How to Watch YouTube Videos While Working on other Tasks

You plan to watch a lengthy video clip on YouTube but the problem is that you have lot of other stuff to do and therefore can’t focus all the attention on just one video. You need to browse web pages, check emails in Outlook and maybe complete that presentation while the video plays on your screen.

Fortunately, this is possible with a simple hack - just decide where that video should be placed.

You can either watch the YouTube video from the Firefox sidebar or, if you are working with other application or don’t use Firefox, create a standalone YouTube player window and move it anywhere on the desktop in Always on Top mode. See screenshots.

Case 1. YouTube Player inside the Firefox Sidebar

Case 2. YouTube Player on top of other Windows

Here are the steps involved for either of the methods discussed above.

1. Get the full screen mode address of the YouTube video clip. It is something like www.youtube.com/v/ABC where ABC is the YouTube video ID.

For instance, if the YouTube video is located at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZ9z6BBMVY, the full screen player will be available at www.youtube.com/v/8bZ9z6BBMVY

2a. To watch the video in Firefox sidebar, bookmark that new YouTube address and check the "Load in Sidebar" property of the bookmark as shown in the screenshot.

2b: To watch the video in a standalone player, open a new browser window and copy-paste the YouTube address THAT you generated in step 1. Now resize the browser window to fit the player, activate the Always on Top program (download link) and press Ctrl + Spacebar to make sure that YouTube player stays in the foreground. That’s it.

Notes: While you may also use the regular YouTube video URL in either of these cases, the experience won’t be so great.

via:labnol.org

YouTube Widescreen!

YouTube a few minutes ago announced that they’re officially changing the size and aspect ratio of the standard video player on the site.

We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don’t worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player.

For all videos uploaded in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio, they’ll appear inset, but the increasingly more common 16:9 videos will fill all available space.

What do you think… will this increase your YouTube enjoyment factor?  Last time we asked, you weren’t overly enthusiastic.  Has your opinion changed?

Soundflavor gives you a ridiculous number of ways to find music

by Brad Linder Nov 27th 2008

There are plenty of ways to find music that meets your tastes on the internet. Last.fm, Pandora, and similar music discovery services will recommend new music for you based on the songs you like. YouTube is filled with music videos from popular and not so popular artists. And music search engines like SeeqPod make it easy to find songs and videos.

Now if you take all of those music discovery methods and roll them into a ball and add about half a dozen other ways to search for, browse, and find music, you'll have Soundflavor. 

We first looked at Soundflavor two years ago, but the service has come a long way since then. Here are just a few of the things you can do with the web-based music discovery service:

• Find and play YouTube videos from artists by searching.
• Browse for music by genre, decade, mood, or subject matter of the lyrics.
• Enter an artist or song name to generate a playlist of YouTube videos of similar songs.
• Embed the Soundflavor Video Jukebox widget on your social networking profile or blog.

Because the music comes from YouTube you will occassionally get a clip of some kid sitting in his or her bedroom with an acoustic guitar, but for the most part the music recommendation engine is pretty good. And hey, some of those kids with guitars are halfway decent.