YouTube announced a new feature this week which allows you to edit your uploaded videos. Let’s say you have a video on YouTube, and you decide that the color is off. You used to have to download the video, edit it with some video editor, and  re-upload  the video. This would cause your stats to be off because, basically, YouTube would treat it as an entirely new video. All of your likes and comments would be gone. This is no longer a problem. Now, you can go straight to your videos and edit them right in your browser. When you go to your uploaded videos section on YouTube, you will now notice an “edit video” button listed, as pictured below.

When you click the “edit video” button, the first thing you will see is a dual screen view. On the left side of the screen, you will see your video in its current state. As you make edits, the right side of the screen will give you a “quick preview” of how your changes will look.

There is an impressive selection of editing tools offered. There are three tabs with different editing tools from which to choose. There is also a large button in the upper right corner called “Revert to Original” in case you make a mistake. Below, you will see pictures of each of the tabs and their tools with explanations.

Pictured above, you will see the “Quick Fixes” tab. This tab contains tools that will allow you to change the look and feel of the video. One of the nice features is the “Stabilize” button, which will help fix home videos where the camera person had a shaky hand. There is also a one-click “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which will automatically make adjustments to your color and lighting.

The “Effects” tab offers an array of predefined special effects that you can add to your video. Pictured below, you can see their many choices of effects. Here, you can choose anything from old-time movie camera effects to making your video look like a cartoon.

The last tab is the “Audio” tab. In the picture below, you can see that there are a number of free audio files available to add to your YouTube video. You have the ability to search for songs. You can also limit your selection to songs of similar length to your video.

I have to say that I am pretty impressed with these new features added by YouTube. The tools are robust, considering that they are browser based. The interface is very intuitive and simple to use. Having the ability to do all of this in the browser, without having to waste time uploading and downloading, not to mention losing comments and stats, is a well thought out and considerate implementation on YouTube’s part.

What do you think?

Yesterday, I saw the most amazing videos. These are called Mandelbulb videos, and half the fun of watching them is understanding the science and mathematics behind them. If you don’t want to learn how these are made, you can skip to the end of this article.

What is a Mandelbulb?

It’s a type of mathematical entity that’s based on ideas behind  Fractals  which were discovered in the 17th century. Fractal mathematics describe  geometric patterns that repeat at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces that cannot be represented by classical geometry. Fractal patterns are often seen in nature, such as in snowflakes. Here’s an example of a Von Koch curve, which is one of the simplest forms of a fractal.

When a fractal shape is calculated, it is calculated in steps, or iterations. You can see the shape change, above, as it goes through each iteration.

Here’s another example of a complex fractal which was generated by the  GoogleLabs JuliaMap Generator.

If you follow that link to Google Labs, your web browser will generate a fractal. One of the unique properties of fractals are that you can zoom in on the patterns and see even smaller but very similar patterns.

Over the years, many mathematicians have tried to determine the formulas for true 3D fractals. Finally, in 2007,  an amateur fractal image maker,  Daniel White, came up with some formulas that seem to generate these 3D fractal shapes. Daniel started his work by using one of the most famous fractal types, called the  Mandelbrot set. The resulting shapes are called Mandelbulbs.

A couple of months later, some software hackers and fractal enthusiasts got together to work on software to render Mandelbulbs on computers. The Mandelbulber Project has been a success, and as you’ll see below, it’s also resulted in some very fantastic images and videos.

Here’s a screenshot of what the software looks like, running on a Linux PC. The software is Open Source, completely free to download  and also runs on Windows PCs.

Here are a few screen-shots of Mandelbulber’s artificial worlds.

Finally, we have reached the video. As you’ll see, Mandelbulber can create entire virtual worlds that can be explored. In fact, it can create an infinity of different worlds and some of them are almost scary in their complexity.

Video:  Trip to center of hybrid fractal

Here are more Mandelbulb videos from XLACE. It’s interesting to see how his videos have evolved over the years, and how Mandelbulber has suddenly changed the world of fractals forever. Someday, I expect to see these artificial worlds appear in movies. If you need an alien place for a Sci-Fi movie, it’s pretty easy to see where you could get one.

[Windows, Linux, Mac]

Late last year, I spotted a deal that I couldn’t turn down. I was able to buy a Sandisk Sansa Fuze 4G player for about $30 USD. When these were first released in 2008, they were over double that price. I already had an iPod Nano, but I wanted video and photos, and the price of the iPod Touch was over my playtime budget.

If you aren’t familiar with the Fuze, here’s some info from Google Products:

Listen, watch and play all day with 24 hours of battery life and room for up to 2000 songs. The Sansa Fuze from SanDisk is your portable music machine with 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of storage. Watch your favorite video clips on the Sansa Fuze’s 1.9″ color screen. Jam to FM radio with 40 preset stations, play with the built-in voice recorder, and share your photos wherever you go. Choose from five electric colors: blue, red, pink, black or silver. Incredible battery life in a 0.3″ thin device – the Sansa Fuze marks the next wave of music and video players.

In the past few months, I’ve enjoyed using it at work and play, but there are two things that I definitely don’t like about the Fuze. First, they used a proprietary connector, instead of using a mini-USB. Secondly, they force you to convert all your videos to a weird AVI format, which can only be created by their special Sansa Media Converter (Windows only).

There isn’t much that I could do about the connector, but I’ve finally found an excellent alternative to the Sansa converter, called Video4Fuze. It is supported in Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, unlike Sansa’s lame converter. Now converting full length DVDs for use on my Fuze is as simple as creating an AVI file, then converting it with Video4Fuze. If you are a big fan of downloading Youtube video, the Video4Fuze utility also converts FLV and MP4 videos with no problem.

Download Video4Fuze

Here’s a video showing how to use Video4Fuze.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

[Windows and Mac] I have hooked up my computers to the TV occasionally. It’s pretty cool, but for me, it’s not very handy. My couch is too far from the screen and I can’t read most of the text while surfing. A new web browser called Kylo, promises to solve that problem. The Kylo browser is based on Mozilla code, so it’s using the same engine that Firefox uses. Here’s what the web site says about their browser:

Sit back and get ready for big-screen browsing. Kylo brings your TV and computer together to create the ultimate content experience. Enjoy your favorite online shows, videos, music, games and news. Take your HDTV anywhere on the web.

I tried Kylo briefly last week. At first I was pretty amazed at how well it worked. Here you can see the Kylo home page. (click to expand pictures)

Next, I visited Youtube. It works very nicely in full screen mode most of the time. Occasionally the video would freeze, but going back to normal screen usually resumed the video.

Below, you can see the on-screen keyboard that pops up whenever you click into a text entry box.

In the next two screens, I was watching a soccer match. It was almost like watching it on regular TV.

Rather than go into too much detail, I’ll show you a video on how Kylo works.

Click here if you can’t see the embedded video.

Download the Kylo TV Browser

Techie Buzz Verdict:

As I mentioned above, full screen video would occasionally freeze up. Other than that, I was pretty pleased with the way Kylo works. If you want to surf on your big screen, Kylo may be a good solution for you.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5 (Good)

[Windows and Mac] Today at the office, I wanted to share a funny video with my friends. I normally download videos from Youtube instead of sharing the links. That’s because our office network doesn’t stream internet video very well.

I used the Deturl bookmarklet to download the video as a high quality MP4 file, as shown below.

The only problem is that most of the people at work don’t have any applications that can view MP4 or FLV files. However, that’s not a problem since I’ve found a great stand-alone viewer named Wimpy FLV Player.

Wimpy is downloaded as a ZIP file, and you’ll see the following files inside it.

To share the video, all I had to do was to put a copy of the Wimpy EXE file in the same folder as the video I wanted to share. All my buddies had to do was to drag the video and drop it onto the Wimpy EXE file.

Here’s what it looks like …

Wimpy plays the following kinds of files:

Video:       – MPEG-4 files that use the H.264 codec
- FLV
- MP4
- 3GP

Audio       – MP3
- AAC
- M4A

There are three main ways to open videos:

• Open up a file location by clicking on the folder icon
• Drag a file and drop it inside of Wimpy
• Open up a video location on the net by clicking on the globe icon

It also has 14 skins that change it’s looks just a little.

Download Page for Wimpy FLV Player

Here’s the video I was showing you above in the screenshots:

I am hunting Wabbits!

Link to video

Techie Buzz Verdict

Any time I run into a stand-alone application that does a job well, I have to give it high praise. Wimpy is small but mighty and I have no problem recommending it to all Windows and Mac users.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

Sometime last month, Shankar posted a tweet about the Khan Academy. Have you ever heard of it? I followed the link and learned about Salman Khan, a man who gave up a successful career in Silicon Valley to teach people using Youtube videos. He’s posted over 1200 videos covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance.

Why does Khan do it? He’s not in it for the money. According to a recent interview, Khan said You know, I think I’ve always enjoyed teaching.

I believe him. His videos are not the dry lectures you’d expect from a geek. His enthusiasm shines through in the 10 to 20 minute videos. Here’s a video overview of the academy:

Link to this video at Youtube

When talking about his teaching style, he says:

I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him. The concepts are conveyed as they are understood by me, not as they are written in a textbook developed by an educational bureaucracy. Viewers know that it is the labor of love of one somewhat quirky and determined man who has a passion for learning and teaching. I don’t think any corporate or governmental effort–regardless of how much money is thrown at the problem–can reproduce this.

Students all over the world are viewing Khan’s videos and are finding that they are learning previously difficult subjects much more easily now.

To find out more, visit the Khan Academy website.

[Windows Only] Currently there are many different ways to convert one video format to another. You can make use of several video conversion services online. If you’d like to convert video on your PC using software, we’ve written about a few, such as Free Video And Audio Converter and Quick Media Converter.

Today, I tried a converter called ‘Any Video Converter‘, and I’ll show you a some of the features.

Any Video Converter lets you convert between a large number of video formats such as AVI, FLV, MOV, MP4, MPG, M2TS, MTS, RM, RMVB, QT, and WMV. You can manually adjust the settings for each format or use several presets. The program can also trim and crop portions of video and merge multiple video files. Other features include batch conversion, YouTube downloads, video snapshots and more.

I was the most interested in downloading YouTube videos and converting them to files for Windows Media Player. Most YouTube downloaders or rippers will give you FLV or MP4 formats and Windows Media Player is not always able to play them.

First I went to YouTube and copied the URL of a video I wanted. Then I fired up ‘Any Video Converter’ and clicked on the YouTube icon to paste in the address. I also used the pull down menu at the top right to select the WMV profile.

Once I had the YouTube URL listed, I clicked the “Convert” button and the program automatically started downloading and converting the video from YouTube. I ended up with the original MP4 and a new WMV file in the “My Documents/Any Video Converter” folder on my PC. It works fast and does a good job.

Another feature I liked was the ability to take snapshots of a video using the video preview area of ‘Any Video Converter’. All you have to do is start the video playback and click the snapshot button (circled below).

After you are done clicking a few snapshots, you’ll find the PNG image files in the Snapshot folder under “My Documents/Any Video Converter”.

Here’s a snapshot I took of a video named “Kissing Monkeys”. You’d think only a mother could love a face like that. Don’t be so quick to judge … check the video link below.

Click to see the video

Those are the only features I’ve tried so far, but based on that, I’m guessing everything works as advertised. However, this is a free version of a commercial product, and the author does pop up an occasional recommendation to buy the paid version. That’s the only thing I didn’t like very much.

Download ‘Any Video Converter’

Techie Buzz Verdict:
I found ‘Any Video Converter’ to be useful, flexible and unique in some ways. If you need to convert video formats, you’ll find it’s easy to use and does a good job.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5 (Good)

UTube Ripper

UTube Ripper is an application written in Gambas, that works exclusively on Linux. With this free application, you can download YouTube videos in a simple and efficient way.

Using UTube Ripper, you can also convert YouTube videos, which are in flash format, to a non-flash format. Using the “Rip audio only” option within this application, you can extract audio from a YouTube video, and then convert it into MP3 format.

You can download the .deb package (debian package for Ubuntu) for UTube Ripper from here.

Techie-Buzz Rating: 3.5/5

If you are a YouTube Fan and spend most of the time searching and viewing videos in YouTube, Mowid can come in handy. It is a tag based search engine for YouTube which lets you explore YouTube videos by combining multiple tags (see example).

How Mowid Works

To get started, just browse to the homepage and you will see a scrolling bar right at the top of the page. This bar features the most popular tags on YouTube.

Select one or more tags and the bar narrows your search based on these tags. For example: If you are looking for videos related to box and best, just select them and Mowid shows you the videos accordingly. The more you mix the number of tags, the better and funnier are the results. It’s not just the same boring searches on YouTube and seeing the same videos over and over again. In brief, Mowid helps you find new videos in YouTube containing multiple tags.

The videos are shown in the same page as shown below

You can quickly share the video you saw on Mowid in your social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon

Techie-Buzz Verdict

Mowid is a new video search engine which lets you find funny and not so common videos. It allows you to search for videos using tags or specific keywords and there are no sign ups or registrations involved.

Techie-Buzz rating: 3/5 (Average).

We have all, at one point or another, wanted to download a YouTube video for various reasons (watching it on the go on your PMP comes to mind). However, considering that this is a streamed Flash Video (FLV) that is embedded onto the site, it is not possible to download the video simply with a right-click and a Save Asoption. This is where Media Converter (formerly known as Media Pirate) comes into play.

Unlike the other ways to download the FLV files that are found online, Media Converter is completely different in that it offers a high degree of customization of the format of the video file you are converting and downloading. You can choose between 3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, FLV, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGG, RM and WMV (now that is a long list!) for video. If you wish to rip only the audio from the file, you can do that as well the options in that respect are MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA formats.

You can also set advanced options such as video and audio bitrate, the codecs used for audio and video (which is another long list!), the offset and duration of the video as well as the resolution. This freedom of tweaking is what makes people flock to Media Converter whenever they want to download and convert a YouTube video on the fly. Since the converter also supports FLV files from any site, you can download MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Facebook and more for free users and also queue the conversions just like a normal video converter.

However, there are restrictions imposed by this online converter software. For unregistered users, the limit of downloading and converting videos is up to five per day and they cannot download files greater than 100MB. For paid users, this limit is raised to 1GB and an unlimited amount of videos can be downloaded per day. The charges are $4 per week or if you buy in bulk, $150 per year.