Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with youtube

What are your favorite anti-bullying and empowering YouTube videos?

3491again — Thu, 09 May 2013 02:43:43 -0800

I was bullied extensively growing up, by family members, peers, and, later, boyfriends. I really find it empowering to watch anti-bullying, It Gets Better, and self-harm/borderline personality videos. What are your favorites? I really like the genre of empowering YouTube videos that range from It Gets Better to anti-bullying, to anti-borderline and self-harm videos. They help me get through tough days.

Inspired by this metafilter post, I'd like to find other inspiring videos. Please hope me!

A few categories:

- It Gets Better videos, especially about issues other than sexuality based discrimination (although videos about sexuality are ok too)
- Videos about self-harm or borderline personality or other issues involving self-hate... that are really touching or talk about surviving and moving on
- Anti-bullying, pro-self-esteem, you can survive, the bullies are wrong, kind of themes

Don't care about production values, length, perspective (teenager, adult, documentary, cartoon, etc.), triggers (can be graphic or scary).

I love videos like this that really move you emotionally -- make you cry, make you think, make you relate.

Thank you so much!

Best video game playthroughs on YouTube?

jcruelty — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:17:21 -0800

A recent post about Deadly Premonition (the videogame) pointed me to this excellent playthrough (100% completion) on YouTube. I enjoyed it in part because it wasn't filled with a lot of stupid nattering and trying-too-hard-to-be-funny. The guy shut up when stuff was happening and just talked when appropriate, and his commentary was usually pretty listenable. What other playthroughs would you recommend? Any era, any platform, as long as I can watch on YouTube.

Watch YouTube videos in own window

chairish — Sun, 05 May 2013 14:03:26 -0800

I hate just watch a video - I want to be able to surf or write at the same time. So what I want to be able to do is watch YouTube and other videos in their own small window and have them stay on top of other webpages or programs.

Windows user, Firefox or Chrome.

Great text-to-video, fast, cheap, dummy-ready?

skypieces — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:10:15 -0800

I want to make YouTube videos of 2-3 minute text. The popular kinetic typography stuff and whiteboard stuff is eye-catching. But I have little video editing experience and suck at drawing. What is something simple I could use? This needs to be something I do myself, preferably computer-only (not camera). No outsourcing. I simply want to take short articles that I write, record the audio (which I can do easily already), and translate that to short, text-eye-candy videos that keep people's attention for 2-3 minutes. Topic: political/civic current events material. Need fairly quick turnaround (one hour, tops). Is there an online or software solution that "wizards" this together? I use a MacBook Pro.

Some quick examples for reference ...

Kinetic typography: http://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY

Whiteboard animation: http://youtu.be/NugRZGDbPFU

Simpler, stylized, scrolling text narration: http://youtu.be/-9huWlXFA1s

Anything interesting that I haven't seen that might fit the bill?

[Bonus Points for free or freeware solutions.]

Why won't YouTube videos buffer and play?

Seymour Zamboni — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:15:52 -0800

About 2 weeks ago, very suddenly, YouTube videos stopped buffering and playing normally on my laptop. This appears to be an intermittent problem. Sometimes a video will buffer and play. And sometimes the same video will not. When it doesn't, it will usually buffer and play for maybe 20 seconds, but then it freezes. And then maybe a minute later, a few more seconds will buffer and play. I have a fast broadband internet connection, Windows 7, 64 bit. The videos that won't buffer and play normally now are videos that I have watched just a few weeks ago with no issues. Again, this NEVER happened prior to a few weeks ago with any video. Something has changed and it is driving me crazy. I tried uninstalling Adobe Flash (using their uninstall program) and then reinstalling the most recent version compatible with my browser (Firefox). But that didn't change anything. I tried clearing cookies and cache. No change. Any suggestions?

Need a web proxy that plays nice with YouTube

Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:19:38 -0800

For some reason, my home Internet connection and YouTube hate each other. I can watch videos fine with a proxy, but I'd like to find one that will display the site properly. Any advice? If I just point my browser at YouTube, more often than not videos will buffer endlessly, taking many minutes to load even a few seconds of content. And thanks to the site's new backend that buffers only a few seconds at a time, I can't just leave the video to load on its own when it's having problems; I have to watch ten seconds, let it load for a while, watch the next ten seconds, etc. This is not satisfactory. When I use a web proxy, videos load much faster and more reliably, but for some reason most proxies either don't work with YouTube at all (the video just says "an error occurred.") or substitute their own Flash player for the site's native one, stripping out features like larger windows or resolution options in the process. Is there anything out there that will let me use the native site, and also isn't run by hackers?

Low-cost automated / automatic camera movement / slider?

audio — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:10:51 -0800

I've decided to start posting my music on youtube... performed live. I'm looking to improve the cinematography with an automated slider / jib that could produce a movement like this on its own: Does anyone know how I can do this on a budget?

How ad-free can a popular YouTube video be?

Koray — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:58:19 -0800

I hear that creators of very popular YouTube videos get paid for advertising. Normally they would welcome this, but I'm curious about what options a person has for keeping ads off their YouTube video, especially in the case where the video has been viewed very many times. Is it possible to keep ads off such a video altogether? And what would an effort to minimize advertising do to a video creator's ability to earn money (from YouTube) by posting videos on YouTube? (I imagine it would destroy it, but I don't know for sure.)

I have a DSL connection. Vimeo lags more often than Youtube.

maggieb — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 22:05:59 -0800

I have a DSL connection. Vimeo lags more often than Youtube. Why? Is there something I can do? Chrome over Windows 7. Firefox secondary. AdBlock used.

Silent Science Videos To Entertain Teens?

The Whelk — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:26:02 -0800

Looking for videos to create a youtube playlist to entertain a group of science-minded teenagers for about 30 min that are largely visual. Sound is fine but the bulk shouldn't be someone talking to the class like an instructor - visualizations are best - ideally they should look really, really cool. Class is engineering focused, but chemistry, robotics, wobbly bridges, comp-sci, biology, are all welcome. Backstory: the kids are going to be holed up in a room for a while without their phones, the projector will be playing a pre-selected set of youtube videos.

Which Social Media is "Best"?

CollectiveMind — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:07:01 -0800

II am trying to get a handle on web content and which content has, overall, the best stickiness. Sites like YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr are, as near as I can tell, mostly visual. Blog and microblogging sites like Wordpress and Twitter are word based. Quora, Reddit and Metafilter are information sharing communities. Podcasts and music sites like MySpace or Soundcloud are, for the most part, sound focused. And then you have sites like Facebook and Google+ that are trying to combine the best of all of them. I'm not asking about raw numbers or surveys that show which sites are used by the most people, though I admit that may be the closest I can get to my question. It seems to me that those sites that give people the most freedom to do more than one thing, i.e., not restrict them to a keyboard or a screen, would be the most popular since time is limited. But is it simply that some people who prefer video or are OK typing into a keyboard don't care about how much time they spend focusing in one direction? And are they markedly different from people who only want to listen to podcasts?
Or am I just going to have to be satisfied with leaders in each genre rather than discovering which social media is the "best."

Songs/videos that feature the Big Muff

drezdn — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 14:20:41 -0800

I'm looking for music videos that include an image of a Big Muff guitar pedal or songs that definitely include the use of a Big Muff on the track.

Korean or jibberish?

ColdChef — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:33:28 -0800

My 3yo son memorized a song from a cartoon on Youtube. He walks around the house singing it all day. We think the song might be Korean, but we're not sure. Is he using actual words or just making sounds? (apologies if this is wildly offensive, my wife and I are just curious).

Downloading playlist from YouTube

VincentLee — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 01:22:08 -0800

Hello guys, I would like to know if it is possibel/allowed to download videos from YouTube? There are a lot of nice playlists that I would like to have with me, so how can I download them? Can you recommend anything? Thanks in advance.

Is there a service like ReadItLater/Instapaper for videos?

aeighty — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 07:04:09 -0800

On the heels of my request for lectures, are there any services out there that would let me queue up videos and then download them to my phone, Instapaper style, for watching on the train?

Offensive YouTube "Recommended for You" - Pass the Eye Bleach!

Seeking Direction — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 13:43:30 -0800

Really disturbing things keep showing up on YouTube "recommended for you". I'm not logged in, and all I watched recently were car reviews and animations of DNA replication. Why is it here, and how can I get it out of here? To complicate matters, I'm running AdBlock already, so I know it's not an ad. I'm not going to describe the content, but it's quite explicit, and completely inappropriate for school. I have no interest in seeing it, and I have no idea why it's showing up in the first place.

Help me choose a web camcorder

brenton — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:27:03 -0800

I'm making some videos for the internet on a very low budget and am having trouble finding a suitable camera. I need something a step up from a webcam or a Flip HD. I originally wanted to use a DSLR capable of taking video, and got all set up with a Nikon D90, but I don't know a lot about cameras and no matter what I do, the lighting and focus turn out wrong. On the other hand, I've been using a little Flip HD which I got for free, and it's easy to use and the results are pretty good. The trouble is that it records in Mp4 which makes it a pain to edit.

I'm basically looking for something that is one step up from the Flip. Something that's easy and meant for video (the D90 can only take 5 minutes of video at a time!) but which has any sort of lens at all--something that will give the videos a better feel.

I'd go for a webcam, but they all look pretty crappy, even the "high-end" ones. I'm bigger on image quality than resolution. I prefer a good quality low-res video that captures great images to a HD cameraphone video that looks like, you know, a cameraphone took it.

Or maybe there's a trick to making the D90 work for me.

Youtube userscript or add-on recommendations?

flibbertigibbet — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 10:33:38 -0800

I love YousableTubeFix for Firefox, which sets global preferences for things like preferred resolution (the most important feature to me), default player size, and whether to autoplay videos on channel pages. The problem: it's still blocking ads even though I told it not to. Could you recommend any other Youtube-preference-modifying Firefox userscripts or add-ons that have a similar purpose but without accidentally blocking the ads? I follow a lot of people who make their living from Youtube, and who don't get paid from adblocked views. That's why it's so important to me that no ads be blocked, including pre-rolls (video ads that show up before the video), Adsense annotations, on-page ads (often found in the sidebar), etc. (This paragraph is just in case someone though I had typoed: no, I really do want the ads).

YousableTube Fix is definitely blocking at least the Adsense Annotations, but it may be letting pre-rolls show. Either way, it's still blocking one ad too many for my taste.

I previously used a userscript to set the default resolution to 720p or highest available, but it was badly-coded and caused all embedded Youtube videos to stop working, so I'd like a recommendation for a new one.

Best Anatomy/Physiology Videos on Youtube?

melodykramer — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 13:31:17 -0800

I have to learn anatomy and physiology on my own in a very condensed period of time. I find that I learn best by watching a lecturer or fantastic video. Do you have any recommendations for fantastic lecture series on YouTube detailing the anatomy and physiology of various organ systems?

WTF happened to the view counters on my Youtube "Manage Videos" page?

Ursula Hitler — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:58:18 -0800

Hi. I've had a weird fetishy tragi-comic cartoon web series thing for about 4 years now, and I obsessively monitor how many (or how few) people are watching it. But just recently, something weird and highly annoying happened with Youtube... Until maybe a week or two ago, I could go to the "manage videos" page on Youtube and it would tell me how many views there had been for each video. It was useful, because the counters on that page were a little more current than the ones on the page for each individual video, and because I could quickly see how a bunch of videos were doing at once. Now that feature is suddenly gone, and the spaces where the view counters should be are all blank. All of the other info is still there, it still says when it was posted and if it was public or private and all that. But no view counters.

I've searched on Google for answers, I've tried to search on Youtube itself, and I can't find anybody else talking about this problem, let alone offering suggestions for how to fix it.

I should say that this happens in Firefox and not in Explorer, but I really don't like Explorer and Firefox is my preferred browser.

How to index a Youtube channel on a Wordpress blog?

diode — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:24:58 -0800

I've just started up a new Wordpress blog, which is all well and good. I've also got a lot of content on Youtube in a channel, quite a bit of videos, as in 200+. Most of that content is not going to be embedded in the blog, but it's useful content that I'd like to be able to index and show to a browser. When I googled this topic, I found a WP plug-in that seemed to do precisely that, generated an XML sitemap of a Youtube channel and a URL on your blog that you could browse and see the content as thumbnails and synopsis. The plug-in unfortunately is no longer available and the developer is not interested in supporting it. I'm not a coder or WP developer. I've got tech skills and can usually find a way to do what I want to do in a technical sense. Solutions that involve me setting up a coded solution are not in my bailiwick. I have some developer resources, but not much. I could set up a static page and do this manually video by video but that's inelegant at best, and tedious at worst, and pretty much obsolete from day one as content gets added.
I was thinking if I replaced the WP search function with Google search, plus the XML sitemap video plug-in, that would be fairly powerful in terms of finding content you want on the blog related to a video topic of interest hosted on Youtube but not embedded on the blog, but clearly the plug-in is now obsolete.
So, any resources I could use to find an answer would be useful including places I could post this question, or other ways of thinking about this problem.

Things Girls Don't Understand About My Drunk Kitchen

Chorus — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:35:14 -0800

Recommend other Youtube channels/artists, now that Jenna Marbles and My Drunk Kitchen are annoying? I used to be a huge Jenna Marbles fan; I found her hilarious and insightful. I also loved the similar comedy of Hannah Hart's My Drunk Kitchen.

However, I find these channels increasingly irritating. I think Jenna lost me when she started including the boyfriend, which is never a good sign. MDK went from Hanna in her kitchen to a 'cast of 1000s' when it comes to special guests and cameos (plus her MyHarto channel takes itself way too seriously). Also, both Hannah and Jenna seem to be part of a YouTube clique with people like Daily Grace, etc.

Anyway, I really miss the 'funny/interesting chick' element to my YouTube subscriptions and would love some recommendations. I seem to go in phases when it comes to YouTube - I'm past Michelle Phan and JuicyStar and only half pay attention to BubsBeauty.

I've pretty eclectic tastes, what I love at the moment are Epic Mealtime, Sorted Food, Daily Mix, Paul Soars Jnr, Red Letter Media, TED, Tested.com, The Japan Channel and a few others. I'm not into the so-called 'talking heads' Youtubers. I wish Jane from The Hairpin was on YT.

Stand-up, cooking, let's plays (esp. Minecraft), intellectual, make-up - please, recommend away!

How do I reference old cartoons in Harvard style?

Chenko — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:18:48 -0800

I'm writing the bibliography for my dissertation which is about the animation studio UPA. I need to cite a lot of theatrical cartoons from the 1950s, which I watched on youtube. This Site give intructions for citing youtube videos, but it seems like its referring to original youtube vids, not existing films. It says to list the username of the contributor as the author, and it feels wrong to credit a John Hubley cartoon to "liquidnature13". Do I need to give the cartoon's director, year of release, and studio, as well as the contributer's username and the year it was uploaded? If so, how should I format it? (I'm using the Harvard system)

Help me find this video.

MaryDellamorte — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 14:24:07 -0800

Help me find a Youtube video I saw a while back featuring a nerdy young man playing an amazing keyboard/synth setup. It may or may not have been posted to the Blue.

Create Youtube playlist from list of links

dirtdirt — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 06:55:12 -0800

I want to create Youtube playlists based on lists of Youtube URLs. How? A common use case is: someone asks MetaFilter a question about good music, and a bunch of folks respond with links to Youtube. And I want to listen to it all, but I don't want to sit and click through each one! Or, someone will post a mega-YouTube linkdump, and I want to listen to it all, but I don't want to sit and click through each one!

Extracting the URLs is trivial - how do I queue them up to play? An on-the-fly playlist is good (roll.io looks like it might be able to do this, but I can't actually get it to do anything), but a real saveable playlist that I can then access from my AppleTV is ideal.