In the past couple of months of working on Excel and VBA Macros, I have been exposed to a few challenges which in the course of time, I have overcome. So, I thought I would share them with my beloved readers. This section: Excel Tips aims at sharing the small tips and tricks that I have come across which makes life easier for anyone working with Excel or VBA Macros. Cheers!
Here we’ll be focussing on how to select a range dynamically and perform further operations to it etc.
For e.g. If we have a Sheet “Input” of which one cell is required say column B, and we need to perform some kind of mathematical operation on them – viz. average, sum, etc. we need to do that by selecting the entire range of non-empty values of those two cells.
The problem here is that the number of entries in column A will vary from time to time, but we want a command button which automatically knows the amount of non-empty values and accordingly runs the mathematical operation. This is known as Dynamic Range Selection.
Download ONLINE. No Software Required.
Yes, you read that right. You can download Megavideo videos for free online without any software installations which load bunch of spywares and adwares into your hard drive.
For starters, Megavideo is a video hosting site, which unlike other video streaming websites like YouTube, DailyMotion and the like, has no upward time limit for videos. The range of content on Megavideo has been similar to its parent data sharing website Megaupload – [ if you know what I mean]. The catch here is that Megavideo allows non-premium users to view only 72 minutes of content at once. After this time is exhausted, the video streaming is halted. There are other work-arounds as mentioned in my post here [Firefox Hack: How to watch Unrestricted Full videos on Megavideo]. But if you are one of those, who just want it downloaded on your PC,Mac whatever, just follow the instructions below.
Good ol Megavideo is now a paid website. And hence to enjoy the full unrestricted video viewing, one would have to pay and subscribe. Unpaid or Free users are restricted to just 78 minutes of viewing after which, the video would be disabled for the next 2 hours.So, if a movie is say, 80 minutes long, you are going to miss the nail-biting climax(That sucks!). There is a work around for this in Firefox, which allows users to view unlimited number of videos for any desired amount of time. Just follow the instructions given below.
1.Choose the URLs of the videos you want to watch. It can be even just one movie, or multiple video URL pages. Open them in multiple tabs on Firefox.
2. Start the video as usual (Hit the Red Play Button to turn it into Green, and then Push Play).
3. Pause the Video to let it Buffer. Repeat this for all the open tabs of videos.
4. Wait until Video or Videos have been 100% buffered till the last bit. (You know how to detect that, yeah the seek bar would have a grey progress bar kinda thingie approaching right).
5.Once buffered, go to File menu of Firefox. The Dropdown Menu has an option called “Work Offline”. Enable it.
6. Enjoy uncut, unrestricted viewing on Megavideo.
7.Remember to go back and deselect Work Offline when you are ready for another Movie or want to Browse the Web again.”
This also works in IE and Opera.Chrome unfortunately has Offline mode for only Google Gears enabled sites. Finally, for Mac users, there is no Work Offline mode in Safari.
I know, I have done a lot of posts on YouTube video Downloads so far. Javascripts, and old favorites like Keepvid. But this new tool is fast becoming my favorite. I don’t feel the need to go back to Keepvid anymore. Because KeepHD is the one stop shop which fulfills all my YouTube needs.
a) It supports HD video download as well. Yes, just copy the URL and paste it in the address bar on the KeepHD page. And voila!! Your video can be downloaded in FLV Low Quality, 3GP Mobile video, MP4 High quality or HD.
b) Second best thing, the address bar gets auto-deleted when you click on it. So, once you are done downloading your previous video and before pasting the next URL, there is no need to select the previous URL and delete it. So you have two steps of redundant work eliminated. Also, to download a YouTube video whose URL is say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXENO12nw28 (Hary Hill’s TV Burp), you can just paste the highlighted portion after keephd.com. So this would look like http://keephd.com/watch?v=CXENO12nw28, and the download options page would be displayed.
c) Best feature as yet, you can download videos which are not available in your region. You do get frustrated when you can’t view certain videos on YouTube due to area restrictions. Just download them via KeepHD and view them offline. And especially with the new TV Shows and Movies added on YouTube, KeepHD will surely become one of the favorite internet services available. Happy Downloading!
Related YouTube posts:
How To Download HD videos from YouTube
YouTube HD for Dummies : Search, Watch, Download
How to Watch and Download HQ videos on Youtube
Yes, this is just a Time-Waster for all who just have way too much time to watch videos in a vertically flipped window. Yeah true, that sometimes you would like to see the videos from a Danny Boyle-esque perspective and you want to flip your cameras. But for the time being, flipping of YouTube videos would have to be your solace. To do this, just add the code:&flip=1 after the video url, and voila, your entire Youtube window gets upside down, even to the text level. Have a look at the screen below.
The above video is a Jimmy Kimmel Live show video courtesy: JimmyKimmelLive The url to this video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebQs1AxCkQo, and when it is changed to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebQs1AxCkQo&flip=1 , the above flipped version is shown. The position of the comments do not change; they are below the video, but the tabs for the share, playlist, flag etc are shown on the botton border of the video. Nice fun to surprise your friends. Cheers!
Category : how to
Tags: hacks, HD, YouTube
This might seem as a repost of my previous articles on HD videos [article1, article2, article3 and article4 ], but there have been some changes made to HD as well as HQ videos on YouTube. So this updated article was necessary.
We all have been absolutely enjoying at the HD resolution videos on YouTube. At 1280X720 resolution, these videos have better picture quality than DVD. ( Of course, not all videos uploaded on YouTube who claim as HD are truly HD. Some of them are upscaled versions –which means their resolution has been increased, but that means, it would be similar to a video of lesser resolution being viewed in full screen. )Anyway, recently YouTube updated its pages, and now HD as well as HQ videos are embeddable, and hence viewers can view HD as well as HQ videos on any website/blog where YouTube videos are embedded. But this means, that the previous search keyword to find YouTube HD and HQ videos ( see article: where the search keyword in Google is site:youtube.com “watch in normal quality watch in hd”, it would no longer show all the HD videos, but would only show those videos which has “watch in HD” in the title.)
So searching for HD videos on YouTube has now to be done with traditional search methods using keywords like HD music, HD trailers, 720p music etc.
_Downloading HD Videos from YouTube
Fortunately the Javascript Link still works. I am reposting it here.
Firefox by default opens up Search results in the same tab, and this can be annoying at times, unless you open a new tab by yourself, before you type in the Search. This however can be easily changed by editing the configuration settings in Firefox. This would enable the users to open the Searches in a new tab by default.
To do this, type in “about:config” in the address bar of Firefox (of course without the quotes). This will open a list of configuration setting lists. In the Filter text space, type in “browser.search.openintab”. This will now show the preference name browser.search.openintab and against which the value is set to False. This means, that Firefox by default will NOT open the Search in a new Tab. To set to the desired setting, double click on the row, to change the value to true, and the status is changed to user set, and VOILA. Searches will now be opened in a new Tab.
All about How to Watch YouTube in HD, Search for HD content on YouTube, and How to Download them
I have been receiving quite a number of emails complaining that my previous post on Youtube HD has been hard to follow. I have also received other emails congratulating me that the hack, google search code as well the downloading script worked perfectly. Just for the benefit of the people who did not get it, I am reposting it, in a simple plain layman language, so that everyone can enjoy Youtube in its full HD beauty. So here it goes.
First things first, only a few of the zillions of videos on YouTube have HD enabled in them. This solely depends on the quality of the original video that has been uploaded. If the original video being uploaded is a 1080p or a 720p video (from a Blu-Ray or an HD TV rip, in simple terms a video with a large resolution), only then we could see the HD option for that video. e.g. The KungFu Panda OST- Kungfu Fighting. It is available in 3 options.
Option 1: The Low-Quality flv version which is suitable for viewing in low bandwidth internet. The buffering of this video would be much faster but the video quality is the most inferior. This is in most cases the default video quality for all Youtube videos.
Option 2: The High Quality mp4 version which is suitable for viewing in high bandwidth internet. The quality is much better than flv. It is available for most videos on Youtube which have been uploaded recently. You can make buffering Higher Quality versions of the Video as default, by changing the Playback Settings in your YouTube account. Just follow the steps below.
Go to your YouTube account page. On the left hand side of the page, click on a link called Playback Setup. Now, you will get 3 options to choose from- low quality for slow connections, high quality for faster connections, or let YouTube choose dynamically depending on runtime connection speed.
Alternatively, even for videos which do not have High-Q viewing enabled, a better picture and sound quality version (not necessarily better resolution) is available if the video URL is tweaked.
e.g. If the Kungfu Panda OST URL is :
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4,
just append it with &fmt=18, to look like
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4&fmt=18
This would make it stream the High-Q version.
Option 3: HD version. Like I said, HD is only available for a few videos, but the number is expected to increase as we see more HD content being uploaded. All the videos available for HD can be viewed in HD by clicking on the “watch in HD” link below the video. The mentioned Kungfu Panda OST -Kungfu Fighting has the link as well.
Alternatively, HD versions can be viewed directly by appending &fmt=22 in the video URL.
So if the original URL is :
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4,
then the HD version would be
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aTU-IJ8c4&fmt=22
How to Search for HD content on YouTube and Download HD videos after the jump.
