Right on! Happy New year guys and gals. It’s 2009, and we are here assembled to celebrate a new year of more awesome technologies and new announcements from the Biggies. January implies Macworld, which means some cool announcements from the house of Apple. But with Steve Jobs not presenting the Keynote, the fizz is a bit low. Also, this is Apple’s last Macworld. Nevertheless, Apple fanboys are assembled and are already speculating some of the rumours making waves all across. Upto you if you want to believe them.
1. New iMac , New Mac Mini Macrumors suggest that this is one of the most likely ones to happen. New hardware releases. [Read more →]
All about How to Watch YouTube in HD, Search for HD content on YouTube, and How to Download them
I have been receiving quite a number of emails complaining that my previous post on Youtube HD has been hard to follow. I have also received other emails congratulating me that the hack, google search code as well the downloading script worked perfectly. Just for the benefit of the people who did not get it, I am reposting it, in a simple plain layman language, so that everyone can enjoy Youtube in its full HD beauty. So here it goes.
First things first, only a few of the zillions of videos on YouTube have HD enabled in them. This solely depends on the quality of the original video that has been uploaded. If the original video being uploaded is a 1080p or a 720p video (from a Blu-Ray or an HD TV rip, in simple terms a video with a large resolution), only then we could see the HD option for that video. e.g. The KungFu Panda OST- Kungfu Fighting. It is available in 3 options. Option 1: The Low-Quality flv version which is suitable for viewing in low bandwidth internet. The buffering of this video would be much faster but the video quality is the most inferior. This is in most cases the default video quality for all Youtube videos.
Option 2: The High Quality mp4 version which is suitable for viewing in high bandwidth internet. The quality is much better than flv. It is available for most videos on Youtube which have been uploaded recently. You can make buffering Higher Quality versions of the Video as default, by changing the Playback Settings in your YouTube account. Just follow the steps below.
Go to your YouTube account page. On the left hand side of the page, click on a link called Playback Setup. Now, you will get 3 options to choose from- low quality for slow connections, high quality for faster connections, or let YouTube choose dynamically depending on runtime connection speed.
Alternatively, even for videos which do not have High-Q viewing enabled, a better picture and sound quality version (not necessarily better resolution) is available if the video URL is tweaked.
e.g. If the Kungfu Panda OST URL is : http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4,
just append it with &fmt=18, to look like http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4&fmt=18
This would make it stream the High-Q version.
Option 3: HD version. Like I said, HD is only available for a few videos, but the number is expected to increase as we see more HD content being uploaded. All the videos available for HD can be viewed in HD by clicking on the “watch in HD” link below the video. The mentioned Kungfu Panda OST -Kungfu Fighting has the link as well.
Alternatively, HD versions can be viewed directly by appending &fmt=22 in the video URL.
So if the original URL is : http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4,
then the HD version would be http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4&fmt=22
How to Search for HD content on YouTube and Download HD videos after the jump. [Read more →]
I hope you people might have noticed that I have two blogs, one is this- Techkeyla, and the other one is OneKnightStands or as most of my mates call it- OKS. It was launched alongside Techkeyla, last year when I joined the independently blogging band-wagon and left the Blogger camp. Things have been great since. Visitors multiplied, my posts got linked and I got readers from all across the world. But unfortunately I haven’t been able to write as much. So to break the hibernation, I thought of redesigning the theme. I was happy with the previous theme for it supporting my long posts and clarity of font. But I needed change. After all it was a year old. So I began my hunt for the perfect wordpress theme to work on.
Sources of Free Wordpress Themes.
My search began with a google search, but it was just not quite adequate. So, the search led me to multiple other blogs and other sources which I am sharing with you.
1. Smashing Magazine
Just love this blog and the exhaustive amount of sources these guys have. Check the following posts e.g.
YouTube has enabled HD videos viewing now, in pure 960p beauty. As opposed to the normal 4:3 ratio, the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio has been adapted, and the Videos have started to roll out. Initially, as written in my previous post , only a few videos were being enabled for testing. But the numbers have started to increase. But you would surely want to experiment various videos which have HD enabled and experience YouTube in all its maximum capacity. Here’s how to search for the HD videos available on Google. [Read more →]
So they are finally here. And pretty much looks like my new GMail inbox is the twin brother of my iGoogle page. The news arrived on the GMail Blog yesterday, but the things took some time to get reflected in my inbox. (I have three GMail addresses for different reasons, and for some reason, the change was noticed at different times, the newest one was the first to see themes being active, and the oldest one the last). But it is official that the GMail inbox can now be customized and decorated as per GMail’s settings. The preset themes are given below in the pic.(Click picture to see larger size)
As per your tastes, you can select the ones that suit you the best. I personally would like to recommend two of the ‘darker’ themes that are my personal favorites.
1. Shiny
2. Graphiti (which I have now on)
A close tie between Summer Ocean and Mountains for the third spot. Which one’s your favorite? Links to the GMail Blog post.
I had done a post before on Techkeyla about watching and downloading videos from Youtube in High Quality version. (The post is here) Not that all videos were uploaded in their High Quality grandeur, but some of them were, and we could watch them in their High Quality resolution just by adding “&fmt=18″ at the end of the video URL. Downloading it was more fun with KeepVid.com. Now, Wired.com reports that Youtube is experimenting with High-Definition videos to be aired. And it is indeed High-Definition at 720p. Have a look at the different versions of the crazily popular “Where the Hell is Matt” video.
How to Download the Youtubes Video in HD after the Jump
It is finally here. Video Chat (along with voice chat) on GMail. Surprisingly though it is not available yet on the GTalk client. I tried using it with my mates and it works like a charm! Lovely addition to the already awesome GMail and now there is no reason why I would want to get any other mail ID. I can hear people in the background screaming “MSN MSN Live Live Yahoo Yahoo!!!!” Calm down people. Here is something that I want to tell ya all. Awright! GMail has a web-integrated video chat facility now, and I know Meebo has made it available before. But have a look at the GMail Video Chat and you’ll know how cool it is. It has chat within mail and yes….it HAS FULLSCREEN. WHOA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Check the video below for more about the GMail Video Chat.
The GOOG guys are pushing it harder. Calendar and Docs have just been included in the GMail and the Labs team have integrated this service which has received quite a welcome appreciation from the blogosphere. The Official GMail post says that ” The (GMail)Labs Team has worked on:
a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail”
And it doesn’t stop there. There’s a third lab enabling users to add any Google Gadget to GMail by just pasting in the URL of its XML spec file.(e.g. http://www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_videos.xml)
All of this is being added on the left nav where we have our chat windows and labels below the normal inbox links. Talking of which, the question arises whether GMail INBOX would now be a cluttered space like MySpace or like the Facebook horror page that was cluttered with applications everywhere.
Answering to this question, GMail official Dan Pupius has said that the new GMail Gadgets are not aimed at being user friendly at the moment, and are aimed at developers who want to play around with the available resources. And to add to that, the left nav-bar is certainly not the only space where they would be adding up the features.And all these future additions to come up in GMail space, would also take into consideration the major edge of GMail over other mail services-Speed. With more and more additions to the Inbox, will GMail be able to keep up? Let’s wait and watch!!
To read more about this topic , click to the links after the jump [Read more →]
