|
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 04/15/2008 The Web is a big candy store, and
what you see is what you get, or you can get ... Part 4 Last week
I talked about a website named Mediaconverter.org . 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. You go to a website that has a video
you want, and you cut and paste that address into the Mediaconverter.org Conversion Wizard
onscreen box, and in a minute or so you’ll have that video on your own
computer in a playable or emailable format. Another
feature you’ll find here is the ability to convert Office Files –
Meaning Microsoft office files
– this includes word, excel, and Powerpoint files - probably most
importantly to Adobe .pdf format, which you can’t do in Microsoft
office. You see , Microsoft and Adobe are computer world enemies, and
Adobe for years has been pushing their file format- .pdf – meaning portable document
format – as the standard format for the web and other portability
issues. Microsoft of course is
against this and wants you to use one of their formats, like XML Often
you’ll buy a new computer and find both Microsoft and Adobe products
are on it, so you might think they’re friends, but they’re not.
It’s a war and each one wants their file formats to be the industry and
web standard. 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. One
choice in their conversion wizard box is to upload an office file from your
computers, and it will convert nicely into an Adobe .pdf file. A few times I’ve been asked if I
could send something in Adobe format; not often, so I would use this site for
this. I did convert a couple excel and Word files and it works fine. Now another way you can use Mediaconverter.org
instead of using it online is to download their Media Converter SA Edition
software, and thus you can do your own conversions on your computer, Rather
than having to do it online. This is your choice. If you seldom convert media
files, it’s probably simplest to do it online. If you’re a heavy
user, you might download the program. This also will give you hands-on
experience using media conversion software, and give you a perspective if you
decide to buy a commercial program. Another thing of interest on this
site is that it’s donor supported and as of
April 15th they had only raised a tenth of the donations goal, and
the operator of this site is a 21 year old college student in Sweden. So as we say about many good
websites – use it while it’s up ! The
web does a Wizard-of-Oz makeover of everything, and everything is usually
much smaller than it appears to be. |
|
|
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 |
|