Pirates Planet

Coming... Working...

Sorry! I know that's what a lot of people say when they are late on getting something done. In this case I am not the exception.

Ashampoo®ClipFinder at Ashampoo.com is the first topic here today. This new free software is the best tool I have seen yet for video-clip junkies. In this screenshot you can see the program interface and its basic functions. The program opens with search windows for YouTube, VideU, MyVideo, ClipFish, SevenLoad, MySpaceand MetaCafe. In my search for "ocean" YouTube returned 185 clips, while VideU returned only one and the total time to search all seven video services was under thirty seconds. That's pretty speedy, but speed isn't everything.

Once you have found some clips you can view them in the program. This is as it should be and makes everything much easier. If you like the clip the viewing window has a "download" button. In my testing of the download function, the program showed it was downloading clips, but when I went to view them with Flash Player 8 they did not play. However, they do play in Effectmatrix.com's TotalVideoPlayer, which is also a free download.

One final note on ClipFinder: you must register the program through Ashampoo to activate the program. This involves a fairly painless form and then the activation code is emailed to you.

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If you would rather stick to just YouTube, SpeedbitVideoAccelerator may be worth a look. It does what it's name says with YouTube videos by making multiple connections to the source video thus speeding up the download time and reducint/eliminating video stuttering.

Happy Viewing!

Technorati : ClipFish, MetaCafe, MySpace, MyVideo, SevenLoad, VideU, YouTube

YouTube can be used in a variety of ways, from entertainment (mostly) to research. Why not streamline the way you go about searching and viewing for videos. Adobe Labs is showcasing a great YouTube widget developed by Yourmins which allows you to do just that from your desktop, website or blog.

You will need to run/install the Adobe Apollo runtime from the Adobe site and the youmins.air file (210kbs) from the Yourmins site for this to function.

Amit Agarwal over at Digital Inspiration has a post about how to download iTune movies and music-videos from the iTunes-Store for free. It is a somewhat complicated process, and maybe an April Fool's Joke because it doesn't work.

Now if you really want to streamline your media experience and not pay a cent, head on over to Democracy Player and download/install their free, full featured software. It will handle nearly every format of video, video RSS feed. podcast or video blog. Oh, YouTube too of course!

You can also cue up any feeds for download to watch them later. All that and a very stylish, user-friendly interface too. Check it out.

Technorati : Adobe, Adobe Labs, Democracy Player, Digital Inspiration, RSS, YouTube, Yourmins, iTunes, video