On the one hand, a browser is just a portal to the web, and so you'd think the last thing you would really need are a bunch of bells and whistles to make a browser look cool. And Google Chrome, with it stripped down interface doesn't really seem like it would have very much to highlight.

But you know what? A car is really just a vehicle for traversing the road. But most car commercials make the car itself look like the sexy thing, not the road. And the video above really does make Chrome look more exciting than the web pages you'll use it to visit in real life.

You can find the rest of the videos at the Google Chrome page on YouTube.

[via TechCrunch]

Microsoft and Apple have been spending millions of dollars on sleek advertising campaigns. Linux, on the other hand is an operating system maintained by a worldwide network of volunteers. Nobody's really promoting it as a desktop operating system other than enthusiasts spreading news by word of mouth.

So the Linux Foundation decided to put together a video contest asking some of those enthusiasts to develop their own ads. The odds of any of these commercials showing up on prime time TV aren't great. But this week the Linux Foundation picked five finalists from more than 90 entries. Tomorrow the winner will be announced, but all five of the finalists are worth a look if you're interested in open source software development.

The video at the top of this post wins my vote for the funniest of the bunch. But I'm not sure it's the best at conveying what makes Linux special. You can find the other four entries after the break.

[via OStatic]

NBC has relaunched its NBC Direct video download service. Honestly, ever since Hulu launched, I haven't thought much about NBC Direct, which I first covered back in 2007. There aren't any videos available from NBC Direct that you can't find on Hulu, and the clunky DRM and download application make NBC Direct much more difficult to use than the web based player.

Still, NBC Direct has two advantages over Hulu or other online video sites:

1. You can watch videos while you're not connected to the internet
2. Videos are available in high definition

There are a few caveats: The NBC Direct player is Windows only. Question number 1 in the FAQ is whether there are plans for a Mac version. NBC's answer? Use Boot Camp to install WIndows on your Mac. And while the videos you download look like normal FLV Flash video files, NBC uses DRM which means that videos will stop playing at some date in the future. And you can only watch videos on the computer you used to download them.

The downloads are pretty speedy. NBC uses peer to peer technology which you can off if you're willing to deal with "standard quality" videos instead of the "high quality" versions that are available to P2P users.
[via NewTeeVee]

There's no question that it's faster to purchase a movie from the iTunes store than your local video store -- assuming you have a speedy internet connection. But if you want to get the latest releases as son as they're out on video, you're probably better off making the trek to the video store. Or at least that's what we would have told you yesterday, when it could take weeks or months longer for movies to show up on iTunes. But now Apple has announced that many movies will be available on iTunes the same day as they are released n DVD.

Apple has reached deals with Fox, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, Sony, Lionsgate, Image, and First Look. That covers a lot of territory. New releases will typically set you back $14.99. The press release doesn't make it clear whether this applies to the $2.99 movie rentals, so if you want to rent a video for just a few bucks, you might still better off using Netflix or walking to a bricks and mortar store.

[via TUAW]

If there's one thing we know about Flickr users, it's that they'r not shy about sharing their opinions. Shortly after Microsoft made an offer to buy Flickr's parent company Yahoo!, images mocking the deal started showing up all over the site. And now that Flickr has added the ability for uses to upload short videos, a large group of Flickr image-only purists has formed a "NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!!" group.

Over 6,000 members have already joined the group, and more than 1600 have signed a petition asking for the new feature to be removed.

Basically, their argument is that there are plenty of places for people to upload and share videos. What's made Flickr special is its focus on images. Of course, anyone can filter out videos from their search results just by clicking on the advanced search options. It would be nice if the feature were more prominently placed, but why ask Flickr to modify its search bar when you could just try to incite a riot?

[via Thomas Hawk]

It's time for YouTube to start earning its keep. Back when Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion a lot of us were wondering how Google planned to make money from the video sharing site. And for a year or so, the company has been talking about embedding ads in YouTube videos. A while back, Google even started offering an ugly ad unit that fits in the border of embedded YouTube videos (pictured right).

Now NewTeeVee reports that Google is preparing to launch an improved version of its video ad units. The new ads will be in-video ads, showing up as pop-up overlays over the top of your video. Publishers will be able to decide whether or not to display ads and where they should appear in a video. Advertisers will be able to publish either short text or video ads that will show up in a video.

Like Google's text and image-based ads, they'll be chosen based on the other content of the web site. But they'll also be paired with relevant videos, which is a bit trickier to accomplish since it's not easy for a computer to decide what a video is about. But then if you've ever noticed completely irrelevant ads popping up in your Gmail, you know that's nothing new.

Update: Google has posted some more info on the company blog, including a link to Google's new video advertising page.

Since our recent invite bonanza, we've enjoyed the heck out of our Hulu membership. But, since its inception, Hulu has been a US-only party. And, while OPENHulu or TVparadise opened up Hulu to a crowd of non-invitees, international users were still out of luck.

Of course if you're willing to trick Hulu into thinking your non-US computer is actually connected to a US internet connection, you can get around that restriction. One way for non-US residents to watch Hulu videos is by using a program called Hotspot Shield. We say "it seems" because, since we are inside the US, we don't have a method of testing whether or not this works.

Here's how it done:

Hotspot Shield is a free program which creates a virtual private network between your computer and a wireless router. While its focus is mainly on protecting your private information from hackers (you've seen them before: those shady characters sunk deep into a comfy chair at Starbucks, a Dell on their lap, a dark beanie almost covering their eyes, a decaf java chip mocha Frappucino melting silently on the table next to them), in this case, it keeps Hulu from recognizing that you are outside the US. Therefore, because Hulu doesn't know where you are from, it assumes the best and gives you full, unadulterated access to all content.

The best thing is, if this works, it will work for all US-only sites (Hello, Pandora)!

International Download Squad readers, please let us know if this works for you in the comments.

[Via profit42.com, thanks Denis!]

Limewire is one of the most popular Peer to Peer file sharing applications around, and it's easy to see why. With its simple but powerful interface, it's the next best thing to old school Napster. One thing that cheapskates and teenagers don't like about it, however, is its tendency to nag the user to upgrade to Limewire Pro for a fee.

Enter Frostwire. virtually indiscernible from Limewire, this program works just fine. It allows the user to download just about any kind of file from a massive community of Limewire and Gnutella users. Hypothetically it's possible to get copyrighted music as well, but you'd never even think about such a thing, we're sure.

Frostwire is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Ubuntu and Debian users can grab it from Synaptic, and everyone else can check out the download site.

The world of video advertising has only just begun. Google announced AdSense units using YouTube videos, and now Blinkx will be rewarding users for sharing video online.

Google offers AdSense customers a chance to provide exclusive content by placing ads over the top of online videos. But these flash ads can be distracting if you're watching a video. Blinkx takes a different approach by putting ads at the top of the video window so that there's never an ad covering the video display.

Blinkx is a video search engine with over 14 million hours of video online. Their technology uses both speech recognition and video analysis software to accurately find videos online from all major sources and now they are integrating this into targeted ad placement.

The Blinkx text ads will get placed together with embedded videos from such popular video sharing sites as YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Veoh, CollegeHumor and Daily Motion. This will work with any video, be it copyrighted or not. It works by simply dropping the embed code from a video site into a form that will spit out the new Blinkx embed code complete with additional ad codes. This will then allow users to place the videos on social networks, websites and blogs to earn revenue per click. Users must have an account on Blinkx Adhoc as well as a PayPal account which they will get paid through when the ads are clicked on.

Blinkx pays you for embedding videos from YouTube, Daily Motion and other sites on your website. It doesn't matter if you created the original video or not. And it doesn't look like there's anything to prevent you from making money on copyrighted content like clips from movies and TV shows.

We assume that copyright holders might get a little uptight about that. But since Blinkx inserts an ad above the video window and not inside of it, you could argue that this is kind of the same as adding a Google AdSense unit to a webpage above content.

Considering YouTube's undeniable 800 lb gorilla status in the video sharing space, it's becoming more and more apparent that the company needs to develop some sort of a system for detecting duplicate video uploads. Even digg and Netscape - who are admittedly social news and bookmarking sites with different issues to worry about - have a decent dupe system, as they both watch for identical URL submissions and titles, alerting the user when they aren't the first to submit a link.

So why can't YouTube make its user's lives easier by doing something like this? Granted, YouTube and others are still working on video analysis and detection technology, but what about a simple system that watches for duplications and similarities in titles, descriptions and video lengths? Searching YouTube for just about any popular music video typically returns at least half a page or more of the same exact video uploaded by users who either couldn't bother searching, or those who simply don't care and feel some need to provide their own copy for their loyal viewers.

If YouTube got their act together and created a duplicate warning system, as well as a way for users to link and share each other's videos under their own accounts, it would do wonders for cleaning up the expanding mess of duplicates, as well as simply navigating and searching the web's most popular video sharing and streaming service. As a bonus, YouTube would no longer need to host endless copies of some videos, and stats like ratings and view counts would be far more accurate due to what could be a significant drop, or possibly even an eradication, of duplicates. Everyone wins.

Apple's new iPhone is wonderful and all, but what if the information you want to sync with it is caught between worlds? Perhaps your contacts are on your Windows PC at work, your music is at home on a Mac and your photography is stored on a friend's notebook. Fear not, power-synching-user, for Gearlog has discovered that the latest iPhone-friendly version of iTunes has you covered: while music, movies and podcasts need to come from one single library, you can actually set your iPhone to sync with a photo library on a different machine, and contact and calendar info from yet another machine, regardless of Mac and PC boundaries. Simply make sure each machine is running at least iTunes 7.3 and you're ready to start toggling checkboxes to build the perfect synching system between multiple computers.

Cellfish is a simple online tool that lets PC users store information in a special online locker, then retrieve them later on mobile devices.

When logged into this social network site, you get your own page, like any other social network, and can hook up with friends, so let's just forget about that aspect of the site and get onto the usable part, the Cellfish locker. Users can upload information into their locker and later retrieve them on mobile devices. This includes a giant list of stock photos, music and videos from the Cellfish site.

Getting to your Cellfish locker from your mobile is simple. Visit Cellfish.com from your mobile browser, enter your account information and you will see all items that are stored in your online storage locker. You can choose to download them, send them to friends, save as wallpapers, or store them on your phone.

Users can also send photos and videos from mobile devices using your special Cellfish emaill address. These photos will be stored on your Cellfish user page and can then be placed in other social networks or blogs using a supplied html embed code.

Now that Pandora is unavailable outside of the US and UK, where do you go for your streaming music recommendations?

Aggrega wants to be a sort of Pandora for music videos. You enter an artist and it will pull up videos from that performer and others it thinks you might like. You can improve the recommendations by clicking "I Love" or "I Hate" buttons for each song.

But here's the problem. Aggrega grabs all of its music videos from YouTube. In other words, you'll wind up with a lot of fan-made music videos of kids lip-syncing songs or amateurs performing covers. The service also brings up a fair number of videos that have been removed, which shouldn't be surprising since many of the actual music videos posted to YouTube are done so without the consent of copyright holders.

As YouTube continues to crack down on copyright violations, it's likely that Aggrega could become even less useful unless the service uses videos from other services or actually gets distribution rights for the videos it serves up.

Another thing that's kind of annoying is that Aggrega will show you a list of upcoming videos, but it won't let you skip ahead to listen to those songs, and it doesn't always play them in order.

[via Mashable]

If making websites just isn't your thing, why not let Jimdo help.

Jimdo is an easy to use web page creation service. Users simply sign in and create a free account, incorporating pictures from Flickr, text, and videos from YouTube in a Jimdo page.

Elements on webpages can be changed with a single click, and there are no page limits. Users can totally customize pages, from background colors, to layout styles, colors and navigation. Everything is so easy to use, it's a joy. The most computer illiterate individual should get a grasp quite quickly as to whets going on, enabling them to build their own custom websites within no time.

There are a few Jimdo plans, a free one that gives users sites under the Jimdo.com domain and 500 MB of space, and another plan for 5 Euros/month that allows users to grab their own domain name to use with 5GB of space.

[via webware]

*UPDATE - Calum in the comments has just notified us that this is a potentially not safe for work site. Seems like he got served some porn content. So be wise if you choose to check this site out.

Have you ever wanted to check out a video, or tried to return to a saved video on YouTube only to come across some big red text that reads "This video has been removed". It's a total bummer. Thanks to the recent Viacom DMCA shotgun and following lawsuit, the red text of death is becoming more frequent.

So what can be done if you desperately have to check the videos out? Thanks to some individuals twiddling around in YouTube's backend, we've discovered that YouTube removes the "pointers" to videos, but most of the time it takes quite a while for them to remove the actual FLV file. Needless to say, some people have exploited this hole, and given us the ability to check out lost videos. Delutube, and Deletedyoutube both work the same way, enter the YouTube video ID and watch. The FLV files aren't online for long -- and that lag will probably only get shorter -- so make sure to check them out the instant you find out they've been deleted by YouTube.