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i'm sick of reading news or blog articles on sites like autoblog.com which refer to YouTube videos that have been removed.

For about the past month, I have noticed that YouTube has really begun dying. Too many big players have a stranglehold on it and it has really started to suck all around. Just like you, I keep running into removed videos embedded/linked from blogs. The annoying advertising has ramped up. YouTube started playing commercials mid-video. It works by locking up the flash player and forcing a commercial to play through before it unlocks.

It might be time to pull all my videos from YouTube and stop using my account. However, I don't know of any decent alternatives right now. Something decentralized would be really nice, like some system built on top of, say, Freenet (ignoring the large barrier to entry for normal people, and the slow speed). Then it would be out of control of anyone. For now we just need something small enough so it doesn't get enough attention to suffer, like YouTube of old times.

To help deal with some of the suckage, I almost exclusively use youtube-dl to access YouTube, which simply downloads a copy of the video. No ads (ads are all done by the Flash player) and I have my own downloaded copy, which YouTube can't arbitrarily remove at some point in the future.

Good point about the MPEG4. I personally sometimes use youtube-dl ( http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/ with the -b flag under Linux on the PS3, then mv the files to my external drive to view under GameOS.

Or, if you're a command line fan: http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/

Use youtube-dl http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/ It'll get you the flv (or mp4 if you use the -b flag) file that you can play in vlc or mplayer or whatever else you have. Quite handy if you're running Linux on PPC (PS3 in my case, not an old Mac.)

Gnash and swfdec aren't super-reliable yet, in my experience, but I highly recommend youtube-dl

http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/

Or you could, you know, not install Flash to start with. Besides a crazy amount of ads, you don't really miss anything. As for Youtube, that's what youtube-dl is for.

Someone is doing that work already with a nice clean Python script: youtube-dl.

One word: youtube-dl.

Good thing then that you don't need Flash to use and view videos on YouTube: Fast Video Downloader and, my favorite, youtube-dl.

Grow a backbone and learn to say "no" and make it stick when people tell you you just *have* to see this hilarious thing they found on YouTube

Like any sensible person, I don't install Flash. As for Youtube, youtube-dl works quite well.

If you're just talking about youtube: http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/

This has been packaged for several distros and is widely known. There are even several GUIs for it, however CLI is quite simple enough if you throw the script in /usr/bin.

I also enjoy not having Flash installed, including the free versions (gnash, swfdec, etc). It also allows me to ignore most links that my friends send: "Can't see it. Don't have flash."

However, I do like watching Youtube videos. You can watch those without Flash using youtube-dl. I use it anytime someone sends me a youtube link.

You can already do this with youtube-dl. Mplayer plays the downloaded .flv file just fine on my Linux PowerPC box ( = no binary codecs needed).

I wonder why YouTube (and all the copies) don't provide a direct link to the .flv file.

Or if you don't want a Firefox extension (or don't use Firefox) then there is a nice python program specifically for downloading youtube videos: http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/

Uhh, yes they can...

http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/

download this give it exec permissions and put in in /usr/bin/ then call it from the command line thus
youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whateveritis
The youtube video is saved to the current working directory that you invoked youtube-dl from (so make sure its ~ unless you want to spend ages searching for what you downloaded) in .flv format.

I don't use the proprietary flash player, but the video played fine in VLC, after I downloaded it with a handly little script called 'youtube-dl'

You're Welcome

even audiophiles are unable to distinguish between CD quality and LAME encoded 192 kbps MP3 files. Those who say they are able to aren't using double-blind tests or have super-human mutant ears

thanks for the helpful post. actually, I tried gtk-qt on my FC box at work, and the scroll bar glitches out, it was way too annoying, so I quit using it. I haven't built it from cvs though. Instead I am using a custom ~/.gtkrc-2.0 which looks like this:

include "/usr/share/themes/Simple/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"
gtk-font -name = "Bitstream Vera Sans 7"

and I'm pretty happy with it. BTW, that tip came from unified_desktop.pdf which is a nice document to read if you run KDE. I know the desktop situation is improving in linux with xorg and other efforts. Over the years I've run nearly every WM and I know how to customize nearly everything to a high degree and can even tweak source code here and there if I absolutely feel the need to spend the time. And my desktop does look nice, but it's not all automatic and transparent.

But I guess what I'm aiming at, is if you run an app in Windows or OSX, everything has a consistent UI through and through end to end. It would be nice if the presentation to the user was some how more abstracted or handled in the X server or something. I suppose if there was a way to seperate the toolkit somewhat, so the application can use generic terms to say I need something, and each toolkit implimented that standard something, so you could unify around qt, or gtk. Hmm, I've been sitting here thinking about it for a few minutes and I don't know what to suggest really. I suppose it's the reason why it's not fixed. It's not an easy fix. Maybe there needs to be a standards body to define some kind of api or something...

Oh well, I dunno. I think I'm just going to go hit myself over the head with a brick a few times and try to forget about it...

Supposedly the connection is one way, so they cannot "rig" the election,

Yeah that's it, a one-way wireless ethernet connection, like my Snort sniffing cable. Just cut the wire right her... oops, no wire.

I was facing this predicament recently and found a few solutions. They're all BASIC dialects, but I learned BASIC on the Apple II decades ago and still turned out to be a decent programmer when I learned "real" languages. (Personally, I think that if you can be "ruined" by using a language, you were too brittle to be a programmer anyway.)

The first was BLASSIC, which is as close to the BASIC dialects of early personal computers as it gets, complete with line numbers, PEEK, and POKE. The cool thing about it is that it supports simple graphics, which is what really got me interested in the early 80's. It's free and purports to be multiplatform, though I've only tried it under Linux.

The other two interesting BASICs were DarkBasic and Blitz. DarkBasic actually consists of several different packages. There's one called the 3D Game Designer which lets you create first-person shooters by dragging and dropping. When your little one has exhausted the rather limited possibilities there, you can upgrade to the full DarkBasic package and he or she can begin implementing simple behaviors in dirt-simple BASIC.

The Blitz product is primarily interesting (to me, anyway) because they offer a dedicated 2D version of the language devoted to 80's-style arcade games, which are orders of magnitude easier to program than 3D games for a novice programmer. Blitz doesn't use line numbers and optionally supports C-style syntax for function calls, and has a GUI toolkit that is pretty easy to use once your beginner gets a toehold in programming.

My project with my daughter was a clone of Pac Man with Blitz. It took several weekends, much of which had more to do with helping her understand cartesian coordinates than actual programming, but in the end she did most of the coding for a single level of Pac Man, and she was quite proud of herself. I doubt she'll pursue it very far -- which wasn't the point anyway -- but now she has a much better understanding of how software works.

Learn why you shouldn't use spectral analysis to determine lossy codecs' quality.

The most respected technique is double-blind testing using an ABX tool such as PC ABX, WinABX or ABC/HR.

More info on conducting blind tests can be found at the PC ABX site.

My other suggestion is Blassic - a "classic" BASIC language, GPL'd and everything. There are a ton of examples, though some take a little muddling through in order to understand since the variables and such may be in spanish (understandable, considering the author). There is also little documentation - the author doesn't keep his list up-to-date - I ended up checking each keyword functionality and writing the contributed reference, but it will get out of date over time, though it should still be OK for the current version online. I have found most old style code works with it fine. Your only problem will be in finding that old code for the kids to type in (no more magazines of old, unfortunately) - check your local libraries, and EBay, and used book stores until you find something (for kids, there was a series of books in the 80's published by Scholastic called "Micro Adventures" - hard to find anymore - also look for David Ahl's "Basic Computer Games" series).

Basically, you will want the kids to type in code (whether they understand it or not) to get a finished "example" - and if it has bugs, they will need to look and see why, and figure out how it works and what is broken. So, you need examples of this, plus the keyword reference, and a book on learning BASIC...

• oe2mbx: converts Outlook Express 5 mailbox to Unix standard format,
• OtlkToNs: converts Outlook Express (not 5) mailbox to Netscape.

Try GAG, is an excelent GPL'ed graphical boot manager, we use it to succesfully dualboot WinNT/Linux.