Last week we went over how to download YouTube videos to your computer. It’s really pretty simple.

What if you want to take those videos and burn them to a DVD, so that you can play them on any DVD player? That’s easy, with DVD Flick.

First step is to go to www.DVDFlick.net and download the free software:

It’s a simple installation and it is completely free. Once it is installed, run the program. You will see an option to “Add title”. When you click this, you need to navigate to wherever your video is stored on your computer and select that video to add. You can keep adding videos to this project, and there is a bar on the left side of the program window that will keep track of how much space you have used until the DVD will be full.

Once you have added the videos you want on the DVD, you can actually just click “Create DVD” to let the burn process begin.

However – if you want to get fancy, click on “Menu settings” and choose a nice background image for your DVD menu screen.

One word of warning – the process takes a while. A 10-minute video will take about 30 minutes to burn to a DVD. If you are burning a lot of video to disc, get it started just before going to bed and let it work overnight.

I would also recommend doing a short video first as a test, to make sure the process goes as expected. If you have any questions about how to use DVD Flick, they have a user forum here.

This week’s video is the brief story of a kid with a problem. He’s stuck behind the couch.

I recently was asked, “What kind of disc should I use – CD-R or CD-RW?”

For that question, there is a simple answer and a more complex answer.

The simple answer: Just use CD-R. If it gets messed up during the process, toss it and make another one.

For some people, that’s good enough. If you are interested in the logic behind that, keep reading for the more complex answer.

First of all, CD-R means “CD Recordable”. CD-RW means “CD Re-Writable”.

Probably my first question would be: what are you recording onto the disc?

If you are using CDs as a regular backup of your computer’s data, such as the My Documents folder, you need to change your backup procedure and not use discs at all (that’s a subject for another day).

If you are taking MP3 files and making an audio CD to play in your home CD player or in your car, you need to use CD-R discs for that.

If you are just making a permanent archival copy of a folder of family pictures, the CD-R is again the best choice.

The idea behind a CD-RW is that you can sort of use that disc as another drive. You can put data on it, erase that data, and put more data on it again. Since they are supposed to be re-usable over and over, CD-RW discs are more expensive. That sounds perfect, right? Nope.

If you are putting something important on the disc, such as irreplaceable family photos, you don’t want to take any chance of them getting accidentally deleted. If that CD-RW somehow made its way back into your CD drive, there is a chance that you could lose those photos.

If you have the photos on a CD-R, and the disc is digitally “closed” after you put them on there, you can no longer add anything else to that disc. So there is no chance of accidentally overwriting your valuable pictures (or other data).

What if you are recording some data to a CD-R and the recording process messes up and the CD-R is ruined? Who cares – just trash it and make another one. They cost less than 20 cents (sometimes a lot less) – consider them disposable. Once you have your data recorded on there and the disc is closed, you can put it in a place for safekeeping. Or if you recorded an audio CD, you can take it to your car and listen to music on the way to work.

This week’s video is a funny mascot at a basketball game:

You (and virtually everyone else that uses a computer) know that if your hard drive crashes, there is a good possibility of not being able to access the data on that drive afterward. That’s why you need a backup.

There’s another place where important data might be stored: your digital camera. What would you do if:

1. the pictures accidentally get deleted before you copy them to your computer
2. the memory card in the camera accidentally gets formatted
3. your camera fails, and you can no longer access the images on the memory card

First, don’t panic. There is a good chance that the pictures can still be recovered. You need to get a program that does just that. There is a free one called ZAR, which stands for Zero Assumption Recovery. You can get it here.

The link above also includes detailed, step-by-step instructions for using the program to recover the images from your memory card. Just follow those steps and everything will probably work out fine.

I recommend bookmarking today’s blog (or printing it) – then keep it in a handy place for whenever disaster strikes your digital camera’s memory card.

This week’s video is a news anchor who needs to pause just a bit between topics:

If you have not used Picasa yet, you are really missing out on a fantastic, free program for organizing and editing your digital photographs. You actually had to buy it originally (that was a few years ago), then Google bought the company and made it free. If you ARE already using it, you might enjoy some of the fun things you can do with it, that perhaps you have not tried yet. I’ll show you what I am talking about – let’s go experiment and have some fun!

1. Lighten up the dark pictures
You’re at your child’s school play. You take a picture that you will never have a chance to take again, and…the flash doesn’t go off. The moment is lost forever…or is it? Picasa to the rescue! When you are viewing the image in Picasa, look for the slide bar on the left side called “Fill Light”:

Slide it to the right as far as is necessary, and see what happens with that dark picture! Below is an example of a picture before and after the Fill Light Slidebar is used (click on the images to see them full size).

2. Make a modern photo into an old-timey photo
This is done by using the “Sepia” function in Picasa. You can do it with any digital photograph. The end result is a photo that is made of just sepia tones, like pictures done a hundred or more years ago. To do this, double click on the image in Picasa, and then click on the “Effects” tab in the left column. If you don’t like it, just click the Undo button.

Here is an example of a regular color photo on which I used the Sepia effect:

3. Put the focus on one person
In this example, you might have a group photo and you just want to identify one person in the photo. Or you just want to draw the viewer’s attention to one person or one part of the photo. You can make the whole picture blurry except for that one area. You have control over what area to have in focus, how blurry the rest of the picture is, and how large of an area will be in focus. To do this, go back to the “Effects” tab and click on “Soft Focus”, then just move the cursor to where you want it. Example below.

4. Colorize just part of the photo
This can be an interesting way to present a photo. Imagine a regular photo, full of vibrant images. Then, you make that photo a black and white – except for one area. Well, you don’t have to imagine – just use the “Focal B&W” function in the Picasa Effects menu. Here’s what it looks like:

5. Zoom in
This is a fun one. It works best on high-resolution pictures. When you are viewing a picture like that, look in the lower right area of the Picasa window, right above the “Collage” and “Export” links. You should see a slide bar there. It has no text label, but that is the Zoom tool. When you slide it to the right, it gets closer and closer to the image you are viewing.

The picture below is a large picture of an airplane cockpit (click on the image and you will see how big it is). The area that I have outlined in red is the spot that I zoomed in on in the second image.

As a kid, whenever I read my Spiderman comic books, I would always see those ads for the “X-ray Glasses”. I never sent away for them because I knew it couldn’t be true. But wouldn’t it be cool to have that just for a day? This week’s video says…maybe not.

Here’s the problem: you have some movies on your computer that you have downloaded from the internet. You can watch them on your computer, but you want to be able to watch them on your big screen television. Let’s face it; if you want to watch The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson’s screen presence is just too big for your little 19″ monitor.

So you need to get that movie on to a DVD disc that will play in your regular ol’ DVD player out in the other room. How to do that? Not that easy. There are lots of different programs that will say they create DVDs, but typically they are expensive programs and not all of them are geared toward beginners. And even when you do it right, they don’t always work.

You want something that does the job, is easy to use, and is FREE! Now you have it.

The program is called DVD Flick. You can see it at http://www.dvdflick.net/ (that’s dot.net, not dot.com). It’s a free download, and it really could not make DVD creation any simpler. You put in your blank DVD, run the program, choose your movie file, and click the “Create DVD” button. I hate to say it, but you don’t even need a computer tutor to show you how to do this!

One downside – the process takes a while, and it pretty much ties up your computer in the process. A 2-hour movie file might take 4 or 5 hours to burn to a playable DVD, so you should just start it running before you go to bed, when you are done with your other work. And when you wake up in the morning, there’s Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman waiting for you.

I remember when USB flash drives first came out – I thought “what a gimmick – who would use that?”. How wrong I was! Now just about everyone has one, because they are one of the easiest ways to carry computer files with you. And like everything else related to computers, they are getting better – and cheaper – all the time.

There is something important to remember when you are using your flash drive. When you are finished with whatever you are doing, you cannot just pull it out. Well, you can, but you are risking damaging the data if you do it that way. If you just pull the drive out of the USB port without the proper preparation, you are sort of “surprising” the computer by its removal. The computer doesn’t like surprises.

Before you physically remove the flash drive, open My Computer and see what drive letter the flash drive is using (once you know that, you can close the My Computer window).

Then, look in the System Tray (the lower right corner of your screen). Move your mouse over the icons until you see one that displays the words “Safely Remove Hardware”. Double click on that icon.

In the new window that appears, you should see some drives listed (and some other things that are plugged into USB ports, such as your printer or mouse or keyboard). Your flash drive probably is listed like “USB Mass Storage Device” or something similar. There should be a box near the bottom of the window that says “Display device components” and you will see exactly what drives are connected to your computer. Click once to highlight the flash drive, then click on the Stop button.

When you see the message appear in the lower right that says you can now safely remove the device, that’s when you can actually pull the drive out of the USB port.

The general trend in web-based video is to have the video play in a Flash player (you probably already have Flash installed so that it plays in your web browser). Flash is just a programming language. If you can see the video I have posted below, you are viewing it in Flash.

However, some sites display videos in Windows Media Player format. If you use Firefox (as I know many of you do), and you have trouble viewing Windows Media videos, you may just need to install the Windows Media Firefox plug-in. This is very simple to do. Just open Firefox, then download the plug-in from here. When you see the “Install” button, click it. You will probably have to restart Firefox.

Now you are ready to view Windows Media videos from Firefox.

This week’s video is a compilation of various people having a really bad day at the office:

A lot of people have a big collection of MP3 (music) files on their computer. Many people have hundreds of these files that have been downloaded through iTunes or elsewhere – you might even have thousands of them. These files can be played on your computer, or on your iPod or other MP3 device. But what if you want to play them on a regular CD player, such as in your car?

To do that, you need to do two things: convert them to CD format, and then burn them to a CD. Fortunately, you can do this in one easy procedure using software that you already have on your computer.

If you already know how to do this with a program such as Nero or Roxio, then there is no reason to change and do it a different way. The procedure that I will describe here uses Windows Media Player, only because virtually every Windows based computer already has it installed. You can open Media Player by going to Start – All programs – Accessories – Entertainment – Windows Media Player. Of course, you will also need a CD burner drive and some blank CD-R discs.

First, put a blank CD-R in the burner. Wait for the computer to recognize it, then close the window that automatically opens. Now, open Windows Media Player. You should see a tab somewhere called “Burn” – click that.

Now, open the folder where your music files are stored in MP3 format (just about any music file that you download will be an MP3). What you want to see are two windows open on the desktop – the folder that contains your music files, and the Media Player window. One at a time, drap the MP3 files to the “burn list” portion of the Media Player window.

When moving files over, remember that most CD-R discs can hold up to about 80 minutes of music (you should see a running total at the bottom of the window so you can tell when you are getting close to the maximum).

When you have the files moved over, you are ready to convert and burn. Click the link at the top of Media Player that says “Start Burn”. I recommend that you not have any other windows or programs running during the burn process – if anything messes it up, you have wasted that CD-R and you have to start over again with a new one. You will see Media Player go through and analyze each file, convert it to CD format, and then burn it to the CD. When it is done, the CD drive should open, so you can just pick up the newly recorded CD and go try it in your CD player.

Happy listening!

Video clip – well, sort of a video. There is a group based in New York City called Improv Everywhere. Their motto is “causing scenes of chaos and joy in public places”. What they do is create some great studies in human psychology. You can spend a lot of time on their site reading about what they have done. For today, here is the story of how one of them got lost at Yankee Stadium during a baseball game.