Monday, July 2, 2007

Week 3, Thing 7 - Technology related post

We're supposed to write about anything technology related that currently catches our attention. As I am currently being distracted by downloadable video technology and You Tube that will be my topic. I added video content to my blog - the book cart drill team from the opening of the new Pratt branch (I am actually in the video towards the end in the audience) and a Muppet video of the Mahna Mahna Song. It was surprisingly easy to do.

I didn't have a similar experience when trying my first Amazon Unboxed video download last week, but after the second call to customer support I was assured that my experience was completely atypical. Once the issue was corrected on their end (vindication - first call to their tech support ended with the guy saying "Well, everything here is okay, maybe this isn't going to work out for you.") everything worked fine and I was able to transfer the movie to my video MP3. The transfer was totally easy and gave me the confidence to then try to utilizing a video grabber site (http://www.zamzar.com/) that I saw referenced in a LJ article about web 2.0 . The site allows you to save a copy to your hard drive of a video clip, like a You Tube video, into a variety of different formats. It only took a few minutes of playing with it to get how it works. Pretty cool.

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UPDATE:

It was driving me crazy that I couldn't find the article that I read since I wanted to link to it. I finally found it. It was in the eNewsletter American Libraries Direct 5/9/2007 not LJ as I previously thought. Here's the link to the original article that was on Mashable which reviews several other ways to download You Tube videos.

1 comment:

JimD said...

This was really cool. Thanks for the suggestion. I used Zamzar today to convert a file off of YouTube and it worked brilliantly. Here's yet ANOTHER way for me to end up spending time I don't have!