Media and Players from the Web

One of my favorite activities anymore, besides eating chocolate, is watching and listening to new media content I find on the internet. Bear in mind the copyright implications of any media you choose to download and share.

While Windows Media Player is okay for some stuff, there's a lot it can't play. Other players like the RealPlayer are resource hogs that will slow down your system and are often loaded with spyware. My preference is the free, cross-platform player, VLC from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. It plays most content. It's free. It rarely crashes, and will usually start right up again. Sometimes video doesn't open up, and you just hit the stop button followed by the start button and everything works fine again. For a free program that handles nearly everything, this is a small tradeoff in minor bugs. It is constantly being improved.

Finding worthy content to view or listen to is easy with a BitTorrent client called Vuze from http://www.vuze.com/. The site highlights a lot of music videos, movie trailers, animations, fan films, and even some made for the web low priced episodic programs. You can search for specific content, such as missed TV episodes, using a search site like http://www.torrentscan.com/. This is where you need to watch for copyrights, especially if you leave what you download available for others to download from you in turn.

Of course, there's always YouTube http://www.youtube.com/ for lots of short videos on many subjects. I do have a few favorites there. You can often find downloads of a few select songs on artist websites. If you like the music, and listen to it over again, please buy the albums and support the artists. I've found several new artists I like by doing this. I discovered Godhead, and Nightwish this way. Yep, I'm moving from hard rock to metal here. Nightwish, by the way, is from Finland, and is very, very good. My favorite song from them is actually a ballad called "Sleeping Sun". I can't get enough of the music video. However, the singer from this song has gone solo, and they have a new lead singer from Sweden. I've also discovered German, Russian and other multi-cultural artists that are as good as, or better than, most artists in the US. Exploring media this way can really open your senses to the rest of the world.

Don't forget the broadband connection and large disk drive.