With the growth of personal digital cameras and gadget phones many people are using their computers to edit and store lots of photos and videos
Recently I was asked how to share some video files via email as they were too big to go through - here is my answer and some tips that might help

Sending large Files

How big are the files you are sending?

A quick Google (see here) tells me that the Bigpond limit for files is 10mb each - that is pretty small for a video so I am guessing that is your problem
(The asker was using Bigpond obviously)

I suggest you store the video somewhere and then send a link to the file to each person via email
This is an especially good idea if you want to send to more than 1 or 2 people 

You can upload to a video site such as YouTube - and you can set to private If you don't want the whole world to see it
Not sure how? Try this 

How to upload a video to YouTube

This page highlights the Public versus Private settings at YouTube

Those of us that struggle with new technology devices with weird names and buzzwords might find this video pretty amusing - I did.

Thanks Glenn for forwarding it

I found this YouTube video very interesting. It’s a brief (8 minute) history of the internet.

Check it out.

Here is a follow up to a few things discussed at the January Mullies meeting

Broadband Pricing and Plans available in Ulladulla area

As always the Whirlpool Broadband Choice site is the place to compare your options. As discussed ADSL 2 plans are available now from Telstra and companies reselling Telstra services. The really competitive prices available in Metro areas aren’t here yet though.

Blu-Ray Disc Players/Burners

Someone asked about Blu-Ray discs. Blu-Ray discs (BD) are the new format of discs that can hold a lot more data than DVDs. Here’s the comparison:

	Single Layer	Dual Layer
CD	700mb	n/a
DVD	4.7gb	8.5gb
Blu-Ray	25gb	50gb

More details at Wikipedia 

So as you can see the capacity of Blu-Ray discs is 10 times that of DVD. The extra capacity is needed for true High Definition pictures and sound on your home theatre and is also useful for backing up a computer where the extra storage means more per disc.

Just like when DVD tech first came out the prices of the machines and media (discs) started out ridiculously high. Burners were over $1,000. Last night I suggested they were still $300 plus but got an ad email today offering BD/DVD burners (for desktop not laptop PC) for about $220 delivered. Laptop burners would be much more expensive. And note the actual discs are pretty dear too – Individual 25gb discs are over $10 each. 5 DVD discs are similar capacity for less than half this price but not as handy as having all in one. Like everything else in tech BD will rapidly become cheaper and more common, or is that more common and therefore cheaper :)

Downloading YouTube videos & Saving the Audio

Stan asked how to save the audio from YouTube videos. A quick search took me to the Digital Inspiration website – a great blog written by Amit. I am subscribed to his RSS feed and you might like to check it out. His post on how to accomplish Stan’s task is here: How To Rip Audio from YouTube Videos

He suggests using the Vixy.net website to save the audio directly from YouTube. You simply input the URL, wait for conversion (it takes a while), then click to download. just like the site we found the other night ListenToYouTube I found this a process a bit flaky.

Much easier to just download the video (as a FLV) and convert it to MP3. To download I use a FireFox extension called Video DownloadHelper. But there are any number of free download programs and extensions available.

As mentioned at Mullies over a year ago you can use KissYoutube to download right in your browser – basically you just type KISS into the YouTube Address url and it takes you to their site to download the video.

 

Once you have the video on your PC I recommend Format Factory to convert it. You can convert the FLV (Flash Video) file to another video format or to MP3 to capture the audio only. The Format Factory is free and is great for ripping DVD’s to video files, converting pictures to other formats, or converting videos for use on portable players, ipods or phones.

 

Portable Music/Video players

As discussed with Romey it can be very frustrating with dealing with portable devices. Some manufacturers insist on making you use their software to load songs/videos onto a device. Then the software they give you wants to take over, duplicates your whole song library and clogs up your PC. Some players of course do not do this which makes life much easier. You can just drag and drop files like it was a USB flash drive.

Apple and Samsung (Romey had a Samsung T9 player) are difficult culprits but with iPods being so common a number of programs can interact with them. The choices for Romey’s Samsung are a bit more limited. But I believe that MediaMonkey should do the trick. It is a far more user friendly and very powerful music player and manager. If you don’t need to deal with video (it doesn’t do video very well) then I highly recommend it over Windows Media Player or other proprietary players. It handles Podcasts and Internet radio too. Because of the extra functions like syncing contacts etc on my Apple iPhone I still use iTunes and am quite happy with it but that won’t help Romey. I recommend downloading MediaMonkey and giving it a try. it shouldn’t duplicate your song library and hopefully will make creating playlists and syncing them with the player much simpler.

As always if anyone needs a bit more help with anything we discussed on the night or mentioned here then fire back a question and we will do our best to sort you out.

Check out this cool Transformers inspired vid

Finally the outcome of this age old battle is known – or is it?

Phil writes:

I am having a problem when I open AVI files that I create from the video camera. When I select them I get a message that reads ' Dr Watson Postmorten Debugger ' you have a problem’. When I click the box to close it, it locks up the computer and I have to do a soft boot.
Sometimes it brings up the Microsoft error reporting message that you have a problem and closing you down. I click on don't send message and I go back to the desk top.
I opened [Windows file folder for error message debugging]. There is a lot of files in the folder telling me what has been done.

I also am getting the Window Explorer message, when I click on a AVI file and when I click don't send message it closes me back to the desk top.

Do you know what might be happening.

I know Phil does a lot of video editing and makes some great photo and video keepsakes for his family. Like most of us he has tried a few different programs and Windows being the complicated software that it is he has in the past had some trouble with file formats and such. So I was thinking that this might be another recurrence of your old problems.

But a little bit of research reveals some more info. Once again the sheer volume of help available from Google is mindboggling – you just have to know how to search.

I found this discussion thread at a forum called MovieCodec.com. The details here are exactly the problem Phil is having.

Windows has a default habit of offering you a preview of multimedia files when you are searching through Windows Explorer. You know how when you open My Videos or whatever and select a video and Windows wants to show you a little preview copy – that’s what I mean. Ok so what happens is Windows (well Windows Explorer actually) takes control of the file and then when you try to access it the file is ‘in use’ and Explorer locks up and requires a restart which a lot of the times will mean restarting your whole system. This lock up triggers the Windows error reporting messages and Dr Watson which is Windows debugging program.

What the linked info suggests doing is to de-register the Windows settings, specifically a DLL file, that do the preview function. By so doing it can avoid this lock up problem altogether

The easiest way is to run a command through the ‘Run’ setting or to save the settings as a Batch file. A batch file is just a plain text file but with the extension changed from txt to bat. Running a batch file is like double-clicking a program file – the simple code written in the file will run. For that reason some antivirus programs will rightly try to block batch files. More Info on Batch files  is available here at Wikipedia

To help out I have made the batch text files for you and you can download them below. There are 2 files – one turns the setting off as described and the other turns it back on.So if changing it didn’t help or you wanted to go back to having the preview you just run the On file.

WinShellMediaOff – turns OFF the Windows Shell Media Handling

WinShellMediaOn– turns ON the Windows Shell Media Handling

Click and save the file somewhere like your Desktop. Once saved right click and choose Rename and change the extension (the bit after the dot) from name.txt to name.bat. Then double click the bat file to run it. If you want to see the contents of these files just open the Text file and read before you change the names to bat or read the website.

So give this a go Phil – I reckon it will work and shouldn’t do any harm if not. Other people on the site say that downloading the newest DivX codec solved their problem.So if this fix doesn’t work that would be my next suggestion. The latest version is always available at DivX.com

Let us know how you go :)

Grant asked me a question a few weeks ago and I thought I would share the answer

Do you know of any good free apps that can convert DVD video to Xvid or DivX? I have a Media player (think it only supports DivX) that is filling up and I need to convert to smaller formats

I have tried a few different programs and I am not totally happy with any of them. Among the ones I have tried are

WinFF and MediaCoder and both are open source and thus free

WinFF is a simple program to change file types. A couple of clicks and you are done. It doesn’t really support whole DVDs or FLV video from websites (like YouTube). But it’s handy if you want a simple program to change say an Apple QuickTime MOV file to DivX or similar

MediaCoder is a much more sophisticated program with many, many options. For the casual or new user it can therefore be very complicated. However it is powerful and offers lots of options.

Both WinFF and MediaCoder use the FFmpeg engine for decoding and are free and open source.

For ripping DVD’s to alternative files like DivX I use DVDFab with the mobile option. It has lots of settings for converting DVDs to formats for your phone, iPod or portable device. It is also my program of choice for DVD copying and back-up. Unfortunately this program is not free. You should also be careful when dealing with copyrighted materials.

To back up my opinions and provide a few alternatives here's a link to a newsletter I read a while ago
http://www.windowssecrets.com/2008/09/25/04-Converters-maximize-your-video-file-options

Windows Secrets newsletter is pretty good. There's a free version or you can get the paid version for $1 US (or however much you want to pay). Highly recommended reading!

When you are converting files for a specific device or purpose be careful what codec you select for the conversion. Grant will probably find his media centre can play at least some version of Xvid and/or DivX codec but it may be an older version. I have 2 different brand DVD players that play DivX and they play Xvid too. You just need to experiment a bit with what version of the codec you rip/compress to so for best results convert to the format that the player supports. Read the manual for the media centre and download the DivX codec version it specifies for maximum compatibility.

Being able to play the compressed files directly is great as you can fit lots of files on a single disc and still watch them in good quality. I have whole seasons of a TV show on a single DVD. Obviously you need a special kind of DVD player for this but they are pretty common these days.

The next question arises – what if I have a pile of compressed video, maybe from your camcorder or TV shows you have recorded, and you want to watch them or share with friends who don’t have a special DVD player?

You need to turn them back into a DVD of course and I will give you a list of programs to try for this too in a separate post.

Don’t know what RSS is? It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it lets you read all your favourite blogs and news sites from one place by pulling content from them. That means you don’t need to keep visiting tons of websites to check for new content.

RSS Feeds have rapidly replaced the old ‘email newsletter’ as a way to communicate with people who are interested in your website. And they work as an update announcement every time you add or change something on a site – For that reason they work particularly well with sites that have content in small chunks like blogs etc

Here is a short video that explains RSS in plain English and helps you get started:

RSS Feeds have rapidly replaced the old ‘email newsletter’ as a way to communicate with people who are interested in your website. And they work as an update announcement every time you add or change something on a site – For that reason they work particularly well with sites that have content in small chunks like blogs etc. Really savvy operators, like say the Mulligrubs website, offer a way to subscribe to updates via either RSS or email

Subscribing to RSS feeds will be discussed at this weeks Mullies meeting along with lots of other items of interest plus the usual Q&A - See you there :)

Notes:
Idea for the post and initial text and video link found at the Digsby Blog

A more technical description of RSS from Wikipedia

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",^[3] or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favoured websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's URI into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats: "Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)", "RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)", or "Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)".

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999,^[4] the RSS icon ("

") first gained widespread use in 2005–2006.

Here are some interesting articles/links from around the Internet

Web's Best 50 Free Downloads

Here’s a list of 50 free programs for you to download. In truth many of these you will  already have or have heard of but you may find something new here. If anyone on dial-up would like some of these programs downloaded and burned to CD just let me know

 

 

The Cyber Crime Hall of Fame

Rules are made to be broken the same way networks are made to be hacked into. These are nine of the most infamous criminal hackers to ever see the inside of a jail cell.

 

 

 

Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos

There are 10 good videos on science type topics at this site. Videos best viewed with broadband but may work (eventually) with dial-up.

I like this one – water droplets in space!

 

 

 

 

Brain Games

Some Flash games to play on the net but these ones have a purpose. To sharpen your mind!

I like Split Words - This game requires you to form words from fragments. The words are compiled using a theme and may have two or three parts.

 

If anyone finds anything cool on the net send us through a link.