Category: Media

This question was put to us recently by an educator who wants to show certain Youtube videos in her classes but cannot rely on a working internet connection. These simple instructions are courtesy of Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Try vixy.net – it will allow you to download Youtube videos directly as a standard video file or even audio-only. It is somewhat limited in the formats though. We’d prefer an Xvid option. Xvid is an open-source alternative to DivX. 

For a free program you can install on a computer and run…try Super…

Finally, if you want to put them on a DVD, Amit offers a bit more advice(Although we generally go the Linux route) and instruction.

Reuters reports that YouTube has signed a deal with Digital Music Group Inc to offer such 1960s US television shows as “I Spy” and “My Favorite Martian.” We’re excited. Nick-at-Nite seems to have stopped showing anything older than 1980.

Tales from the Web 2.0 Frontier commented recently on the necessity of cable. Alan Graham, who writes the blog, put it this way:

“Last week I came to the realization that with Netflix and iTunes, I would be able to cut out the $50 portion of my cable TV bill and ditch the 80 or so channels I never watch, including 3 shopping channels, 3 sports channels, 6 family channels, numerous foreign language channels, and one Lifetime Channel for Women that my fiance tortures me with.”

The FCC has long tried to push cable and satellite companies to provide ala carte purchasing…allowing people to purchase only the channels they wish to, instead of being forced to pay for dozens of stations they don’t. While most seem to think that ala carte pricing being forced on the cable companies would increase costs for a large percentage of customers, we think that it would be a good idea to explore alternative packaging schemes. Our local cable company offers a value set of channels, a standard package, then a premium pack. They could offer more ways of saving money by forgoing programming.

But that brings us to the question that Alan Graham raised? What about places like Itunes? They offer per show purchasing. If you combine that with Netflix, which allows you access to any movie for a monthly rate…including DVD box sets when they come out…you can achieve almost the same effect. Channel surfing will be missed though…sometimes you find something unexpected.

We’ve been working on our own method. We built ourselves a Digital Video REcorder and have been recording old movies and runs of TV shows off of television in the wee hours. Before long, we’ll have so much in terms of old movies and other programming we won’t need beyond broadcast stations. Of course, if we get rid of cable…we will have to get a better antenna.

A good tip though…if you can’t check out the competition every so often(our cable company has no competitors)…check them out. They may change their offerings and you can benefit and save money. We check all our utility service bills every few months.

The New York Times reports that, according to a survey by Nielson Media Research, for the first time, more Americans have a DVD player than have a VCR. Since 2000, the number of households reporting owning a VCR declined by one-tenth, while the DVD households increased to six times what they were.

The VCR would likely die completely if not for the difficulty in using DVD recorders for temporary video recording.  This market is held by the Digital Video Recorders(DVR). Most DVR packages do not allow for archiving of recorded programs to backup media. Until that changes, which is unlikely considering the video industry’s lobbying on the subject…VCRs will continue to linger as a backup TV recording device.

The Consumerist has a fascinating summary of a USAToday article on online song purchasing. When you consider the prevalence of Ipods…buying only 23 songs per Ipod is not that large a number.

People don’t want a large amount of inconvenient restrictions on their music. Most people are willing to pay for music, but the music industry, to protect their profits…has limited what you can do with that music. More people prefer to buy CDs and rip the music to digital formats for use in music players.

However, this is annoying. No matter what the recording industry does…people will find ways to steal music. All they do by putting in inconvenient restrictions is discourage the impulse buying of singles that they desire. People will burn their DRM(Digital Rights Management) encoded music to CD, then back to an MP3 without DRM.

In the end…we have never purchased a song from an online music site…it seems more trouble than it is worth.

The people at Crunchgear have a simple way of downloading YouTube videos for an Ipod or other non-internet connected device. Here is their advice.

Sometimes the best deal is not the best option you can have. After years of trying to save money on blank CDs and DVDs and having an annoying failure rate on many of the discs, we found this guide to the quality of media.

To summarize the results, the best media is manufactured by Pioneer, Mitsubishi, Taiyo Yuden, Hitachi Maxwell, Sony, and TDK. Our advice, consult the guide, and take the advice, and don’t buy something that is likely to fail.

Consumer Reports has a special feature on their website about HD Televisions. The reviews require a subscription, but the basic advice is rather useful, and it prompted us to address High Definition as it exists.

High definition television has more lines making up the picture(pixels for the computer monitor people there) than a standard definition television. Thus, it produces a more vivid and clear picture. It is not just the television that adds to the cost though. You need to plug some high-definition equipment into it.

Now, as we mentioned, HD-DVD or BluRay equipment is expensive and unproven in the marketplace, but a simple solution is an HD upscaling or upconverting DVD player. This will take the DVD output and scale it up to match the high-definition inputs of the screen. There are varying qualities of thi.

The simplest way to get HD is to call your television service provider and tell them you want to upgrade your service to HD. Hopefully it won’t be too much. That will at least get you the big networks to start your HD adventure on.

The Washington Post yesterday reported on the war between the two high-definition video formats. One of these formats will quickly go the way of the Betamax, or the Laserdisc. Both HD-DVD players and Blu-Ray players can cost anywhere from $500 to $1000, and as an organization embracing frugality, we cannot endorse purchasing a product when a clear future is uncertain for both.

Most experts agree, that in a year or so, one of these formats will be gone. But this will delay a new high-definition video disc format of any type from being widely adopted by consumers for that time.

For us, we’re just annoyed that our efforts to rid ourselves of VHS cassettes in favor of DVDs are not yet done and the DVD is already being replaced by a High-Definition cousin.