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Collecting Cool Clips

Someone at work asked me a question today about how to do something, and I thought it was a good question. Sometimes, the definition of a good question is a question I happen to know the answer to, and in this case I did. 🙂 Although I’ve written about this topic before, it was a while ago and since the answer might be of use to others I thought I’d respond here in my blog. That way I can just direct my colleague Bernie to the blog to get the answer, plus it might benefit a few others as well.

The question was this… “If I see a video on YouTube that would be useful to me, how can I get my own standalone copy?”

This would be useful if you needed to show that video somewhere you weren’t connected to the Net, or to embed it into a slideshow for example. The videos on YouTube are in Flash Video format, (.flv) and don’t play nicely with most other programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote files. (The notable exception is SmartNotebook, which works really well with them).

So, here’s a solution…

  1. Go to YouTube and load up the video you wish to view.
  2. Select the URL of that page and copy it to the clipboard.
  3. Go to www.vixy.net and paste the URL link from YouTube into the empty URL field.
  4. Select your choice of output video format from the dropdown list.
  5. Click the Start button.

Just be a bit patient, as Vixy goes over to YouTube, finds the video, converts it, and then downloads it to your computer in the format you’ve selected. Too easy! Hope that helps you out Bernie…

Now, if you’re the more geeky type (like me) and you use Firefox or Flock or Camino or any other Gecko-powered browser, you might like to try another method using the free Mozilla add-on called UnPlug… it’s one of my favourite add-ons for the Gecko engine… Unplug let’s you, well, unplug any embedded media from a webpage and save it to your computer. Of course, this means it is still in .flv format, but I then just drop it into the wonderful VisualHub application and it spits it out in whatever format I want. Noice!

BTW, this is the video we were trying to convert…

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/csS_RnOhd-Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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Lessons from Geese

Do you have as much sense as a Goose? I first read this little piece of writing many years ago and thought it was wonderful…

As each goose flaps its wings, it creates an “uplift” for the birds that follow. By flying in a ‘V’ formation, the whole flock adds 71% extra flying range. People who share a sense of community can help each other get where they are going more easily… because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back to take advantage of the lifting power of the birds in front. If we have as much sense as geese, we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.

When the lead goose tires, it drops back into the formation and another goose flies to the point position. It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks. We should respect and protect each other’s unique arrangement of skills, capabilities, talents and resources.

The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up front to keep up with their speed. We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, production is much greater. Individual empowerment results from quality honking.

When a goose gets sick, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times, as well as when we are strong.

Today I stumbled across a video version of it on YouTube, made by advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. I recall seeing it years ago, but had completely forgotten about it. It has some beautiful slo-mo footage of Canada Geese as the words float in and out over the images… I’d love to know where the music comes from too…

I shared the video with a group of students today, so I thought I’d share it with you here on the blog as well. Enjoy.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/9cdyej0AJaI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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Walls Come Tumbling Down

Boy, is my face red…

As one who so often espouses the true value of a blog as being its ability to encourage direct discussion and conversation with its readers, I happened to find a couple of stray comments over at Paul Wilkinson’s 24 Learning blog that took me by surprise. He and others were noting how difficult is was for them to leave a comment here on Betchablog. Paul, Rachel and an anonymous somebody were all saying how they tried to comment on my recent laptop trolley post but couldn’t because this site required them to log in to comment. Oops! Sorry about that.

Here’s what happened… I was having a heap of comment spam a while back, so I played with the WordPress settings to make life harder for the spambots. Apparently I made life harder for everyone. I’ve now turned off the strict security that required a login to leave a comment. After my chat with James Farmer last night on the Virtual Staffroom podcast where he mentioned the new Edublogs features for minimising comment spam, I feel much safer in backing off the security so people can easily post.

So, if you’ve wanted to leave a comment at some stage and it was all too hard, I’m sorry for the inconvenience. However, it’s all fixed now so go for it. 🙂