Here is a follow up to a few things discussed at the January Mullies meeting
Broadband Pricing and Plans available in Ulladulla area
Blu-Ray Disc Players/Burners
Someone asked about Blu-Ray discs. Blu-Ray discs (BD) are the new format of discs that can hold a lot more data than DVDs. Here’s the comparison:
| Single Layer | Dual Layer | |
| CD | 700mb | n/a |
| DVD | 4.7gb | 8.5gb |
| Blu-Ray | 25gb | 50gb |
So as you can see the capacity of Blu-Ray discs is 10 times that of DVD. The extra capacity is needed for true High Definition pictures and sound on your home theatre and is also useful for backing up a computer where the extra storage means more per disc.
Just like when DVD tech first came out the prices of the machines and media (discs) started out ridiculously high. Burners were over $1,000. Last night I suggested they were still $300 plus but got an ad email today offering BD/DVD burners (for desktop not laptop PC) for about $220 delivered. Laptop burners would be much more expensive. And note the actual discs are pretty dear too – Individual 25gb discs are over $10 each. 5 DVD discs are similar capacity for less than half this price but not as handy as having all in one. Like everything else in tech BD will rapidly become cheaper and more common, or is that more common and therefore cheaper :)
Downloading YouTube videos & Saving the Audio
Stan asked how to save the audio from YouTube videos. A quick search took me to the Digital Inspiration website – a great blog written by Amit. I am subscribed to his RSS feed and you might like to check it out. His post on how to accomplish Stan’s task is here: How To Rip Audio from YouTube Videos
He suggests using the Vixy.net website to save the audio directly from YouTube. You simply input the URL, wait for conversion (it takes a while), then click to download. just like the site we found the other night ListenToYouTube I found this a process a bit flaky.
Much easier to just download the video (as a FLV) and convert it to MP3. To download I use a FireFox extension called Video DownloadHelper. But there are any number of free download programs and extensions available.
 | As mentioned at Mullies over a year ago you can use KissYoutube to download right in your browser – basically you just type KISS into the YouTube Address url and it takes you to their site to download the video. |
| Once you have the video on your PC I recommend Format Factory to convert it. You can convert the FLV (Flash Video) file to another video format or to MP3 to capture the audio only. The Format Factory is free and is great for ripping DVD’s to video files, converting pictures to other formats, or converting videos for use on portable players, ipods or phones. |  |
Portable Music/Video players
As discussed with Romey it can be very frustrating with dealing with portable devices. Some manufacturers insist on making you use their software to load songs/videos onto a device. Then the software they give you wants to take over, duplicates your whole song library and clogs up your PC. Some players of course do not do this which makes life much easier. You can just drag and drop files like it was a USB flash drive.
Apple and Samsung (Romey had a Samsung T9 player) are difficult culprits but with iPods being so common a number of programs can interact with them. The choices for Romey’s Samsung are a bit more limited. But I believe that MediaMonkey should do the trick. It is a far more user friendly and very powerful music player and manager. If you don’t need to deal with video (it doesn’t do video very well) then I highly recommend it over Windows Media Player or other proprietary players. It handles Podcasts and Internet radio too. Because of the extra functions like syncing contacts etc on my Apple iPhone I still use iTunes and am quite happy with it but that won’t help Romey. I recommend downloading MediaMonkey and giving it a try. it shouldn’t duplicate your song library and hopefully will make creating playlists and syncing them with the player much simpler.
As always if anyone needs a bit more help with anything we discussed on the night or mentioned here then fire back a question and we will do our best to sort you out.
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