Apr 27 2009
Video Browsing
The ‘net is crawling with video. After waiting years for broadband and content, we can now enjoy everything from ABC to Rocket Boom news, from iFilm to YouTube.
There’s also a fledgling offshoot of the podcast phenomena in Vlogging. It should be no surprise that there’s a great Open Source application for tracking and watching Vlogs. In addition to iTunes, there’s another slick and free alternative.
Browsers/Viewers
The Democracy player (formerly known as DTV) is a QuickTime 7 based viewer and aggreggator. Democracy has tools for creating your own “channel” and has a built-in search feature for finding more video.
The player’s interface is slick. The guide boasts 300 +channels. Be prepared for large files, though, and long downloads.
This player/aggregator also has built in search and directory. FireANT has a trimmer interface and is a step ahead in its support of portable devices and BitTorrent support.
FireANT’s search takes you to a built-in browser, and it supports a wide range of formats. Downloading is easy, though you can’t schedule downloads like you can in Democracy.
Getting Video off the Web
Once again, Firefox is our tool for tweaking the web. The following are extensions that let you get at embedded video.
This extension lets you grab embedded video from a ton of sites. It lives in your status bar, and can also be used from the site itself for browsers not supporting extensions.
This extension does not rely on any given site’s structure. It looks for and lists downloadable embedded media.
There are the tools you’ll need to get on top of video on the internet.