Tagged: YouTube

adJelly: Your social media image/ad guide

Internet / Resources
15 Aug, 2016

adJelly social media specs

You may recall that I’ve written about Advise in the past, but they’ve changed their name and domain to adJelly.

If you missed my previous write-up about them, adJelly offers a fantastic collection of specs for all the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and more. You simply select the social media site you’re creating ads, images or graphics for in the left column and you’re presented with all the specs you’ll need.

The site is particularly useful for designers because sites like Facebook offer numerous options for sizes. For instance, Facebook offers sizes for single image ads, carousel ads, video ads, video slideshow ads, cover and profile images, post images, event images and more. Plus, specs change frequently, and some sites don’t make it easy to find the specs (I’m looking at you, Facebook!).

You can also download PSD and Sketch Packs to use in building your graphics.

30% discount on Airy 2.0 upgrade

Mac & OS X
16 Mar, 2015

I’ve written about Airy in the past. Eltima Software has upgraded their awesome little YouTube video downloader to 2.0, and brought with it a few handy features.

Airy 2.0 continues to make downloading YouTube videos even easier by adding the ability to download an entire YouTube playlist with a single click. I was able to download several playlists of music videos numbering from 15 to 40 videos with no problem at all. Downloading is the same as previous versions: you paste a YouTube video address into the Airy app URL bar, or use the included browser bookmarklet (my preferred method).

The update also adds the ability to pause downloads, so the next time you open Airy, the downloads resume automatically. Given that Airy downloads videos so quickly, this may seem unnecessary, but when you consider downloading a playlist with dozens upon dozens of videos, it can come in handy.

Airy hasn’t added any new formats that I can see. But you can already save videos as MP4, FLV and 3GP formats, as well as save only the audio as an MP3, so I see little room for improvement here anyway.

Airy 2.0 is a little faster, and a little more stable—though I never had problems with the older version to begin with. This is one of those little gems that I’m glad I have around. For years there have been plenty of YouTube video downloaders that were a pain to use, and usually stopped working after a few months. Airy has been around for a while, is not free, and is provided by a stable developer. That means it’s likely to be supported for the foreseeable future.

The latest upgrade runs on Mac OS X 10.7 and later. Previous Airy users can upgrade to the new version for 50% off, and new users can use the coupon code THGM-DSC at checkout time to receive 30% off the regular $19.95 price.

Elmedia Player Pro: View, download & manage video files (15% off)

Mac & OS X
2 May, 2011

If you’re looking for a simple, one app solution to viewing, downloading and managing video files on your Mac, Eltima Software has the solution for you.

Let me start out by saying that Eltima offers a free version of Elmedia Player, but I don’t recommend it because there are already several plugins and apps that integrate with the Mac OS and your browser to simply view videos not natively supported on the Mac. While Elmedia Player (free) does this well, it adds an extra step vs. browser plugins, etc. For a truly full-featured solution, you really need Elmedia Player Pro ($19.95). (more…)

Convert YouTube and Internet videos to iPod/iTunes format for free

Mac & OS X
20 Oct, 2010

There are plenty of browser plugins that allow you to download videos from websites like YouTube. A few of them even allow you to convert the video to a different format to suit your needs. However most of them are either complex, require further processing, or simply break every time the browser gets updated. Thankfully, there’s a free Mac OS X app that does it quickly and easily.

Evom from TheLittleAppFactory does just that. Evom allows you to convert online video to a number of formats, including iPod, Apple TV and HTML5.

Evom converts Internet videos to a number of convenient formats easily

The easiest way I’ve found is to drag the Favicon of the YouTube page containing the video you wish to convert to the desktop, then to the Evom window. Evom does the rest for you. In my tests, it worked on YouTube and a number of other sites perfectly.

YouTube supports deep-linking in videos

Internet
11 Nov, 2008

YouTube You may not have noticed, I didn’t, that YouTube now supports deep-linking in their videos. Deep linking means you can tell the video exactly where to start playing – perfect for long videos where you only want to show off a portion of it. The code is easy. You simply add #t=XmXXs (substitute the Xs for the minute and seconds where you want the video to start) to the end of the link code. For instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjBOTT0tr84#t=20s In the link above, the video is 2:42 long, but when you click the link to view the video, it starts playing at the 20-second mark. Unfortunately, deep-linking does not appear to work when you embed videos in your own site. Hopefully Google adds this feature to YouTube soon.