyright and do not download FLV source videos that do not belong to you. In these tutorials, we will only show the video clips we ourselves uploaded to YouTube as examples. You may be breaking copyright rules if you download content that belongs to someone else.

Download YouTube Videos with KissYouTube

Download YouTube Videos with YouTube Downloader

Related Links:

How does YouTube work? And should you download the videos?

Labels: flash video, movie, share, youtube

Download YouTube Videos with YouTube Downloader

YouTube Downloader is a program that lets you download FLV source videos for any of the movies you see on the YouTube site. It is a free program that you can download from here...

Once you install the program, follow these steps to download YouTube videos with YouTube Downloader:

Launch YouTube Downloader, and enter the URL of the YouTube page that contains the video you want to download (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Add the URL of the YouTube page that contains the video
Make sure that the Download video from YouTube radio button is selected, and then click OK.
YouTube Downloader will show you a File Download dialog box (see Figure 2), and ask you to choose a name and location for the downloaded FLV movie.

Figure 2: Save the YouTube movie
Once the download is done, you'll find a FLV file in the location you saved it to. If you find that the downloaded movie has no file extension, rename it to add a dot and the extension "flv" -- so that get_movie reads as get_movie.flv

Remember: YouTube Downloader is a constantly updated product -- sometimes YouTube might change a few things on their site, and YouTube Downloader may no longer work. If that happens, check the YouTube Downloader site for a newer version.

Related Links:

Download YouTube Videos

Labels: download, flv, movie, youtube

Download YouTube Videos with KissYouTube

KissYouTube.com is a site that makes it super simple for you to download the FLV videos on the YouTube site.

Using KissYouTube.com is easy -- just change the URL of the page on which you are watching the YouTube video, so that you add the alphabets "kiss" before the domain name youtube.com.

For example, if you wanted to download the FLV movie for this page:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF0yCZ8PWco

You would go to the address bar at the top of your browser, and add the alphabets "kiss" without the quote marks before the youtube.com domain, so that it now reads like this:

http://www.kissyoutube.com/watch?v=dF0yCZ8PWco

Scroll down the page and click the download link provided to save the FLV video to your computer.

Related Links:

Download YouTube Videos

Labels: flash video, movie, share, youtube

Sunday, August 12, 2007

What is FLV?

FLV stands for FLash Video, and is a proprietary streaming video format from Adobe. This format is used to store and share the video clips on sites like YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, and many other sites.

Normally you cannot download the actual FLVs, but there are applications and hacks that let you do so. There are also several FLV players and converters (that convert FLVs to other movie/video formats) available.

Labels: flash video, flv, glossary, movie

Saturday, August 11, 2007

How does YouTube work? And should you download the videos?

Although the title says YouTube videos, this post discusses any other similar video sharing sites. The technology that YouTube and other sites use may be something like this:

You upload your videos in any of the formats that YouTube accepts.
YouTube then converts your video to the FLV format -- this Flash based format is more suitable for viewing the content online.
You are provided a URL where this FLV content is embedded.
You can then share this URL with anyone, or use some embedding code to place the video on your site. The code that you embed sources the FLV from the YouTube site. At any point of time, you are not provided a direct download URL for the FLV file itself.

Although it is possible to do so, sites like YouTube don't really want visitors to be able to download the actual FLVs. However many programs and hacks have been developed that get over this limitation.

There's also another aspect to this download issue: plainly, you may be breaking copyright rules if you download content that belongs to someone else.

And there's yet another thought, that of the video quality. Most of the content on YouTube is compressed so that the videos can play well over all types of Internet connections. Sometimes, you can request the original owner of the video for a higher quality copy. This approach also allows you to request their permission to use the video clip.

Labels: movie, share, youtube

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

PowerPoint to DVD Software

I discussed whether and why you should create a DVD from your PowerPoint presentation a while ago...

And now let's take this to the next logical level: do you need a separate PowerPoint to DVD conversion software? The answer is not yes or no, it depends on your expertise level.

For starters, I haven't found a foolproof program that does it very well. And if you search for a PowerPoint to DVD program, it looks like the results are engineered by people who just want to sell their products! (they seem to be outsmarting Google for now). So I'm not going to recommend any of those programs. But to be fair -- most of them have trial versions, do check them out for yourself, and they might even work for you.

Essentially, creating a DVD from PowerPoint is a two step process:

Creating a movie from your PowerPoint
Creating a DVD from that movie

There are many good programs for the second process, and one of them may have been bundled with your DVD writer. As for converting your PowerPoint to a movie is concerned, you can follow my PowerPoint to YouTube tutorial (just skip the step where I ask you to upload the movie to YouTube).

This is not my last post on this subject -- expect to hear much more!

Labels: dvd, movie, powerpoint

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Why Should You Create a DVD from PowerPoint?

Yes, it's the next big thing, and hordes of people want to do this. And since we live in a world with the mentality of a herd, everyone else wants to do this. But why? Ask them and many are confused. They might answer that there must be advantages using this approach since so many others want to do it!

So am I asking you to abandon the very idea of creating a shining DVD disc from your PowerPoint presentation that you can play on your TV via the DVD player? Not really. So why I am putting up such a layer of skepticism right at the beginning of this article? Well, actually this is not skepticism for the idea, it's more related to not being aware of how to do it, and of learning if better solutions exist for you.

I'll certainly go into the finer details of this issue, but for now let us look at the advantages and disadvantages of this approach:

Advantages:

Since I don't want you feeling gloomy, let's first list the advantages of creating these DVDs:

DVDs are easily played by anyone -- even by great grandmothers who don't know how they can use a computer. Did you notice I did not say grandmothers? That's because today's grandmothers are smarter!
DVDs containing PowerPoint presentations don't contain the actual presentation, just a movie of the presentation -- that means no one can copy your slides and pass them as their own, or even edit them to change a spelling (even if you made a typo).
Creating your own DVD sounds much more impressive than creating a mere PowerPoint presentation.

Disadvantages:

It's not too easy an task -- and you need the right software and hardware (and that's not always cheap).
It's not easy to email a DVD! It's so much simpler to send a PowerPoint presentation by email.
Editing DVDs can be time-consuming and expensive.

That's for now -- I'll discuss more PowerPoint-DVD nuances sometime soon.

Labels: dvd, powerpoint

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