Top 10 YouTube Hacks
Summer's ending, and with it goes a certain sense of taking it easier, relaxing a bit at the office—you know, caching up on all th...
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Summer's ending, and with it goes a certain sense of taking it easier, relaxing a bit at the office—you know, caching up on all that YouTube browsing you skip when there's real work to be done. The popular video sharing site is a great resource (and source of entertainment) that gets better with the right add-ons, plug-ins, third-party tools, and clever usage. Let's take a look at the best ways to get better video, download clips, and just find the video you're looking for at YouTube, so you can get more from your guilty pleasure.
10. Paste together YouTube clips, no editor necessary.
Even without iMovie or another paid-for editor, you can use the ridiculously vast realm of YouTube videos to patch together funny/poignant/clever projects. Free tools like Yahoo'sJumpCut can take in the FLV and other format video clips you downloaded using the other tools in this list. Want to patch together your own clip-sing-along in the style of BarackRoll? Creator Hugh Atkin says he used Google's political video search tool to find all the relevant words and copy them. Now it's just a matter of finding the time to pull it off...9. Sort all your YouTube links in Gmail with Xoopit.
If your inbox is anything like ours, you get a regular stream of YouTube links from friends, relatives, friends-of-friends, friends-of-relatives-of-friends ... and you only occasionally click through. Gmail add-on Xoopit lets you sort and run through all those links, playing them right from within Gmail. It's an easy way to avoid hurting that avid linker's feelings the next time they ask you if you saw that hilarious Amy Winehouse parody.8. Get baked-in improvements with Better YouTube.
You'll have to excuse the horn-tooting, but we've put together a Firefox extension that combines some of the best JavaScript we've seen for YouTube and makes them all in check-on, check-off usable for any Firefox browser. TheBetter YouTube Firefox extension empowers you to keep videos from auto-playing, put clips in a wide-screen, no-distraction background, and embeds download links on every clip. If you're a serious YouTube user, there is probably something here you'll find useful.7. Download audio from videos.
There are a lot of great live performances lurking around YouTube, many of which have never seen the light of day in the recorded audio realm. To jump those jams into your playlist, use a web-based converter like VidToMP3, or follow one intrepid LH reader's guide to recording and converting YouTube vids into MP3. It may take a few more steps, but Matt's guide will still work, while many web-based hacks end up on the pile of dead-end links.6. Get around international video restrictions.
This summer's Olympics has been a good lesson in the necessity of working around networks' and video providers' often ridiculous restrictions based on location and timing. On YouTube, there's often a simple work-around, as explained by the Google Operating System blog. Most YouTube links look like this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOIDYou'll find a string of characters where VIDEOID is. Copy that string, and paste it like so:
http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOIDYou'll get a copy of the video meant for embedding, one that doesn't care as much about where you're watching from.