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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 04/09/2008 The Web is a big candy store, and
what you see is what you get, or you can get ... Part 3 Last week
I talked about commercial software from Applian Technologies that you can buy to let you capture
internet videos and movies to your own computer. This week
I’ll show you some free internet sites with software you can use for
video capture. This information was provided by a Raw Bytes listener, Luka
Krmpotich, a college student in Coeur D’Alene who’s a real
internet power user. Mediaconverter.org Features the capability for you to
online directly convert videos from youtube and several other sites just by
pasting the url or web address of the video. I went to
my youtube guitar
video page of me playing Mississippi John Hurt’s version of Stagolee the Badman - and
I pasted the web address of this video into the Mediaconverter.org Conversion Wizard onscreen box and
clicked next -
The next screen gave me a very
wide choices of video formats to convert to, but I picked .wmv as
that’s one of the most portable formats:
The next screen gave me options to
change in the video format, and the good advice not to do anything if you
don’t know what you’re doing ...
So then I clicked next it then
downloaded the Youtube file and converted it, and then gave me the option to
download the file, which I did.
And in less than a minute I had not only captured a video I had seen on Youtube but
converted it to a portable format and downloaded it to my computer. I then had to rename the file to a
logical name – it game down as So Mediaconverter.org provides you with a free online way to
capture virtually anything you see on the Web, and
convert it to a wide variety of file formats and then save it to your
computer. When we’re talking about
media file formats, it’s important to realize that there are many
formats. When you download a file, you want
it to be in the most portable format. Portability means you can email that
file to a friend, and they can play it on their computer with the standard
windows software they have. So usually your choice for a video format would
be .wmv windows moviemaker format, and for audio would be .mp3 or .wma
windows media audio, all of which can be played by any windows pc with
the built in windows media player.
If you’re an Apple or Unix user, you will want to use different
formats. The file format choices are really
important – and on Mediaconverter.org
you can see the choices provide
not just about every current movie and sound format available –
but also Office
Document types,
meaning word , excel, powerpoint, and Adobe .pdf - Portable Document Format. This is a great feature. Most pc’s have the free
Adobe Reader on them so you can read Adobe.pdf
files – but you have to buy
the Adobe writer, which lets you create .pdf files of your documents.
Mediaconverter.org provides this function for free. I’ll talk more about free
online and other software for media conversion next week on Raw Bytes. |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2008 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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and I
renamed it to 