Note: This blog post is a work-in-progress. If you have any other tools to suggest, please leave a comment and it will be added.

On September 26, 1960, about 70 million U.S. viewers turned on their TVs to watch Senator John F. Kennedy debate with Vice President Richard Nixon for the first televised presidential debate. This revolutionized the way that Americans would interact with the presidential candidates for years to come.

Fast forward 48 years and see how the times have changed. YouTube is being used as a direct source for presidential candidates to address the Internet audience. The problem is that some channels on YouTube are temporary and are fully controlled by the user. So let’s say that 12 years from now I want to see how Obama ansswered a specific question, it wouldn’t be possible if I recorded the presidential debate on TV or available on YouTube.

Here are some ways to save YouTube videos.

By Software/Operating System

Windows:

FlvDown: Type in the URL, works with YouTube.
KeepV: Works with Flash videos and converts as well. Copy the link of the video and click Get Video. Converts automatically.
Moyea FLV Downloader: Download from all Flash Video sites and convert to iPod, iPhone, PSP, MP3, WMA/WMV, XviD, etc.
My Video Downloader: Not free. Works with YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Daily Motion, iFilm, etc. Converts to iPod, PSP, Zune, DVD, XviD, 3gp, etc.
Orbit Downloader: Works with YouTube and Google Video. This is a P2P software that downloads fast and works by placing the mouse over the video and clicking “Get it.”
PipiSoft: Save SWF/FLV files from Flash sites. Full version costs $18.95.
Real Player: The new versions of Real Player has a new feature that allows users to download Flash from any web site. This includes YouTube and Google Video.
TubeSucker: Download videos from YouTube for free. $39.95 to download all videos from users, certain searches, playlists, categories, etc with one click. Commercial edition @ $99.95.
YouTube Grabber: Downloads FLV files from YouTube. Copying and pasting the URL and then pressing Grab saves the file to your hard drive.
VDownloader: VDownloader allows users to links from the clipboard. Copying and pasting the direct URL for the video from YouTube, Google Video, and Grinvi videos works.
VideoGet: Download videos from more than 100 different sites.

Specific for Mac O/S:

Get Tube: Download from Daily Motion, YouTube, Kewego
PodTube: One click download from Safari.
RealPlayer for Mac: Download videos from YouTube for free.
TubeSock: Works on YouTube and saves to iPod, Mac, PSP.

Linux:
clive: command line tool for YouTube and Google Video.
Gnash: Free software for Flash video downloads.
swfdec: Works on YouTube, CNN, AOL, Yahoo! Video, Daily Motion, etc.
Youtube-dl: Download videos in FLV format.
YouTube Ripper: Script that downloads videos using keywords.

Firefox Plugins

Ook? Video Ook!: Works on YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, etc.
Vidtaker: Works on Google Video, YouTube, MySpace.

Web-based Download Tools

KeepVid: Works with Google Video, MySpace Video, Daily Motion.
TechCrunch
YouTube Video Tool: Enter YouTube URL and save in FLV format.
VideoDownloadX: Simple download and convert. Works with MySpace, YouTube, Spike, Metacafe, Daily Motion, LiveLeak.
VidGrab: Works with MySpace Video, YouTube, Google Video.
Vixy: Download and converts.
YouTubia: Search users or keywords, then download.
Zamzar: Downloads and converts.

Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube confirmed that high quality videos will start appearing on the video sharing web site within 3 months.  Introducing higher quality videos isn’t YouTube’s biggest priority.  Making video content available to everyone globally requiring low-bitrate streams is a bigger priority.

Steve Chen told CNET that current resolutions of YouTube videos were good enough for the site until now and that high-quality YouTube videos will start to appear within 3 months.  Chen also confirmed that videos uploaded to YouTube are stored in the original resolutions that they were uploaded in.  This should make compressing into a high resolution somewhat easier.  It would have been more difficult if they were taking the low quality videos that are used on YouTube and converting those into higher resolutions.

More details to come in 3 months or so.

Google’s YouTube is ready to ramp up for more and higher quality content. Now users are encouraged to upload more files, with higher resolutions, and longer in length. Each video can now be 10 minutes long and 1GB in size. Originally, each movie file allowed on YouTube was limited to only 100MB.

YouTube is also building a YouTube Uploader tool for Mac. The YouTube Uploader tool for Windows PCs can be downloaded from Multi-Video Upload site. After multiple videos are done uploading, they will be automatically added to your My Videos page.

What makes this new feature even more interesting is that although YouTube is a Google property, I believe that the video-sharing website seems to be giving us unlimited storage for content. Whereas Google gives us limited storage for GMail, Picasa, and other services. Maybe this is Google’s way of paying for YouTube server and lawsuit bills.

As pointed out by ReadWriteWeb, InterActivCorp (IAC) is also involved in the video sharing market. IAC’s Vimeo introduced HD video uploading last month. YouTube videos often times face too much video compression.

[Update by Mo Kakwan]
It should be noted that both Vimeo and this recent move by YouTube to support higher quality video are ahead of the curve. The requirements of having to play HD video is more memory and faster processors.  Be sure to check out the comments on this HD Video (http://vimeo.com/342968/) and you’ll notice a number of people experiencing choppy play. My machine is fairly old (xp 2700+ with 1 gig of ram) and is bottlenecked not by processor speed or memory but by my slow DSL line (What’s going on Slowskys?). It’s going to take a little bit before the mainstream can catch up with the early adopters. I look forward to seeing these advancements drive down the price of HD Cameras as well which are currently rather pricey.

Information Source:
[1] The YouTube Blog: Multi-Video Upload Arrives

Andrew W. Meyer, an undergraduate Journalism student at the University of Florida asked some very hard questions to former presidential candidate, John Kerry during one his speeches at the University. Some of them included why John Kerry did not insist on having President Bush impeached. Meyer also asked what it meant that John Kerry and George Bush were both Bonesmen, members of secret organization, Skull and Bones. The microphone was then cut off from Meyer and then the police officers moved in. Meyer resisted arrest and was eventually dragged near the exit and was “tased” with a stun gun while Meyer screamed, “don’t tase me, bro!”

The video of the entire incident became extremely viral on the Internet within the matter of a couple days. “The Meyer arrest video has received 2.6 million views and almost 40,000 new comments since Monday [within 2 days],” stated Wired. People have even created mash-ups for the video. The most creative I have seen so far is a mash-up of the incident with M.C. Hammer’s Can’t Touch This:

This parody got over 600,000 views in about a month and one week.

What makes a video like the one above so viral? When watching the above video, you can easily find yourself laughing, but at the same time think, “Oh my God, that really happened, I cannot believe the police actually tased him. That’s police brutality right there.” As optimistic human beings, we don’t want to be constantly thinking about negative things that happen in the media… Fortunately for us, the Internet is clever. It helps us make light out of serious situations. And the expression uttered from young Andrew’s mouth, “Don’t tase me, bro” provided the perfect comic material to accentuate that cleverness.

The role that the Internet played has made Meyer happy though. “While Meyer was incarcerated, state investigators say the jail recorded two phone calls in which Meyer ‘appears to sound elated that the arrest has occurred and at one point states that he is happy this has happened.’ They spent a lot of time talking about all the “media exposure the incident has generated,’ the investigators say.” And the police that were involved in the incident were all reinstated. Meyer even told the police officers that what they were doing wasn’t wrong when being driven to jail.

I place Meyer in the YouTube Hall of Shame along with LonelyGirl15 and Chris Crocker.

One of the outcomes of the use of the Google AJAX Search API (Beta) was a widget that enhances the embedding of YouTube videos on blogs, MySpace profiles, etc.  This new tool allows users to embed a strip of YouTube videos that are related to search expressions and YouTube Channels.  Other options for the types of videos that show up in the video bar includes the ability to select videos within the Most Viewed Videos, Top Rated Videos, and Recently Featured Videos categories.

Below is a screen shot of how a user can customize the channel selections for the video bar:

There are also additional options for customizing the video bar such as controlling the thumbnail size, the player size, and the number of results.  I decided to test out the video bar below.  Below is the outcome (I hope it works, my blogging platform, Wordpress is known to struggle with widget codes):

I just noticed that on my Alexa.com toolbar (owned by Amazon.com), Google’s rank looked a little different.  The web information company’s toolbar was telling me that Google is no longer glazed in bronze.  It had a silver spoon in its mouth.  Oh for crying out loud, If you don’t get my metaphor, what I’m saying is that Google is now ranked #2 and MSN is ranked #3.

Alexa’s Global Top 10:
1.) Yahoo!
2.) Google
3.) MSN
4.) YouTube
5.) Live.com
6.) MySpace
7.) Orkut
8.) Facebook
9.) Wikipedia
10.) Hi5

Looking at the top 10 web sites, Google has the most presence on Alexa.  They are ranked #2 and they own #4 and #7.  Whereas, Microsoft only owns #3 and #5.  Google also has a presence on #6 because they have an exclusive advertising partnership with MySpace.com.  Microsoft counteracted that move by signing an exclusive partnership with #8 website, Facebook.com. It seems like both companies were playing with their domains a little bit over the last year or so.  We saw the rise of Live.com this past year and GMail.com shifted over to the Google.com servers.  Below is a chart comparison from Alexa:

Notice the instant growth of Live.com?  This is perhaps because Hotmail.com shifted over to Live.com servers.  Seeing as how Live.com is constantly growing and MSN.com is slipping a little bit, I’m curious to see what Microsoft will do with MSN to ensure it doesn’t slip more.  And also, what will Yahoo! do to maintain #1.  Over the next couple years, we should see some interesting changes in the Top 10, especially seeing as how it felt like YouTube and Wikipedia came out of nowhere and claimed their current spots.

Gideon Yu has been travelling from job-to-job around the Valley lately. I read a little bit of background on the guy from ValleyWag^[1]. Yu recently left Yahoo! working as a Treasurer to work as a junior partner at Sequoia Capital and YouTube’s Chief Financial Officer. But today, I read an article that Yu signed on to work as Facebook’s new CFO to oversee their accounting books.

This move enhances the speculations that Facebook will be going public. Facebook has been on a hiring binge for industry experts since F8 (Facebook Applications) was unraveled. Last week, Facebook acquired Parakey, a company that was started by a couple of Mozilla Firefox’s developers.

“My heart is first and foremost with venture-stage companies and consumer Internet companies,” stated Gideon Yu. “I’m hoping this is my last job for a long time.”

“I consider it kind of a coup that we were able to recruit him here,” stated Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. “He’s just excellent.”

“We’re not looking to sell the company, and we’re really not looking to IPO any time soon,” continued Zuckerberg. “Our board and we believe it’s probably best to push some of these things off as long as possible.”

References:
[1] ValleyWag: Sequoia’s newest initiate
[2] Wall Street Journal: Facebook Hires Yu as Finance Chief

Flint, Michigan native, Michael Moore is coming out with a new and interesting documentary-like movie called SiCKO. SiCKO reflects upon the current health-care situation in America. Interestingly, Moore discovers that the only place that has free health-care is in Guatanamo Bay. Above is Moore’s intro video for his YouTube Channel and below is the SiCKO trailer:

The SiCKO YouTube channel is available at: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=SickoTheMovie[1]

[1] YouTube: SiCKO The Movie Channel

Jalipo is an online distribution video content website that has partnerships with BBC World, Al Jazeera English, France 24, and Bloomberg. 

Chris Deering is serving as chairman for the website and will offer a pay-as-you-go credit option for users that would like to view the content.  It is not user-generated content like YouTube.

“If you were looking to put us into the marketplace, I would put us at the other end of the market to YouTube. This is rights-protected, territory-restricted and monetized every minute,” stated Alex Taylor, CEO of Jalipo in an interview.

There are several categories contained within Jalipo including TV Stations, Live Events, News, Sports, Movies, Entertainment, and Other.  Within those categories, each has a link to an RSS feed that can be subscribed to.

This new service isn’t available to everyone.  Some programs have territory restrictions that will prevent users to watch the content in certain countries.  If you act soon, new users that register are eligible for 100 J:Credits free without inputting a credit card.