Make Full Use of YouTube With These Great Tools
Once upon a time, YouTube was just a speck in the vastness of cyberspace. Seemingly overnight, however, YouTube has become a phenomenon; a place for people to learn, vent, laugh, cry and think, YouTube has become the world’s playground for video posting. When Google bought YouTube in 2006, it became even more popular and now, counting on millions of users from all over the world, it has become the foremost video uploading site on the Internet today.
The only drawback to YouTube? Its limited useability. Upload, watch, link or embed — those are the only four choices for YouTube videos. Or are they? I have scrambled and scrambled all through the web looking for some cool applications and tools that can maximize my YouTube experience and I’ve found a few excellent ones that I’d love to share with you.
Video Downloader is my favorite YouTube tool because it integrates right into my Mozilla Firefox web browser. Video Downloader allows you to download videos onto your computer so you can do whatever you want with them, whether it’s watching them on your own time without having to go to YouTube and search for them again, or extracting audio for various other uses, whatever your need is, Video Downloader helps you get it all done. The Firefox extension gives you immediate access to it by providing icons to add to your browser and its user-friendly interface makes it a breeze to use.
Have you ever seen a video on YouTube and wished that you could watch it at any time, from any device? You don’t have to wish anymore; this application, TubeSock, makes it possible for you to do so. TubeSock allows you to rip videos from YouTube and format them so that you can play them on your iPod, or your PSP, or your Mac. There are some particularly awesome things about this application that I love. For one, it’s supported on both Mac OS and Windows XP. It can also download videos from other video sites, not just YouTube. My favorite thing about TubeSock though is that if you’re like me and you only have an audio-only portable device, TubeSock will rip the audio for you and convert it to an audio file. Very cool application, indeed. And so easy to use!
Splicd is a neat little website that is pretty self-explanatory. For those of you that are easily annoyed by extremely long YouTube videos that only have a snippet of useful information that you want to share with friends and family, Splicd gives you the opportunity to take that little snippet and create a link for that specific spot on the video, so you can send friends that link instead of having them agonize over an extremely long video clip. When you go to the Splicd website, you paste the link to the video in question, then you plug in the start time and the end time of the clip you want to extract from the video. When you hit the submit button, it gives you a Splicd link to share. It also shows the video that you’re sending so you can make sure it’s the right clip. It’s pretty easy to use, very fast and very convenient, I have found, especially for educational videos.
What kind of cyberworld would it be if we couldn’t have a WordPress plugin to help us improve our blogs? TubePress comes to the rescue with a plugin that creates beautiful and crisp video galleries for your WordPress blog. It is simple to use and integrates nicely with WordPress. I really love it because video can add so much variety to a blog, and TubePress makes it so easy to achieve that. I love anything that can enhance my WordPress experience; WP is one of the most user-friendly blog hosting sites on the Internet, and plugins like this make it so much more fun to use! No longer do I have to go through posting videos on my blog the old way. TubePress makes it easy and fun to add videos to my site.
Using these and many other applications, widgets and plugins will enhance your YouTube experience in spades and help you make the most out of the most popular video site on the planet.