Chinese YouTube

http://www.youku.com/ on wikiPedia

http://www.tudou.com/ on wikiPedia

http://www.56.com/ on wikiPedia

How to embed high quality YouTube videos

A lot of people don’t know that YouTube has high quality videos, as well as the generally poor-quality standard versions. The links to the better (not HD, but still pretty good) versions are easy to miss, but there are a few steps you can take to make sure you’re watching (and even embedding) the good stuff. Jason Kottke ran through a few of them recently on kottke.org.

First, make high-quality your default setting. You can do this in the Account menu, under “Playback Setup.” That takes care of playback, but what if you want to link to the high-quality version of a video? Just paste “&fmt=18” or “&fmt=22” at the end of the URL. 18 is the 480×360 version, and 22 is the 720p version. Some videos will have one, but not the other, so try both if you need to.

When it comes to embedding, you can make a quick change to the embed code to get better video quality. Just add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” to the end of the URLs in your embed code.

Filsh.Net Converts Web Video For Playback Anywhere

Plenty of good software exists for capturing audio or video from YouTube and other such sites, but I’m always on the look for portable apps or web services that offer the same features.

Filsh.net offers an extremely easy-to-use way to convert clips before downloading. It’s so easy, in fact, that I barely noticed the German interface whilst creating a Nintendo-DS compatible version of some kid setting his pants on fire. Nice!

Drop in your target URL and select your desired format from options including AVI, MPG, MP4, DPG (the DS format), 3GP, OGG, or MP3 and Filsh goes to work. Multiple sites are supported, including YouTube, Google Video, Break, MyspaceTV, and Veoh. I was unable to grab from Vimeo, but Filsh does support uploading – so I could save a clip first and then send it back up to Filsh for conversion.

Conversions are fairly fast, and I didn’t notice any quality problems. Videos remained clear, and audio extracted from clips to MP3 sounded just as good as the original.

Filsh works well, and though it doesn’t handle the variety of conversions that Zamzar does it’s still a useful site to keep in your bookmarks.

Unintelligencer Maeks U Rite Dum – Time Waster

It’s always nice to have a good laugh during an otherwise stressful workday, and what’s more fun than laughing at outright supidity?

The Unintelligencer uses an array of sophisticated linguistic algorithms to convert your text from perfectly suitable English into the unrecognizable drivel you’ve gotten used to seeing on YouTube, Facebook, and all your other favorite sites.

Let’s try an example from a favorite movie of mine: “i haved an wonderful girlfriend linda. 2gethr wee drove too small cabin ins da mountains. t seems an archeologist hads kum tew dis remote place 2 translate + study him latess phidn: necronomiconexmortis. thee book uv de ded.”

Oh, the good times you’ll have with this. Send that important departmental memo as a Moron, or shoot the moon and render it Incomprehensible. Unintelligencer offers 5 subtle shades of idiocy!

It’s web based, so users of any operating system can utilize this fantastic – and unbelievably useful – tool. I’d like to see a reverse translation so I can finally understand what the hell some of these lolcat people are talking about.

Add subtitles to YouTube vids with Subyo

Sometimes we find ourselves watching funny YouTube videos in a language we don’t understand, and we feel like we’re missing part of the joke. What did he say, and why did she drop that on his head? Maybe we’ll find out now, thanks to Subyo. It’s a service that lets you create your own subtitled translations of YouTube videos, and search for subtitles submitted by others (by entering a video’s YouTube URL, naturally.)

The downfall of sites like these isn’t the functionality — Subyo works just fine, and we finally figured out what the rappers were saying in some of those music videos — it’s the challenge of getting widespread user adoption. The site’s only as good as its users, so it will be interesting to see whether Subyo catches on and becomes an essential add-on to YouTube.