Show Me Nonstop is a third party service that offers an alternative that is most appealing to broadband users. The free service will play videos about a certain topic for as long as the user wants.

All it takes is to enter a search phrase into the form on the page to start playing videos nonstop on the site. You could enter movie trailers 2012, kittens, or a band name to start watching high definition versions about the selected search term for as long as you want.

Show Me Nonstop seems to load the high definition version of a video whenever it is available on YouTube. The next video is automatically loaded whenever the previous video ends, without user interaction.

No controls are available, which is one of the issues that users may experience, considering that this means no pausing or replaying a video. A click on the video does however skip the video that is currently playing to load the next video in the queue.

The only other control that is available is the Show Me button at the bottom of the screen. This opens the search form again with options to refine the search or search for a new term on YouTube.

Show Me Nonstop is a useful services for uses who’d like to watch multiple related YouTube videos. It works very well for specialized search terms. It is also interesting to note that you will see new videos when you search for the same term again (provided there are enough videos available on YouTube).

Visit Show Me Nonstop to start watching right away. (via)

YouTube Charts, which you can access here, offers various top listings. This includes the most viewed videos, most liked or most discussed videos. If you open the YouTube video charts page for the first time you will notice that it offers several filter menus to change what is shown on the page.

This begins with the All Categories pulldown menu at the top. Charts are displayed from all categories by default. You can change this to display the charts from one category only, for instance gaming, science & technology or sports only.

Two additional menus with filtering options are displayed right beneath that. The “most viewed videos” menu can be changed to display the most discussed, most liked, most viewed HD or top favorited videos instead. The Today menu to display the top videos of the week, month or even all time instead.

Each video is listed on the page with a large thumbnail, its title, uploader and the views that it has received. You can play individual videos or click on the Play All button to watch all videos in a playlist one after the other.

If you thought that was all then you are wrong. YouTube by default filters the videos it displays on the page by country. If you are from the US you may see different videos as someone from the UK, Germany or France.

You can change your location at the very bottom of the page. Here you can select one of the support countries or a worldwide listing.

If you ever wanted to know what’s hot in Israel, Australia or Taiwan then here is your chance to do just that. It is however likely that you will encounter many foreign language videos if you do that.

The charts on YouTube can be used to find out the next hot music gig, upcoming games that everyone is talking about or the latest gadgets. The charts are on the other hand mainstream charts which becomes especially apparent in the music category.

Game resolutions can differ a lot. I recently recorded the first few levels of the Tower Defense game iBomber Defense which I purchased on Steam. The game has a maximum resolution of 1600×1200. The problem was that my desktop resolution is set to 1920×200. This meant ugly black bars on the left and right side of the video.

I first tried to remove the black bars using VirtualDub, the program that I normally use for video editing. This somehow did not work for me, even though I used the correct filter and selected the Cropping option there.

An alternative is Avidemux. The free open source software offers a similar functionality as VirtualDub. You can load one or multiple source videos into the program, convert them into a different format and apply filters to the resulting video. Among the available filters is the Crop tool which can be used to remove left, right, top or bottom space. This can be used to remove black borders from a video for instance.

Cropping Video

Download the free Avidemux software from the project website over at Sourceforge. The program is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Install the software and load your video files via the file menu into the application. You load the first file via File > Open, and additional files via File > Append. You then have to replace the Copy action under Video with another codec. I have selected MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid) for instance.

Click on the Filters button afterwards and selected Transform > Crop from the selection.

Click on the Configure button afterwards. This opens a preview image of the video. Enter pixels in the left, right, top or bottom fields to crop the video. The values are immediately shown on the preview image so that it is easy to fine tune them. You can also try the auto crop button which picked up the black bars in my test video nicely.

Click on the OK button to accept the changes. You can then click on Preview in the previous configuration screen to see how the cropped video will look like. If you are satisfied close the window.

All you need to do know is to save the video via File > Save > Save Video or with the Ctrl-S shortcut. The process may take some time depending on the performance of your computer and the length of the video.

And that’s all there is to it. This is without doubt one of the easiest way to crop a video.

Google yesterday announced on the official YouTube blog that they have added editing options on YouTube. These editing options become available for all users and all uploaded videos of a particular user on the site.

When you open one of your videos on YouTube, you see a new Edit Video link at the top next to Edit Info there.

A click on that link opens an edit video screen on Youtube that auto-plays the original video and the edited video on the screen. Video editing options are displayed in tabs on the page. The Quick Fixes tab for instance can be used to trim and stabilize the video, to rotate it left or right, to auto-correct lighting and color, and to make changes to lighting, coloring and saturation of the video.Each change is highlighted directly in the preview area.

The Effect tabs offers access to filters that can be applied to the video. This includes a Black and White effect, Sepia or a cartoon effect. It is unlikely that many YouTube video uploaders will make use of those effects. They do not really add anything to the video, but make them harder to watch. Still, there may be users that will make use of the Neon Pink or Green filters, and if it is only to annoy the hell out of their friends.

The Audio tab finally offers to add or exchange the audio track of the video. There is unfortunately still no option to use multiple songs for a video. That’s a issue if the selected audio track is shorter than the video play time.

Here is a quick video that Google made to demonstrate the functionality. Please note that the video is not showing the right interface.

Most video uploaders will still use third party software for their video editing needs. The options on YouTube are nice for quick limited edits though.

That’s what the Firefox extension LmnPopVideo helps you with. The extension makes many HTML elements detachable from the browser. It works well with videos, games and other Flash contents, and may work with other HTML elements as well.

Here is how it works. You first need to download and install the add-on from the official project website over at Mozilla. The extension is compatible with all versions of the browser from Firefox 3.6 on.

Once installed the browser needs to be restarted. The functionality at this point is then fully available in the browser. You can now detach supported HTML elements by moving the mouse cursor over them and clicking on the appearing camera icon in the upper right corner of the element.

When you click on the button, the element is detached from the browser and launched in a separate window where it works in the very same way. Well, the difference is that the separate window is resizable which means that you can adjust the size of the video or game to suite your screen and needs.

Keep in mind that not every element is resizable in the new window. It works well if you detach YouTube videos but for instance not for Kongregate games. The games are still playable on the detached screen.

If you hover your mouse over the top of the detached window you will see a small menubar appear. Here you can access the extension’s options, attach it again to the original browser window, reload the video, switch to the default size of it and set the window to top.

The standard controls of the element may be displayed as well. The YouTube controls when hovering the mouse over the window appear so that it is possible to change the volume, pause the video, change the quality or switch to another video position.

The add-on’s options offer a few customization options. You can for instance limit the number of detached popup windows to one, make the extension close the original tab automatically or change where in Firefox the extension’s links and contents are displayed.

LmnPopVideo is a great Firefox add-on for users who want more control over media elements in the browser. An option to always detach videos, games or music on specific sites would come in handy.

Update: The add-on is no longer available in the Mozilla Add-On Repository. Pop Video is an alternative for Firefox with the same functionality.

YouTube has added commands to the video hosting platform to correct the aspect ratio of already uploaded videos. While the end result won’t be as pretty as re-processing the video, it will save the director the troubles of doing that.

Take a look at the following two screenshots. The first shows a video that I have recently uploaded to YouTube. It has black bars on the right and left. The second screenshot shows the same video after making the changes on YouTube. It is now stretched. The bars are gone.

YouTube some time ago has added commands that are executed when added to a video’s tags. Commands are available to get rid of black bars on videos. Here are all commands that you can utilize.

• yt:crop=16:9 – This tag crops the video. It basically means that the player zooms in on the video so that contents at the borders may be not visible anymore.
• yt:stretch=16:9 – Stretches the video into a 16:9 format. This is the tag I have used for the video. Depending on the size of the black bars, it may make the video look distorted.
• yt:stretch=4:3 – Another stretch command. This stretches the video into a 4:3 format instead.
• yt:quality=high – Sets the video to play in high quality, if a hq version of the video has been uploaded by the owner.

You can apply tags by clicking on the Edit button next to the video in your YouTube videos listing.

Just copy and paste the commands into the tags text box and click Save Changes afterwards. Re-open the video on YouTube and watch how the tag modified the aspect ratio. You may need to reload it once or twice for that. If you are not happy with the result go back and use another tag or remove the existing one.

The options to crop or stretch videos will usually not result in optimal videos. Videos may look to stretched or important parts of the video may be missing if you have selected to crop it. In that case, you may have no other choice but to process it again on your local computer.

The main advantage of those video tags is the fact that you do not have to process and upload the video again to YouTube.

Here is a video that demonstrates use of the video tags.

As a content creator. How do you handle black bars in videos? As a user on YouTube: Do you prefer black bars over stretched videos?

Kastor Free Video Converter is a free, easy to use, video format converter for the Windows operating system. It supports single and batch conversions of many different video formats. Among the supported file formats are avi, mpg, mp4, mov, mkb, flv and about a dozen additional files.

You can add video files via the Add Files button at the top. Just select video files from the local directory. You need to make sure that the directories do not contain spaces in their names. If they do, the program will fail to convert the video files and generate files with a size of 0 in the selected output directory.

Video files added to the program this way are then listed with various information including their file name and format in the interface. It is possible to convert only part of the video by using the preview area slider. The preview area displays only video stills which feels a bit strange, considering that you cannot play the video in the application to change start and end times exactly.

Still, it is a feature that many other video converters do not support at all.

The output settings define the output video format that all videos added to the listing will be converted into.

Several output formats are available among them the majority of supported input formats plus device specific video formats for devices like Apple’s iPhone, Ipad, Sony’s Playstation 3 or audio only.

A click on Settings displays advanced video conversion options including the video cideoc, size, fps, bitrate and audio related settings.

You can select an output format from the preset listing as well, which offers additional format variations not available under the Output Format menu.

All videos listed in the program will be converted into the selected video format. A progress indicator next to each video listing indicates the progress of each individual conversion.

Kastor Free Video Converter is a handy tool for users who want to convert one or multiple videos into another video format. The application has a few shortcomings like missing support for directories with spaces or a preview feature that is not sufficient for previewing videos. The core feature on the other hand, video conversions, is handled fast and sophisticatedly.

The video conversion software seems to require the Microsoft .NET Framework. The required version is unfortunately not mentioned on the project website.

Interested Windows users can download the free video converter from Kastorsoft.

In a surprising turn of events, Google today announced that they have eliminated both deadlines based on user feedback. I’d love to say that the decision had something to do with my recent article Why You Need To Protect Your Data In The Cloud, but that’s wishful thinking. Still, the arguments brought forth in the article are likely similar.

So, Google Video is not shutting down right now. The April 29 deadline is eliminated which means that you can continue using the service as a visitor after that date.

That said, it is still Google’s plan to close down Google Video, but they want to provide their users with a better migration experience.

One thing that I did not understand back then was that they did not offer a way to move your uploaded videos to your Youtube account. It is likely that many Google Video uploaders have Youtube accounts as well.

Google has added an Upload Videos to Youtube option on the Google Video status page which can be used to upload all videos to Youtube. This works if you have both a Google Video and Youtube account. Users without a Youtube account need to create one before they can migrate the videos to Youtube.

The option to upload videos to Youtube should have been there in the first place. It is great to see that Google realized that and added the option to Google Video.

Google Video will still close down eventually, but users now have more options and time to preserve videos either by downloading them to the local system or uploading them directly to Youtube. (via Youtube Blog)

Back to Google Video. The service was not closed down immediately after the Youtube purchase, but it was clearly put on the backseat both in advertising and development efforts. Uploads were disabled in 2009 but hosted videos continued to be served.

This is going to change in the near future. Users of Google Video, that is users who have uploaded videos to the service, have received emails in the past week that informed them about the shutdown of the service on May 13. The first part of it is pasted below.

Dear Google Video User,

Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.

On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

For the next two weeks or so, you are able to play videos on Google Video just as usual. This data is for instance important to webmasters who have embedded Google Video contents on their sites. After April 29, those videos won’t play anymore. Then, two weeks later, the whole service will shut down.

Google Video users who have uploaded videos to the video hosting service can download those videos from their Video Status page.

We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner. To learn more go here.

Here’s how to download your videos:

Go to the Video Status page.
To download a video to your computer, click the Download Video link located on the right side of each of your videos in the Actions column.

Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link.

If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all.

Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.

Thank you for being a Google Video user.

Sincerely,

The Google Video Team

Google obviously recommends Youtube, as it is their second video hosting service, the one they bought after finding out that Google Video was not the Internet user’s favorite service. You could naturally upload the videos to Youtube, which on the other hand raises the question if you should do that, or look for a more reliable hosting solution. While it is unlikely that Youtube will be closed down in the near future, users would probably have said the very same thing about Google Video.

Alternatives are popular video hosting sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo, MetaCafe or Photobucket.

Video uploaders can download their videos via the Video Status page. But what about webmasters who have embedded those videos on their websites and blogs? They need a third party solution to download this videos, or they could try and find the same or a similar video on other video hosting sites.

One of the easiest options to download those videos is to use the Firefox extension Download Helper.

Keep in mind that you have less than 14 days left to download the videos that you have not uploaded from Google Video. Video owners have two additional weeks to download their videos from the video hosting service.

Radbox offers a different solution for this, and several other related, situations. The online service basically collects, or saves, information about videos that you want to watch at a later time, with options to do watch those saved videos at any time at their website, or a compatible RSS reader.

That’s helpful for users who get video links regularly that they cannot watch immediately, but also for users who like to visit multiple video portals to find new interesting videos (the type that collects first and watches later).

The main way of saving online videos to your Radbox account is with the help of a bookmarklet. Just click on the bookmarklet whenever you are on a page with videos. But the bookmarklet is not the only way of adding videos to the account.

Users can add videos by email. The Extras page of their account lists a secret email address that they can use to save videos to their account. They can for instance forward an email with a video link to their Radbox email address. Video links of supported services are automatically parsed and the videos added to the video list of the account.

Another option is the integration of Radbox in Google Reader. The configuration adds a link to Radbox to Google Reader which, when clicked, saves the videos on the page to the Radbox account. The service supports way over one hundred video services, from Youtube over Gametrailers and Justin.tv to The Guardian, Bravo TV and Fox Sports.

Lets talk about accounts for a second. New users can create a Radbox account by entering an email address and password. No verification or additional details are required.

All videos that have been saved to the account are listed on the main account page first, from where they can be moved to the favorites or archives later on.

A click on a video opens the embedded video on a new page. Video controls are taken from the hosting video portal, and additional options added by Radbox. It is for instance possible to visit the video source, share it with friends at Twitter, Facebook or per email, display the video description or add it to the favorites, trash or archives.

The other videos that are currently saved on the user’s frontpage are displayed below the playing video. A click on any of them loads them directly on the same page.

Radbox offers a rich media RSS feed for videos that can be added to compatible RSS readers such as Google Reader or Boxee so that it is theoretically not necessary to visit the Radbox page again after the account has been setup and the RSS feed url copied.

Especially the extra features, like RSS integration, make Radbox more than just an online tool to save and watch videos from multiple video sources. Is it enough to use the service regularly? That depends largely on the amount of videos and video links a user receives and discovers throughout the day. If the count is high enough it may be worth it.

XL version, what’s that again? If you point your web browser to youtube.com/xl you will see a different layout, optimized for large screens. The differences? Night and day.

Youtube XL displays very large buttons in a sidebar, larger video thumbnails, titles and information in the main area and a big search form on top.

Youtube XL lists spotlight videos by default. Each video box is completely clickable making it easier to load a video. Videos that are loaded make use of a similar optimized interface.

Next to the video that starts playing automatically are several related video entries and five buttons at the bottom to favorite, flag or share the video, display video information and see related videos which is also the default page.

Most controls on Youtube XL change elements on the page without reloading the whole page. This speeds up surfing noticeably. The sidebar on the homepage offers access to several video filters. It is for instance possible to switch from spotlight to top rated or most viewed, and change the time based filter from today to all time or this week.

The more link offers groups of additional buttons that were not included in the main layout. Here it is possible to access several music categories for instance.

Youtube XL supports accounts, and users can login normally. This is a requirement for some features like favoring a video. The settings can be used to change the display language and geography. Another useful option here is the setting to play the next video automatically when the current video ends, which reduces the user interaction further. Oh, and before you ask: Yes, there is a fullscreen option.

Youtube XL can be an interesting option for users who access the video hosting site on large screens.

Lets take a moment to think about the features that a userscript should offer. Most users will probably mention that it should support a resolution selector, options to disable autoplay, download links, any maybe hide some stuff on YouTube.

YouTube HD Utimate offers most of those features, in an easy to configure interface. The userscript is only compatible with the Firefox web browser, and requires the Greasemonkey extension to be installed as an add-on, before it can be installed.

The userscript does its magic on all YouTube video pages. The script selects the highest possible video quality automatically, with options to lower it if the computer has problems playing 1080p videos. The video is automatically expanded, and preloaded to avoid playback pauses.

youtube hd ultimate

Download links for various formats are displayed beneath the video for quick video downloads. Several options need to be enabled before they become active. The userscript supports hiding annoyances on the video pages, which includes advertisements and annotations in the video. One interesting option is the mini player mode, which shows playback controls but no video. This mode has been designed for users who want to listen to music on Youtube.

Other options include looping videos, making the videos fit to the browser screen size, darken the video page, keyboard shortcuts for basic player controls and the ability to share HQ links. Youtube HD Ultimate is a feature rich userscript, well suited for users who regularly use the video hosting platform. Remember that Greasemonkey is required to install the userscript.

We want YouTube to be the best place to upload video. Without question, the number one requested feature by our creators is to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. We’ve heard you, and today we’re pleased to announce that we’ve increased the upload limit to 15 minutes.

A 50% increase may seem like a lot on first glance, but then again a maximum playing time of 15 minutes is not. Dailymotion for instance supports video uploads with a playtime of up to 20 minutes for some time now, Vimeo, another popular video hosting service does not limit the maximum video length at all (but limits the Megabytes that can be uploaded per week to 500 Megabytes).

If you read the official announcement over at the Youtube blog you can read between the lines why Youtube offers such a restrictive video length.

It is not a resource issue, apparently. Joshua Siegel, Youtube product manager states:

In the meantime, you may wonder “why now?” — the upload limit for non-partners has been 10 minutes for years. Well, we’ve spent significant resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today. We will continue our strong commitment to provide advanced technology and tools to protect the rights of small and large copyright owners worldwide. We’ll also do everything we can to release incremental improvements like this one that benefit our video creators.

The upload limit was ten minutes because of content distributors, and is now 15 minutes because of them. This reasoning surely does not please the family trying to upload a birthday video or holiday trip, the geek who reviews computer hardware, or people who do not want to cut their videos in parts so that they can be published on Youtube.

What Joshua basically means is that Youtube made the decision to limit everyone’s (that is that of basic users) video length to 15 minutes to avoid conflicts with copyright owners because of the possible abuse of some users.

Does that sound right? Or should not they better allow users to upload videos with a longer playtime, and deal with copyright issues when they are detected?

What’s your take on the video limit increase?

4K videos raise the bar by running in a resolution of 4096 x 3072, that’s almost four times the size of the full HD resolution.

But 4K videos raise the bar not only resolution wise. The hardware requirements to play those movies on Youtube have gone up a lot.

Youtube visitors need a ultra-fast broadband connection and a computer system capable of displaying the videos smoothly in the web browser.

First user comments in the official announcement mention that the videos are not running properly on their computer systems.

Youtube 4k

But then again, it does not make lots of sense anyway to run 4K videos on a netbook screen or on a computer screen considering that the best screen size for 4K video is 24 feet, according to Youtube that is.

Our Core-i7 860 test system that’s connected with 50 Mbit
to the Internet was able to display the videos smoothly.

The test videos in 4K resolution are available here on Youtube. They are currently not offered for HTML5 Beta users, only Flash users are able to select the Original resolution to watch the movies in 4K.

4k videos youtube

We all know that resolution is not everything, a low bitrate can turn a 4K resolution video in an unpleasant experience. The sample videos seem to suffer from a low bitrate. What’s your take on the 4K addition? Good move or publicity stunt?

The messages that users receive when trying to view contents from outside the allowed countries are vast, some examples are this video is not available in your country or this video contains content from [company name] who has decided to block it in your country which both indicate that the publisher has limited access to users from specific countries.

If you search the Internet for solutions you find many different approaches to bypass the country restrictions on Youtube. Most of the solutions might have worked in the past but do not work anymore. Here is what is not working anymore:

• Replacing the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx url with http://www.youtube.com/v/=NIyiOB64fc8.
• Using translation services like Google Translate or Babel Fish. This usually yields the error message “an error occurred, please try again later.

Lets cover the basics. Youtube checks the user’s IP address, looks it up to find out the country the user is living in and compares it to the allowed country listing. If the country is in the list the user is allowed to watch the video, if not an error message is displayed explaining that the video is not available in the user’s country.

Several solutions are available to overcome the country restrictions on Youtube, all make use of proxy or intermediary services to hide the user’s IP address.

Test Videos:

• US: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q05bdFtERjM
• UK: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=luuX1nAd17A

1. Using a VPN

A VPN is a virtual private network which offers secure connections between computer systems. The important aspect for this guide is the fact that all web services and websites will communicate with the IP of the VPN which then routes the traffic to the user PC. If the IP of the VPN is located in a country that is allowed to watch the video then the video can be watched by the user as well.

VPNs often offer access to different servers to reduce the latency. We have been using VyprVPN in our tests, a VPN service that is offered for free for Giganews Diamond account owners. It offers servers in the US and NL currently (so no UK video access).

Free VPN services may work as well but they usually restrict the traffic of free users. Hotspot Shield and Project Loki are two services that offer free VPN connections. You may need to narrow down the search to find a VPN with servers in a country that is on the Youtube video’s country whitelist.

If you open the US video from outside the United States you receive the following error message on Youtube.

video blocked in your country

If you now connect to a US VPN you can watch the video without problems.

unblock youtube videos

Virtual private networks are great to watch videos hassle free. The free VPN solutions are usually very restrictive and slow. Setup and signup makes this an elegant but time consuming option to view blocked Youtube videos.

2. Download the video

Youtube video download services can be very helpful. They allow the user to download the video to the local computer to watch it there. The website offering the service needs to be hosted in a country that is on the whitelist for that video.

• US: Zamzar or File2HD
• UK: ?

youtube video download

Most video download services do not work even if they are located in a country that is on the video’s whitelist. Especially download services that are using a Java applet to download the videos did not work during our tests.

We were not able to find a single working UK video download service. If you know one let us know.

The option to download Youtube videos should be seen as a last resort. The method does have its advantages though, namely that the video can be watched for as long as it is stored on the local PC.

3. Web Proxies

Web proxies are proxies on websites that sit between the user’s computer and the target website. Selecting a web proxy from the right country should in theory be sufficient to play videos that are blocked in the user’s country.

Most web proxies on the other hand do not work. The message that is usually displayed on the Youtube video page reads “an error occurred, please try again later. Out of the 50 web proxies that we have tried only two have been working.

• US: Anonymous Browser
• UK: Action Access

unblock bbc youtube videos

Web proxies are great since they can be used to watch the blocked Youtube videos directly.

Proxy Server

Proxy servers need to be configured in the web browser’s settings. They route all web browser connections through their server. The destination websites interact only with the proxy server which means that the IP of the server is used to determine whether content is shown or not.

Proxies come and go as quickly – if not quicker – than web proxies. Proxy checkers like Charon can be used to verify a large list of proxy servers at once. It is possible to verify servers manually but that would mean to enter the proxy server’s information in the web browser before testing it to see if pages are loaded which is a time consuming process.

Here is a list of sites that post fresh proxies. There are more out there, just search for free proxy list, proxy server list or US proxy server.

Proxy servers need to be anonymous. Some proxy servers are not. These transparent proxies spill the user IP which has the consequence that blocked videos will remain blocked.

• http://www.samair.ru/proxy/type-01.htm
• http://www.proxylist.net/
• http://www.proxy-list.net/
• http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html

There is also a risk involved in using those proxy servers. All data will be routed through the servers for as long as the proxy is activated in the browser. It is theoretically possible to intercept that data to use it for malicious activities. Not a big problem when viewing Youtube videos though.

Do you know of another way to view blocked Youtube videos? Let us know in the comments. Have a service that should be included in the article? Post it in the comments as well and we take a look at it.

The Videoembed userscript tries to change that by turning links pointing to videos on 44 video hosting sites into embedded videos on the same page. This alteration happens directly on the page the links are posted without limiting the user experience on the site. Below is an example from Kottke.org. The first screenshot is showing the original page with the Youtube video link, the second the same page with the userscript activated.

youtube video without embed

online videos

The userscript supports many of the most popular video hosting sites, among them youtube, Metacafe, Veoh, Gametrailers, Ustream or MySpace. The script works globally and will embed the video if it is hosted on one of the supported video hosts.

The userscript works in Firefox if Greasemonkey is installed and in Google Chrome as well. It is likely that it will work in Opera and other userscript supporting browsers as well. It can be downloaded from the userscript website.

Non-Chinese speaking users will have difficulties navigating the video portal as all texts and most of the videos are only provided in Chinese. The texts on the site can however be easily translated with a browser like Google Chrome or translation plugins for other popular browsers.

Tudou is the Chinese word for potato and a reference to the English term couch-potato. The video hosting portal offers video categories like any other platform. A difference to Youtube is the presence of tv series and other tv productions on the platform, a sector where Youtube is still lacking in.

Most videos are in Chinese but there are also videos in other languages, especially on the Sports category which contains lots of football, fighting and the popular US-American sports.

Different video quality are offered at Tudou.com which can be selected on the video pages.

Tudou.com has 250 employees in four offices in China of which 100 are responsible for reviewing all videos that are uploaded to the platform to ensure that they do “not contain political or social content that is barred by the [Chinese] government”.

The most comfortable way of navigating Tudou for non-Chinese speaking users is to use the Google Chrome web browser and configure the translator to always translate Chinese into a language understood by the user.

International visitors might want to start with the sports, fun or music video categories-

The Tudou.com homepage is accessible here.

Youtube videos are commonly converted to mp3, which basically means that the audio portion of a video is extracted and saved as an mp3 file. Especially music and educational videos are prime candidates for this process. It is possible to convert the Youtube videos to mp3 for playback on an mp3 player or cell phone afterwards.

Different tools are available for the process, all with their distinct advantages and disadvantages. They usually fall into the categories of online services, browser add-ons and desktop tools. We have decided to review one of each category. Note that Youtube recently revised their API, which breaks many tools that we have tested in all three categories.

Convert Youtube Videos To MP3 Online

Dirpy is an online service that can convert a single Youtube video to mp3. All that needs to be done is to copy and paste the Youtube video url into the web form on the Dirpy page and to click the download link afterwards. The conversion and download of the mp3 to the local computer system begins immediately. Dirpy offers several tools on their website, including a transcoder and mp3 tag editor. Furthermore, it is  possible to download the video as well.

Convert Youtube Videos with a bookmarklet

Dirpy also provides a bookmarklet to make the process easier. A bookmarklet is basically a bookmark which can be added to the web browser’s bookmarks. It will send the url directly to Dirpy when it is activated on a Youtube video url page. Bookmarklets work in all modern web browsers, an advantage over web browser plugins which only work in one or a few.

Convert Youtube Videos To MP3 locally

Desktop applications often offer features which online services do not. It is actually not that easy to find a working program to download and convert Youtube videos in one go. Due to the recently revised Youtube API, most applications appear to be broken at this point in time.

DamnVid is a Youtube downloader and mp3 converter that is available for Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh systems. The program is actually compatible with lots of different video hosting services. Videos can be converted to mp3 right away by selecting the mp3 profile from the right sidebar. The application features a built in search, which however did not work when we tested it. Nevertheless, it is possible to copy and paste video urls from Youtube directly into the program interface. It is likely that the developers will fix the search problem in the near future. The Damn Vid Youtube downloader will also catch any Youtube video URLs which are opened in a web browser and add the videos automatically in its interface. DamnVid is available from the Google Code profile site.

Tubequeue is a Windows-only Youtube downloader that offers batch conversions and a build in search. This has the advantage that the user does not have to copy URLs from the Youtube website into the application. The batch processing feature can convert multiple Youtube videos to mp3 files at once. Tubequeue supports general searches and custom searches. It will display 25 videos per results page. The user can then move none, some or all of the videos that have been found to the conversion settings queue. The output file format can be selected here. The mp3 format is but one of the possibilities, other options include mp4, avi and flv file formats. The selected videos are then added to the processing queue from where they can be converted with a click on the download/convert button. Tubequeue is currently not able to download videos.

Please let us know if you know of free alternatives to the programs that we have discussed and reviewed in this article. Let us know how you convert Youtube videos to mp3.

That’s where Synchtube comes into play. The new online service creates rooms in which users can watch Youtube videos together in sync. Think of a chat room that has a unique url that can be send to other users who can then join that room.

The chat room places the videos on the left side of the screen and a chat area on the right.

The first person to enter the room is the leader of the room. The leader can start and stop the video which will perform the operation for all users who are connected to the chat room. A new video can be loaded as well by the leader by pasting a Youtube url into the form at the bottom of the screen.

A new room can be created by anyone. All it takes is to paste a Youtube video url in the form at the Synchtube homepage to create a new chat room for that video. A unique Synchtube url can then be send to other users who the creator wants to invite. Rooms can be set to be private which makes it impossible for random users to join the room. Only users with the right url of the room can join.

Synchtube offers an interesting service that makes it easier to watch videos together with other people.

You can watch that video directly at Youtube by following this link. The 1080p videos seem to make use of the &fmt=37 parameter which can be added to the url to see if the Youtube video supports 1080p.

The second feature consists actually of two technologies: automatic captions and automatic timing.

Auto-Timing: Upload a transcript (a simple file with the text of what’s said in the video), and through speech recognition technology we’ll turn it into synchronized captions. Timing is the toughest part of creating captions, but now this should be much easier. The technology works best for videos with good sound quality and clear spoken English.

Automatic timing ensures that an external transcript is being used to avoid errors during speech recognition. This does however mean that a transcript of the video needs to be available. Youtube will automatically turn the transcript into synchronized captions through the use of speech recognition technologies.

Auto-Captions: We use the same speech recognition technology to create machine-generated captions (which can then be translated into 51 languages). You can see auto-caps in action right now on a range of educational channels, such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google channels, including YouTube’s. Click on the menu button at the bottom right of the video player, then click CC and the arrow to its left, then click the new “Transcribe Audio” button. In time, we hope to expand this feature for many more YouTube videos.

Automatic captions on the other hand uses speech recognition not only for timing purposes but also for creating the video transcript.