YouTube isn’t just for watching videos. A lot of times you can find great music in the form of old songs that aren’t available anywhere else online. Or you come across a fascinating audio track and get tempted to use it elsewhere.

Extracting audio from a YouTube video usually requires you to download the video to your hard drive, convert it to another format and then extract the audio track from it. Well, I’ve been doing a little experimenting and discovered that you can extract audio directly without downloading the video from YouTube. The secret of my success: MediaCoder.

As far as transcoders go, Mediacoder is one of the best out there. It requires a bit of a learning curve but it’s capable of a lot of stuff. I’ve been using it almost exclusively whenever I need to convert a video or any media files.

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TV Series Papercraft can be seen as an addition to the Cubeecraft Papercraft series. Papercrafts are little toys that come on paper. They have to be printed, cut out and assembled which is where most of the fun lies. Cubeecraft had some wonderful designs like Iron Man, Stromtroopers, Indiana Jones and as their latest edition the Vault Boy from Fallout.

TV Series Papercraft concentrates on popular tv series like 24, Lost or Prison Break and delivers some interesting looking designs of popular characters of those series. If you look at the 24 category you find papercrafts for Jack Bauer, Tony Almeida, David Palmer and Mike Novik among others. Each tv series contains several character designs which can all be downloaded and printed without additional costs.

The site has a interesting vintage tv series category with stars from the past including Magnum, CJ from Baywatch, Michael Knight from Knight Rider and B.A. Baracus from the A-Team.

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Something interesting for the weekend. If you feel that the usual retail usb sticks are to boring you might want to give designing your own a try. You can do that at the Fabidoo website which not only offers the creation of unique usb sticks but all kinds of like animals or hearts which would probably make a great gift for loved ones.

Back to the usb sticks. The customer can pick one of the colorful templates and edit that or start the process with a white usb stick. The sticks can be rotated, zoomed in and out, opened and looked at from every possible direction.

It is then possible to change the colors of all the parts, apply text, upload images and frames to create fantastic looking usb sticks. Just look at some of the results, they look really great.

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I’m loosely following the technological advances in a few sectors that are not directly related to the topics I write about at Ghacks. This includes advancement in new input technologies like Microsoft’s Surface but also character animation and robotics.

Maybe once or twice in a year I come upon something that is so fascinating that I have to applaud. Meet Emily is one of those situations. Some of you who follow this tech sector more closely might have seen the video already, for those who have not read on.

I do not want to spoil the fun and would like to ask you to view the video below and hear what the interview is all about, a description of the technology. Once that is done scroll down to read the rest of the article.

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From time to time I read an article on the Internet about a new technology or software that makes me jump up and down and clap my hands at the same time. In other words, a technology that blows me away. This time it is a new method of enhancing video by using photos of the same scene to create effects like high definition resolutions, enhanced exposure, object removal, object touchup or high dynamic range.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington have developed a software application that automatically enhances a video by using several photographs of the same scene. This takes the higher resolution and detail of photos in comparison to videos into account to deliver stunning enhanced videos.

Take a look at the original images in the upper row and the enhanced images in the lower row.

continue reading "Using Photos To Enhance Video"