Music and Video

Watch Documentaries Online

It seems that more and more specialized websites appear that list videos from sites such as Youtube and Google Video. At the beginning websites that would post lists of tv shows and movies were the most common ones and they are still very popular. Other websites emerge now that only list anime, sports or music videos.

FanCast watch TV Shows online

Fancast is a service by the cable provider Comcast who streams dozens of popular tv shows from Battlestar Galactica to The Office and The Unit free on their website. The service is available to viewers with a US IP only which means that everyone else will not be able to view the tv shows unless they hide their IP with a service like Hotspot Shield.

Stream Music contained in torrent files

Downloading pirated films is stealing

Did you recently purchase a DVD in store ? If so you must have noticed this wonderful reminder at the beginning that can't be skipped that downloading pirated films is stealing and a crime. I recently bought 24 season 4 on DVD which comes on seven DVDs and contains all the 24 episodes of this season.

Music Industry Thoughts

I could not sleep well yesterday evening because I was thinking about the Music Industry which was directly related to the article I wrote on that day. I was to tired to pen it down but I would like to try and recap my thoughts. We all know that album sales are down and that it will most likely stay that way. I thought about the reasons for this and came up with the following.

HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray Next Round

I don't know how you feel about the ongoing format war between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray but I'm sick and tired to hear which company is backing up which format and which format is doomed because of this move. Today the news hit the Internet by storm that Warner is going Blue-Ray exclusive and everyone was asking the question if this was the end of HD-DVD losing another major movie studio.

Check for and add missing Video Codecs

I do not like Codec packages. You may ask why that is the case and my answer would be that they tend to install more than is needed to run the videos on your computer. There are also lots of fake codec packages out there that install viruses and trojans on your system.

MSN Video vs. Google Youtube

Youtube is a well established video portal with the huge advantage that content is added every second by its visitors. Most Internet users probably do not know that Microsoft has its own video portal called MSN Video. That is probably the greatest weakness of MSN Video that hardly anyone knows about it and that this has direct impact on the amount of available videos.

Christmas CD Sales are down 20% compared to last year

Ars Technica are reporting that CD sales this Christmas, that is the period between Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, are down 20% compared to last year which means that 21.4 million CDs have been sold less than the previous year. This looks serious but is it ? We have to take a look at overall earnings to make a fair judgment.

Microsoft uses YouTube to promote their products

Microsoft competes with Google in many areas but has still chosen to create a video channel on Youtube to promote Microsoft products. While this seems odd it could be an effort to reach potential customers in enemy territory. What most websites reporting about the ads are reporting is that the PR guys decided to leave the comment function activated which invites many comments that are criticizing Microsoft.

Batch Convert FLV to AVI or MPG

Most video portals on the Internet use the flv - that's Flash Video - format to stream videos to their users. While Flash Video has several advantages over many other video formats when it comes to streaming it on a website it does have some severe disadvantages when it comes to playing those videos on a computer and even more so on a DVD player.

New Future 3D Technology from Japan

I like to take a glimpse at future technologies so that I can see which technology changes we can expect in the next few years. This one is amazing. It has been taken right out of a Japanese news show showing how a characters appearance is changed in real time. Character is probably not the right word because what I really mean is that the real time image of a human is taken and altered in a way that offers several new interesting prospects.

What do you look for in Online TV?

Whether you have a cable subscription, Tivo, or other means of getting your daily dose of TV shows, most of you will have tried viewing shows online at least once. If you […]

Refresh yourself with power-nap sounds

You may have gone through some stressful and exhausting periods lately when arranging everything for nice and quiet x-mas time, trying to find just the right presents for your friends and family and so on. Now you probably want to rest a little bit and enjoy the days off as much as possible. You might appreciate some kind of stimulant that would help you loosen the tension and concentration accumulated in your mind and body..

Realtime Youtube Video transcoding for mobiles

I have been praising emTube just a day ago which was an application for Symbian S60 mobile phones such as the Nokia N73 and Nokia N95 that made it possible to browse Youtube with your mobile phone and download + view movies as well. No conversion was needed and the quality of the service was astonishingly good.

Music Charts and Search right in your browser

Want to listen to the latest charts of the UK, Europe and Germany ? Want to create your own playlist, add artists to it and search for songs as well ? Mucelli offers all of this in a easy to use very user friendly interface. They pull the music from Youtube and display it either with or without the video.

Download and add mp3 automatically to iTunes

Have you ever thought that the process of downloading mp3 files, opening itunes, adding the files and syncing them is kinda overcomplicated ? The creators of the browser extension Tunestor for Internet Explorer and Firefox surely did and created an extension just for that purpose.

Grab your Hulu Beta invites

Hulu is doing a huge promotion currently offering several websites 2500 beta invites each and lots are still available. I found three website promotions with roughly 4000 invites left for Hulu, make sure you head right out and sign up using any of the following links:

View TV Shows Online with Alluc

There is only one television in my house so there are times when programs clash. At such times, I often have to forgo watching my choice of TV show. This means that […]

Add Hard Drive Songs to Your Myspace Profile

I have a Myspace profile, thanks to a friend who had his own band. There are a bunch of sites that have fancy comments as well as cool layouts you can use […]

Share Unrestricted Music with your Zune

Did you know that the Zune, the mp3 player from Microsoft, has a filesharing feature that is probably one of the best ever implemented in mp3 players ? Did you also know that Microsoft restricted playback of song shared using that filesharing option to three playbacks in the new Zune players ? The old players had an even tougher restriction set in place, their restriction was three plays or three days.

Watch NBC Shows on Veoh

NBC offers two official ways to watch their tv shows online. The first is NBC Direct which forces uses to download and install DRM infested software that adds the permanent MediaAgent.exe process to your system wasting resources even though the NBC Direct client is not running.

Mikontalo Lights Project

The Mikontalo Lights Project was created by the students of Tampere University of Technology in Finland. "The object of MIKONTALOLIGHTS was to create the world's physically largest colored graphics platform by using the windows of Mikontalo's D-staircase as light pixels. The platform was used to play Tetris and other games and present demos created by the students of Tampere University of Technology."

Use MPUI as a Portable Media Player

When it comes to media players, there’s no doubt in my mind that Mplayer is head and shoulders above the rest. In fact, I think it’s even better than VLC. The only […]

Free Mp3 Downloads with Bee Mp3

Specialized mp3 search engines that let users download the mp3 songs found for free seem to appear by the dozen every week. Bee Mp3 is another one of those that copy the usability and interface of a search engine like Google but only let the user search for mp3 songs that can be downloaded from the web.

Youtube finally playing HD content

Graham send me an email just a few minutes ago informing me that Youtube users could finally upload high definition videos to Youtube which have the benefit of a much sharper, clearer image and the negative side effect (for some users) of a size increase of the videos.

ALSong a music player with lyrics

I'm really fond of XMPlay which is in my opinion the best software music player. I normally do not even look at other music players except if they offer something different, unique which I have to investigate. ALSong is one of those music players that comes with a feature that sounds interesting enough.

Download free music from Last.fm

Did you know that Last.fm has a free mp3 download section on their music portal ? The Weekly Free Downloads category of Last.fm lists currently 189 songs that can be downloaded to your computer without charge. All songs are available on one page sorted by popularity. You do find some popular artists among them including Snoop Dog, Sarah Connor as well as some classics from Beethoven and Bach.

Windows Media Player Playlists not working anymore?

The playlists that are generated by Windows Media Player have a different structure and file extension than generic m3u playlists which are supported by all software mp3 players. Windows Media Player Playlists are saved as .wpl files and a big difference is that they store the absolute path to the songs.

Validate your mp3 collection

Most software mp3 players do not report playback errors which is not such a big problem most of the time. It could however become one when you copy the mp3 to a player, be it software or hardware, that does not play the file because it checked for those errors before playing the mp3.

NBC Direct Uninstallation wont complete

NBC Direct is a software that will be installed on your computer if you want to watch the videos offered at the NBC Direct website. Before NBC Direct is installed the Open Case Media Agent is installed on your system as well which is used for distributing content and managing rights.

Find Songs from bands and artists

Songza is a music search engine that searches websites for music of the artist, band or song that you enter into the search form. Most interesting is the fact that they mainly search Youtube for those artists or songs. Don't yell at me just yet, this is not another "Search Youtube, display Videos" type of website.

NBC Launches Direct Video Downloads

I'm a bit puzzled by the recent launch of NBC's Direct, a video downloads website just a few weeks after launching Hulu together with News Corp. Direct Video Downloads sound nice at first glance which is exactly what users would like. Instead of watching the tv episodes at Hulu online they can now download the videos and watch them whenever they feel fit to do it.

ZML is for movies what Allofmp3 was for music

The developers of the now defunct Allofmp3 website announced a new website called ZML - The Movie Library - that offers movies in three different versions for prices that will cause the concern of the MPAA. The lowest price for a full movie begins at $1.99 which is the version for iPods with a width of 320 pixels.

Edit Mp3 without encoding them

I sometimes want to cut mp3 audio files into separate parts, mainly because the single file is that large that it does not fit on my mp3 player. This is also useful to create mp3 ringtones who only use the first 30 seconds of a song anyway. It does work the other way round as well.

How to play Ape files?

You might be puzzled at first if you encounter an audio file with the ape extension for the first time. Trying to play it in Winamp, Windows Media Player and XMPlay will not be successful, in fact, the song will not be loaded at all. The Ape file format is a lossless compression format of the compressor Monkey's Audio.

Find out what the world is listening to

When I was young I was astonished by the fact that the top music albums of each country varied a lot. There were surely those million sellers that made their way into virtually all charts of this world but most of the time the chart music was different. Great Britain for instance was always way ahead of my country and it was always a good market to see what would be in the charts soon in my country.

A quick fix for Internet Radio stream buffering issues

Nothing can be more frustrating than to listen to some great tune on Internet Radio which suddenly starts to skip ruining all the fun. The following, pretty obvious method, helps most of the time if you regularly experience stutters, slowdowns or skippings when listening to Internet Radio.

The best way to record Internet Radio streams

I don't want to make a big fuss about it. I tried lots of softwares that record Internet Radio streams and found one that was the perfect fit for my situation. I prefer a software that would function as my main music player and be able to record Internet Radio streams over a software that would have the ability to record the streams but that I would never use to listen to music.

Radiohead, their album and Bittorrent

There is a lot of coverage going on at the moment on various sites that all report that the new Radiohead album In Rainbows which is exclusively available on a official In Rainbows website is spreading like any other major music album on Bittorrent. The main difficulties that the reporting sites have is that listeners may pay the price they like to purchase the album on the In Rainbows website which can be anything from $0 to hundreds of Dollars for the album plus a small service charge.