People are crazy about watching videos on Youtube, Metacafe & Co. but the videos there are in most cases either entertaining or kinda crappy. In my opinion, it’s a little hard to find really good or useful videos in this jungle if you’re not searching for something specific or don’t get a suggestion or link from another website.

You probably want to learn something new sometimes and in such case vivid video tutorials are many times more appreciated than written tutorials. Instead of just reading how something is done you hear and see it instead.

SuTree is a social website aimed at creating and maintaining a knowledge community. They collect video lessons, tutorials and short how-to videos from the community, let users decide which are the best ones and also approve the videos themselves (at least they claim so). SuTree was also nominated for the CNET’s WebWare 100 competition by the way.

continue reading "Knowledge Community Video Sites"

Online Music Recorder is a web service brought to you by the team that also created the Online TV Recorder web application. The music service basically records songs from Internet radio stations for you which you can download once they are available. Due to legal concerns you can only download songs that have been recorded since you joined the service and actively stated that you want them to record songs for you.

This means that you create a large library of songs over time. Hundreds of songs are added daily to the list of recorded songs which are kept for an infinite amount of time. The music that you download from Online Music Recorder is encrypted and you need a special software that decrypts the music using your username and password that you use when logging into the website.

continue reading "Online Music Recorder"

One of my regular readers CC send me a link to SMPlayer about a week ago and I was testing the frontend for mplayer since. SMPlayer is a video player that is supporting the most important video formats out of the box including avi, mpg, mov, wmv and vob plus numerous other formats.

It is also possible to play DVDs and Internet streams with the video player that is available for Windows and Linux. Several ways of displaying subtitles and various subtitle formats are supported including srt, sub and DVD subtitles. I personally think that SMPlayer is a great alternative to the VLC player.

This could be useful for everyone who is having troubles with VLC for example. The only real difference that I was able to spot was that the SMPlayer is Open Source and that it remembers where the playback of the video stopped. Make sure you download the full SMPlayer plus the update.

continue reading "A VLC alternative called SMPlayer"

Bebo is one of the many social networking websites that is extremely popular in the United Kingdom. It has a large music category that hosts band profiles including several songs that can be played on the site in an embedded player.

The music category lists a multitude of genres to choose from starting with Rock over several kinds of electronic music like Trance and Hardcore to Comedy and Christian music. I honestly do not know most of the bands that have a profile on Bebo making it ideal to find new unknown bands.

There is no obvious way to download the songs. All you can do is click on the play button next to the song name which starts the playback.

continue reading "Download songs from Bebo"

Many users were quite happy when Apple announced that they would be selling drm free music at their iTunes online store. It would finally be possible to make one purchase and be able to play the music in your car, mp3 player, computer and other devices. Prices for the drm free music were set higher than for music with drm which did not get the bad feedback that I expected it to get.

The possibility to download drm free music is live and several websites examined the new files that were downloaded after a purchase has been made. As Arstechica puts it: “We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files”. This information is however stored in all songs that are downloaded from the iTunes store, not only in the drm free songs.

While it has not been a real concern before it could become one now. I don’t think that a lot of users will purchase music at the iTunes store and then add it to their p2p folder to share it with the world. The professional groups that release mp3 albums get their albums before store release and spread it world wide in a matter of minutes which means that they will not use the iTunes store to get hold of the music.

continue reading "DRM Free Music from iTunes hides account info"