Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Flypaper, a desktop program that creates online presentations

Flypaper is a cool, new presentation creation program that lets you create Flash presentations that you can instantly upload to sites like YouTube, MySpace,a nd Facebook. In its present beta incarnation, it has some rough edges and any comparison with PowerPoint would be probably like comparing apples and oranges since Flypaper seems to provide a very different concept altogether.

Flypaper is a free application that runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista only (no Mac yet) -- it's a large download at 89 mb whereabouts, but it's fun to play with and may evolve into something very useful. The screenshot above shows the interface -- click on the screenshot to see a larger preview.

Flypaper does get into new terminology though: slide layouts/designs are called 'models'! Here's a quick one slide pres that I created in Flypaper, and then uploaded to Youtube.

Labels: flash video, flypaper, online_presentations, powerpoint, youtube

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Mix and Mash Online Video Clips with Omnisio

Omnisio, a new startup allows you to mix and mash videos from several online video sites like YouTube, Google, and Blip.tv to create new videos. You can choose start and end points to trim the existing video clips, combine them in a sequence you want, and create a new online video clip that you can share.

These shared clips are entirely embeddable -- and you can have comments that actually hover over the video on these shared clips (see screenshot above). Many users find this distracting, so it's nice that you can turn them off.

More importantly Omnisio is about to introduce new features soon that will allow you to synchronize PowerPoint slides with video -- this will take Omnisio to the professional league.

Membership is free and very quick -- and you don't even need to be a member to view some sample clips. The clips are great -- and can allow you to get hours of fun.

Learn more at the Omnisio site...

Labels: mashup, movie, powerpoint, video, youtube

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

authorSTREAM Provides YouTube Output

authorSTREAM, a site that lets you upload and share your PowerPoint presentations upped the ante today by offering a slew of new options:

Download original presentations: You can now download the original PowerPoint presentation (or other file) if the author of the content enables the relevant option (see figure below).

For your existing presentations uploaded to authorSTREAM, this option is turned off by default. You can however edit your presentation properties and check the option (see figure below).

Share on YouTube: You can also share your presentations on YouTube. This option is now available for presentations that include narration or rehearsed timings -- these presentations would automatically be available in a video format (MP4) that you can upload and share on YouTube.

Share on iPods: Again this option is only available for presentations that include narration or rehearsed timings.

Labels: authorstream, ipod, online_presentations, powerpoint, youtube

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Improve Video Quality with a YouTube Hack!

Laura Bergells who runs Maniactive linked to this tip on Lifehacker.

This quick hack allows you to quickly view a higher quality video on YouTube.

All you need to do is suffix "&fmt=18" witout the quotes at the end of your YouTube URL.

Laura has put up some samples in her post along with more details, thanks Laura.

Labels: flv, movie, share, youtube

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

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

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