How often has this happened to you - you shot a really funny video of your cat, posted it to YouTube, then accidentally lost the original and now you want to download the copy back from YouTube? Never, you say? Okay, but work with us here for a minute. Supposing you had done that, there’s a real easy way to download it back to your system, and you don’t even have to use any special software to do it. Here’s how:
First, open Safari and navigate to the YouTube page containing the video. While the video is playing, press the following key combination: Command-Alt-A OR click on the word “Window” in the top menu bar, then select “Activity” from the drop-down menu. Once the Activity window is showing, look for a line that contains this character string: get_video
If you have trouble seeing it, it may help to look for the largest files in the list - it’s usually the largest file shown. It may also help to expand the window so you can see the complete links. When you find the one containing the get_video string, double-click on it and the video should download. Once the download is complete, go to your desktop or downloads directory (wherever your downloaded files are normally saved) and rename the get_video file to something meaningful, but be sure to give the file a .flv extension. The annoying “Mac Nanny” will pop up and ask if you are sure you want to change the extension, and you do.
Now that you have recovered the precious video of your cat clawing the neighbor’s dog, you can watch it whenever you want. You’ll want to make sure you’ve downloaded and installed Perian, so that you can play the .flv files. If you have also downloaded and installed MPEG Streamclip: video converter for Mac & Windows, you can use that to play the video or encode it to another format, or even do some selective editing of the clip (such as trimming off extraneous material at the start or end of the clip).
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Here are a few quick looks at some interesting freeware for the Mac. We are strong supporters of freeware unlike the ‘hard cider boys!” Take a look and let us know what you think of these freeware programs.
Smultron Text Editor
Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs - like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on.
[ http://smultron.sourceforge.net/ ]
Cyberduck
Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour, QuickLook and the Keychain. Cyberduck is free software. Current available localizations are English, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Danish, Polish, Indonesian, Catalan, Welsh and Thai.
[ http://cyberduck.ch/ ]
Delivery Status 4.2.1
Can’t wait for your packages to arrive? Don’t waste your time checking the site constantly, just open this all-in-one delivery tracker and enter your order number or tracking number. The status will update automatically for you, and even count down the days! It also works with Growl to give you pop-up message, email notifications, and more, whenever your package status changes. If you have more than one order, just open another copy of the widget so you can keep an eye on them all at once!
[ http://mikepiontek.com/software/mac/delivery-status.html ]
Mactracker
Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made, including items such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, Apple TV, iPhone, Wi-Fi Base Stations, Newton, and Mac OS versions.
[ http://www.mactracker.ca/ ]
AppUpdate
App Update is a free Dashboard Widget that can automatically check for updates to your installed software. It supports Apple’s software directory, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. It will present you with a tidy link list of all the updates found, enabling you to read release-notes and download the the updates quickly and painlessly.
[ http://gkaindl.com/software/app-update ]
WidgetUpdate
Widget Update is a free Dashboard Widget that can automatically check for updates to the all the other widgets that you have installed. It supports Apple’s software directory, DashboardWidgets.com, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. It will present you with a tidy link list of all the updates found, enabling you to read release-notes and download the the updates quickly and painlessly.
[ http://gkaindl.com/software/widget-update ]
VLC media player
VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
[ http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ]
Amaya Editor/Browser
Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium. Work on Amaya started at W3C in 1996. Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.
[ http://www.w3.org/Amaya/Amaya.html ]
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FStream is an interesting piece of software that has probably escaped the attention of many Mac OS X users in the English-speaking world, because its web site is entirely in French. It’s a small program that makes it possible to listen to, and to easily record Web radio stations and audio streams.
Features of FStream are as follows:
- Decoding of streams in any of these formats: OGG Vorbis, AAC/AAC+, MP3, MMS (ASF for WMA)
- Encoding of the streams to any of these formats: MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV
- Recognizes the Apple infrared remote control
- Very low CPU usage
- Minimalist Interface: Simple to use, and does not take much display space
- Customizable interface
- Great flexibility in recognition of streams (among other things, IceCast and ShoutCast streams)
- Access to pre-selected lists (ShoutCast and SourceMac)
When they say minimalist interface, they aren’t kidding - there’s a lot more to this software than you might think at first glance. Normally, this is all you see on the screen:
We should note that if you don’t care for the basic style of the interface, there are a number of skins available for download. Anyway, when FStream is the foreground application and you press the SHIFT key, it changes color and now you are at the recording panel:
The button on the left hand side controls playing or pausing the stream unless the SHIFT key is depressed and you’re at the recording panel, in which case it starts or stops recording. Note that in the program preferences you can select whether pausing the audio will simply mute it, or will actually buffer it so that when you un-pause it will play the stream from where you left off (like a PVR). We wish this functionality wasn’t buried in the preferences, but instead was on two separate buttons (or a “split” button as is used on the right side), because there are times when we may want to pause but don’t care that much about what we’re listening to (as when it’s in the middle of a long commercial break) and other times when we really don’t want to miss the discussion on whatever talk show we’re listening to.
As mentioned above, the button on the right hand side of the interface is split into two halves. Clicking on the lower half reveals a volume control slider:
While clicking on the upper half brings up the main menu:
From the main menu you can select Quick Open, which lets you enter (or paste) a stream URL directly:
But most of the time, you’ll probably want to use the Streams Manager, which allows you to select any of a multitude of preset streams, or streams that you have previously saved:
FStream actually has a fairly comprehensive help file (accessed from the top menu bar, and yes, it’s in English if you’ve selected English as your primary language) and it would be a real good idea for you to scan through it if you want to utilize FStream to its fullest capabilities. Also, if you want to visit the author’s web site, we suggest using either Yahoo Babel Fish or Google Translate to translate the page to English (here are links to the translated main FStream page using Yahoo and Google).
FStream is a great FREE program, and it is the only one we know of that will give you the ability to pause live audio streams and/or record them for future listening. The only way it could be made better (other than the aforementioned suggested change in the pause control) would be to actually allow recording on a schedule, so that you could have it automatically start recording your favorite show at the time it begins (and stop when it ends), in case you aren’t home, or simply forget that the show is on. If there is a way to do this with FStream, we haven’t discovered it yet, but if you’ve figured out how to do it please leave a comment and share what you know!
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