8:47 am Software
YouTube has a lot to offer the world, besides the wonders of the next LightSaber kid or a home video of someone getting injured at a wedding. Clips of news broadcasts, homemade video of important world events – if you take the time to plumb the depths of online video, the educational opportunities are endless.
Of course, due to filtering issues, we can’t access YouTube here on campus. But there’s a perfect clip of “The Colbert Report” you want to show in your Current Events class. What oh what to do?
There are a lot of ways to handle this – plugins for Firefox, downloadable programs, scripts you can run in browers, etc etc. The process I’m about to outline is a little slower than some other methods, but it is the easiest in terms of steps.
First off, you’re going to need a home computer and Net access – broadband recommended, the faster the better.
Find the video you want on YouTube – or Google Video, or almost any other Flash-based video site. Go to the page with the actual video. A quick word about YouTube – say you’re looking for a clip from “The Colbert Report”, and you find five samples of the same clips. You’ll want to take a quick look at the first few seconds of each clip to determine which ones are the best looking. Some people upload files with terrible encoding, others upload pristine copies. Go with the best-looking one, it’ll result in a better end-product.
You’ll then want to open a new window, and in that new window head over to http://www.all2convert.com/index.html. This is an online converter / downloader for Flash Videos. Look on the left-hand side of this new page. There is a field marked “URL Video”. Copy and paste the URL of the video you want (from your original window) into this field. Below that is a drop-down menu. Choose the last option: “WMV Windows Video” (it is not the best choice, but it’s the only choice that is guaranteed to work with our Windows Media Player here on campus due to codec issues). In a few moments, your file will start downloading. Your mileage may vary in terms of time, subject to the speed of your home connection.
Then all you need is a school computer and LCD projector to show the clip in class. I highly recommend putting Windows Media Player in “Full Screen Mode” when doing so. In terms of actually getting the videos to school – they’re going to be too large to email to yourself through the school’s email system, so you can either use an external email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) or you can put them on USB keys and bring them in.
You can obviously convert multiple clips at a time, and when you bring them to school set them up as a playlist on Windows Media Player.
These clips will be of decent-but-not-spectacular quality – but keep in mind that Flash videos are half the resolution and half the frame rate of “normal” video, which is how the files are kept at a reasonable size.
Next time – how to rip DVD’s for more efficient classroom use.
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