Music fans have been using YouTube as a quick way to listen to songs for ages now, and it looks like developers are finally catching on. I recently told you about TubeRadio.fm, which turns YouTube into a pretty nice little music player. Now there's another YouTube/Last.fm mashup called YouScrobble. It's a similar service, but with a twist: YouScrobble is a music players, but it also allows you to download a limited number of songs.

YouScrobble, true to its name, will scrobble your songs to your Last.fm account, while TubeRadio.fm's integration with Last.fm is limited to mining it for track data. On the other hand, TubeRadio.fm shows the actual music video for each song and automatically puts together the track listings of album. It's really a tossup between the two, but if you don't care about downloading - heck, you can just use Dirpy to download any song from YouTube, anyway - I think TubeRadio is the better choice.

[via ghacks]

Everyone knows Flash is a massive resource hog, especially on Mac or Linux. If you're sick of totally bogging down your system whenever you want to watch a YouTube video, the new video specifications in HTML5 might be the answer. By using HTML and plugging into the Mp4 streams on YouTube, the folks at NeoSmart have created an HTML5 YouTube Viewer. It doesn't quite work perfectly, and not every browser is ready for it, but it's nice proof-of-concept to try out.

The Download Squad team had mixed results watching videos with this viewer. Firefox was a bust - NeoSmart says it's because of proprietary codec issues - but some other browsers worked. I got working video (extremely smooth working video, actually) on both Chrome and Safari for Mac, but no audio. Meanwhile, on the Windows side, fellow Download Squad bloggers report that the HTML5 viewer works well in Chrome 4 in XP, and Chrome 3 on Windows 7.

Meanwhile,YouTube seems to be running its own HTML5 tests, including some examples of new in-browser 3D rendering features. Sounds like this could finally be the end of reliance on Flash ... once your browser supports it, or once YouTube starts supporting OGG Theora, Firefox and Chrome's video format of choice for HTML5.

Using YouTube to listen to music is nothing new. Search for a song you want to hear, and you're very likely to find it, even if there's no official music video. YouTube isn't built to listen to music though, and that's where TubeRadio.fm comes in. It's a slick music player that lets you create playlists from YouTube, and can even find entire albums at once, using track listings and album art from Last.fm. The TubeRadio homepage describes the service as "iTunes meets YouTube meets Spotify," and that's not much of exaggeration.

TubeRadio.fm puts more emphasis on the "radio" than the "tube": the videos themselves take up very little space in the UI. More space is devoted to the tabbed info box at the bottom of the screen, which automatically pulls up lyrics and artist bios. TubeRadio does a good job of getting the album versions of songs when you use 'Discography Mode' to grab whole albums, but occasionally it will find a live version instead. Fortunately, there's another mode that searches all of YouTube, and you can manually add the version you want, if it exists.

Remember when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion back in 2006? A lot of observers couldn't help but feel that maybe Google was paying a bit too much for a service that hadn't really demonstrated a profitable business model yet.

And you know what? Google CEO Eric Schmidt agrees. Kind of. CNET reports that in a deposition earlier this year, Schmidt stated that he asked Google's board of directors to approve the $1.65 billion figure, even though the board only believed YouTube was worth between $600 and $700 million at the time.

Basically, if Google didn't spend the extra money, Schmidt was under the impression that another company would purchase the web's most popular video site instead. And while YouTube wasn't making any real money in 2006, Google has continued to build the site's traffic while rolling out several different revenue models.

What do you think. In retrospect, do you still think Google paid too much for YouTube?

What's been on the Internet 12 hours too long, is 5 years too old and demonstrates the gaping chasm between blog journalism and credibility? This Huffington Post piece pointing to a five year old YouTube video as footage from yesterday's tsunami in American Somoa.

Are you getting all your news on the Internet? Constantly cruising a mix of major and minor media sites, or sucking them all in at once through an aggregator like Google News? Pointing fingers at blogs, Amazon's Kindle, Google News and Youtube has become a popular habit of once healthy -- and now hurting -- newspapers and broadcast outlets both great and small. even Twitter fell complicit, with both @huffingtonpost and @Alyssa_Milano tweeting it to nearly 200k followers each, both without a hint of retraction.

Mistakes do happen, and no one is saying that major media gets it right 100% of the time -- or prints retractions and corrections in the same size font point and weight as the stories they seek to correct. But, it's near certain that 5 year old incorrectly attributed footage wouldn't still be airing on any national news service -- 12 hours after it was first run.

This would be different if we were discussing any third tier blog running in the streets with a wildly incorrect and unvetted story -- heck, Newsmax and Michelle Malkin practically invented that strategy. But this is Huffington Post -- the number one blog in the world according to Technorati, and an oft-cited source in the old media universe. Pitiful.

So, still ready to write off all of those old media institutions of the Fourth Estate and pin the murder on teh Intarwebs?

Update 2:42am: HuffPo has removed the video as of a little after 2am EST. The original YouTube video in the post was here. Still no response from Huffington Post, and no public mention of the incident.

YouTube may be an online video site, but that doesn't mean you can't use it to distribute podcasts, audio interviews, music (which you own the rights to) and other audio files. In order to upload an audio file to YouTube, you'll need to convert it to a video format by using software to add your audio to a video track, photo slideshow, or a static image.

But if you don't feel like taking the time to edit a video using desktop software, you can convert an MP3 file to a video file quickly and easily with MP32Tube, a web-based service that will create a video file for you and even upload the finished product to your YouTube account.

All you have to do is sign in with your Google Account (using Google's API), choose a background image, pick an MP3 file, and hit convert. A few minutes later the file should be available on your YouTube page.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Some YouTube videos are really only worth it for the audio portion. I've seen tons of songs posted to YouTube with still images instead of real videos, and often wished I could just download the audio in one step. Dirpy lets you easily save the sound from a YouTube video as an mp3 for later listening, or save the whole video if you really want to.

One of Dirpy's best features is the ability to specify the portion of the audio you want to download by entering start and stop times, which really helps when you come across a video with a long intro. Dirpy also lets you set ID3 tags for your ripped audio files, so they're probably labeled in iTunes and other players. You can find videos to rip by searching on Dirpy or using the bookmarklet on any YouTube video page.

[via Lifehacker]

Believe me, I'm as shocked as anyone to be writing this post, but RealPlayer SP ships with a substantially reduced amount of suck compared to previous versions. Yes, the new version sucks so much less that I'm actually ok with using it to download and convert web video.

There are still glimpses of the past, of course. The installer does offer a toolbar (at least it's Google and not Ass...er, Ask). It also offers the pro version and a 14 day trial of something, but I can't tell you specifically what it was. Instead of reading, I quickly located the "leave me the hell alone" button and closed the screen.

There's an incredibly short post up at Typophile by Miha showing how much better YouTube's favicon could be if Google applied a sub-pixel rendering technique. Sub-pixel rendering is the approach that Microsoft uses in its ClearType font-smoothing technology, though there are many others using the technique. The concept of sub-pixel rendering is that you can fool the eye into seeing smoother curves and cleaner lines than are actually possible due to the pixel density of a screen by using very specific colors. Miha's example shows that to make clear-looking white inside the read YouTube logo, you actually use yellows and purples rather than the white that is currently used.

While there's no doubt that sub-pixel rendering is valuable for rendering text on computer screens, is it really necessary to have specialized talents in this area to make favicons more readable? There's no doubt that Miha's revised version of the YouTube favicon is more clear and easier to read; what do you think? If you could apply it easily, would you revise your site's favicon using sub-pixel rendering?

[via Google Blogoscoped]

YouTube Auto Buffer is a userscript that fixes a lot of the things that annoy me most about YouTube. It's a beefed up version of the barebones one Lee wrote about last December. Instead of autoplaying a couple seconds of video and having to stop and start because nothing's buffered, this script turns autoplay off and clips fully buffer before playing.

I don't know about you, but I was doing that manually whenever I loaded a YouTube vid anyway. On top of that, it also turns HQ/HD on by default, so you're watching the best available version of each video, and hides the in-video ads that YouTube occasionally shows.

You'll need the Greasemonkey add-on to run YouTube Auto Buffer in Firefox, and the equivalent in other browsers (for Safari, it's GreaseKit). If you don't like all three of Auto Buffer's features, you can turn any of them off in the script's preferences. They're hiding in plain sight underneath YouTube's search box -- not in the Greasemonkey menu as you might expect.

[via Lifehacker]

YouTube's most popular content has always been user-generated, with a lot of self-produced stars making a name for themselves on the site. People go there to watch the latest viral videos, and maybe TV shows that haven't yet been taken down due to copyright. That's why it might sound strange that YouTube is reportedly getting into the business of streaming Hollywood movies, a la Hulu or Netflix. According to the Wall Street Journal, heavy-hitting movie studios like Sony and Warner Brothers are already in talks with YouTube.

Streaming rentals would be available for a limited time, and would either cost a flat fee (like iTunes) or be ad-supported (like Hulu). The WSJ speculates that $4 would be the price to rent a new release. Although this squares with what iTunes charges, iTunes movies are downloadable, and don't necessarily need a speedy internet connection like streaming does. YouTube is no-commenting the story, except to say that they're developing their relationships with movie studios.

[via Wired]

It's been in beta for some time, but today, finally, Windows Live Movie Maker has gotten its release papers.

Yes, it's got the love-it-or-hate-it ribbon interface. On its tabs are loads of transition effects, filters and fades, caption tools, and ready access to editing functions. Videos can be created in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios and resolutions up to 1080p. YouTube uploading is now built-in and other services like Facebook, SmugMug, Picasa, and Drupal-based sites can be added via plugins.

For those of you who, like me, don't want to deal with the Live installer, head on over to Softpedia to download the new version directly.

Remember, this baby is Windows Vista or Windows 7 only.

Quick-fix updates have also been pushed to the rest of the Live suite and the Messenger Geek has a list of links to the individual .msi installers.

Dazzboard, an app that enables easy media transfers between your computer and your mobile device, now has a Facebook version. This new Facebook app lets you skip a step in the process of uploading photos and videos from your portable phone, camera, or even PSP to Facebook. Instead of going from device to computer to Facebook, you can use Dazzboard to drag and drop media from one location to another.

Although you can use Dazzboard to transfer media to and from your PC, there's no desktop software required. You can transfer your media to and from Facebook anywhere, as long as you have a browser and a place to plug in your device. There's also Flickr and Youtube support, and you can drag and drop media amongst various networks the same way you'd do it between your phone and your computer. The app is currently only available for Windows, and seems to work best with IE8. Mac compatibility is in the works.

Google's 20% self-directed time rule is a wonderful thing -- it brought us Gmail, Google News, and AdSense, to name just a few. The latest toy to come out of a Googler's one-day-a-week personal project time is 3D stereoscopic videos in YouTube.

The concept is simple; upload a video that contains both the left eye and right eye frames side-by-side. To make your video viewable as in 3D, tag it with "yt3d:enable=true" as well as "yt3d:aspect=3:4", setting this one to the actual aspect ratio of your video.

The YT3D tag will enable a drop-down menu under your video that gives the viewer the option to view it using various 3D technologies, from Red / Cyan glasses to simple Parallel or Cross-eyed modes that don't require special glasses to view. The video is manipulated for each of these various viewing modes on the fly, so you can switch between instantly.

It seems likely that as consumer electronics companies look for ways to differentiate their products, we'll likely see stereoscopic video cameras in the not-too-distant future. So, what do you think? Cool new YouTube mode, or is 3D simply not all it's cracked up to be? Let us know in the comments.

[via Googling Google]

If, like me, you're totally obsessed with all of the coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing and walk on the moon, you're going to like Jason Kottke's latest project.

If you're not aware of the coverage I'm talking about, first of all check out We Choose The Moon, which is a project put together by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum to follow the Apollo 11 mission from lift-off to landing on the moon. The site contains CG graphics of the main (i.e. most interesting) stages of the trip, and there is full 24 hour a day coverage of the radio communications between mission control, the service and control module, and the lunar lander. Of course, to top it all off, you can follow mission control, the control module, and the lunar lander on Twitter.

I've been following We Choose the Moon all week, and though it's amazing to have coverage of all of the radio communications, I'm spoiled. I want video. Luckily, NASA knew that video coverage of the moon landing was imperative, and the mission was put together with a priority of having video coverage available and broadcast live to the public. Jason Kottke has delved into YouTube and either found or uploaded copies of Walter Cronkite's CBS News broadcasts of both the first ever moon landing, and the first ever moon walk, for a site he's put together called Apollo 11 Live TV Coverage. Kottke states that the site was inspired both by the anniversary of Apollo 11, and by the unfortunate recent passing of legendary news anchorman Walter Cronkite.

The site is set up with a late-60's era television framing YouTube, which Kottke hopes will help to emulate the experience people had 40 years ago of watching the live action on relatively small and low-resolution television screens. It's cleverly coded to show the video coverage at exactly the same times it was originally broadcast 40 years ago - this isn't typical web-based video where you can scrub backwards and forwards; this is appointment television viewing.