5Min Life Videopedia

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 16, 2008
Updated • Dec 22, 2012
Music and Video
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Youtube sits tightly on its spot as the number one video portal in the world. It's extremely hard to compete Youtube, comparable to the problems that search engines have to compete with Google. One way of dealing with this challenge is to provide a specialized video service. 5Min is one of those specialized video portals. It provides access to thousands of Do It Yourself and How To videos. While it is not the only video portal in that niche it provides access to interesting functions that the other portals do not provide.

Videos are archived in categories like Tech, Food or People and can be played without having to register an account at the video portal. The website offers the usual "social web" features like rating videos, leaving comments, embedding videos and bookmarking them.

The videos on the main site have about the same resolution that Youtube provides but the player provides additional functionality like zooming in, slowing down or increasing the brightness of the video. Even more interesting than that is the so called Smart Player which opens the video and controls in fullscreen mode.

The resolution of the video is increased in that mode. It pretty much looks like a standalone video player in that mode. The functionality in that mode remains the same with the exception that it is a tad easier to browse related videos, add-ons and external links all without having to leave the page or stop the video from playing. Access to additional videos is given on that page as well which means it is entirely possible to stay in that mode and watch many videos.

Registered users can upload their own videos to the website. It is possible to edit video details while uploading the video which is another interesting feature.

The contents are extensive, lots of videos to chose from. Most videos have a playtime between 1-5 minutes but there are some that have a longer playing time. 5Min is a specialized video portal that provides enough videos to put it in a top spot of the Do It Yourself video portals. The player surpasses the players of most video portals by a mile and is reason enough to check the site out.

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Comments

  1. Anonymous said on August 1, 2010 at 12:43 pm
    Reply

    Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?

  2. Mike J said on August 1, 2010 at 2:58 pm
    Reply

    Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.

    1. Martin said on August 1, 2010 at 3:39 pm
      Reply

      Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.

      1. Mike J said on August 2, 2010 at 2:30 pm
        Reply

        huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
        Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.

  3. myo said on August 1, 2010 at 5:52 pm
    Reply

    yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.

  4. Kishore said on August 13, 2010 at 2:55 pm
    Reply

    Error:
    Buidling font Cache pop-up

    Solution:

    Open VLC player.

    On Menu Bar:

    Tools
    Preferences

    (at bottom – left side)
    Show settings — ALL

    Open: Video
    Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
    Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”

    Save
    Exit

    Re-open – done.
    Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts

    Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc

    1. Martin said on August 13, 2010 at 3:10 pm
      Reply

      Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.

  5. javier said on August 14, 2010 at 1:50 pm
    Reply

    @Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
    I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.

    Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?

    I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…

    /thanks
    /j

  6. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:38 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,

  7. Kishore said on August 15, 2010 at 12:39 pm
    Reply

    @ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.

    No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure

  8. Ted said on October 22, 2010 at 3:57 am
    Reply

    Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me

  9. Evan said on December 8, 2013 at 1:48 am
    Reply

    I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).

  10. Mike Williams said on September 6, 2023 at 1:26 pm
    Reply

    Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?

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