Kiran Upadhyay

We have all fallen in love with a music video you just want to show to your friends and watch all the time, and help, by doing that, the musicians who created it publicize their music. There are also times when you are on a long plane trip with no internet access and would love to watch some of your favorite music videos to help time go by. Even though we are getting online more and more often, there are just certain times when that is not an option, or when you’d like not to have to go to a website to search for those videos. So what do you do when you want to download free music videos you love so you can watch them later? Or what about when you want to create your own archive of the music you love to watch whenever you want? Fortunately there are a few ways to find free music video downloads. Real Player Real Player has been one of the most popular media players in the market for quite some time now. Their most recent versions have an amazing variety of features that make stor

Need a cool project for school? Have oodles of free time? Try your skills at creating a video with claymation or stopmotion! Claymation is an animation technique used with clay figures.  Basically, each movement is a new “shot” and the “shots” are connected together at the end to make a movie. Famous claymation cartoons like Gumby and Wallace and Gromit have made the artistic form popular. Stopmotion is the original animation technique used to create cartoons.  You can use any kind of toy (legos, for example). This technique was replaced by computer animation. Old cartoons used this technique to replace drawings and cells. There is no clay involved. Ingredients 5 cups of patience A detailed storyboard Clay (for claymation) or toys (for stopmotion) Backdrop for scene Digital camera 6 more cups of patience Lots of time Movie-making software (free or commercial) Step 1: Plan, Plan, Plan There is a really good reason that old cartoons are short. They take a long time to cr

Sometimes it’s the music that makes the movies. You just have to watch ‘Sound of Music’ or ‘Saturday Night Fever’ to understand what I am talking about. You have to be a Martian not to have heard about either of those two. Then let me throw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at you, a movie that entered the musical consciousness of a lot of people, as time went by. Yes, it’s the magic of movies. But even as the movie unspools, music lends a bit of its own too. Just for the nitpickers, let’s use the more precise term of soundtrack . The word ‘soundtrack’ has obviously come from the sound recording on a narrow strip of a motion picture film, which runs with the images. Today, we also know it as a  Film Score or more promotionally as OST (Original Soundtrack). It’s music by another name and quite similarly, it can uplift, it can sadden or it can give us goose pimples. If you have seen ‘Chariots of Fire’, then the opening scene with Vangelis’ score is as energizing as the scene of the athletes. Or t

YouTube was created in 2005, but much like Google, it feels like it’s been around forever. We post our videos on YouTube, look for some silly entertainment during boring afternoons and send videos along to friends much like old ladies used to spread gossip around town not very long ago. But should you be limited to YouTube ? Let’s be honest, there is a whole world of streaming video online that most people have never seen because they have settled for YouTube. Most sites have the same features, or features even better than YouTube has and some have a more specialized selection or much higher quality videos. So here is a small sample of video sites you should check out that many people feel are better than YouTube. Current TV Current TV is a website that is also a TV channel, but unlike all other tv sites, that post their content from tv on their sites, Current plays the content from their website on TV. People post their videos, or pods, on the site which get voted by the communi

Last week we talked about the advantages of carrying your music with you on the go – not on an MP3 player, but on an ordinary USB stick. Accompanied with a portable audio application, you would be able to play your music anywhere, anytime; be it at home, at work, or even at your grandmother’s place. We already showed you how to do a custom portable Winamp install , making it fit for any portable storage device, but this time we’d like to focus on native MP3 players that are portable. That is, audio application that can be put on your USB stick without messing around. Some of these are adapted to run on portable media, others simply work. CoolPlayer+ Portable This one is, if we may, a ‘real’ portable application. Based on the original CoolPlayer, PortableApps has modified the application and repackaged it as a portable app. With 1.5 MB and over 2 million downloads to date, CoolPlayer+ Portable has proven itself both a lightweight and a fit candidate. Apart from audio playback,

I love to watch TV, I always have and always will. But as I get older, time becomes a bigger problem. In the early part of 2000 I snatched up a TiVo to help me watch all my prime time shows when I got around to it. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 12pm – 2am. Since the baby came around, that time is either for sleeping or trying to get the baby to sleep. So I take what I can get and maybe hit up my Sling player from my Windows Mobile device. But more likely than not, I am at a computer without access to anything other than a web browser. Now I bring you my 3 favorite web sites for watching full television episodes online. Sadly as of now these links will only work via a computer from the United States or by using a US Proxy or VPN service. You will find a link to one such service further down. First up is my long time favorite Hulu . Hulu came to my attention when I found full versions of South Park episodes online here years ago. Now you can access their full television shows using