Monday, April 14, 2008

How to embed background music in googlepages

A lot of people have been asking me about this - which is no surprise, seeing as the popular "solution" to this seems to be to publish the page, save it, edit the code, upload as a file, and link to this file. This means that your ability to edit the page is at par with the competence of the Kolkata Municipality.

So here's the easy way

First, upload or find the URL of the music file that you wish to play in the background.

Once you've uploaded your music file - pulp.mid in this case, just paste the following code into your page. (Just go to the right bottom corner of the screen and click on 'edit html' : once there, just paste the code.)




(Click on the image if it is unreadable - I would have used text, but blogger also has a similar code, so it'll just disappear..)

Its possible to embed anything using this code, not just music. Once the first line is written, you can write html code normally.

N.B. : It is advisable to put this code at the bottom of your page, so that you can use the googlepages interface with greater ease.

This is twenty per cent skill. Adios Amigos!

Sunday, April 13, 2008

How to download videos from Youtube, Dailymotion,et cetera

Some of my friends have been asking me for posts on a few things, like how to save flash videos(youtube, etc.) and play them, and also on how to embed sounds, or other things in googlepages. So, here's the first one...


Step 1 : Get the video

If the site does not seem to allow saving, You can get the video by using a website like http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/ or, just wait for the video to load (all of it), then go to your Temporary Internet Files folder, and copy the file to another folder.

For Firefox users:
Just open firefox, and type in about:cache?device=disk as the URL. The folder used for Temporary internet files will be displayed, as well, as the various files and their details. Just search for the URL of the video, and then open the folder and copy the file by seeing the file size. Arranging the icons according to size is usually a good idea.

For IE users :
In many computers, the Temporary Internet files folder is hidden, so to view it, you'll have to change your view. To do this, just open any folder, and go to:
Tools > Folder Options > View (the second tab)

Here, change the following :
A) In Hidden files and Folders, select Show hidden files and folders
B) Uncheck the box saying Hide protected operating system files

Now go to
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USERNAME\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
And copy the file to your chosen folder.

If you have trouble finding the file, there are three common ways of identifying it-
A) Right click, and arrange icons by size - your videos will be larger than most other files.
B) Arrange by Modified - if your video was the last thing you loaded, then your video will be the large file at the end of the file list.
C) The name of the file will often begin or end with the name it has on the URL, so,
www.blahblah.com/videonum=drw43rfsf will often have the name drw43rfsf.

Step 2 : Get a player or codec

There are many ways of playing these files, but the three most common ways are to use a flash video player, or to install a codec, so it plays in Windows Media Player, or to use another player like VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/).

There are plenty of flash video players available, however, it is often difficult to know which ones are safe to use, so be sure to scan it before running.

As for codecs, the one I use is FFDshow (I actually installed something called PlayFLV, which required FFDshow to play most new files). This, once installed, allows you to play numerous file types on Windows MediaPlayer.
FFDshow can be found at : http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow

. dot . dot . dot .

Been a long time

Hello World. Its been a long time since my last post, and it seems to me, that 'soory'[sic] seems to be a most inadequate word.

I have been wasting my time in a number of new ways, ranging from playing Minesweeper to trying to imitate a crow to mugging words for GRE (I shall soon put up a post detailing said preparations and the sites I have found useful). That being said, it has come to my attention that I am woefully behind on my plans for WORLD DOMINATION, OR FAILING THAT, BECOMING FILTHY RICH.

So, here I am.