Welcome to Land of Tricks

Youtube - You know that site with videos and all. Yeah! It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:

1. View high quality videos

Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2. Embed Higher Quality Videos

While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part

Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4. Hide the search box

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5. Embed only a part of Video

Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6. Autoplay an embedded video

Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.

7. Loop an embedded video

Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

8. Disable Related Videos

Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering

Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode>

10. Download Video

Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching.

Do you know of some similar Youtube URL tricks and hacks? Fire them in comments!

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For anyone who owns a guitar and a Mac, these are good times to be living in. The release of iLife 09 saw GarageBand upgraded to include guitar lessons from the stars and there are other apps around such as Guitar Guru which is probably the slickest and most effective guitar learning software I’ve used on Mac or PC. Of course, no amount of computer genius can turn you into Slash, but for many, using a computer tutorial can be more effective - and cheaper - than spending hours learning to play Baa Baa Black Sheep with some long bearded instructor with bad breath or messing around printing badly tabbed tablature from the net. Here are a few tips and links to get you strumming:

Tuna Pitch The first thing you need to get right before you do anything is the tuning of your guitar. Most Mac guitar tuners however will only play you the tone of what your strings should sound like. The problem with that is, if you’re tone deaf like me, you still can’t tune your guitar. Tuna Pitch uses your Mac’s microphone to detect the tone of your strings so your Mac does the hard work for you. Just tune your string until the small dot hits the middle of the reading scale.

GarageBand Why learn to play like the big names off a sheet of paper when they can teach you themselves? That’s been Apple’s philosophy with the introduction of guitar lessons in GarageBand. Ok, so some of the names aren’t to everyone’s tastes - initial offerings include Sting teaching you Roxanne,  John Fogerty teaching you Proud Mary and Fall Out Boy teaching you I Don’t Care. I guess the number of other big names they add will depend on whether users are willing to pay $4.99 for each lesson. There’s no doubt too this is a bit of a flashy marketing move by Apple and you should also bear in mind that just because they’re the author of the song, doesn’t mean they’ll be a good teacher. Still, this is one of the most exciting innovations in online guitar learning in a long time.

 

Guitar Guru An excellent application that doesn’t include celebrities but does include a lot of practical, easy to use instructions about how to play your favourite songs. Again, it doesn’t come for free but you get what you pay for with software sometimes and for around anything up to $7, you can have some of the greatest guitar tracks ever written explained and annotated for you on a virtual fretboard in idiot proof simplicity. Guitar Guru also includes a tuner and a tempo control slider so you can slow things down to your own learning pace. The tabs you purchase and download come with a free MIDI sample of the song but you can also opt to insert your own MP3 or CD track.

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