Daniel 'MaTachi' Jonsson

Tag Archives: YouTube

YouTube Now Playing Notifications Firefox Add-on

I just got my very first self-made Firefox add-on approved on AMO (https://addons.mozilla.org). It’s a simple add-on that shows a notification in the operating system when a YouTube video starts playing. Maybe a bit pointless if you are watching videos, but it may be useful if you are using YouTube to listen to music in the background. It’s called YouTube – Now Playing Notifications and can be found here:

As I said, this is my very first add-on, and I must say that I really like Mozilla’s developer tools. Developing an add-on with their add-on SDK is really easy and it’s also really easy to upload add-ons to AMO.

How to Try the New YouTube Interface Cosmic Panda

Yesterday at school I heard from a classmate that there is a new Youtube interface called Cosmic Panda which you are able to try out.

To activate it, you have to visit the following page:

As I’m writing this, I have only watched a single video with this interface. But it looked pretty slick on that video. ;) The profile pages have also been updated.

Check it out if you are interested. You can always deactivate it by visiting the page and pressing a button.

I also saw that they have a page dedicated to testing stuff:

Jupiter Broadcasting

Juper BroadcastingUmmm… Lets see if I can explain what Jupiter Broadcasting is. The sub-title on their website is “independent entertainment, on demand”, and I think that pretty much sums it up. What I have seen, there are three persons making the videos, or at least I have only seen three in the videos. Maybe there are more behind the scenes, I don’t know. However, they have five shows (according to their homepage), where I find their show Linux Action Show the best. It’s broadcasted live every Sunday on their website, and then uploaded online for downloading and streaming. It’s usually about one hour long, and it’s fun and informative. But they don’t have that many viewers, according to the numbers below the videos on their Youtube Channel. Maybe many watch them live, or watch the episodes on their official website instead, or maybe download the episodes, I don’t know. But I really want more people to check these guys out, because they are doing a great work on their spare time – which they are providing to us completely free of charge.

So, check them out. :) I have added some links below. I hope you will like their work as much as I do.

Links:

How to Watch Restricted YouTube Videos

Yesterday I wanted to watch an age restricted video on YouTube, but I got the following well-known message:

This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community.
Sorry, you must be 18 or over to view this video or group.

So I googled the problem and found a website that described how to bypass this restriction. For an example, if I want to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW17DpaJz40, I will get the restriction message. But if I use the URL that the embed code uses, it will work perfectly. Because if I watch an embedded video on someone else’s website, YouTube will not be able to check if I am logged on, and therefore are the embedded videos always watchable that way.

Instead of typing the URL that I wrote earlier, type http://www.youtube.com/v/IW17DpaJz40, with /v/ instead of /watch?v= in the address type http://www.youtube.com/embed/IW17DpaJz40, with /embed/ instead of /watch?v= in the adress. Whoila, it works!

EDIT (May 15, 2011): Youtube has changed the way you embed videos since I wrote this post, and therefore did not the method above work any longer. However, the post has been updated with new, working instructions.