Finding, downloading, and managing media

I’ve covered this topic in varying levels of detail multiple times throughout my blogging career, but most recently in my newest post entitled “Media”. However, I am not fully satisfied with how “Media” turned out, and I do not feel that I have covered the topic enough and in a comprehensive manner up to this point, so I will do that now. In the ensuing article,

I will cover the following topics:

On music:

• Finding songs
• Listening to music for free
• Downloading music for free

On the topic of videos:

• Obtaining videos from specialized websites
• Obtaining videos through the use of torrents
• Recording video streams

On the topic of storage:

• Storage strategies
• Archiving videos
• File formats

Moving your media around:

• Moving your media between drives
• Backing up your media files

Sharing videos:

• On YouTube
• On Veoh
• On Vimeo
• On Viddler

Before continuing I am going to leave a list of the software that will be discussed throughout this article in order for you to be able to have a list to refer back to, but also so that you can easily find download links to the software should you decide to download any of the programs.

• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Orbit Downloader (Streaming media downloader)
• Vuze (Bittorrent program)
• Limewire Pirated Edition (P2P Program) (Via isoHunt)
• TeraCopy
• Any Video Converter

Music

Alright, the first topic I said that I would discuss in the music section was finding music. I’m not talking about finding music to download or anything like that, but actually finding songs that you have heard. For those of you who are now disgusted, please move on. The rest of you, read on.

Finding songs

For some finding a particular song can be challenging, but since, in reality, this is such a simple topic the explanation will be brief. The method I primarily use is simply to either commit the lyrics of the song I want to look up to memory until I get back in front of my computer, or jot the lyrics down on a piece of paper. Then, once I get home or get access to the internet in some for or another, a quick Google search yields the results I am looking for. Let’s run through a quick example:

I would like to find a song with lyrics that go as follows: “Just one more moment, that’s all that’s needed, black wounded soldiers, in need of healing, time to be honest”. In order to do this I would simply type in the lyrics into the Google search box and append them with “ lyrics”. So my query would look like this: “Just one more moment, that’s all that’s needed, black wounded soldiers, in need of healing, time to be honest lyrics”. Searching for this would return a few million results, and would tell me that the song is “I’d Come For You” by Nickelback.

Listening to music (For free)

Alright, now that I have the name and artist of a song that I obviously like (Why else would I be searching for it?), but what if I want to listen to that song? Here are my recommendations:

• Grooveshark
• Rhapsody
• Pandora

First, Grooveshark. Some of you may have heard of this awesome website before, but for those of you who have not, Grooveshark is a totally free website for playing music. You can create an account in order to store playlists and “add” music to your library, or you can play without an account. Either way, Grooveshark offers a very comprehensive library of music to choose from, even when you are looking for the more obscure songs.Grooveshark also features a “Radio” tool, which suggests songs based on what you are listening to and what you like by taking data from other users who like the same kinds of music and suggesting those songs to you. A little more on this after the paragraph on Pandora.

Rhapsody. Almost everyone knows what Rhapsody is, so I will hardly bother to talk about it here. The only reason that I would not recommend Rhapsody is due to the fact that you are limited to 25 plays per month. It does make my list though due to the fact that if I cannot find the song on Grooveshark, it will undoubtedly be here (With the exception of some of those obscure bands).

Pandora. For those of you who do not know, Pandora is what is called an internet radio station.  The reason Pandora is so popular then? Pandora allows you to give it artist’ names, song names, and even album names and then Pandora will recommend music with similar qualities to those of the songs or artists that you gave it. For example, if I went to Pandora and submitted “Nickelback” as the artist whose type of music I would like to hear more of, Pandora would then begin playing songs similar to those of Nickelback. If I like the song, I can give it a thumbs-up which tells Pandora to expand its search to include this type (songs similar to the song I gave a thumbs-up to). If I don’t like the song, a simple thumbs-down will cause the song to never be played again. There’s even a third option: If I’m feeling tired of a certain song, I can click the “I’m tired of this song” button in order to tell Pandora not to play that song anymore, while not saying that I do not like the song.

So Pandora or Grooveshark Radio? Well, it depends. Pandora suggests music to you based on approximately 400 attributes assigned to each and every song including melody, rhythm, and lyrics, just to name three. By using these tags in order to suggest songs, Pandora is able to suggest songs that are very similar to each other. But sometimes there are other things about the songs, things that you may not be able to define. Grooveshark Radio takes care of that by suggesting songs similar to the one you are listening to based on songs other people liked that are similar to yours. In short, Grooveshark Radio suggests songs based on those from people who liked the same songs as you, whereas Pandora suggest songs based on attributes. It’s a small difference, but something that keeps me hopping between the two.

Pandora is primarily for discovering new music rather than playing specific music as you can only input artists and songs to find similar music to, not pick out specific songs to listen to. And given the restriction on the number of songs playable each month imposed by Rhapsody, I would also not recommend this service if you are looking to listen to music online. Finally, Grooveshark, which has a massive library and allows unlimited plays, as well as its own “Radio” feature, is my pick for the best manner in which to listen to music online.

Downloading music (For Free?!)

So far we have covered finding music by searching Google, and listening to music for free online through Grooveshark. Which brings us to the third and final topic on music: downloading it. Before continuing I feel it is appropriate to let you all know that this post is merely for educational purposes and that I am not encouraging the piracy of music in any way. What you do with this knowledge is fully up to you and you are the only one to be held responsible for your actions. That said, let’s move on. Downloading music is generally done after buying it at an online store such as the iTunes Store or maybe the Amazon.com music store. That is not what I’m going to be covering here. In the next few paragraphs I will talk about a few different methods to download music without paying for it.

P2P clients

I discussed the mechanics of P2P (Peer 2 Peer) programs in my last post, “Media”, but I will still give a brief explanation on how P2P programs work. P2P programs, such as the one I will highlight later on, allow users to connect to each other’s computer in order to download a file that one user may have, but another, who is looking for this file, does not. Sometimes users will share their entire hard drive with P2P networks, but it is far more common for a single folder to be shared to improve security and to more easily manager shared files.

Once the searcher finds the file he or she is looking for, the P2P client makes a connection to all the computers in the swarm (all the computers connected to the P2P client) and downloads parts of the requested file from each source. By making multiple requests it is possible to greatly speed up downloads, one of the many advantages to using torrents or P2P clients for downloading files.

Limewire is one such P2P program, and has faced quite a bit of controversy ever since around 2006. In fact, in October of 2010 Limewire was forced to cease distributing its P2P software because it was being used to pirate music very frequently. Somewhat ironically, less than a month after the court order took affect, shutting Limewire down for the time being, a secret team of developers released Limewire Pirated Edition (LPE) on various popular torrent websites such as The Pirate Bay (Yes, the software that was shut down for enabling piracy was now being pirated). For more information on LPE, check out my last post (“Media”). Here, however, it will suffice to say that it is still available to download.

Unfortunately, no website, to my knowledge, hosts the executable file to download LPE, which means that you must have a program capable of handling .torrent files in order to download LPE. If you already have this capability, download LPE here via isoHunt: Limewire Pirated Edition. However, if you do not, don’t worry about it: torrents and programs to handle .torrent files will be discussed later on in this article. However, for now I will assume that you have installed LPE and have it running for the sake of keeping with the outline I have created for this article.

Alright then, fire up LPE. Once Limewire is up and running, which could take a little while, you should see a screen that, for those of us who have used Limewire in the past, is fairly familiar. To those of you who have not, the window title will read “LimeWire Pirated Edition” and be mostly blank except for a few buttons and a search box at the top. Let’s suppose that we wanted to find the song we looked for and found via Google earlier: “I’d Come For You” by Nickelback. To do so, follow these steps (these steps apply to any song):

1. Click the search box at the top of the screen and type in the song name. For this example I am searching for “I’d Come For You”, so that is what I will input. Once you have entered the name of the song you are looking for, hit enter. A new tab will open and Limewire will begin searching for files that match your query. Once the search is finished, proceed to the next step.
2. On the left-hand side of the window there are a few options in a menu bar. These options allow you to sort the results by file type, artist, or various other filtering options. When searching for music I prefer to filter the results by the artist of the song, so in this case I would click “Nickelback”. I can further refine my search from here by specifying the album (Dark Horse) if needed. Since there is only one result though there is no need for me to narrow the results any further, so proceed to the next step.
3. Before downloading the file there are a few things that you can find out about it to make sure it is of a decent quality, and the file it actually claims to be. First though, the quality. Limewire makes this extremely easy by putting the quality next to the (in this case) album. For what I have found, the quality is excellent, so there is no need for concern there. Now the length of the song. You may or may not know the exact length of the song beforehand, but knowing about how long the song should be will help to differentiate between the actual file you are searching for and a file that someone has edited or a file that is not exactly the one you are looking for. Again, Limewire makes this sort of check easy by displaying the length of the song right after the quality. If the length of the song is within a few seconds either way of how long the song “should” be, then go ahead and proceed to the next step. If it isn’t, however, then go search around some more for a file that matches the criteria above.
4. Since it is not my goal to encourage music piracy, I will refrain from downloading this song because, upon clicking it, I received a warning telling me that Limewire could not find a copyright license for the file. This is a pretty good indicator of a pirated song, and therefore I recommend that you do not download this sort of file. However, had I not received the warning here is what I would have done:
   a). Click the name of the file in order to begin the download. If you are sure that the file is legit or do not care about copyright infringement then click “Yes” if a window pops up warning you about a possible copyright violation. The file will then begin downloading. The speed of the download will depend on your internet speed, but here’s a few things you can do while the file is downloading:
   -Preview the file. Through the use of swarm downloading it is possible to play some of the file that you are downloading before it has fully finished downloading. To do this, look down at the bottom of the window where you should see the name of the file you are downloading. Right-click it and select the option “Preview file.” Limewire will warn you about possible viruses contained in the file, so it is up to you whether you want to open the file before getting a chance to scan it for viruses.
   -Check download progress. Checking the progress of your download will generally not be quite as important, but if you would like to see you can look at the blue bar next to the file name, and the download statistics next to that. Those statistics will display things such as how much of the file has been downloaded, how much is left, and at what speed the file is downloading.
   Once the file is finished downloading, move on.
   b). Now the file will be in your Limewire library. To play it, you can simply right-click the file in the download window (at the bottom of the screen) and select “Play file”. Alternatively, you can also click the button in the top left corner labeled “My Files” to view the files that you have downloaded via Limewire. From this window you can play any of the files.
5. Feel free to explore LPE some more, but the steps mentioned above will be all that you need to know to find and download music from Limewire, should you so choose.

Videos

Alright then, now on to the second topic of videos. In this topic I will discuss finding videos, TV shows, and movies and watching them on the internet. Additionally, I will cover using torrents to download videos, TV shows, or movies in depth as well as a way to capture any video that plays in your browser.

Watching videos

Anyone who has not been living under a rock for the past ten years or so will have heard of YouTube, so I will not even bother to discuss what YouTube is and how it works. However, I will discuss two similar websites: Vimeo and Viddler. Both Vimeo and Viddler are so similar that I will not devote an entire paragraph to each, but instead discuss them together in order to be able to move on to a more interesting topic sooner.

Viddler and Vimeo are both very similar to YouTube with a few exceptions, but these exceptions are very significant. For a fairly even comparison with YouTube, I will only compare the free accounts from each service.

• Vimeo and Viddler both have a maximum file size of 500MB. YouTube: 2GB
• Bandwidth:
  a) Vimeo: No limit.
  b) Viddler: 2GB.
  c) YouTube: No limit.
• Time limit:
  a) Vimeo: No limit.
  b) Viddler: No limit.
  c) YouTube: 15 minutes.
• Video life (length it will be live on the internet):
  a) Vimeo: Forever.
  b) Viddler: 30 days.
  c) YouTube: Forever.

As you can see, YouTube does allow for larger file sizes, but limits the videos are limited to 15 minutes. But since there are filetypes such as .FLV that allow for a massive amount of compression, the size limit is of little consequence. So time limit. Both Vimeo and Viddler have no time limit (versus YouTube’s 15 minute time limit), but the clear winner can be found when looking at the next feature: video life. This may be something foreign to many of you since YouTube keeps videos up indefinitely, but Viddler keeps videos alive on its servers for a maximum of 30 days before deletion. Therefor, Vimeo, in my opinion, is the clear victor out of all of this. And since there is no limit on the running time of a video hosted on Vimeo, TV shows and sometimes even movies can be found after a quick search.

TV Shows

If you cannot find the TV show you are looking on Vimeo of Viddler, what then? Another option is Hulu. Hulu is a free, ad supported service that allows users to play TV shows as well as videos through your browser. Shows like House, The Office, Burn Notice, and NCIS are all available to watch for free on Hulu. The movie selection is a little less spectacular and consists of mainly less-popular movies, but there is still some selection to choose from.

A third option is to go to specialized websites. A simple Google search for “watch showname online” would return millions of results, some of which allowing you to watch that show online and free of charge.

Downloading videos

So now that you have found a place to watch your favorite show, what about downloading it? Well unfortunately both YouTube and Viddler do not allow you to download videos from their servers, so even if you were to find a show, or parts of a show (more common on YouTube), you would not be able to download it using a feature built-in to one of the respective services. As a side note, Vimeo does allow users, with an account, to download any videos hosted on their servers. But since this is not a feature available on YouTube, Viddler, and more than 90% of all the other websites offering streaming video, there must be another solution.

Specialized Sites. The first, and definitely the simplest, solution is to look for a website that hosts the videos you are looking for. A simple Google search similar to the one mentioned in the “TV Shows” section will suffice: “download showname free”. Now I suppose the “free” part could be left off, but since most people would prefer to get content for free I would leave it on there. Anyways, Google will (as always) return millions of results, and it will be up to you to sift through the websites to find one that offers the shows you are looking for at a price you are willing to pay. Simple, easy, and fairly quick. Since we are on the topic, you can also do this and search by genre of show rather than name. For example, if I wanted to find a place at which to download cartoons from, my query would look something like this: “download cartoons online”. Again, very simple, easy, and quick. Let’s move on to the next solution.

Torrents. Going from trying to find websites that will allow you to download shows via a simple download to torrents is like going from playing with Nerf guns to being handed an assault rifle: you may understand the basic concept (pulling the trigger, downloading a video) but, more likely than not, you have little to no idea how to accomplish the task. Knowing this, let’s start at the basics. To stay brief on a sub-topic that really has nothing to do with the main subject of this section, I will use bullet points.

• .torrent files, the files that make all of this possible, can be thought of as a dictionary of sorts. Not in the programmatical sense, but that they contain the names of the files contained within the torrent. Programs to handle .torrent files take those files and look for the file or folder described with the .torrent file and, once found, begin downloading those files.
• No matter how large the files in the torrent are, the .torrent “descriptor”, or “dictionary” file will only be in the KB range.
• Torrents allow you to connect to many different computers and downloads parts of the same file from each source, thus greatly speeding up your downloads. As a comparison, when you download a file from a server (like you would when downloading shows (or videos) from a website in the manner described above), you are making a single connection. Torrents allow you to make multiple connections to the same file and download different parts of the file.
• The actual files that make up a torrent are hosted on personal computers. Torrents, through the medium of a program such as Vuze or µTorrent, connect to individual computers in order to download the files pointed at by the .torrent file. By eliminating the “middle man” (the server), large files, and in massive quantities, are able to be shared between hundreds of thousands of users in a way that would have cost quite a bit of money otherwise in server and bandwidth costs.
• Once a torrent has finished downloading, those files are added to the “swarm”. You are now “seeding” the file, which allows other people downloading the same torrent connect to the files on your computer which just finished downloading. As a side note, you can stop your computer from seeding the files, so this is, while recommended, optional.

Alright, so now you know the basics of torrents. The next thing to be decided is what kind of files you will be primarily using the torrent to download. To keep with the example of downloading episodes from a TV show, I will be working with videos. However, the same principles apply to any kind of file.

Choosing a program. My two favorite torrent programs are Vuze and µTorrent. Whenever I use torrents it is usually to download videos of some sort, which Vuze is optimized for. Additionally, with many built-in features such as live transcoding of files as they are downloaded, Vuze is, in my opinion, the best choice if you are planning on primarily downloading videos.

µTorrent is the other option I will discuss here, and has its own advantages. One such advantage is file size. At less than 400KB, µTorrent is extremely small by any standards, period. So if you are just looking to do some lite, sporadic torrent downloading, want to try torrents out, need to download a single file through a torrent, or just want a lightweight torrent program, µTorrent is a great program that will definitely accomplish any or all of those goals.

One of the reasons that µTorrent is such a small program is that it is a bare-bones torrent application. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that µTorrent’s interface is unpleasant or cumbersome, but merely that µTorrent consists of the bare minimum of features. Similar to Firefox, for example. One of the main selling points of µTorrent are the apps. Rather than bundle tons of features with µTorrent that most users would never use, the µTorrent developer team decided to make a lite application and offer addons for their program to add certain features that are not available right after installation, thus allowing the users to choose what features that wanted to add to the program.

Overall, it really comes down to personal preference. There is little doubt in my mind that I could use addons to add most of, if not all, the functionality I appreciate in Vuze to µTorrent, but it is more convenient for me to simply continue using Vuze.

Finding .torrent files and beginning the download. Despite what you may think, finding .torrent files is extremely easy. Like most other things, I use Google to solve this problem. Here’s how to look for .torrent files using Google:

1. Go to Google.com and type in the following into the Google search box: “showname filetype:torrent”. Hit enter. You can optionally add any number of additional criteria to your search. A few examples, along with their explanation, are listed below:
   a) “showname season 1 filetype:torrent” As I’m sure you can guess, this would search for a torrent file for the first season of showname.
   b) “showname +dub filetype:torrent” This one is a little trickier and might not be so evident as the last to most of you. This query will search Google for torrents of showname that are dubbed. Now for those of you who do not know, dub, in this context, means to have translated a show into another language. For example, if a show was produced in Spain and was dubbed into English, all the actors, or characters, would be speaking English. This specific query would only search for torrents of showname that had been dubbed and not for a specific language.
2. Once you find a torrent that looks like it is what you are looking for, open up the webpage. At this point, you really have to just do trial and error. It is not an uncommon thing for a website to claim to offer a torrent download when it actually does not, or for there to be any number of button or links on a webpage labeled “Download” with no indicator as to what you are downloading should you click it.
3. Once you find the download link for the .torrent file though, click it. Firefox, or whatever browser it is that you are using, will open a dialogue box asking what you would like to do with the .torrent file. I prefer to keep all my .torrent files in my “Downloads” folder, inside their own special folder named “Torrents”. Additionally, I prefer to name my .torrent files with a descriptive name so that I can refer back to them later if needed. Once you have decided on a location for the .torrent file and the naming convention you will use, save the file.
   Alternatively, you can open the file instead of saving and downloading it, but I refer to save my .torrent files to a location I know of. Again, personal preference.
4. Once the .torrent file has downloaded, which should only take a few seconds, open it. You may receive a warning of some sort telling you that this file may not be safe-blah blah blah. Open it in your torrent program.
5. There you go, you have begun downloading your first torrent. An estimate on the time it will take to complete the download will be displayed near the torrent name, so look for that. On a side and totally unrelated note, ETA actually stands for “Estimated Time of Arrival”. Strangely, the time left in the torrent download is usually displayed as “ETA: X hours Y min”. Maybe something like ETF (Estimated Time of Finish) or something would have been more fitting.

The download speed of your torrent will depend greatly on your internet connection speed as well as your hardware. If you are not getting the full 20MB/S download speed you are supposed to be getting from your ISP, don’t worry about it; it is common practice for ISP’s to throttle bandwidth for torrents. Unfortunately, there is little that can be done about this.

In the above guide I used Google to look for the .torrent file, but there is another way to find .torrent files: specialized “tracker” websites. These websites maintain a list of torrents available for downloading. My current favorite is a website called KickassTorrents. Yes, the name is certainly interesting, but the fact of the matter is this: KickassTorrents does a job and does that job extremely well. More and more often I find myself looking for torrents on KickassTorrents rather than on Google because the quality of torrents on KickassTorrents is much greater than those I generally find on Google.

Despite my fanaticism about KickassTorrents, I can still recognize other websites as useful. One of these such websites is isoHunt, which is actually where I downloaded LPE from in order to test it out before writing this article. I generally do not go to isoHunt and search for torrents like I do at KickassTorrents, but if I see a result on Google from isoHunt I generally go with that source.

There are various other websites that you will come to know depending on how frequently you use torrents, but both of these two websites are great places to start.

Recording video streams.

Alright, for some of you torrents may be a little too much. Or maybe you just don’t want to deal with downloading torrents-whatever the reason, there is another option: recording video streams. Whenever you watch a video, listen to music, or view an image, that for of media is cached by your browser for a certain period of time. The process of recording video streams allows you to “get a handle”, so to speak, on the stream that is coming in to your computer and save that stream as a file on your hard drive. For example, using this method I could go to YouTube and play a video, and as soon as that video starts buffering, begin downloading it. Similarly with music sites such as Rhapsody: It would be possible for me to go to Rhapsody.com, play one of their 30-second samples, and capture that stream. Below is a guide to learning how to do this by using a program called Orbit Downloader. Orbit woks by installing a Firefox addon (only available if you install the actual program) and then capturing streaming media.

To install Orbit Downloader on your computer, follow the steps below:

1. Go to the Orbit downloader page and click the big, yellow “Download” button. Save the file to a location that you will be able to access easily and wait for the download to finish.
2. Once the download is finished, open the executable file and begin the installation. For the most part you can just install Orbit with the default settings. The only modifications you should have to make during the installation process is to change the browser(s) that Orbit will integrate with. If you are following my suggestion, make sure that only Firefox is checked and proceed with the installation.
3. Once the installation is finished, if Firefox is open, close Firefox and restart it. Upon starting back up Firefox should notify you of a newly installed addon. This addon is called “OneClick YouTube Downloader” and is what allows Firefox to capture media streams and make them available for you to download. If you do not see the addon in the “Addons” window, try closing Firefox, make sure there are no Firefox processes running, and then open Firefox again. If you are still having problems (and Orbit Downloader is running, you may be running an incompatible version of Firefox or a problem may have occurred during the installation), try uninstalling and reinstalling Orbit, and make sure you have “Firefox” checked in the list of browsers to integrate.

Assuming the Firefox addon was installed successfully, head over to YouTube.com so that I can run you through a quick tutorial on how to use Orbit to download streaming media.

1. Find a video to watch – any video will be fine.
2. Now before moving on, look for a new button at the top of the window. It should have a gray circle with an arrow inside of it, and a green bar underneath the circle/arrow. Upon mouseover, the tooltip should read “Record” or “Recorder”. If you find the button, move to the next step. Otherwise, follow these sub-steps:
   a) Right-click one of the bars at the top of the window and click “Customize” in the menu that pops up.
   b) In the window that comes up, look for a button with the characteristics described above. Once you find it, click and drag it over near your “Homepage” button and “drop” it there.
   c) Go back to the window containing all the buttons and close it.
   d) Proceed to the next step.
3. Start playing the video. The gray circle on the button, as well as the arrow inside it, should turn blue as soon as the video starts loading. If it does not, try restarting your browser or go to a different video.
4. Once the button turns blue, click it. A menu will appear underneath the button with a single entry. The entry will most likely read “videoplayback.mov” or “videoplayback” with some other file extension. This list displays all the media that is streaming to your computer at the moment. The options will only be live (available for you to download) for around 180 seconds unless you change the default.
5. Underneath the entry there is a link labeled “Record now”. Click it. The movie will now be downloaded to “C:/downloads” with whatever filename was displayed in the menu. If the file does not download instantly, it is still loading. This is a frequent occurrence with videos, which generally take a while to load depending on their length.
6. Once the file is finished downloading (A percentage of the file downloaded will be displayed while it is being downloaded) a new link will appear where “Record now” used to be: “Open Folder”. Click it. A new folder will open after a second or two showing the file you just downloaded. From here you can do anything with the file just as you would with any normal file.

The process of recording an audio stream as mentioned earlier is much the same. I prefer to record the audio streams of Grooveshark because of the massive music library it offers. Follow these steps:

1. Go to Grooveshark.com. The website is based on Flash (I believe) so it may be slow in loading.
2. Once Grooveshark has loaded, click the search box and type in the name of the song you would like to download. Supposing I still wanted the song “I’d Come For You” by Nickelback that I was looking for earlier, I would enter the following into the search box and hit enter: “I’d Come For You – Nickelback”.
3. Sift through the results on the results page until you find the song you are looking for. Once you find the song there are two ways to play it:
   a) Click the name of the song and then click the “Play now” button at the top of the frame in which the results are displayed.
   b) Mouseover the song and to the left of the name a small arrow will appear. This is a play button, so you can click it to start playing the song.
4. Once the song starts to play the gray circle of the Orbit Downloaded button in your Firefox window should turn blue. Click the button and find the most recent entry labeled (for Grooveshark streams) stream.mp3. Click the “Record now” link underneath the name to start the download.
5. When the download is finished, click the new “Open folder” link to open the containing folder of the download (by default, C:/downloads). Rename the song to whatever you would like it called and either play it from there or move it to another folder. Should you decide to move it to another folder, going back to Firefox and clicking the “Open folder” link again will no longer direct you to the file as it is no longer where Orbit Downloaded last knew it was.

Recording audio streams is as simple as that.

Storage

Alrighty then, now that we have all this media, what can be done with it? Since videos are by far the largest files out of those talked about above, and because I have the most experience managing video files versus audio files and images, I will primarily discuss managing video files. However, most of the practices will apply to all different types of media.

Storage strategies.

The particular strategy you end up using to store your media is totally up to you, and will be most effective if you come up with it on your own through trial and error, so I will merely give you some tips in this section before moving on to the next topic.

• Only store one copy of your media. Unless you have a massive amount of storage or very few files to store, or both, I would recommend keeping only one copy of all your media; there is little point it trying to maintain two separate libraries of media files. However, I will suggest that you make backups of your media. Whether that be an ISO file of your Videos folder, a zipped file of your songs, or whatever, I suggest making a backup at least once a month at the very least, and more whenever your library significantly changes. (For example, if you downloaded 10 new songs or something like that.)

Archiving videos

Archiving videos is something most people, myself included until just recently, never did. Up until a few weeks ago I stored all of my videos in whatever format I received them in-generally as .AVI or .MKV files. However, both of these file formats are quite large and gave me some problems with storage. Because of this problem, I was soon storing all of my videos spread across my hard drive and two external hard drives. Faced with this issue, I began searching for a solution. The first solution I thought of was to use compressed folders to store my videos. Unfortunately, after trying multiple compression types including .7z, I found that such methods produced little compression, if any at all. Then I started wondering about converting the videos to a different format. Since I generally convert all of my videos to the .mp4 format in order to transfer them to my iPod I was fairly familiar with different file types and how certain file types took less space than others. I was also aware of a less well-known format called FLV, which offered pretty good compression as compared to other formats. For example, a 110MB AVI file was only a 92MB FLV file. Armed with that that knowledge, I began to look in to the FLV format.

My main concern with converting my videos to FLV was losing quality. Video quality is a huge deal with me, so if I could not retain quality there was no way I was going to convert the videos. After some research though, I learned that the FLV format is what is called a “lossless format”, which basically means that there is no quality lost when converting to the FLV format. Concern 1: Clear.

My other concern was being able to edit the videos once they were converted. This was less of a concern than the loss of quality, but since I edit videos from time to time it was something I still wanted to be able to do.  There was always the option to simply convert the videos back from the .FLV format to .AVI or another format that my my video editor could handle, but I soon discovered that my video editor, VideoPad Video Editor, could handle .FLV files just as well as any other format. Concern 2: Clear.

With my two main concerns about the format cleared, I was ready to make the conversion happen. To do this, I used a program I have been using for quite some time: Any Video Converter. I heard about AVC from a friend after trying numerous other programs to convert videos into the MP4 format in order to play them on my iPod, and have been using it every since. For those of you who are looking for a video converter to convert videos to play on your iPod, this program is for you. Do not be confused: you can convert videos using the free version of Any Video Converter to a format and frame size that is perfect for your iPod, no matter what version or generation, despite what the website claims. Assuming you have downloaded AVC already, I will go through the steps to convert any videos to the .FLV format, as well as the steps in order to convert videos so that they will be able to be played on an iPod.

1. Open Any Video Converter.
2. Click the large button in the top, left side of the window labeled “Add Video”. Alternately, you can click “File>>Batch Add Video Files” if you would like to add all the videos in a specific directory or directories to the conversion cue.
   a) If you clicked the “Add Video” button:
   Navigate to the file or files you wish to convert. You can choose one or more (by Ctrl-Click or Shift-Click) files here to add to the conversion cue. Once you have selected the files to be converted, click “Open”.
   b) If you used “Batch Add Video Files”:
   Use the directory tree to locate the folder containing the video files you wish to convert. Once found, click the checkbox next to the directory. Note: All subfolders will be selected when you select a folder, so in order to avoid this expand the target folder and manually uncheck all the subfolders. Otherwise, all videos in the selected folder, as well as the videos in the subfolders, will be added to the conversion cue.
3. The next step is to select what filetype you will be converting the video(s) to, as well as other factors such as frame size, audio encoding, etc. To change these, click the drop-down menu at the top, right corner of the screen, near the text “Output Profile:”. A menu will expand with all the types of videos you can convert your videos to.
   If you are archiving your videos:
   a) Scroll down until you get to the “Flash Video” section. Click “Flash Video Movie (*.flv)”.
   If you are converting your videos to play on your iPod:
   a) Under the “Mobile Phone” section, click “Mobile Phone MPEG-4 Movie (*.mp4)”.
4. Regardless of what type of video you are converting to, you will need to set the frame size. Be aware that setting the frame size to something higher than the original video will not increase the quality of the video. Enlarging the frame size to something greater than that of the original video will result in making the video size larger, however, the quality of the video will go down.
   In the frame on the right side of the window there are quite a few different options you can use to change the way your video will look once it is converted, divided into four sections: General, Output Duration, Video Options, and Audio Options. Look under “Video Options” for the field to change the frame size of the video.
   If you are archiving your videos, I would recommend choosing “Original” from the dropdown menu.
   If you are converting your videos for playback on your iPod, you need to know what the resolution of you iPod or other portable video player is, and change the frame size to the closest height and width to the resolution of the device you will be playing the video on. For example, I either leave the frame size of the videos I convert for my iPod touch as “Original” or change it to “640×480”.
   Note: Changing the frame size to anything, whether greater than or less than the frame size of the original video, you will lost some quality.
   If you feel the need, you may also change any or all of the other options here, but unless you know exactly what you are doing, leave them as they are.
5. Once you are finished choosing the correct frame size and modifying the other options, click the large, blue button at the top of the window near the “Add Video” button labeled “Convert”. Depending on the length of the video you are converting, the type of video you are converting to, as well as a few other factors, the conversion could take anywhere from a single minute to a few hours, but for the most part AVC handles the conversion quickly.
6. When the conversion is finished, a window will pop up asking you to upgrade to the pro version. Depending on the settings, it may also open the directory the converted videos were placed in. If it does now, your converted videos will be placed in “My Documents>>Any Video Converter>>FLV”. If you had converted the videos to the .MP4 format in order to play them on your iPod, they would be in “Any Video Converter>>MP4”.

Moving your media around

Moving your media between drives

Now that you have converted your videos, what are you going to do with them? Since the idea is to archive them, I would guess the next step, unless you are keeping the videos on your hard drive, would be to move the files to a different drive. The common way to do this would be to either click and drag the files over, or right-click and use the “Move To…” option, if you have that option enabled. Both methods have one prominent thing in common though: they both use Windows Explorer. Now I don’t have anything against Windows Explorer, I actually think that it is quite good-especially the Windows 7 version. However, when it comes to moving large files, Windows Explorer just does not cut it. I can’t even remember the number of times I sat around, waiting for a file move to complete with an unknown ETA. And then what if Explorer freezes? Crashes? Or maybe your computer crashes? All of those-any of those can be relatively common when moving very large files, and each is equally annoying. The solution I came up with, after numerous hours of frustration, was a program called TeraCopy. Now for those of you who, like me, do not like to install extra software to accomplish a task that can be handled, albeit less efficiently, by something you already have, bear with me.

TeraCopy, besides giving a surprisingly accurate ETA on file transfers, also offers several other nice features such as file transfer pause and resume, and “error recovery”, which means that if there is an error transferring a file, TeraCopy will first retry the transfer several times, and then skip that file without aborting the entire transfer. In short, TeraCopy is what Explorer’s file transfer utility should have been. But, alas, it is not so. However, go ahead and install TeraCopy and you will find that it integrates nicely into Explorer, taking over normal file transfers in Explorer’s stead. Therefore, using TeraCopy is as simple as selecting the files or folder you wish to transfer, right-clicking it, and clicking the “TeraCopy…” option. A minimalistic dialog will pop up with a few options: Either copy or more the files, test the files, or permanently delete them. In the right pane you can select the target location for the copy or move, choosing from a traditional browse window, from the most recent location, or from a list of favorite locations. Overall, TeraCopy does a great job with file transfers and offers many features that Explorer does not.

Sharing Videos

The final topic I am discussing in this article is sharing videos. I already discussed this earlier in my article in the “Sharing Videos” section, so this will be brief. Overall, I would suggest Vimeo over YouTube as long as you are planning on uploading long videos because Vimeo allows for unlimited runtime. However, if you are planning on uploading short videos in high-definition, I would recommend that you use YouTube because there is no monthly upload limit, and the limit for each individual file is four-times larger than that of Vimeo: 2GB vs 500MB, respectively.

There are other websites out there such as MegaVideo which allow both unlimited runtime and unlimited file size, but MegaVideo is not a free service and therefor I would not recommend it over Vimeo or YouTube. It really just comes down to what kind of videos you are planning on uploading.

Tips and tricks

This section is sort of an afterthought and therefore is not included in the index above. However, I felt that it would be fitting to impart some tips and tricks that I have learned over the years to help you out in your endeavors.

If you can’t find it on a torrent, download the stream. Suppose you were looking to download all the episodes from your favorite show. Disregarding the fact that this would more than likely be illegal for the sake of this article, let’s suppose you had already searched around for a torrent on Google as well as other torrent websites and found nothing. The solution to this problem that I have most commonly used is to first find a website that plays the video or videos that I am looking for, play the video(s), and then record the video stream using the OneClick YouTube Downloaded Firefox addon.

Can’t find the song no matter where you look? Download the video. Even with Grooveshark and Rhapsody, occasionally you will not be able to find a certain song. You might even be out of luck trying to find the song and play it from some other website. What now? More likely than not, the song you are looking for can be found in a video. Whether that be during a movie or a YouTube video, the trick is to extract the audio. There are a number of programs available that will do this, but if you already have Any Video Converter to archive your videos, why not just use that? Here’s what you need to do:

1. Open up Any Video Converter and add the video file with the song you would like. If the song is, say, in the middle of the video then there is no need to extract the audio from the entire video, so you can use the built-in video trimming tool to specify how much and which parts of the video will be converted. To do this, follow these sub-steps:
   a) On the right side of the AVC window, above the frame in which you change settings such as the frame size, there is a screen in which you can preview the video to be converted. Underneath that screen, there is a scissors icon. Click it. This will open the built-in video trimming tool.
   b) First, click the “New Segment” button highlighted in the image below: 

   

   c) Your trimming window should now look like this:

   

   Drag either or both of the triangles left and right to change what part of the video will be converted. For example, if I wanted to only convert three seconds of the video starting at 00:00:9, then it would look like this:

   

   d) When you are finished clipping the video, click “Apply” at the bottom of the window.

2. Now you need to choose the output profile. I prefer to have my music in the .MP3 format, but you can choose whatever audio format you prefer. Just as you did when choosing the format to convert videos to, click the dropdown menu at the top of the screen near the text “Output Profile”. Scroll down until you see “Common Audio Formats”. Choose one of the options underneath the title “Common Audio Formats” by clicking it.
3. Click the large, blue button at the top of the window labeled “Convert”.
4. The conversion to an audio format will take much less time than the conversion between video formats does, and once it is finished the new audio file will be placed in “My Documents>>Any video Converter>>MP3”. Replace “MP3” with whichever format you converted the video file to.

That’s all there is to it; with this knowledge you can trim video files and extract the audio quickly and easily.

Merging clips. Surprisingly often when collecting episodes from any show it is necessary to merge multiple clips, usually in the form of “parts”, into a single episode. Well guess what? Any Video Converted does that, too. Here’s a list of steps to merge the output of two video files: Note that these steps apply to any number of videos.

1. Add the video files to the conversion cue by either using the “Add Video” button or going to File>>Batch add video files. Once the video files to be merged are together in the conversion cue, proceed to the next step.
2. Choose the output profile. Since I have already gone through this twice, I will not go through the steps to choose an output profile. Just know that any profile will work when merging the output-even audio formats.
3. Select all the videos to be merged. This can be done quickly by the key command Ctrl-A.
4. Click Edit>>Merge Output.
5. Click “Convert”.
6. The videos will now be merged and converted to whichever format you specified as the output profile. The resulting file will be placed in the folder for its filetype (e.g. MP3 if you merged and converted the video files to the MP3 format).

Ending notes

Thanks to awkisopen of Writing on Linux for encouraging me to divide my articles into sections so that they could be more easily read through and referenced.

Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome of this article that has been in the works for approximately three weeks. I hope you have all learned a thing or two and will come back here to read my next article.

Resources (Sites I referenced in the creation of this article) (Listed in no particular order):

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/pandora.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_(downloading)
http://www.viddler.com/
http://vimeo.com/
http://www.hulu.com/