In PART 1, we looked at how to listen to internet radio (specifically 181FM 80’s Hairband Station) on the go. In this part, we will look at two ways to listen at the office on your computer with a web browser, assuming your computer has sound capabilities. The quickest and easiest way to listen is to simply navigate to www.181.fm.
Once there, you will find a list of ALL of their cool stations down the left hand side. There’s SO much good music to listen to there. But if its Glam your looking for, Just navigate down to “80’s Hairband”, and click it. A new window will open with a player in it, and it should start playing immediately.
Another way to listen to internet radio through your web browser is to go to Tunein.com, and in this case, again, we will search for “80’s Hairband” in the search bar at the top.
Once 181FM 80’s Hairbands appears, click it to open a new window which contains a player, and even the album art for the songs it is playing.
Earlier today I tried to copy a large file I had made in Photoshop and I was told that the operation couldn’t complete because there wasn’t enough room on my hard drive for it. So, I needed a way to get a lot of space back, but I wasn’t sure what was taking up all of the room. I set about looking for ways to see what was going on on my drive and I happened upon some really great tools to help you visualize all your files. The process is called “Treemaps”.
I managed to find free Treemap programs for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. For Windows users, you need to get a copy of WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) HERE. Once installed, you can start it up and tell it to either analyze your whole drive, or specific folders. Here’s how it looks.
There is two options for Mac users. Grand Perspective (Gets up and going really quickly, easy to use) and Disk Inventory X (Longer to scan but a more thorough and detailed interface). Here’s how Grand Perspective looks.
And this is how Disk Inventory X Looks.
For Linux users, you can get KDirStat HERE. I havent tried it yet, but it looks very similar to WinDirStat. This screen capture is from their site.They are all fairly easy to use. Just roll your cursor over the big ones and the filename appears in the bottom left corner of the window. You can then decide which files you want to delete, and start enjoying some free space on your hard drive again.
From time to time most of us see something on Youtube that we would like to download and save.
In my case this week, I found a Youtube channel that has the video broadcast from every NHRA drag racing event of the 2012 season. As my wife and I flew from Australia to attend the Sonoma round of racing, it makes a really great souvenir for us to have the video broadcast. The problem is though, Each days racing is split into about 9 or 10 pieces, and it was a three day event. Thankfully though, KMan2100 has arranged the videos into playlists, so they can be viewed in order.
Now, you could download the videos one at a time using the method described in my post about Video Download Helper HERE, but that will take a LOT of time. If you want to download all of the videos in a playlist quickly and easily, you need to make a download list, then download them all!
To do this, you need to be using the Firefox web browser. Its free, it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and if you are not already using it, you should be. You can get it free HERE.
With Firefox open and running, select “Add-ons” from the “Tools” menu in your menu bar. The first Add-on you need is the one that takes all of the videos in the playlist and turns them into a series of links. It is called BYTubeD, Bulk Youtube Downloader. To get it, type “BYTubeD” into the search bar in the top right corner.
Click the “Install” button to the right of it when you see it in your “results” list. This will download and install it. When this is finished, go back to the search bar and type “Download Them All”. As before, click the “Install” button to the right to install it.
To make your new add-ons active you need to restart Firefox. To do this, simply click the text that says “Restart now”
Once you have clicked restart, you can close the Add-ons window, and any other windows that may have popped up.
And now the fun starts!
To get downloading, go to Youtube and find your channel, and click the playlist you want to download.
As you can see, there are 28 videos on this playlist. To download them all, open your “Tools” tab on your menu bar and select “BYTubeD”. It should be at the bottom. This will open a new window.
**BEWARE** – Not only does this window contain info for all the videos you want, it also contains the info for other playlists and videos that are on this page that you may not want as well! As highlighted below, you can see the Sonoma videos I want, but I am not interested in Phoenix or Gainsville etc etc…..
For the next step, you need to tell BYTubed which videos you DO want to keep. To do this, simply highlight them. To select multiple videos (Which is kinda the point of this article) hold down your control key, then click each one if your using Windows, or your command key and click if you’ve got a Mac. Once you have highlighted the videos you want to download, click the start button.
BYTubed will now chew through the playlist and open up a new web page with links to all your videos.
Now’s where the magic happens. To download them all, open “Download Them All” from your “Tools” menu in your menu bar.
All that is left to do now is to check mark (click the circles to the left of the names) the videos you want to keep, choose your download location (I usually download to my desktop) then click “Start” to watch those babies start loading down!
From time to time we all come across videos on Youtube that we really want to download and keep on our computers so we can watch at anytime, or to re-encode so we can watch and keep them on our phones or ipods and ipads to. A simple way to download videos is with Video Download Helper.
In order to use Video Download Helper you need to be using Firefox browser, so if you are not, you probably should be, and you can download it free HERE.
Now you have Firefox open and running, you need to get the free Video Download Helper Add On. To do this, select this “Add-ons” from the “Tools” menu in your menu bar. Once the Add-ons window opens type “Video Download Helper” in the search box in the top right corner.
Video Download Helper should be the first result, so when you see it in the list, click the “Install” button to right of it. Once it has finished downloading and installing, you will need to restart Firefox to make it active. To do this, simply click the “Restart now” text.
Once Firefox restarts, you can close out of the Add-ons window and any other windows that have popped up, and you should now see a new icon in the top left.
This means you are all set to go! Now when you wake up at 2am and worry that Gangnam Style is going to be taken down and you will never see it again, you can open it up in Youtube, click the little black upside down triangle next to the colored logo (when its gray out it means there is nothing to download on the page – when its colored, there is a file it can retrieve for you) and select the quality of the file you want to download.
Once you have selected your preferred resolution and format, its just a matter of confirming with the “Save File” dialogue box, and your good to go!
Video Download Helper has a swag of other cool features as well, but we’ll cover those another time as I know you just CANT WAIT to go and run your new Gangnam Style video up on your home theater system!
Not sure what a pretty lady who can afford and appreciate a good cup of coffee has to do with horse riding though? Ahhh Who Cares……..Opp-Opp-Oppan Gangnam Style Baby!
So now you have created your 3D video file, its time to watch it back and see how it looks. If you try to open it using Quicktime or Windows Media Player, you will see your two camera feeds simultaneously in “Side by Side” format.
In order to see the 3D effect, and watch your video in 3D you will need to use a player that is capable of handling Stereoscopic Video files. There are quiet a few out there, but my Favorite is called BINO. I like it because it is really easy to use, can play your side by side video file back in lots of different flavors of 3D (like red/cyan, amber/blue, green magenta), there are versions for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix, and the best part, its completely free!
You can download BINO from the bino3d.org web site HERE.
Once you have downloaded, extracted and installed BINO you can launch it, and from the file menu select your Side By Side video file, and the player will appear. You now need to set only two parameters, you need to tell BINO what kind of file it is you want to play, and how you want it played back.
In the “Input” drop down menu, select “Left/Right Half Width”, and in the “Output” drop down menu, select the display method that corresponds to the 3D Glasses you will be using to watch the video. I have the ones with the Red and Blue lenses, so I use Red/Cyan High Quality mode. Now, just push play and see how you did.
You can make your video go full screen by double clicking the playing video. Double clicking on it again takes you back to window mode.
If you have a Windows based computer, and someone sends you a Quicktime video, or if you have a Mac, and you want to watch an AVI or a WMV video, your computer just isn’t going to play it for you without some additional software. Over the years I have experimented with a lot of different programs, but there really is only one program users of all platforms require – Videolans VLC Media Player. It will play just about everything (including DVD’s and Audio Cd’s), regardless of your operating system and installed codecs, it supports playlists for audio and video, supports sending and receiving streams, and has tons of tweaks to allow you to adjust everything from brightness and contrast, to Digital Audio pass-thru for those of us using Dolby Digital/DTS enabled audio cards with Digital Coax or Fibre Optical SPDIF audio outputs. Below are the supported video playback formats:
And the supported audio playback formats:
These are the supported Audio/Video outputs:
There are also some filters that you can apply to the playback.
The main one I find useful is the de-interlace filter, which stops you getting the “stripped” effect when watch fast moving scenes in a interlaced video (like shown below)
VLC Media Player also supports many formats of subtitles:
But the best part about VLC Media Player, it is ABSOLUTELY FREE!
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In PART 1, we looked at how to listen to internet radio (specifically 181FM 80’s Hairband Station) on the go. In this part, we will look at two ways to listen at the office on your computer with a web browser, assuming your computer has sound capabilities. The quickest and easiest way to listen is to simply navigate to www.181.fm.
