[HOWTO] QuickTip: Why are there Smurfs in my YouTube videos?

The other day I noticed that YouTube videos were taking on a bluish tint for some odd reason. I thought it may have been due to a Firefox addon I had installed but it turned out to be a red herring. The problem is a problem with how Flash player version 11.2.202.228 interacts with Nvidia drivers. If I save the video to my hard drive and watch it in VLC I can see it with no problem but it’s a pain to have to save a video just to be able to watch it.

I did some searching and found it’s a common issue and it can affect Flash videos from any site, not just YouTube. (I’ll show it in Firefox since I’m unable to change the setting within Chromium for some reason.) The fix is to right-click on the video, which you can do even before you press the “play” button, and select Settings from the context menu. You’ll want to clear the checkbox that says Enable hardware acceleration. Then click close and reload the page. When you play it again you’ll find the normal colors again and the smurfs will be banished. At least until the bug becomes a recurrence.

Thanks to the folks at my-guides.net for publishing the workaround for this. The video I used for this post is the latest video from The Piano Guys, an incredible group of folks from Utah. If you’re not familiar with them you should go check out some of their now 35 videos they’ve created. These guys blow me away with their creativity.

We’ll be back to our program in just a couple of minutes…

Public radio listeners know it’s that time of year again, time to interrupt your favorite public radio programs for the spring pledge drive. But today I saw a tweet from one of the folks at APM’s Marketplace with a link to a YouTube video that’s sure to bring a smile to the face of any regular public radio listener.

Greg Studley (yes, that’s his real name) has put together a take off on Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire that replaces the names of celebrities in the original song with the names of people you hear across public radio networks (definitely NPR and APM, and I think even PRI although I don’t catch any PRX names). He even drops in Donnie Baseball, although I’m not aware of anything he does with public radio.  [My bad. I'm always confusing Don with Dave on NPR.] (If you go to the YouTube page for the video you can see all the names he drops.)

After hearing it many times I have to admit it’s kind of lame and the singing isn’t the best, although it still beats some of the vocals I had to record as a studio engineer back in New Orleans. What do you guys think of it? The only other problems I have with it is that after repeated plays of the video (I really want an MP3 of it one of these days) I had to go see Billy Joel’s original as well as the cover by Guns N’ Moses. Although it’s pretty ironic that I found the video yesterday, the day that WBUR, my local NPR station, officially started their spring fundraiser. Please consider supporting them as they try to completely do away with their summer pledge drive for the second year in a row. If you do you can get chances to win some pretty nice swag.

[HOWTO] Get YouTube videos and video files on your computer so they can be watched on your Samsung Restore mobile phone

[Updated 3 October 2011 to reflect the new name of the profile I submitted to MMC's devs, although I didn't update the screenshots. Thanks for the quick work, Mike! -Peng]

According to the user manual for Virgin Mobile’s Samsung Restore (M575, although the Sprint version of the phone carries M570) the phone can play MP4 video files, but I haven’t been able to get it to work. I have seen websites that make 3GP video files available that should play on the phone, but when I try playing them I get an error about a bad URL.

The phone takes videos, with the file extension 3g2, and that was exactly the information that helped me get video files that play on my phone. The secret is to use a free desktop computer application called Mobile Media Converter, and you can also use it to get videos directly from YouTube and convert them for viewing on not only the Samsung Restore but also for many other phones, including Android and iOS phones. It can handle a range of formats as you can see on their website.

Mobile Media Converter (MMC) is available for Windows, Ubuntu Linux and MacOS X, as well as in source code so you can build it yourself if you need to and are willing to do it. Since Linux Mint 10 KDE (my operating system of choice) is based on Ubuntu Linux that’s the version of MMC that I’ll look at.

You can download an Ubuntu .deb file from the MMC site but before you install it there are two packages you need to have installed first, mencoder and desktop-file-utils. Once you have those packages installed you can install MMC by running the following command in the directory you have downloaded the package in. (The package name may be different if you get a different version.)

$ sudo dpkg -i mmc_1.7.3_i386.deb

In Linux you can launch MMC by launching (in KDE, the path may be different on other desktop environments) Applications > Multimedia > Mobile Media Converter, or by running /opt/MIKSOFT/MobileMediaConverter/MobileMediaConverter in a terminal. No matter what operating system you use, when the program launches you get a pretty basic screen.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to get the profile for the phone. The program comes with a profile called Mobile Video – 3GP Video and it comes close, but I submitted a profile called Mobile Video – 3G2 Video (.3g2) Samsung Restore Video (.3g2) that contain a couple of tweaks to make it more useful for the Samsung Restore: Adding support for using the qvga size, it makes the preferred codec mpeg4, and most importantly it changes the file extension to .3g2. Without that last change you’d have to manually change the extension on each file you convert from .3gp to .3g2 for the phone to even recognize the video exists. For info on what the file size abbreviations mean you can see the FFmpeg Documentation page.

Of course all of this could be jumping the gun if you don’t have a video to convert. For this tutorial I’m going to use the video for a song I discovered through this week’s Studio 360, John Wesley Harding’s There’s A Starbucks (Where The Starbucks Used To Be). MMC can grab YouTube videos for you, you just have to click the Add YouTube Video button and paste the URL, select the quality you want, and click Download. MMC defaults to Worst quality so you probably want to change that. Personally I don’t like using MMC’s download function since it downloads FLV Flash videos and I prefer to use MP4 videos. Luckily you can use the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox to get MP4s for most videos on YouTube. Once it’s installed you can load the video on YouTube, click the down arrow next to the icon ion your status bar and select the video quality you want. I go with the best quality available, going with the Medium quality MP4s over FLVs any day. (My settings may be different than yours so the screenshot may not look like yours does.)

Once you have the video you want to convert drag it into the MMC window if you didn’t have MMC download the file for you. Click the Advanced … button and make sure the settings are how you want them. I go with a video rate of 100k with the qcif size and the mpeg4 codec. The qcif size gets you a video that’s 176×144, and that may be kind of small on a screen that measures 240×320, and I tried using the qvga setting to create a 320×240 video but I find that the video stutters with the larger size.

When you’re ready to convert simply click on the Convert! button and MMC will give you a screen showing the progress of the conversion. If you’re converting more than one video you’ll see a second progress bar showing the status of the entire job. Once the conversion is done you can click the OK button, and you can click the More button for information on any errors that occur in the process. Either way you have a nice, shiny video that can be copied to your microSD card for viewing on your phone.

If you use the DownloadHelper extension to download your YouTube videos you can use it on more sites than just YouTube. The extension supports a growing list of sites, including MLB.com and even WBZ TV, my local CBS affiliate. Why is that good news? The Samsung Restore doesn’t support Flash video, even with the Opera Mini web browser, so I can’t watch stories from WBZ on the phone. This sucks because I often want to see the weather forecast when I’m away from a television or the roomies don’t want to turn on the news, but with a little advance planning I can snag the forecast video with DownloadHelper and be able to watch it any time on my phone. This doesn’t help when there’s an updated forecast available on the website but it’s often better than nothing.

One more note: I recommend closing down any apps you don’t need while doing converting videos. I had some audio sync issues on some videos I converted while having my web browser open and it was annoying as hell. Understandably I had to reconvert the entire batch of videos, and since I’m on a borrowed computer it took time I really didn’t want to have to spend again.

[MODIFIED] A nice Christmas video playlist

[I really meant to post this much earlier today but it took a lot longer than I expected to find the right videos for these songs. Nor did I realize I was looking for vids to 21 songs when I got started but I don't want to pull any of these from the playlist. I love them all too much. -Peng]

Updated 2 January: Holy crap! The load time for all of these videos is a killer! Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t support embedding a YouTube playlist so you’ll have to go to YouTube to see the videos from here out. Sorry about trying to make your computers run home to mama.

I’ve been enjoying Christmas songs on my media player since the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve been toying with the idea of posting a list of my favorite Christmas songs. I’ve found a couple of great Christmas song videos the last few days so I decided I’d take some time this Christmas morning to put together a Christmas video playlist. I’ll also make it available on YouTube for those who want to let their computer provide some entertainment today and haven’t found a good audio stream. Some may not be proper music videos because they simply don’t exist. Yet.

You can see my entire Chrismukkuh 2010 playlist on YouTube here. Here’s the info on the videos I selected:

The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping

This is my all-time fav Chrismukkuh song. For me it isn’t the holiday season until I hear it, and this year I threw it on my media player to make sure I could hear it early and often. Unfortunately there’s no video of The Waitresses doing this song because they didn’t make one when the band was together. There’s a nice story on American Public Media’s Marketplace about the song from their Christmas Eve show.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Christmas Cannon Rock

I’m not big on the TSO’s newest couple of releases, but this song from their 2004 release The Lost Christmas Eve is probably the best version of Pachelbel’s Canon that has ever been recorded.

Pomplamoose – Deck The Halls

I love Pomplamoose. They do an amazing job on both their own songs as well as covers of other people’s songs. Hyundai hired them to create some new holiday commercials for them, giving the duo complete artistic control, and I think the results are amazing. You’ll have to forgive the vlog post at the end of the song, but you can always skip to the next vid if you’d rather not sit through it.

Relient K – Sleigh Ride

The video is even more fun than the song itself, and definitely belongs on any Christmas video playlist. Granted, I don’t think Santa Claus would conjure a Snow Monster to get back at some pesky kids who borrowed his sleigh for a joy ride, but it’s still a very cute video.

The Royal Guardsmen – Snoopy’s Christmas

And old favorite, this song is a follow-up to the Guardsmen’s original song about Snoops and the dreaded Red Baron. Once again I haven’t found an official video but this is the best vid I could find.

Trio West – O Tannenbaum

I’m not sure where I came across this song but I suspect it was in a new/free MP3 email from Amazon. It quickly became one of my favs and I bet even people who aren’t that big on jazz will love it.

The City of New Orleans – O Holy Night

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip only lasted a single season but Aaron Sorkin didn’t let that stop him from bringing us some damned fine hours of television. This is from the show’s Christmas episode, set right after Hurricane Katrina did a number on the real city of New Orleans. I had really hoped to find a video I had found a number of years back that used audio from this video came from an MP3 that NBC was kind enough to make available to viewers, but it seems that it’s no longer online.

Slade – Merry Christmas Everybody

This song appeared in the first two Doctor Who Christmas special (since the Beeb brought back the series in 2005) and has become somewhat of a tradition for us. You can also find a video of Slade performing the song here.

Benny Grunch and the Bunch – The 12 Yats of Christmas

You don’t have to be from N’awlins to love this song, but it’s a great trip down Memory Lane for me between crawdads, Mr. Bingle, McKenzie’s, K&B, Schwegmans, and the best tamales anywhere. There’s just one big problem with this bid. Now I really want some crawfish.

Ray Stevens – Santa Claus is Watching You

This isn’t the version of the song I have on Christmas in Dementia but you have to love Ray Stevens and Clyde for Christmas.

Bruce Springsteen – Santa Claus is Coming To Town

The Boss and a Christmas classic. I call that a double WIN.

Cheech & Chong – Santa Claus and his Old Lady

I dare anyone to not smile as they hear this song, no matter how bad the video may be. It’s another song I’ve loved for eons and I wish I could find a proper version of it but this vid will have to do.

Rebecca St. James – Emmanuel

You may not like Rebecca St. James’ music but I don’t think I’ve ever found a better version of O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Good King Joy

I first saw this song on the TSO’s 1999 The Ghosts of Christmas Eve and immediately loved it. This video isn’t from that release but it’s an official video from TSO.

Bob Rivers – The 12 Pains of Christmas

Another song I’d love to find an official video for but it doesn’t seem to exist. Pity. For the longest time it was my favorite version of the holiday classic, until I discovered Benny Gunch’s version.

Barenaked Ladies – Elf’s Lament

This is a song I discovered when Amazon offered a free download for it. I think it’s a great song from the perspective of Santa’s helpers.

Louis Armstrong – Christmas in New Orleans

Hats off to Music of Treme on Facebook for bringing this and many other great videos to my attention. You can’t do a N’awlins video playlist without this number from Sachmo.

Bob & Doug McKenzie – The 12 Days of Christmas

One of my favorite versions of 12 Days ever, I managed to find a video without the promotional spot for the McKenzie’s animated tv show. You can see the entire video on Animax’s YouTube channel.

Weird Al Yankovic – Christmas at Ground Zero

This is another Christmas tune that has become a nice little tradition for us. Written way before September 11th it’s a nice nostalgic parody. Please forgive me if an ad pops up first, I tried to get a direct link for y’all.

James & Kling – A Terrorist Christmas

Before anyone flames me for this video, it’s a parody that I heard many moons ago on the Dr. Demento Show. It’s supposed to be funny, not taken seriously, and anyone who likes to blow things up in video games will love this song. Everyone else, please just chill and move on to the next vid.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Christmas Eve – Sarajevo 12-24

Another song I love in The Ghosts of Christmas Eve but rather than a performance by the TSO I’ll share a video someone made of their automated Christmas lights. It’s so beautiful I wish I could do something like this, in SecondLife if not in RL.

That’s all the videos I have, although there are songs I would have loved to find videos for songs like Carol of the Bells by The Proclivities, John Mehler’s rocking good Little Drummer Boy, and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones’ Medley from their Jingle All the Way album.

Merry Christmas!

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo

Snagging web videos has gotten even easier

This post is now available on Peng’s new Tux + Me blog. You can find it at http://bostonpeng.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/snagging-web-videos-has-gotten-even-easier/

If you came to this site form a link on another site please let the site you came from know that the post has been moved. Thank you.

YouTube breaks third-party apps again, but Minitube got a quick fix

Earlier this year YouTube rolled out a site redesign that broke every video downloading addon out there, although Firefox’s addon devs rose to the occasion. (I do with my gChrom extensions would get fixed so I don’t have to fire up the Fox so bloody often.) Recently YouTube devs did it again, rolling out an upgrade that broke third-party YouTube apps, rendering my beloved Minitube able to find videos but unable to play a one of them.

Luckily for us Ferramosca Roberto, Minitube’s creator, found the bug and rolled out Minitube 1.1, allowing us to once again enjoy YouTube vids without opening our web browsers. As of this writing he doesn’t have a Windows installer yet but he does have binaries for Linux and OSX, although OSX binaries require a small fee to help fund the development and support. Minitube users on the other platforms are more than welcome to donate what they can to help fund continued development as well, because Ferramosca still has bills to pay while he works in open source software development.

GNU/Linux users have a handy set of install instructions since it’s going to take time to get packages built for the various distros. The instructions list dependencies and notes about what you many need to do to get it working on KDE, as well as notes for people with 64 bit systems and those who don’t get video.

Ubuntu users have it even easier because while it will take some time for GetDeb to get an updated package build Ferramosca has a Launchpad PPA that already has the update available.  Info for adding the PPA is on the PPA link if you need it.

While you’re at Ferramosca’s website you should also check out Minitunes, Minitube’s new sibling that could become your new favorite audio player. I haven’t fired it up yet (KDE has yet to add it to my app menu after installing it for some reason) but check out what their entry in the Ubuntu Software Center says. (You’ll need to add the PPA above to get it to show up in the USC.)

I do like the way they word that. Give it a whirl on your own system and see how you feel about it.

A few of our favorite Chrismukkuh things

Yesterday my brother posted some great Chrismukkuh videos that he’s found, and of course there are other holiday videos that are worth making sure you know about.

We’ll probably be adding more vids as we find them or remember them (yes, you should post some more vids here too, Peng) so I’m going to make this post sticky until Twelfth Night.

Peng has a great idea.  The videos do shove the other posts down pretty far. Rather than have to decide which videos to keep on the main page and which to make you have to go to the entire post to see I’m just going to add a break here. As the guys at SciFi Wire say, the videos are after the jump.

Merry Chrismukkuh from Nanci and Peng!

In less than two weeks the jolly fat man will be loading up his sled and visiting all the good cats and kittehs. A good friend of mine showed me a video that we simply must share with y’all to help celebrate the season. Make sure you also visit the page Nanci started with even more fun holiday videos.

BBC America will be sharing a trio of Doctor Who specials this season. They’ll start with The Waters of Mars on Saturday, 19 December, and continue it with The End of Time, Part One on Saturday, 26 December. You won’t have to wait long to see the conclusion of not just the story but also David Tennant’s time as our favorite Gallifreyan one week later on 2 January. If you love The Doctor you should make a point of visiting the BBC’s Doctor Who Adventure Calendar every day. You can’t see the vids if you’re not in the UK but you can enjoy the stories, wallpapers and other goodies they post. There is a way to enjoy the vids on our side of the Pond thanks to the YouTube channels for Planet Who News and the Doctor Who Time Vortex.

The Doctor isn’t quite your cuppa? How about the latest video from those crazy cats and kittehs at JibJab?

Perhaps your idea of celebrating the season is just some holiday tunage. You may remember back in October my writing about an incredible concert DVD. (The DVD is still at the top of my wish list in case anyone wants to send it as a thank you for being helped through my articles here.) I found a pair of video clips from the disk that may be just what you’re looking for, but the person that posted it to YouTube has disabled embedding so you’ll have to head over to YouTube to see it for yourself.

No matter what holiday you celebrate (or don’t celebrate) Nanci and I want to wish everyone a happy and safe Chrismukkuh. We really appreciate everyone coming to our blog.

Updated 23 December: I learned this am that the maternal one is in fact buying me the DVD I’ve been drooling over since late October. It won’t be here in time for Chrismukkuh Day but I’ll definitely be enjoying it soon enough. If you’re still thinking of sending a gift my wish list still has some items on it that I would be more than happy to receive.

[UPDATED] Enjoy YouTube without your web browser

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is for the Ubuntu Geek site. They publish some great tutorials and news, and I keep learning new things from them. (They’ve been in our sidebar links for some time.) Friday they had an article about a great way to watch YouTube videos that I flagged to look at more when I had the time. Yesterday I got time to check it out and found what could be one of my new MustHave apps.

Minitube is a killer app for enjoying YouTube vids that not only doesn’t have anything to do with your web browser, but it also doesn’t require Adobe Flash. Instead you simply enter a keyword and Minitube creates a video stream for you. Of course you don’t have to watch the whole stream, you can cherry pick the video or videos that you want to watch and just sit back and enjoy the videos. There isn’t a way to save any of the vids you find to enjoy on your Digital media player (like my beloved E100), but you can open a video in your web browser.

One of the best features of Minitube is that it isn’t a GNU/Linux-only app. You can also run it on the MacOS, but there hasn’t been success building it for Windows yet.

The Minitube website has great installation instructions, complete with links to a PPA, and you can even get a Debian-style package from GetDeb. Just remember that a package on GetDeb may not be completely compatible with other Debian-based distributions. But you can also snag the source code, as well as a universal for OSX.

Thanks to the good folks over at Ubuntu Geek for turning me on to this amazing app. If you end up loving Minitube as much as I do please feel free to use his donate buttons. It’s definitely worth contributing some of your disposable income to.

Updated 26 November: Thanks to comments from Eric and Pat I have seen that Ubuntu Geek isn’t quite as good a resource as I thought. I’ve removed the links to their article about Minitube and removed them from our sidebar links. Thanks for the advice, Eric & Pat. I owe you two a brew.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 30 May

I bet you guys (and gals) thought I wasn’t doing these links posts anymore. Things have been crazy on my end of things but I’ve still been making notes of things I wanted to share with y’all. I won’t post all of them (some are well over a week old) but I do have a dozen or so that I think you’ll like.

• Leo Iannacone: A simple plugin for Sonata… If you love the Sonata GUI for MPD Leo has a plugin that you may love as well. What does it do? Read his post for all the good news.
• Martin Owens: Who Needs Flash, I Don’t, SVG For Me. Martin has found a great way to use rich graphics for the web without having to go the proprietary route with Flash.
• Josselin Mouette: Reporting userful bugs. One of the biggest issues for any software tester is the need to file a bug report with the information that will help the devs identify the problem enough so they can see about fixing it. If you even help test a single prerelease software application you should bookmark Josselin’s post.
• Kartik Mistry: artha. Ubuntu ships with a dictionary application, but every now and then you need a thesaurus. Artha may be just what the doctor ordered.
• John Stowers: Playing With Clutter. Last October I started a links post with some news about Gloobus, a nice open source way to bring the MacOS coverflow feature to GNU/Linux, and John has some nice info on getting it to play well with Nautilus, one of the biggest issues with Gloobus, which isn’t any fault of the Gloobus dev.
• David Thomas: Preston Gralla: Why you Shouldn’t Care. David read an article in Computerworld that tries to minimize the benefits of Linux. David writes a very well thought out response that shows why Mr. Gralla’s article doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with a little something we like to call facts.
• Matthew Revell: Launchpad’s YouTube channel. Matthew has created a channel on YouTube where you can find demos on how to use all the benefits of the Launchpad code hosting service.
• Paul Cutler: Meet Snowy, Tomboy’s best friend. Tomboy, the note-taking applet from the good people at GNOME, has gotten a web app that will make your Tomboy notes even more uesful.
• Lior Kaplan: “Get Openoffice.org” icon on a new laptop. What would you say if you bought a new laptop and found an icon to get the most popular open source office productivity suite on your desktop? No, I don’t mean like you get when you install a GNU/Linux distribution on your computer, because they tend to have the actual apps installed rather than simply providing you with a “get me” icon. What if that new laptop came from Toshiba? And had Microsoft Vista and MS Office 2007 installed? That’s right, that’s the very thing Lior found on his brand-spanking-new, fresh out of the box Toshiba laptop.
• Stefano Forenza: GiftWrap helps you create .debs. Every now and then a GNU/Linux user needs to install an application that doesn’t have a pre-compiled package. Now people who run Debian-based Linux distros have a nice little helper, except rather than using the link to the debs that Stefano provides for installing GiftWrap you should use the GiftWrap devs’ PPA so you make sure you have all the dependencies satisfied when you install it. I’ll see if I can use it to create a .deb of Mac4Lin to make the install process even easier.
• Paul Tagliamonte: Making a bootable USB drive. Have you tried creating a bootable USB drive so you can have your favorite operating system on just about any computer? I have, and I’ve run into some issues, although I’m thinking it may be due to a BIOS setting I need to tweak. Anywho, Paul has a great tutorial to walk you through the process of making a bootable USB drive.
• Andrew SB: “Because humans need Oxygen.” You may know Andrew from his andrewsomething PPA on Launchpad (which has a ton of software you should check out if you run a Debian-based Linux distro), brings a little Sweet to his news about a new icon set. Or am I the only one that thinks of that band when you read his article?
• Dave Richards: Evolution Picture Gallery Under Development. Dave tells us about a way to bring a popular OpenOffice.org feature to the GNOME email client.