Recently in YouTube Category

"How can I delete a video if someone else uploaded it to YouTube?"

If someone else uploaded a video to YouTube, there is no way you can directly delete it. Only someone with access to the username and password for the YouTube account that uploaded the video can delete the video. If the video infringes on your copyright, if someone included you in their video without your permission, or if the video you want deleted violates the YouTube terms of service in some way, there are a few other actions you may be able to take.

"I just started uploading videos to my You Tube Channel. Then I copied the embed code and loaded the video to my Wordpress Blog. All works great except a ton of other videos are listed as thumbnails beneath mine and can be played on my blog. I do not want these videos on my site. How do I get them off and why are they attaching when I copy my embed code?"

Part of YouTube hosting your videos for free is recommending videos from other YouTube users in the files embedded on other sites. YouTube does have a feature for turning off these extra video clips, but they hide it because they really want people to watch as many YouTube videos as possible.

Have you ever wanted to post a YouTube video on your blog or page, but automatically start it at a specific point in the video? Maybe the video is a speech and the point you are referencing is 3 minutes in to the video, or maybe it's your favorite motorcycle crash in a video montage of motorcycle crashes. Either way, you don't want to embed the video and then write instructions to fast forward to the 3 minute mark. There's an easier way. Simply grab the embed code and then modify it just a little to make the video start at the point you want. Here's how to do it:

"Is it possible to perform simple editing i.e.deleting part of a .flv flash video?"

FLV files create a kind of unique video editing challenge not readily solved by just opening the files in your favorite video editing application. The FLV format simply isn't supported by most video editing tools. You have two basic options for editing an FLV. Option 1: you can convert the FLV to another format and edit the converted file. Option 2: You can download an application specifically designed for FLV editing. In general I recommend going with editing software rather than conversion for a couple of reasons.

"I have audio files from my band's recording session that I want to put on YouTube. Every time I try to upload the files YouTube gives me an invalid file format error. I've tried both MP3 and WMA formats with the same error message. How can I upload my band's MP3 music tracks to YouTube?"

While YouTube may be among the best places on the Internet to find music by your favorite artist, it is not a music site. YouTube is a video site. The YouTube upload tool expects you to upload a video file format of some kind. YouTube specifically accepts MP4, MPG, AVI, MOV and WMV file formats. For your music files (or something like spoken audio from a speech) to upload successfully to YouTube, you need to convert it to a video format. Below are options that will make a video file with software from either a Mac or Windows PC.

Make a Photo Montage
If getting your music exposed to the YouTube audience is your primary goal, a photo montage may be the most cost effective route. Using software like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, you simply build a photo collage using your song as the back drop. Slap some transitions and effects on the photos for something a little flashier, then save out a video and upload to YouTube. Based on the way the YouTube audience tends to respond to these sorts of things, the more attractive the people in the photos you include are the better.

Add Video Titles with Lyrics
A slight variation on the photo montage is using the title and credits building tool in the video editing software to build some moving text. This could be the lyrics to your song or a clever haiku, but either way, you're giving the YouTube viewer something to look at other than a blank video while they listen to your song.

Add the Bands Album Cover
If you don't have any good photos or are simply feeling lazy, a single image of the band's album cover, or maybe your publicity photo, can be an easy way to have something visual to accompany your music on YouTube.

Combine Your Audio with a PowerPoint Presentation
For spoken presentations, coupling the recorded audio with PowerPoint slides may help visually tie the speech and concepts together.

Hire an Animator
If you have a budget (or live near a college campus) hiring an animator to make a video for your music will up the marketability of your YouTube presence. A great animation might be the thing that brings your band from obscurity to international fame and fortune.

Shoot a Music Video
Along the same lines as hiring an animator, if you can get a video made to go with your song, chances are it will fare better on YouTube. An ad in Craigslist might find you some videobloggers willing to work on a budget or if you've got deeper pockets, making a bigger production might be your ticket to a giant YouTube fan club.

The bottom line here is whatever you do you really need to convert your audio file to a video file and you might as well invest some time in making it visually appealing before you upload.

YouTube is starting to roll out higher resolution versions of videos on the site. What this means for viewers is text that looks crisp; improved sound quality; and video that loses some of those soft moments and blocky transitions we've come to expect from watching YouTube videos. There are two ways to get better video from YouTube, depending on whether you do or do not have a YouTube account.

If you happen to have a YouTube account, you can tweak your account settings to improve the way YouTube videos look. Go to your account settings and look for the Video Playback Quality link all the way at the bottom. This gives you three choices, which are basically let YouTube decide what to show you (which means you get ugly video), the slow connection setting (which means you get ugly video), or the fast connection option (which provides a slightly improved video experience).

If you don't have a YouTube account, the only way to get this to work is to use the secret handshake. When you get to a page with a video you want to watch, you need to tack some additional code on the end of the URL before you'll get the upgraded experience. Hopefully this is a short term fix, but in the meantime it's like turning a Man into a Mane with silent 'e'.

Start with the basic video like this one I did on turning clips sideways in Windows Movie Maker:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlqqlS8CDv4

Now tack &fmt=6 on the end for a much clearer picture and slightly sharper sound:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlqqlS8CDv4&fmt=6

Six little characters and it's like stepping out of a fog. Supposedly there's an even higher quality setting achieved by adding &fmt=18 to the end of the URL instead of &fmt=6, but so far I haven't seen a video where this makes a difference.

You can also build your own high quality embeds using my YouTube code generator.

Download Ashampoo ClipFinder

Quickly search for videos across multiple video sites from one convenient search bar with Ashampoo ClipFinder. This free app searches YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Veoh, MySpace, iFilm and many other places, turning up videos based on your query. Thumbnails are displayed for all videos and you can watch videos without going to any of the sites. Download your favorites to your hard drive for offline viewing. Created by the people who brought you Movie Shrink and Burn, ClipFinder is one of the best tools I've seen for finding video. Movie search and downloading is comparable to what RealPlayer 11 delivers in ease of use, without all the extra overhead associated with the media library functionality of that app. Advanced search features do a good job of narrowing video search results to help return more meaningful results, which is highly useful if you are looking for specific types of online movies. ClipFinder requires free registration for use after the first 10 days. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]

"Is there an RSS feed with my YouTube videos people can subscribe to?"

YouTube recently publicized a bunch of RSS feeds for subscribing to popular topics and categories, but they haven't made it obvious how someone might subscribe to your YouTube channel via RSS. Thanks to their well documented section for developers, this is a relatively easy. Each YouTube user has their own unique RSS feed in the format:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/jakeludington/uploads

Just replace my YouTube username, with your own YouTube username in the URL and you'll have an RSS feed of only videos you uploaded to YouTube. You can find more ways to access your YouTube information, like an RSS feed of your Favorites and Playlists, see the detailed YouTube API documentation.

A slightly different approach to this, including an enclosure with a SWF video file, is to use a URL like this where the file is in the format username.rss. This is a little more complicated because other people could tag their videos with your user name and show up in your RSS feed.Here's an example:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/jakeludington.rss

Subscribe to my YouTube RSS feed

Download Roxio Buzz

Roxio is well known for making video tools. Their Easy Media Creator suite is a popular solution for editing movies, photos and audio. For some things, like quickly preparing a file for upload to YouTube, a full-fledged editing suite can be more software than you need. Enter Roxio Buzz - an editing tool for quickly cliping a portion of video for upload to YouTube, GoFish, Silverlight, or all three at the same time. The software supports WMV, AVI, MPEG-1, QuickTime MOV files, MPEG-2 and various implementations of MPEG-4, like 3gp and h.264. For photo slideshows, you can add pan and zoom motion, apply transitions and layer a soundtrack underneath images prior to uploading. While Roxio Buzz does not replace traditional editing tools, this is among the easiest tools for people who want a quick solution for getting their favorite clips from a hard drive to YouTube or other sites. [Windows 2000/XP/Vista $19.99]

"When I watch YouTube videos, they constantly pause and restart, the video keeps saying it is buffering. Sometimes YouTube videos say they are loading forever. How can I fix this?"

When I first started watching videos online, I used to wait forever because my Internet connection was simply too slow for smooth playback. Assuming you're watching YouTube videos on a cable or DSL connection, there should be no reason your connection can't keep up. Slow YouTube videos seem to be a common problem, with YouTube video loading wait times becoming a problem that Google should be able to stay on top of.

"How can I add a YouTube video to my PowerPoint presentation?"

PowerPoint supports adding many different types of movies, including AVI, MPEG, and Windows Media. YouTube videos, which are Flash FLV files, aren't directly supported. There are a couple of ways you can add a YouTube video to your PowerPoint slides. One way involves download inga YouTube video and then converting the video to one of the formats supported by PowerPoint. If you know you'll be presenting somewhere with an Internet connection, you can embed the YouTube video in your PowerPoint slide following this slightly complicated series of steps.

The first thing you need to do is enable the Developer menu tab in PowerPoint by opening the PowerPoint options and turning it on. Click the Office icon in the top left corner followed by PowerPoint Options.

On the Popular tab, check the box next to Show Developer tab in the Ribbon and click OK.

Click on the Developer tab on the menu ribbon and click the More Controls button.

Choose Shockwave Flash Object from the list of controls and click OK.

Use your mouse to draw a box on the slide where you want the YouTube video to appear. Right-click the box and choose Properties.

Click on the square with the three dots next to Custom to open the Property Pages for the Shockwave Flash Object you just created in your slideshow.

On the YouTube page with the video you want to add to your slideshow, copy the URL from the sharing area.

Paste the YouTube URL in the box labeled Movie URL on the Property Pages box in PowerPoint.

Make changes to the URL you just pasted, replacing the = with a / and the ? with a / so that they URL looks like the one in the box below:

Preview your slideshow to verify these steps worked and you should see the YouTube video appear in the slide you pasted it in. The video will not appear in PowerPoint edit mode.

Brian writes, "I want to download just the music from YouTube. How do you separate the video from the music?"

There's no easy way to strip the audio out of a YouTube video while it's still on the Web. It's far easier to first download the video to your computer and then strip the audio once the video is on your computer. Since the new version of RealPlayer integrated video downloading the download process is remarkably easy. Once the video is downloaded, you then strip the audio and convert it to MP3, WMA or your favorite audio format.

I recently got a question from someone about how to randomly display one of many YouTube videos in a player using PHP. I'm a hack when it comes to programming, but I came up with something that should do the trick in most cases. Basically, you put a YouTube video file on a single line of a text file, for as many videos as you want to randomize, then you use a couple lines of PHP to pick one of those IDs at random from the text file.

Here's how to Randomize YouTube Videos with PHP:

I'm going to use a bunch of videos from Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome channel on YouTube for my example, because he's got a ton of stuff to choose from. Each of the video pages on YouTube has a URL that looks something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWsqTrDJ_gU

The part you're going to want to copy is everything after the equals sign, or in the example above: yWsqTrDJ_gU

Copy on that text into a text file, hit Enter and paste everything after the equals sign of the URL on the next video page on the following line. You'll end up with a series of lines that look something like this:

5MQ0QX870FE
yWsqTrDJ_gU
JyTawuNvQi0
HwRQ9dbti-4
_ziv_WeBLvo

Save this text file with a meaningful name and upload it to your Web server. Next you need to build the code to display your video. If you copy the following and paste it onto a page that supports PHP, replacing only the YourVideoList.txt with the path to your file, you should get a YouTube player with a randomized set of videos.

<?php

// Build an array from the list of YouTube videos
// Replace YourVideoList.txt with the path to your text file
// This will likely be something like /home/accountname/public_html/foldername/etc
$video_array = file('YourVideoList.txt');

// Randomly pick one video from the array
$video = $video_array[rand(0, count($video_array) - 1)];
$video = trim($video);

?>

Here's an example of the whole thing in action. Hit refresh on your browser to see the video change.

"How do you post a video on MyChurch?"

MyChurch.org is sort of a cross between MySpace and free blogging services like Wordpress.com, with a focus on making it easier for church congregations to collaborate online. MyChurch currently doesn't host videos the way YouTube or MySpace do, but they do provide a fairly easy system for linking to videos from video hosting services like YouTube. If you want to share your own video on MyChurch, you first need to upload the video to someplace like YouTube. After uploading the video follow these steps to link to your video in a MyChurch blog post.

Download Video Accelerator for YouTube

One of the worst parts of all online video playback is the wait. I generally have an incredibly fast connection available and yet I'm still waiting for files to playback. YouTube is one of the worst offenders because their playback is designed to feed you small file chunks as you need them. Video Accelerator for YouTube solves this problem by placing multiple requests for file parts, getting files to load and playback faster than they would without Video Accelerator for YouTube. By using this app, you spend more time watching video and less time waiting to watch video. A built-in search makes it easy to find videos from your desktop and bookmarking makes it easy to find videos you liked for a second viewing later. The premise is the same as other download accelerators - open more requests for the same file and get the whole thing faster. As of this writing, Video Accelerator for YouTube only speeds up video playback times for Windows XP and Windows 2000, but Vista support should be coming soon. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]

New YouTube Features

YouTube recently rolled out some new features that make the user experience a little better. The coolest of these features is something called Active Sharing which lets people see who is watching what. If you elect to turn this feature on for your YouTube account, a list of
the last 5 videos viewed shows up in the left sidebar of your Channel page similar to the example at the left here taken from my own YouTube profile. Apparently you can also see who watched videos you uploaded if A) people watching your videos have Active Sharing turned on and B) people are actually watching the videos you upload. Mashable seems thrilled about this feature, although it only really gets interesting if everybody is doing it. Here's an example of what the who's watching portion of Active Sharing looks like.

Tony asks, "How do i delete a video I uploaded onto YouTube?"

We've all had that moment where we wish we hadn't posted something online. Depending on where you post, removing things can be difficult or almost impossible. YouTube makes it fairly easy to delete a video if you decide you don't want it online anymore.

To remove a video from YouTube, you must be logged into your accout.
After logging into your YouTube account, click the My Account link at the top right of the page.

Venetian writes, "I saw your instructions of how to post a video from YouTube into your blog section of MySpace. But what if I want the video to start playing on my home page when people first visit?"

MySpace made a few changes to the way they handle YouTube videos that makes the process of adding video to your MySpace Profile page a little easier. At the same time, it's a slightly more confusing process than my previous method for adding YouTube videos to your MySpace blog. MySpace automatically changes the YouTube video embedding code to fit MySpace requirements, so you need to make sure you add the autoplay information in the right spot if you want a video to start automatically on your MySpace profile home page.
To add a YouTube video to your MySpace profile page, make sure you're logged into MySpace. Click on the Edit Profile link next to your photo.

Livy asks, "How do you put a YouTube video on Windows Movie Maker?"

To edit YouTube videos in Windows Movie Maker you need to do a couple of things. First you need to download the video from YouTube. Next you need to convert the video from the FLV file from YouTube to a video format supported by Windows Movie Maker (like WMV). Keep in mind that the YouTube video will be 320x240, which is not a television display resolution, so if you're planning to burn a DVD the video will look even worse than it does on your computer because it will contain all of the compression artifacts introduced when it was uploaded to YouTube.

Shannon writes, "I don't have a video iPod, but I was wondering if there was some program or anything that would help me strip the audio off of a video from YouTube and convert it so it will play on my iPod."

Without knowing exactly which iPod you have, there are two possibilities. Many of the newer iPods with no video support will playback the audio portion of an MP4 file without playing the video portion. If your iPod will support MP4 playback, the easiest thing to do is use one of the software apps for converting YouTube videos for iPod playback. If MP4 playback is not an option, taking video from YouTube and converting it to an audio file is relatively easy. You download the video file and then use file conversion software to go from the FLV format used for video on YouTube to an MP3 file playable on an iPod, Zune or any other portable media player. This second option requires a two step process. First download the video and then convert the file.

Kate writes, "I'm trying to put a YouTube video on my MySpace, but because I have a Mac, it won't let me use advance blog, so then I can't post the video. How do you do it on a Mac?"

If you're using Safari on a Mac, MySpace gives you an error message like the one below when you try to post new information on your blog.

By clicking OK on that message, you are switched to the plain text editor, which is what I recommend everyone do when posting YouTube videos on MySpace. Safari turns off the Advanced Editor, so you don't have to.

If you're following my tutorial on posting MySpace videos, simply skip the step where I tell you to click the link for If you can't input your Blog, click here. The rest of the steps about copying and pasting the YouTube code and deleting parts of the code are exactly the same.

If you happen to want the Advanced Editor for other types of blog posting on Mac OS X, download Firefox and always use Firefox when posting new information to your MySpace blog.

Brittany asks, "How can i get YouTube video's onto my iPod? Is this even possible?"

The files YouTube plays back on their site won't play on an iPod directly, but if you download the files to your hard drive and convert them to an iPod compatible format, they will definitely play on your iPod. Depending on whether you have Mac OS X or Windows XP, there's are two different software tools that make putting YouTube videos on your iPod almost automatic.

Putting YouTube Videos on an iPod for Windows XP

If you're a Windows user, the software you need to put YouTube videos on your iPod is iTube.

The software prompts you to paste in the link for the YouTube page with the video you want to convert, then it downloads the video, automatically converts it for your iPod and adds the video to your iTunes library. The next time you connect your iPod to your PC, you can sync the video to your iPod.

Find the video you want to download and copy the URL.

Paste the URL in iTube and click Go!

The software locates the video, downloads the video, and automatically converts the file to an iPod compatible video. The whole process takes a few minutes to complete depending on how long the video is. When the conversion process is complete, the video will be in the Movies section of your iTunes library.

Putting YouTube Videos on an iPod for Mac OS X

If you're downloading YouTube videos to Mac OS X, you need an app called PodTube. The software works almost automatically and gives you a couple of options. There is a slight trick in that the video you want to download from YouTube needs to be your top window in Safari when you start PodTube.

PodTube gives you the option to Encode the video for your iPod as well as letting you toggle whether the software will add the finished file to your iTunes library or not, so if you simply want to play the video locally on your Mac, you don't have to have the file in iTunes.

Amber asks, "I figured out how to make my YouTube video play automatically, is there a way to make it keep playing over and over again without having to press the play button?"

YouTube enables a number of parameters by appending data to the URL of the video file. They do a lousy job of making the information easy to find, but once you know how it works implementation is fairly easy. I recently stepped through how to automatically start a YouTube video, with specific steps for MySpace users. The same trick will also work on any other online publishing space. To make the video loop, so that it restarts when it reaches the end, you need to add a slightly different command either in addition to the auto-start feature or by itself if you want viewers to click play the first time.

Zachary asks, "Once I have inserted a YouTube video into myspace, is there any way to get it to play automatically? If so, how?"

In a previous article I talk about how to add a YouTube video to MySpace, without all the headaches caused by the MySpace blogging interface. Making a video start playing automatically requires one additional step, which requires modifying the code provided by YouTube for posting. This step will also work if you want to make a YouTube video automatically start playing on any other type of Web page, although the exact steps for adding video to a particular blogging engine vary.

Aimee writes, I have a two part question - first, how the heck do I put a YouTube video on my MySpace pages? You have a bunch of articles about embedding video, but I can't figure out how to do this with YouTube. Second, how do I get rid of a friend from MySpace? There doesn't seem to be any way to delete them.

YouTube provides an Embed code in the About This Video section of every video. Similar to my demonstration on how to post Flash video to the Web, you can use this Embed code to post a YouTube video to MySpace. The steps to post the video are listed below. I address your question about how to delete a friend from MySpace elsewhere.

Download iTube

Not to be confused with the other iTube! for Mac OS X, which is designed for easy location of online streaming video, this iTube makes downloading YouTube videos easier for Windows users. Put in the URL for the YouTube video you want to download, iTube converts the video to an iPod compatible MPEG-4 file and automatically adds the video to your iTunes library. The premise is simple, just paste in a URL and let the conversion magic happen, but it's a much better way to manage viewing of YouTube content offline than something like KeepVid, which merely grabs the Flash file and puts it on your desktop. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]

Brian writes, I just started watching videos on YouTube recently, but I can't figure out how to save them to my hard drive. Is this possible, or am I stuck bookmarking the pages?

YouTube uses Flash video to playback movies on their site. In addition to being universally supported on most computers, one of the many benefits of using Flash from a publishers standpoint is making it harder for people to download the movies. It's not impossible and depending on how the Flash movies are played, you can sometimes simply dig in your Temp directory for the file because the server actually downloads the entire movie to your computer during playback.