Top 30 Amazing Tools for YouTube in 2011 (1)

YouTube is the most popular website where users discover, watch, upload and share videos. Since its inception, YouTube has been growing in popularity by leaps and bounds every year. At the same time, many useful tools for YouTube have been developed to meet the needs of YouTube fans.

Here I would like to list the top 30 amazing tools for YouTube in 2011 that are incredibly useful and yet very simple. This collection will make your YouTube more funny and effective. Hope you like it.

1. YouPlayer

YouPlayer is one of the must-have add-on tools for YouTube which allows you to watch YouTube videos without leaving your current browser page. It is a video player with playlist and supports sites of Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace and YouTube. You may add and drag a video link into the playlist and watch or download it.

2. Overstream.net

This is a subtitles adding tool for YouTube videos and other online videos. With Overstream, you can customize any online videos by adding your own comments, subtitles and closed captions in any language without downloading it. You can also save them on the Overstream server, and send a custom video postcard or the link of the subtitled video to your friends. The video will still be streamed from YouTube but the text in the captions will appear via Overstream.

3. Sothink Web Video Downloader

This is an excellent YouTube video downloader converter. It can intelligently capture YouTube video and other web videos and directly convert to multi-formats in high quality. This tool also allows users to download YouTube HD videos. You can save these videos in various formats or devices such as iPad/iPhone/iPod. With this tool, you can download HTML 5 video and save other online videos in HTML 5 format. This YouTube downloader app also has a Firefox add-on version which also helps you download YouTube videos as MP4 format.

4. Tweak Tube

Tweak Tube is another must-have Firefox add-on tool for YouTube. It helps you auto-embed the video file, enlarge it, and provide a link to download the video. Also it plays videos with your local FLV-capable media player, displays a tooltip for YouTube videos with video information and provides a small player for a preview. Moreover, it can download YouTube videos as MP4, FLV, 3GP and MP3 format and much more.

5. Orbit Downloader

Orbit Downloader supports HTTP/FTP/HTTPS/RTSP/MMS/RTMP protocols and provides a total solution to download YouTube videos more simply and easily. It supports IE, Firefox, Maxthon and Opera and is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/files from YouTube, MySpace, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare.

6. Easy YouTube Caption Creator

Easy YouTube caption creator is a web-based tool for YouTube captions. You can use it to create a caption text file (.sub format) and then add to YouTube video files you have uploaded.

7. Semsix

Semsix is a freeware web tool with which you can create your own playlists and listen to them as often as you want. Also, you can search lyrics and listen to web radio stations by genre, artist or city.

8. Video DownloadHelper

As a Firefox add-on tool for web content extraction, DownloadHelper provides an easy way to download YouTube videos and other online videos. This also works for audio and picture galleries. For instance, if you go to a YouTube page, you'll be able to download YouTube videos directly to your file system.

9. YouTube Widget

YouTube Widget is an Adobe AIR app which lets you browse top-rated videos or search for something specific without opening your browser. You can reduce the size of the thumbnails window on the right-hand side of the interface or display all of your favorite videos on your site or blog.

10. Free PPT2YouTube

Free PPT2YouTube is another free functional tool for YouTube. It is a PowerPoint to YouTube converter which can convert PowerPoint to YouTube videos, which enables you to easily upload fantastic PowerPoint to YouTube for wide sharing.

11. YouTube Podcaster

YouTube Podcaster helps you create a podcast feed from YouTube search results. The feed is from embedded YouTube video IDs and all videos are converted to the MP4 file format. This means you can subscribe to these feeds using iTunes player and even play these videos on your iPod.

12. YouTube Reloaded

YouTube Reloaded is an online free playlist generator tool for YouTube. It creates an embeddable playlist out of Top Rated, Top Favorites, Most Viewed, Most Popular, Most Recent, and Recently Featured that can be added to any website depending on YouTube Search, also you can custom playlist jus by adding the URL.

13. TubeReplay

TubeReplay allows you to watch your favorite YouTube video over and over again without hitting replay button. If you can’t get enough of a special video (or a song) and you are tired of manually replaying it, then TubeReplay is a good choice for you.

14. YtDub

This is a video dubbing tool for YouTube. If you want to dub a YouTube video by adding an audio in the background from another source then you can use YtDub. It is very easy to use, just type the track of back ground YouTube video and the actual video in the following box, and then set other options.

15. Tubechop

TubeChop allows you to easily share funny YouTube video section. Just find the video you want to chop and select or cut interesting part of the video, and then you can share this portion of the video with your friends.

These tools for YouTube are all gems for YouTube fans. In the part two article, I will introduce 15 more tools for YouTube. Hope these tools can enhance your YouTube entertainment.

Which server-side video encoding solutions are suitable for you, FFMpeg, MEncoder or VEE(1)?

If you’ve ever wanted to create a streaming video site or add a video to server side, then you must have heard of FFMpeg and MEncoder. They are both famous open source projects and easy to get. Anyone can get these scripts at zero cost. However, some webmasters don’t want to be tied to a GPL or LGPL. So they try to find other server-side encoding solutions.

These solutions are called as FFMpeg MEncoder alternatives or adobe flash media server alternatives, and most of these alternatives are commercial projects. I used to join in a video site creation work and have made lots of preparation work. Except for the known FFMpeg and MEncoder, I also searched some commercial projects and YouTube clones. For me, my budget is limited, so I choose affordable top one rank product in Google (the search term is “server-side video converter”). This commercial project is Sothink video encoder engine from SourceTec software. For the request of some friends, I process the experience into an article and make some comparisons of these three projects, which helps those people who want to create streaming video sites or add videos to server side choose the appropriate projects.

Concepts of FFMpeg, MEncoder and VEE


What is FFMpeg?
FFMpeg, one of the prior adobe flash media server alternatives, is a free open source project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFMpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the FFMpeg command line program for transcoding multimedia files. FFMpeg is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1+ or GNU General Public License 2+ (depending on which options are enabled). And now it has been ported for nearly all operating systems, including Linux, cygwin, Windows, and Mac OS X, some versions even have a GUI.

What is MEncoder?
MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. It is considered the most popular free adobe flash media server alternative. It is a close sibling to MPlayer and can convert all the formats that MPlayer understands into a variety of compressed and uncompressed formats using different codecs.

What is VEE?
VEE, the full name is Sothink Video Encoder Engine developed by SourceTec software, one of the FFMpeg MEncoder alternative projects. It is an easy server-side video uploading, encoding, and publishing solution, and helps anyone who would like to add video sharing feature into their website or create streaming video site from scratch like YouTube. It is not the free open source, but offers you video encoder program, demo site, PHP/ASP/ASP.NET full script, document guides, SDK and life-time support.

Differences among those Projects


MEncoder, FFmpeg and VEE (Sothink Video Encoder Engine) are all command-line tools to convert one video file format to another and installed on your Windows servers. But VEE is much more different, because it is not only command-line streaming video site creation tool, but also provides the whole video sites creation solution with demo site, source code, manuals, parameter SDK included. This solution which is provided by SourceTec Software (www.sothinkmedia.com) has been successfully installed and run on over 300 Websites.

Both MEncoder and FFMpeg are developed as adobe flash media server alternatives by worldwide programmers as a part time job. Sharing the same library and upgrade fast, these two free open source applications always keep strong and advanced. However, those two powerful video encoding script are quite complicated, due to a wide range of parameters and lack of tutorials to help users, especially hard to the entry-level programmers and webmaster to start. Since there is no demo site or continuous technique support, the beginners have to complete the whole environment configuration, video encoding, Website building and more, all by themselves. It is the key point to limit the popularity and usage of both flash media server alternative projects.

The most attractive feature of MEncoder and FFMpeg is that they are open sources, can be used freely by anyone and developers, while the shortcomings are also obvious as said above. However, as the most competitive FFMpeg MEncoder alternative and adobe flash media server alternative, Sothink Video Encoder Engine, it comes with Windows version which supports the most popular environment, like Windows 2008/2003/2000 Server. It is $689 (USD) for sale, one-time payment including the fee for server-side video converter program, the player license, and also the full source code, SDK and manuals, but free installation guide and life-time technical support.

Is HTML 5 Ready?
Another big difference is that only Sothink Video Encoder Engine supports converting videos on server side to MP4/F4V format, encoded by H.264/AVC, with HTML 5 video tag supported and HTML 5 video player offered. Therefore, all videos converted by this FFMpeg MEncoder alternative can be compatible with the most popular browsers, and the most importantly, compatible with hot portable devices like Apple iPod, iPad, iPhone and Andorid Phones. View the follow chart.

Since the detailed needs for creating streaming video site are changed all the time, more webmasters are searching for other FFMpeg MEncoder alternatives since MEncoder or FFmpeg never offers ready-made solution for newly video sharing needs, like iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch compatibility.
As the number of people who surf the net with iPad and mobiles increases rapidly, video sharing sites needs to keep magnetic by Apple iOS and HTML 5 support. The new upgraded Sothink Video Encoder Engine just can batch convert all popular formats of video into iPad/iPhone/iPod MP4, H.264/AVC HD MP4, F4V and common web video format FLV.

Through the pre-set encoding profiles, webmasters needn’t worry about their video content’s compatibility with Apple iOS, Android, or any popular devices. And the JWPlayer used in Sothink video sharing solution makes the videos viewable via “video” tab on HTML 5 supported platform. Combining the effective video encoder, powerful video editing functions and full source code assistant, Sothink Video Encoder Engine releases all users from the most different and crucial script part and make everyone can create streaming video site like YouTube.

As shown in Tab.1, FFMpeg and MEncoder are equipped with most of functions. If you are acquainted with video streaming technologies or want to save budget, these two projects are your best choices.

If you have the correct mplayer/MEncoder binary, you will get support for many more codecs than the FFMpeg supports. Maybe this is one of reasons that MEncoder are more wildly used. However, if you are not satisfied with these functions of these projects, you can choose commercial FFMpeg MEncoder alternatives.

You can realize much more differences among these adobe flash media server alternatives in the part two article.