Getting the Most out of YouTube
for your foreign language study
In the olden days - 10 or 15 years ago - if you wanted to learn an exotic foreign language, you could maybe order an obscure title on the language found in Books in Print and procured by way of a STOP order placed at your local bookseller. Now Amazon and others do great things to bring other languages and other worlds home to you. But better even than books and CDs, you can find a wealth of videos from YouTube, among others. But for language study, you're probably going to watch the same video more than once, probably many times. And YouTube doesn't let you save files. What to do? Here's a very short guide for saving and using those YouTube videos.
1. YouTube.com: this is, for obvious reasons, the best place to find and view videos. Run searches for, eg, Turkish music, and you'll have a wealth of stuff to look at.
2. YouTubeX.com: if you find a video you like, go back to the search page you found it on, right click on the link, and select "copy link location" (or its equivalent for your browser). Then, paste the URL (the link location you just copied) into the blank on YouTubeX and click download. The video will be downloaded to your computer. This works 95% of the time.
While YouTubeX downloads the video, it may give it the wrong format. Follow the instructions on YouTubeX, but be aware that the file you're looking for may be "get_video..." Use the same instructions for renaming and making the file an ".flv" file (by the way, you can rename the file anything you want, just so it has an ".flv" file extension (the part at the end, like ".doc").
3. Temporary Internet Files: If YouTubeX can't snag a video, but you can play it with YouTube - and you're in Internet Explorer - go to Tools>Internet Options>Settings>[General] tab>Settings>View Files. Look for FLV files and files labeled "get_video..." Right-click on these, select copy, and paste them on your desktop. Rename them as FLVs and with any luck you'll have the videos in your cache.
4. FLV player: This is a player for FlashVideo. The most common one is found here. And it's free. Which means that once you've installed it and gotten familiar with either using YouTubeX or pulling files from your IE cache, you can watch videos as often as you want without downloading or being connected to the net.
5. Bulrak's Metadata injector: To use all the functions (particularly video resizing) on the FLV player, the FLV file must have accurate metadata. Go here and download the converter (FLVMDI) and interface (FLVMDIGUI) (under Downloads), extract them in to the same directory and run FLVMDIGUI on any files that don't resize. Before messing with this one, be sure to read the page you're downloading from. You don't need to understand the technical parts, but you should be sure you understand the warnings so that if something doesn't work you don't get caught by surprise.
A final note: Please do not use the (ridiculously) limited information found here to redistribute copyrighted material, profit from the works of others, yada yada yada. But do enjoy the video distributed at YouTube to get an ear for your language and a picture of the culture in which that language is spoken.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home