Rex Is Excited

If you are looking to download some high-res video clips from YouTube for your next presentation, try this easy trick that will only display high quality videos in the search results.

Go to Google.com, type your search phrase and append the following paramters your search query.

site:youtube.com "watch in normal quality watch in high quality"

To illustrate this with a real example, a search for "cnn hologram" related videos on YouTube would look something like this on Google:

cnn hologram "watch in normal quality watch in high quality" site:youtube.com

This works because YouTube adds a small "watch in high quality" link beneath their video player if the video you are watching is available as high resolution.

When you click that "high quality" link, it is replaced by "watch in normal quality" so the two strings are really close in the HTML source and that helps us filter low quality videos from search.

Related posts:

1. New YouTube Player To Stream Better Quality Videos
2. Import Videos from YouTube, MySpace in Facebook
3. How Many Videos Have You Watched on YouTube ?

Search High Resolution Videos on YouTube - Digital Inspiration

I was talking with a colleague recently about the Barack Obama tribute video made by Will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas and Bob Dylan’s son Jesse, and how fascinating it was to watch as it made its way through various media last week, from emails and Twitter feeds to blog posts and then into newspapers and media websites.

When I first came across the video, known as the “Yes We Can” video, people were describing it as compelling and passionate — many seemed impressed by the fact that it wasn’t official, and that it had young men and women of all colours in it, symbolizing the breadth of Obama’s reach and how people connect with his message.

Over time, however, you could see the tide starting to turn. Some people started to talk about how slick it was — filled with celebrities and very commercial, in a music-video kind of way. Then people started musing about how that was part of the problem with Obama’s campaign to begin with: style over substance, etc. The blog NewTeeVee called it an “appalling exercise in celebrity self-congratulation.”

Within a day or two, the video was being used as an example of how “user-generated” media isn’t always such a great thing for a campaign. The political site Hot Air called it “disturbingly cool,” while a blogger at The New Republic wondered whether it might not hurt Obama more than help him. One commenter on Twitter wondered when Obama campaign had started having his videos done by The Gap.

So the Obama video went from blockbuster media event and unadulterated success story to backlash in about 48 hours — less time than it would have taken for a typical campaign video to even be distributed to TV networks a few years ago, let alone watched by almost two million people, posted to blogs, commented on and analyzed. Fascinating.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Humor, iPod Family, Found Footage

I can't say MADtv is my favorite sketch show, and personally I really liked the Feist iPod ads, but in terms of skewering the downsides of being an iPod user, they pretty much hit the nail on the head on this one.

If you listen to our talkcast, you'll already know that Apple makes their product release decisions based around my own personal experience -- every time I buy an Apple product, Steve stands up and releases something even newer and cooler soon after. Of course, as the parody says, if you want to own something that doesn't ever get better after you buy it, there is always an alternative.

[Via Macenstein]

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Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Internet Tools

I've got two toddlers who love video chatting with grandma and grandpa. It starts out cute, but quickly deteriorates into the two of them jumping around in front of the different effects and backgrounds.

More iChat Effects has made it worse.

This free download adds 48 new effects to iChat, including outer space, a mildly disturbing cube effect and a pretty cool hologram. More iChat Effects is a Universal Binary and includes an uninstaller, just in case you don't want to chat as the Mona Lisa.

Thanks, Grant!

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After having his account suspended for what YouTube said was a history of repeated copyright violations, uber celebrity-blogger Perez Hilton has announced that he is pulling all of his videos from the site and will henceforth only be posting them to perezhilton.com. YouTube says that it is merely complying with the rules under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by blocking a known copyright infringer — but is its behaviour towards Perez part of its ongoing war with Viacom?

As CNET points out, many of the copyright complaints about Hilton have come from entertainment giant Viacom, and part of why the Google-owned site might be a little hyper-sensitive about copyright infringement is the ongoing $1-billion lawsuit launched by Viacom against YouTube for just that kind of thing. It’s more than a little ironic, then, that Viacom is also the parent company of VH1, the entertainment channel that owns the rights to Perez Hilton’s TV show, and would presumably be interested in the publicity that his videos might draw on YouTube.

After phone calls back and forth from lawyers, YouTube reinstated Hilton’s account, but by then he had already decided to pull his videos and stick to his own site from now on. But the big question is this: was Google beating up on Perez as a way of sending a message to Viacom about the cost of winning its war? Or maybe it was just trying to do the right thing

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