Grease Monkey & You....Tube

Recently I've grown extremely frustrated with the popular new service You Tube, because I couldn't save the videos to my hard drive. Now you can (although you probably could before, I just didn't look hard enough)! You will need a few things: the Firefox web browser, a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey, and a custom script (for Greasemonkey) which can be obtained here. The script adds a red bar above the videos on You Tube that allow you to download the flash video files to your hard drive, where you can then convert them to a more appropriate format using various applications around the internet.

Alternatives To The Norm

A preview of an exciting new open source media player project called Songbird, to compete against iTunes and Windows Media Player, has launched today. Although it is just a preview build, the player seems promising. The interface is straightforward and intuitive. The player also seems to have a focus on integration with the web and internet - like music tracking site last.fm and several others.It will be interesting to see how this project develops.

If you try Songbird and don't like it, try the cult hit foobar2k. While foobar2k doesn't natively support synching with mp3 players there are rather robust plugins for the latest stable release - sadly some of these plugins are broken in the latest beta release. The audio fidelity in foobar is amazing, and while it may not be as graphically pleasing as WMP it definitely out performs it in perceived quality. But don't take my word for it, give it a try and decide for yourself.