Youtube is the 3rd most visited site in the world as per Alexa rankings. YouTube is serves more than 89% of online video views and with other mind-boggling stats, it just keeps getting better. Unless you live a part of the world that still uses dial-up internet, you might be spending atleast a few hours per week to watch Youtube videos.

Today we have something that enhances your video viewing experience – Youtube Enhancer. This userscript does a lot of value addition to Youtube and makes it a perfect application for viewing online videos. Simply install Youtube Enhancer script (Firefox users will need Greasemonkey addon to install this script while Chrome users won’t require anything and get lots of useful options on Youtube.

Some of the nice features of Youtube Enhancer:

• Hover previews: Simply take your mouse over a video thumbnail and it shows more frames from the video.
• Download videos: While viewing a video, a blue download button appears to the top-right.
• Lights-off: Clicking on the small bulb icon in the top-right makes the screen go black Ento give you that ‘theater-feel’.
• More playback options: You will see some more controls like ‘loop the video’, ‘step forward/backward’, ‘kill stream’ and buttons to see videos in all quality and sizes.
• Autoplay on/off
• Better volume control
• Lots of keyboard shortcuts

There’s no reason you shouldn’t be using this free script. Download & install Youtube Enhancer now!

YouTube has gone mainstream quite a long time ago and has outgrown itself from hosting amateur videos to professionally edited and managed video collections from music companies. Instead of searching a song on Google, audiophiles tend to use YouTube because the probability of getting the exact AV content is much higher. There are ways to download YouTube videos onto your hard drive using services like KeepVid, but what if you specifically  want a music video in an MP3 format to add to your music collection?

We have gathered 5 nice tools that can convert any YouTube video into an MP3 audio file and lets you download them for free. Check them out.

YouTubeToMP3

Get Audio from Video

ListenToYouTube

VideoToMP3

VidToMP3

Enjoy YouTube videos as MP3s and add ‘em to your audio collection!

YouTube is by far the most successful and preferred video sharing website and the credit goes to the robust features and quality of service it offers. In December last year, YouTube announced the support for 1080p High Definition videos which turned out to be a great success. In the latest blogpost, YouTube has announced to push the envelope even further and provide support for 4096×3072 pixel resolution.

“We always want videos on YouTube to be available in the highest quality possible, as creators intend. In December of last year, we announced support for 1080p, or full HD. At 4096 x 3072 pixels, 4K is nearly four times the size of 1080p. To view any video in a source resolution greater than 1080p, select "Original" in the video quality pulldown menu.”

There are some videos on YouTube to give you an idea of what 4K resolution looks like. Check out the videos in this playlist. The only problem is, most of the parts of the world currently do not have the broadband power to stream 4K resolution videos flawlessly. But then, it’s all about time.

HTML5 will sooner or later replace flash. This is quite evident from the latest upward trend in the popularity of HTML5 and the fact that most of the web browsers are not supporting HTML5 multimedia. Even popular video hosting sites have shown their positive support to HTML5 video formats and hence it’s inevitable for webmasters to consider HTML5 as a very strong option while integrating audio and video on websites and blogs.

To make your task a breeze, here are some very good HTML5 video players that can be integrated onto a website or a blog that can not even play HTML5 audio/video files but also traditional formats.

While you check-out the players below, do subscribe to our feeds and join us on  Facebook and  Twitter.

1) Video JS: Video JS is by far my favorite HTML5 player so putting it on top of the list. It is a Javascript based video player that fully utilizes the power of HTML5 in latest web-browsers like Firefox 4, Chrome 5 and Opera 10.60

2) JW Player: The close second is the JW Player. What I really like about JW Player is that it gives comparatively more personalization options. So there is hardly a chance that the player won’t go well with your blog/website’s theme.

3) Kaltura: An open-source video solution that works on all major browsers and yes, it even works on Internet Explorer. It is a skinnable and can be a decent HTML5 video player.

4) OSM Player: Open Standard media player is a jQuery based HTML5 video player that’s versatile and can play even the traditional video formats. It can additionally deliver videos from YouTube and Vimeo.

5) Video for everybody: Most simplest of them all. This isn’t actually a video player but merely a piece of code that your browser (HTML5 compatible browser, ofcourse) understands and fires up the native player to play the content. You need to embed your video under a <video> element, like so:

<video height="360" width="640" src="LINK TO THE HTML5 VIDEO FILE" controls="controls">Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video.</video>

I am sure there might be many more options available optimised for different platforms like WordPress, Joomla, etc. If you know of any or have developed a player of your own, do mention it in the comments.

A regular reader of a Czech site Jablickar.cz, posted some pictures and a video sample taken from an iPhone 4 which he obtained prior to the official release. Not surprisingly, the quality of the photos and the video is awesome, thanks to the 5MP camera.

Pictures taken from iPhone 4:

Video recorded on iPhone 4:

The Czech reader, named Swenak, also stated that the new iPhone 4 is fast, slick and with better ergonomics in design. Now of course we all knew this was coming, but when I saw the video, it still impressed me that a phone can actually do that. There was a time when I strongly believed a phone should be used as a phone while for music and photography, one must get an iPod and a decent dedicated camera. But not anymore. How far we have come!!

Earlier this week, Google announced WebM which might become the de-facto web standard for online videos considering the huge positive response it received. In just a couple of days later, the Participatory Culture Foundation came up with a new version of Miro Video Converter with WebM (VP8 video codec) support.

Miro Video Converter is an open source awesomeness that supports all major video formats and has a very intuitive interface. You will be surprised to see how you easily you can convert any video into a format compatible with Android, iPad, iPhone, PSP and other devices.

Talking about the WebM format, it took about 2.5 minutes to convert a 10 second H.264 video @ 25FPS, 640 x 480 resolution and 1409kbps bitrate. That’s a bit average but the .webm file thus generated was around 30% smaller than the original H.264 video file. And that’s really great.

Miro Video Converter is available for Windows and Mac.

Download Miro Video Converter

YouTube has been continuously adding small but really useful functionalities to their main site after the major makeover. I don’t know whether you already know about this or not, but YouTube has added a functionality to translate the video captions to your own language. The functionality is still in BETA but works considerably well.

It’s a simple two step procedure:

• If there are captions available for a video, you will be able to see its icon ‘CC’ at the bottom of the video. Click it and then select ‘Translate Captions’.

• Now select your desired language. Click OK.

Enjoy the captions in your language.

You may have also noticed the ‘Transcribe Audio’ option which essentially performs speech recognition and gives you a dubbed audio in your selected language. I have tried this but feel like it needs to be tweaked to a larger extent. Anyways so far so good. What say?

Quick-Tutorial

Media Player Classic bundled with K-Lite Mega Codec Pack is my favorite player for watching movies (VLC comes close second). But sometimes I do run into a problem where the volume of the movie is not properly normalized. The result is a very low sounding audio. Here is a small workaround for this.

I am assuming that you have already installed K-Lite Mega Codec Pack.

» In Media Player Classic, go to View > Options… 

» In the Options window, in the left pane, click Audio Switcher under Internal Filters.

» In the right pane, checkmark Normalize option and move the Boost slider to a considerable amount (as shown above). Click OK.

There you go! The volume will now be normalized and also the intensity will be much better.

The much anticipated Silverlight 4 has been launched some minutes ago and now you can download its Windows and Mac runtimes. For those who don’t know, Silverlight is a platform for creating and experiencing top-notch interactive web, desktop and mobile applications. Silverlight 4 is claimed to bring in even better support and interactivity for multiple browsers thanks to the awesome .NET framework.

Striking new features of Silverlight 4:

• Support for local fonts
• Support for printing
• Webcam and microphone
• Official support for Google Chrome
• Out of browser window settings like position, size, etc.

For more features, click here.

Download Silverlight 4 for Windows and Mac

]]> http://www.techexplorer.in/2010/04/download-silverlight-4-now/feed/ 0 http://www.techexplorer.in/2010/03/wmp-12-automatically-preview-songs-on-mouse-hover/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wmp-12-automatically-preview-songs-on-mouse-hover http://www.techexplorer.in/2010/03/wmp-12-automatically-preview-songs-on-mouse-hover/#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:17:20 +0000 Jal http://www.techexplorer.in/2010/03/wmp-12-automatically-preview-songs-on-mouse-hover.html

Beginner Quick-tip

Windows Media Player 12 is my favorite music player on Windows and it has evolved to a great extent. I have shown some WMP tricks in the past and today I am back again with yet another small trick that will enable / disable automatic preview of songs just by hovering over them. This small tip will work for Windows Media Player 12 that comes bundled with Windows 7.

» First, open up Windows Media Player 12. Click ‘Organize’ > ‘Options’.

» In the ‘Library’ tab, just check the option ‘Automatically preview songs on track title hover’. Press OK.

» Now you can preview songs just by taking your mouse pointer over the title of the song. A small pop-up will appear and the song will start playing immediately when you click ‘Preview’. Moving your mouse away will stop the preview.

Enjoy previewing songs