Want to know how to download a YouTube video? Just go and watch the video! It’ll automatically be downloaded for you. Let me explain further…

While you watch the video on the web it is being downloaded for you to your /tmp directory. Try it out:

1. go watch any YouTube video
2. go to /tmp
3. you’ll find a mysterious file name there without any extension reference. Double click and you should see that is is your video. If you’d like change the file name to something you’ll remember better and move it to whichever folder you want.

The  file downloaded will be .flv so if you want another format later on, please use a converter app.

Doing a basic screencast in Linux is pretty easy. The package recordMyDesktop can be found easily on the repository of many Linux distros (including Ubuntu 9.04 that I use).

With this package you’re actually getting the backend recordMyDesktop which is written in C and the frontend developed in Python (gtk-recordMyDesktop or qt-recordMyDesktop).

The feature list is simple but that is all I needed for a quick screencast demo I had to prepare this afternoon:

If you’re using Linux with Gnome, do a mouseover the music file and you’ll start hearing the song immediately.

You don’t even need to double-click to open the file in a media player, not even a mouse click is needed. Nice little hidden secrets of an awesome desktop file manager.

I’m a big Last.fm enthusiast (although it isn’t open source) so I try to install a scrobbler on every single media player I use. It took a bit of time for me to find a Symbian Last.fm client and mobbler it was.

Mobbler works like a charm! It recognizes and scrobbles songs being played by the phone’s native media player, plus I get all of the cool Last.fm features such as:

Over these past 2 days I recorded some videos on my Symbian cell phone that I wanted to share with my family back home. Problem is that the videos are saved in .mp4 format, which gave me some problems when trying to edit them (video editors I tried to use didn’t support mp4).

So, as we speak I’m converting these files to .ogv with ffmpeg. Linux command line work is involved but just writing one very simple line:

As an open source fan, I make my audio CDs portable in .ogg (.oga) format. Problem is that unfortunately .ogg isn’t as popular as it should be right now so sometimes it can be difficult to find a decent player, which is exactly what happened with my new Symbian cell phone.

Symbian OggPlay to the rescue, I was able to solve the issue. OggPlay can play.ogg, .oga, .flac (haven’t tested it myself yet), and .mp3. It also recognizes the default audio formats you have on your mobile so you can still play .wma (for example) with the same program.

My favorite cross-platform music manager Songbird is now on its 1.0 release!! I’ve written about Songbird before and it is fantastic to report that finally the first full release is available.

Why do I like Songbird so much?

• it is open source;
• cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS X)
• built on top of the same framework as Firefox, it allows me to navigate through other websites and easily get songs that are embedded in these websites;
• also inheriting from Firefox is the ability to have add-ons so its functionality can be greatly expanded.

Using GStreamer for playback means that Songbird can easily play several music formats, and do it well. Also improved for the 1.0 release is the performance (using much less system resources), faster to startup, some cool add-ons that come bundled with the software, a nice way of handling iTunes library migration, and more.

Today I had to add subtitles to a short movie. Problem is, I had never done that before, I’ve seen subtitle files but never actually done any changes to them. Let alone create subtitles!

So, I go to my Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs app to look for what is available for me. I found and installed Gnome Subtitles.

The program was pretty simple to use. I opened a video, started transcribing the audio myself into the subtitle lines at the bottom of the screen and pressed Ctrl+Enter when I wanted a separate subtitle line. Gnome Subtitle has a movie preview window so that I could see exact time (or frame) any dialogue was spoken for me to sync the subtitles to.

One of the reasons why I don’t like iPods is the entire philosophy of having everything closed and according to the likes of Apple. But, fortunately the open source community is too awesome and have developed a firmware that we can install on several different audio devices.

Rockbox is a bit like an operating system for portable media players. You can install it on several different devices from the following manufactures: Apple, Archos, SanDisk, Toshiba, iriver, and more.

The Mozilla team has announced that Fiirefox 3.1 will come with native support for Theora and Vorbis media. So, this means that:

1. open source media can become a bit more mainstream (finally moving away the proprietary mp3 monopoly);
2. no longer will we have to install Firefox plugins to see embedded audio and video files (as long as they’re in .ogg format)

The code is already out, available in Firefox’s nightly builds releases for large scale testing.