Method 1 : Play with VLC Player, No Encoding Required
One way is to play the video in VLC Player and use the best Cropping option there (right click while the video is playing > Video > Crop).
Method 2: Use VirtualDub to Crop and Re-encode the Video
01. Capture video with max resolution with VirtualDub to AVI file (this step may not be applicable for everyone)
02. Open that video to VirtualDub Editor
03. Play video 2-3 frames and stop it
04. Click on Video/Filters/Add/null transform/OK/Cropping
05. Drag the every outer side of black borders with mouse toward the video screen so much that black parts are gone
06. Click on OK
07. Click on Filters/Add/Resize/OK/Size Options/New size Absolute/Aspect Ratio Disabled
08. Write New size Absolute 1280 x 720
09. Click on OK
10. Click on OK
11. Click on File/Save as AVI
If you are bored right now or are always interested in material to cover future periods of boredom, you have come to the right place.
With the internet at your fingertips, there is never a lack of fun things to do. We here at MakeUseOf try to show you all the good stuff there is to explore, discover and, well, make good use of.
Alright, So don’t let me waste your time, here are 7 silly pages to have some fun with.
Objective: Active entertainment, have fun with photos!
The Squirrelizer, inspired by the now-famous National Geographic photo, adds a ground squirrel to any image. All you need is the URL of a picture that isn’t copyrighted.
You could use one of your own pictures or go through your friends’ Flickr accounts and search for a boring group photo. Turn it into a hilarious shot by adding this unexpected guest, then share the blast with everyone.
Objective: Do something good, make someone smile, send flowers!
Being bored means you have some time to spare. Don’t let it go to waste! You could invest a minute or two to make someone happy. Are there any birthdays, anniversaries or holidays coming up? How about mailing a bunch of flowers? And if you’re notoriously broke, you will love this one because it’s free!
You can add different color flowers to the bouquet, change the vase and add a customized greeting card. The virtual flowers can be mailed up to 15 days in advance and you will be notified once the flowers are picked up.
Objective: Active entertainment, play a game!
Kapi Regnum is an online strategy game set in the Middle Ages. The game simulates an economy as it may have existed about 500 years ago. You enter the role of a man who was sent to settle down and repopulate land. Being the landlord, you can produce over 100 products, build houses and entire villages, hire employees, sell your goods, trade with other players and expand your business.
How I wish something like this had existed back in the days when I had way too much time on my hands.
Objective: Passive video entertainment, watch something different!
ScienceHack provides science videos of real scientific experiments. The videos are screened and approved by scientists. The categories include Chemistry, Space, Computer Science, Robotics and many more. Below is an example from the Psychology section:
Maybe you’ll discover something you can do at home?
Objective: Social entertainment, chat with somebody.
Do you feel like chatting, but none of your friends are online? Head over to Tworl and be matched up with a random chat partner right now, based on age and/or sex. Unfortunately, the chat client is currently restricted to AOL Instant Messenger. There is one more catch: you need to sign up to use Tworl. And before accepting a match, AIM must be running.
Once a match is accepted, you’ll see Tworl’s mashup data, consisting of your chat partner’s and your own details, i.e. age, location, picture, what you have in common etc. If your chat partner accepts your invitation, you can rate each other. If he doesn’t, you can mark him as unresponsive. Happy chatting!
Objective: Passive audio entertainment, listen to audiobooks.
Podiobooks is a site that distributes free audiobooks through RSS feeds and direct downloads. You’ll find material in over 20 different categories from countless authors. The first chapter of each book is available to anyone. To hear more, subscribe to a title or download the entire book, you need to sign up.
You should use your “I’m so bored” moment now to select a few cool books and load your mp3 player with chapters. One of these days you will get bored in a random place, e.g. stuck in public transport, and the internet may be far, far away. Yep, it’s a cruel world.
Objective: Vent, say what you have to say to a specific person and let the world know!
Do you have a secret crush on somebody and would you like to give them a hint? Or do you need to anonymously relate some information to someone? At HadToSay you can.
There are two catches: you have to sign up and you have to deliver a physical note to the intended recipient. HadtoSay provides a printable template, which contains the pickup code of your message. You can even print a template without attaching a message to it (yet), leave the note with someone, then log into your HadtoSay account and enter the message after delivering the code.
If you cannot physically deliver a note to the person, you can still eMail them anonymously with the URL and code. Simon has written an article on How To Send Completely Anonymous Emails.
Bitlet, the first web-based BitTorrent client, is known for its innovative services and ease of use. Bitlet’s latest new feature allows users to stream video torrents directly in a web-browser - no additional software required.
In 2007 BitLet launched a web-based Java applet which allows users to download .torrent files without having a BitTorrent client installed. For this innovation Bitlet received a nomination for the Webware 100 Awards where the hobby project competed with companies backed by millions of dollars.
Although they didn’t win the award, the evolution of Bitlet continued steadily. After its introduction it added features such as music streaming (currently utilized by mininova) and the ‘bookmarklet‘ which allows users to inject a direct download link into torrent search engines. Today Bitlet adds video streaming to this list, another long awaited addition.
The experimental video streaming feature allows users to stream video using BitTorrent and watch the file, even as it’s still downloading. The first release only supports videos in the Ogg format, but developer Daniele Castagna told TorrentFreak that he might extend this list, depending on how much time he can spend on the project.
In order to make Bitlet work with streaming video a few modifications had to be made, but its still good old BitTorrent technology under the hood. Daniele has put up a few example videos on the site and below them are instructions on how to stream your own files using Bitlet.
There are a few important conditions to fulfill in order to achieve an optimal streaming experience. Of primary importance is the need for sufficient seeds and peers to guarantee a decent download speed. Besides this, the playback time will depend on the quality of the video - the higher the quality, the more bandwidth is needed.
The streaming feature seems to be working well, and it’s actually the first live example of BitTorrent video streaming which doesn’t require the installation of any obscure third party applications. The only thing needed is an up-to-date version of Java, which most people already have installed.
Although current bandwidth prices are dropping, most video services such as YouTube are paying millions of dollars for traditional server side streaming. Especially high quality video is costly to stream, and peer-to-peer technology can certainly make a huge difference there.
Are you frustrated with Mega Video time limit, and don’t want to pay for the premium account? I tried Firefox’s addon like “DownloadHelper” but it only downloaded 72 minutes of the flv file. Well, I found a solution to bypass this timed out limit, thanks to Scribd. It’s a simple way to get around it.
Step 1: When you click play on a Megavideo video, click pause and allow the video to buffer all the way to 100%. Step 2: Once the video is done buffering, go to your menu bar on your browser, and click on File > Work Offline. Step 3: Watch video. Step 4: Unclick the “work offline” button.
Note: The trick here is to block MegaVideo from connecting to your PC once the buffering is done. So, alternatively,you can pull the ethernet cable, turn off WiFi, or turn off the modem.
Video games are great fun, and sometimes it’s ok to go on a “gaming binge.” At some point, though, you need to stop yourself. When that time has come, admit that you’ve got a problem and cut it out completely.
Admit you have a problem- As cliche or cheesy as it may sound, the first step to recovery is to admit to yourself and others that you have a problem. Use the beginning sentence of this article as a starter.
Identify the problem Is it a particular game that you’re addicted to? Is it a genre of games? Be sure to find out exactly what it is that you’re addicted to.
Identify the triggers Triggers are mental and physical cues that cause you to want to indulge in your addiction, namely play games. Try and figure out what kind of things makes you want to play video games. Maybe its a particular website that you go to online that starts your video gaming frenzy. Maybe it’s being around certain people that make you crave a game or two. Do your best to figure out what kind of triggers make you want to play games.
Plan out your recovery Quitting video games cold turkey might seem like the best way to stop your addiction, but in reality, most people fail trying to quit completely. Your best plan would be to gradually wean yourself away from video games. Make yourself an ending date of when you want to be completely free from video games. Then, create steps to that ending date, with mini-goals that you want to achieve. For example, instead of playing for 20+ hours a week, try cutting it down to 18+ hours a week, and so on. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t reach your goals! Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your addiction won’t go away overnight.
Carry out your plan Start working on executing your plan. If you find out that your plan is too hard, then ease it up a bit. If you discover that your ending date happens to be the release date of Starcraft 2, postpone your ending date so you can indulge instead of potentially becoming an addict again. Whatever you do, be flexible with your options, but stick to your plan at all costs.
ATITool is an overclocking utility designed for ATI and NVIDIA video cards. Design target is to write a light-weight application for the enthusiast - so no questionable registry tweaks. Sorry.
Main Features
No limits overclocking.
Support for overclocking for NVIDIA cards.
Adjustment of GPU and memory voltage (when supported by VGA card).
Tweaking of memory timings (most ATI cards).
Finding maximum core and memory overclock by rendering into a Direct3D window and scanning the output for visual artifacts.
Temperature monitoring and fan speed control (on supported cards).
Removal of Catalyst overclocking lock for 9000/9200/9550/9600 series.
Artifact scanning mode to test for stability.
Loading a predefined clock profile on Application/Windows startup.
Hotkeys that can be used any time to load clocks from a profile.
Extract video card BIOS to file for backup purposes.
3D application detection (Direct3D 8, Direct3D 9, OpenGL) to overclock your video card only when required.
Gamma control
ATITool will only work on Windows 2000/XP/2003 (64 bit versions are supported).
I can't remember how many times I've had a seemingly great idea for a skit with one of my coworkers. Sadly, most of us don't have the time or resources to produce our own animated shorts.
A beta web app by Xtranormal aims to level the playing field by making movie creation drag-and-drop simple. If you can write dialog that makes sense and click a mouse, you're well on your way to creating a digital masterpiece.
Choose a character, type in a block of text, and drag in facial expressions, actions, and sounds. The speech is surprisingly fluid, all things considered - no MS Sam here!
You're currently limited to one or two actors, but that's plenty for putting together a quick, fun clip. You can choose either Lego-style (my preference) or more life-like actors to play out your script.
When you're done piecing together elements, just click the action button and Xtranormal will render your clip. If you've registered for an account you can save your work for later. Finished clips can, of course, be shared for anyone to view.
Quite honestly, I don't have the time or skills to throw together 3d animations from scratch. Even if I did, I'm not certain the half-baked ideas I come up with would merit expending any serious effort.
Xtranormal is a great way to finally see your cinematic ideas in come to life with minimal fuss.
A lot of people don't know that YouTube has high quality videos, as well as the generally poor-quality standard versions. The links to the better (not HD, but still pretty good) versions are easy to miss, but there are a few steps you can take to make sure you're watching (and even embedding) the good stuff. Jason Kottke ran through a few of them recently on kottke.org.
First, make high-quality your default setting. You can do this in the Account menu, under "Playback Setup." That takes care of playback, but what if you want to link to the high-quality version of a video? Just paste "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=22" at the end of the URL. 18 is the 480x360 version, and 22 is the 720p version. Some videos will have one, but not the other, so try both if you need to.
When it comes to embedding, you can make a quick change to the embed code to get better video quality. Just add "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" to the end of the URLs in your embed code.
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
Plenty of good software exists for capturing audio or video from YouTube and other such sites, but I'm always on the look for portable apps or web services that offer the same features.
Filsh.net offers an extremely easy-to-use way to convert clips before downloading. It's so easy, in fact, that I barely noticed the German interface whilst creating a Nintendo-DS compatible version of some kid setting his pants on fire. Nice!
Drop in your target URL and select your desired format from options including AVI, MPG, MP4, DPG (the DS format), 3GP, OGG, or MP3 and Filsh goes to work. Multiple sites are supported, including YouTube, Google Video, Break, MyspaceTV, and Veoh. I was unable to grab from Vimeo, but Filsh does support uploading - so I could save a clip first and then send it back up to Filsh for conversion.
Conversions are fairly fast, and I didn't notice any quality problems. Videos remained clear, and audio extracted from clips to MP3 sounded just as good as the original.
Filsh works well, and though it doesn't handle the variety of conversions that Zamzar does it's still a useful site to keep in your bookmarks.
MediaJoin MediaJoin is a free Windows utility that joins media files. You probably could have figured that out from its name. But let's get a bit more specific, shall we? The program lets you select a group of audio or video files, put them in order, and then spit them out as one long media file.
For example, say you've got a bunch of MP3s representing a live concert and you'd rather have just one long file that will play the whole concert from start to end. Just select the MP3s, select your output format, and MediaJoin will do the rest.
The utility even lets you mix and match file types. So you can combine WAV, MP3, and WMA files and output the results as a single file. One thing to keep in mind is that MediaJoin appears to perform some recompression. So if you're starting with a compressed media format like MP3 you might notice some quality loss in the finished product unless you choose uncompressed WAV as your output format.
Sometimes we find ourselves watching funny YouTube videos in a language we don't understand, and we feel like we're missing part of the joke. What did he say, and why did she drop that on his head? Maybe we'll find out now, thanks to Subyo. It's a service that lets you create your own subtitled translations of YouTube videos, and search for subtitles submitted by others (by entering a video's YouTube URL, naturally.)
The downfall of sites like these isn't the functionality -- Subyo works just fine, and we finally figured out what the rappers were saying in some of those music videos -- it's the challenge of getting widespread user adoption. The site's only as good as its users, so it will be interesting to see whether Subyo catches on and becomes an essential add-on to YouTube.
If you are bored right now or are always interested in material to cover future periods of boredom, you have come to the right place.
