Convert Youtube Videos Into MPG Format

To begin with, you will need to download the Youtube video that you want. There are a number of ways in which you can do this. The most popular ones are to use the online service Vixy. there are also a number of diffrwent Firefox addons that you can use to download the video of your choice. a few of my favriout addons to do this are either Fast Video Downloader", or VidoDownloader

If you are not a fan of Firefox, then you can always use this handy little program called Youtube-dl. To install this, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Then to download the video that you need:

youtube-dl http://YOUTUBE_VIDEO-URL

Now that you have your Youtube video downloaded, you can now convert it.
To do this, you will need the ffmpeg package installed:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

To convert your flash file, you will need to do something like this:

ffmpeg -i FlashVideo.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 FlashVideo.mpg

So what does all this mean?
The FlashVideo.flv is the name of your flash file.
-b : video bit rate. The default bit rate is 200. So you will only need to include this if you want a different bit rate
-ab : audio bit rate. the default is 64
-ar : sample rate. This default for this is 44100 Hz
-s : Frame Size. the format of this is Width x Height. The default is set to 160x128

This can be used for Youtube, Google Videos, and many of the other popular video hosting sites (as long as the format is .flv)

How To Watch Any Video In ASCII

Okay, so I got bored at college, and had a play around with some things.. and what I came up with was amazing

First, make sure you have mplayer & LibAA installed:

sudo apt-get install mplayer
sudo apt-get install libaa-bin

Okay, so now here is the cool bit!
(You'll need an AVI video for this... you can download youtube videos from http://www.vixy.net in AVI format)

Once you have an AVI file downloaded and ready to use, you can play the video in ASCII mode using the following command:

mplayer -vo aa xxxxx.avi

Just change xxxxx.avi to your video name .avi

Nice huh?

And if you want to view the video in color, you will need to download and install Caca-Utils:

sudo apt-get install caca-utils

And to paly the video:

mplayer -vo caca xxxxx.avi

Have a look at some of the settings using

mplayer -vo --help

to find how to change the contrast and many other options of the video.

If you have any problems with install or using any of these applications, then please do leave a comment to you, and I will help you as much as I can do.

Voice And Video Support In Pidgin

Now wouldn't that be a cool thing to have in Pidgin?
For me, that is the only thing that lets Pidgin down.

Well, some good news! They are in the process of developing pidgin to support both video and voice. - The bad news is that it isn't going to be done any time soon.
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/34

Watch Live TV On Ubuntu

Zattoo have developed a great application that allows you to watch live TV on your computer or laptop. All you need to run this application is broadband internet, and of course, Linux. This is 100% free & legal!

To Read more on Zattoo, and to download, please visit this link: Download Zattoo

Edit (31 Dec 09):
For a while now, Zattoo have said they have had problems with their Linux version, and have taken Linux of from their supported Operating Systems. A message used to be there saying they are doing all they can to fix the Linux version.

After checking back today, it seems that they were unable to fix any problems they had, and no longer are trying to sort it out. they have completely removed Linux from their downloads page now. Taking a look in their FAQ section, and I only came across this: "Zattoo does not support Linux platforms anymore."

Let's hope sometime in the future they will have a working Linux version up and running again.