Pirates Planet

YouTube Fast Seach (view and save ?)

2007-05-31T21:08:00.001-06:00

Efficient YouTube Search and View

Next to Ashampoo's free ClipFinder, this is the best YT S+V* I have seen yet. Big shout-out to developer Yvo Schapp for this service. (This is the same person who created the wonderful Wordpress theme generator.)

However, I must mention that it only searches YouTube while ClipFinder searches there and six other video venues. (It also saves the files locally if desired.) If you're a video fanatic, you need these tools.

*YouTube Search and View

Ashampoo Free Video Search Tool

2007-04-04T20:58:00.000-06:00

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 Play and Search from Your Website, Blog or Desktop

2007-04-01T18:54:00.000-06:00

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

Open Any File Type - FREE !!!

2007-03-31T16:57:00.000-07:00

Even after many years of dealing with hundreds of file formats, I still encounter some file I cannot open without installing software. For people who are new to using computers the encounter is more frequent and often intimidating, until now.

Universal Viewer (ATViewer) is a Freeware/OpenSource utility which can open practically any file format you may encounter. Here is a short list from the product website:

Text/Binary/Hex/Unicode: all files, with unlimited file size (even 4Gb+ sizes are allowed);

RTF/UTF-8: RTF and UTF-8 encoded texts;

Image: all general graphics formats: BMP JPG GIF PNG TGA TIFF etc;

Multimedia: all formats supported by MS Window Media Player: AVI MPG WMV MP3 MIDI etc;

Internet: all formats supported by MS Internet Explorer: HTML XML DOC XLS etc;

Plugins: all formats supported by Total Commander Lister plugins.

However, even with the broad ability to open so many file formats, ATViewer will not open the following file formats:

Microsoft Office

Lister plugin for DOC/XLS

OpenOffice.org

Lister plugin for ODT/ODS

Adobe Reader

Foxit Reader

Lister plugin for PDF

For all the above file formats you will need to install the application software with one exception (as to my knowledge). Microsoft Office documents (.doc files) can be opened with the free Doc Viewer available from the Microsoft website HERE, which also has viewers for other MS Office products formats.

If you are a "newbie" ATViewer is an invaluable tool to have on you maching. Visit the product website HERE.

Stormy Weather

2007-03-19T03:52:00.000-07:00

Wimpy offers some great ways to post your music or video. Their light-weight applications are easy to configure and install. It is worth a visit to their site to take a look at the free offerings. Among them are an easy to use XML playlist maker. For my example of the Wimpy player here I used the iPod skin and reduced the mp3 files size with DietMp3 for faster downloading. DietMp3 is another small application used to reduce the size and quality of Mp3's to suit your particular needs. In my experiments 1500, 128kbps files were reduced to fit on one 750 Mb Cd.

Easy Apache Server Setup

2007-03-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in setting up your own private Apache server read on. Like myself, it may take you hours of surfing to bring yourself up to date on things. There are many very useful sites which will guide you through the (somewhat complicated) installation process. Server, PHP and SQL can be installed manually, even by a beginner with patience, but why?

XAMPP of Apache Friends is the easier and more time efficient way to go. Whether you're installing on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or Solaris you'll find a complete installation/setup file. With the latest release, in less than 15 minutes you can have Apache 2.2.4, MySQL 5.0.33, PHP 5.2.1 & PHP 4.4.5, phpMyAdmin 2.9.2 FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.22 and OpenSSL 0.9.8d up and running.

Ok, some extra effort may be required, such as setting the correct ports and configuring them in your firewall and router. But having solved those, surf around to find the many useful free PHP utilities.

One final note: running your own private server, you must consider bandwidth and ISP issues. Also, the URL to your server will be your IP address unless you configure it otherwise with DynDNS.

Nigmae Community - Copyright Infringement Rampant

2007-03-17T01:49:00.000-07:00

Here is a good place to begin. Over at what is called the Nigmae Share Community is a pirate site run by the NILLAND Group Limited. Googling Nilland Group results mostly in links back to Nigmae.
The first page offerings today include VanDerLee Photoshop plugins valued at $80US and more Photoshop plugins from theimagefactory valued at $240US.
Several links away you arrive at the Rapidshare file-sharing site. It appears that most links to file downloads at Nigmae are to Rapidshare. The rare exception will link to IceFile or Megashares.
While the majority of offerings at Nigmae are moviestar/model photos, wallpapers and icons, there are 673 pages of available software listed. For comparison there are 389 music pages, 81 games and 156 video among the 16 listed categories. Clicking on the "Amenities" category takes you to the xxxNigmae site where a plethora (945 pages) of soft/hardcore images and movies are listed.
Copyright infringement is rampant on this site. Software, images and video are all linked with either passwords, cracks or password generators. I would strongly urge readers to avoid either visiting or downloading any material from this site and its provided links. In addition to violating copyright laws, most files offered in such a way are infected in some way by trojans, viruses and BHO's.

Welcome to Pirate World

2007-03-17T01:48:00.000-07:00

The purpose and intent of this blog is simple and straightforward: I would like to enlighten software users and manufacturers on the world of piracy. Daily posts will direct interested visitors to what I have discovered to be the most active venues of software piracy.