New Media Center » Firefox

Making YouTube More Cinematic

New Media Specialist — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:20:38 +0000

Here’s a neat trick to use next time you want to show a YouTube video in class, or in your home theater (h/t to WebWare). You need to have the Firefox web browser and an add-on/plugin called YouTube Cinema. So you can go from this:

To this:

You can still view a given YouTube video in a normal fashion (with all the distracting images and adverts) by either clicking a button in the lower right corner labeled “Go To Site”, or you can hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the link to the video, which will prevent YouTube Cinema from kicking in. Then if you want to watch in cinema mode, right-click somewhere on the page and choose “Play in Cinema” from the menu. You can also play around with the background color used to display the film. By default it uses a dark-green color. I personally would go with black. It doesn’t appear to be an instant change, but will take effect on the next viewing.

YouTube may start to include a similar feature in all of it’s videos. It already has a “turn down the lights” button on some videos, including the Star Trek Original Series videos (for example). Also, it doesn’t appear to work with High Definition videos, and it also doesn’t work on videos where embedding has been disabled. You can display videos using the high quality setting and you can even make the video slightly larger than the normal size. It also will work with a playlist of videos, so you could conceivably watch an entire movie that has been broken up into parts and uploaded to YouTube – not that such things exist. Popcorn anyone?

Stick THAT in your Google . . .

New Media Specialist — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:46:30 +0000

Just a quick post to tell folks about two nifty plugins (add-ons) for Firefox that make Google searches more . . . well . . . interesting (especially when you search for Edupunk). The first is Search Cloudlet which will include a “tag cloud” in your search results that allows you to refine said results more quickly. You can instantly see which related tags are most common and narrow your results accordingly. When you click on individual tags, you essentially add keywords to refine the search. By switching your cloud from Tags to Sites, you can select from sites that are most commonly associated with your search term and narrow the results by website. It’s fun, fast, and can lead to more serendipitous results. You can also search by top level domain names (.net, .com, .edu), or turn it off within the page if it does get in your way.

The other plugin is Googlepedia, which as you can see from the photo above, inserts a Wikipedia entry right into the Google results page. It nicely replaces the useless paid advertisements space to the right with a useful Wikipedia result. God help you if you search for Edupunk (and no, I don’t mean edulink).

Firefox

New Media Specialist — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:13:18 +0000

Summary: Firefox is a free Internet web browser that works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers. It is feature-filled and extensible, which means you can add functionality to Firefox by installing “Add-ons” (plugins). Read on to find out why you should use Firefox, or go immediately to the page where you can download it.

Why You Should Use Firefox

Reason #1 – Tabbed Browsing – You can have multiple websites open in one browser. Like tabbed folders in a file drawer, you can click on a tab and bring that web page immediately to the front. You can even set multiple tabs (web pages) for your starting page when you open Firefox. To see these features in action watch the video demonstrating “tabbed browsing”.

Reason #2 – Built-in Google Search – You don’t even have to go to the Google home page any more. Just type your search terms in the Google search field and experience Google search heaven. To see the Google search features in action watch the Built-in Google Search for Firefox video.

Reason #3 – Search Popular Sites from Firefox – You can also search other web sites from Firefox such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and the Weather Channel.

Reason #4 – Built-in Spell Check – Great for checking those words as you blog, or write in your Wiki. It gives you a red underline for unrecognized words, just like MS Word (only less obnoxious in my opinion). Right-click the word for suggestions or too add it to your dictionary.

Reason #5 – Session recovery – What that means is when you’re doing your research and you have fourteen tabs open and something causes Firefox to crash, when you restart Firefox it will ask you if you want to recover your previous session.

Reason #6 – Plugins! – Extend Firefox’s functionality with plugins. Here are some “must haves”:

For even more added functionality:
Greasemonkey

Old and outdated version of “Why You Should Use Firefox website”

How Firefox Detects Webpage Forgeries

Official Firefox website

Go Get Firefox

http://getfirefox.com