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March 16, 2006
Steve Garfield at Fray Cafe, SXSW 2006
I just got back from SXSW in Austin, TX. I had a great time and met a lot of great people. I also got to hang out with a lot of people the I know from the interweb but don't get to see very often, like Steve Garfield.
On Mon. night we went to the Red Eyed Fly bar in Austin for an event called Fray Cafe. I didn't know about Fray before, but its a website with a rich history. It was one of the earliest blogs before "blog" was a word, and it featured original, personal stories submitted by people around the world. Its still going, and each year at SXSW they do a live open-mic event where people tell their own stories. It was a lot of fun.
Steve ended up telling a story about the first time he saw Elvis Costello in 1977 ("My Aim Is True" tour), but he had originally intended to tell a story about FireAnt.
Posted by jkinberg at 10:08 AM | Comments (1)
March 3, 2006
Google Video Getter again
It seems the Google Video Getter Greasemonkey script I wrote a while back has become very popular. It was on Digg.com, and since then I've gotten tons of inquiries and comments about it. The Google Video service is still in beta and changes regularly. As such I've had to update the script a few times to keep it functional with their changes.
Here's the latest...
Google Video now uses javascript to load the Flash Player. This kind of breaks the method used previously by my Greasemonkey script because it essentially tries to hide the HTML that the script was searching for. Not to worry though, it was a pretty easy fix. I also tightened up the code to a mere 3 lines!
Click here to install the new Google Video Getter 2
So why do you need this script? Doesn't Google offer downloads for their free videos?
... yes and no.
If you go to any free video offering on Google Video and click the Download button for "Mac and Windows" it forces you to download a Google Video Player application to playback Google's own .gvp video format. These videos do not play in other applications. I checked out the .gvp file, and its really just a text file with a pointer to a video file on the web... I copied the code and manually downloaded the video referenced and discovered it was a .avi (presumably DivX), but it would not play in Windows Media Player because it uses a DRM scheme for file protection.
There are alternative download options for the free videos though. These include videos formatted for the Video iPod and Sony PSP. I haven't really tried these, but I assume they don't have the same DRM protection since they need to be able to play on those devices.
So really, you don't need this script at all. You can download the videos formatted for iPod and PSP from Google Video. But for some reason, people often write me and leave comments asking for this script and how to make it work again.
Posted by jkinberg at 10:57 AM | Comments (8)