One part of internet usage that is booming in popularity is the use of online videos.  It doesn’t matter if the video is funny, information, educational or just plain weird – people love to show video clips to their friends.

This means that a lot of video clips get sent by email.  All it takes is one person to start, and before long it snowballs and the video clip is being forwarded to email groups all over the internet.

Don’t do it! Here are 4 reasons why you shouldn’t email a video as an attachment:

1. It means you have a huge email in your outbox.
I have written about this before – if you use Outlook (or any email software, really), an email can get “stuck” in your outbox.  If this is a particularly large email, it can cause a problem.  There is a fix for the problem, but why put yourself in that predicament in the first place?

2. It ties up your friend’s email while it downloads to their inbox.
I know, everyone is on high speed these days so it’s okay.  But wait a minute.  First, everyone is not on a high speed connection.  Believe it or not, some people still use dialup.  And some use DSL, which can be only a little better than dialup sometimes.  Second, what if everyone sent emails by video?  No matter how fast your connection is, if you have multiple videos to download, you will be waiting for a while.

3. It takes up space on your computer and your friend’s computer.
Yes, hard drives these days are huge so there is a lot of space available.  That may be true.  Do you know how much space you have available on your hard drive right now?  Most people don’t.  I have seen a lot of inboxes, and some people get a lot of email forwards.  If you get multiple videos by email each day, that hard drive is going to fill up more quickly than it should.

4. You shouldn’t open a video attachment in an email anyway.
This may be the most important reason.  If you are thinking about sending a video out to your group of friends, how did you get that email to start with?  You had to open an attachment to see it yourself first.  Bad idea.  That’s an easy way to download a virus or spyware.

So how do you share videos with your friends safely and efficiently?  Use YouTube (www.YouTube.com).

It doesn’t matter what video you want to send – it’s on YouTube.  Even if it’s the funniest or strangest thing you have ever seen, it’s on YouTube already and it’s been seen by a lot of people before you saw it.  The only exception is if you or your friend actually shot the video.

So let’s say you have a video that you want to share.  It’s about a guy that comes out singing, but he is not singing any actual lyrics, just “la la la” or “trololololo”.  You know your email friends would just be dying to see it (who wouldn’t?).  Here’s  what you do.

Go to YouTube and type in a search to find the video.  I’ll say it again, the video is somewhere on YouTube.  It might take you a search or two, but it’s there.

When you click search, you will see a bunch of videos come up that match that search:

So you click on one to watch the video, to make sure it is the right one (the one that I am using as an example is a video that is going viral right now).  Once you have determined that it’s the one you want, look over on the right side somewhere and you will see a couple of lines of code.  One of them will be labeled “URL” and the other one is “Embed”:

Click once in the URL field and the whole line will be highlighted.  Then, do a right click on that line and choose “Copy”.

Now, go to your email program and create a new email to the person you want to show the video to.  Somewhere in the body of the email, do a right-click and choose “Paste”.  The address of the video shows up right there in your email!

• No files to save on your computer
• No big emails to send
• All your recipient has to do is click on the URL to view the video

Now, on to this week’s video – when we lived up north, one of the things that made the long winters more bearable was riding our snowmobiles.  Here’s a guy that’s not having a good day with his:

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.

(Welcome! I publish a new computer tip every Monday – if you want to subscribe by email, just enter your email address in the subscription box on the right.)

YouTube has millions of videos available, and a ton more are being added every day. In addition to the stupid ones (of which there are quite a few), there are many that are entertaining, informative, even educational.

What if you’re watching a video on YouTube, and you want to download that video to your computer for your own archives? You can look for a “Download” button, but you won’t find one. Youtube doesn’t want to make it easy for you to save videos to your computer, because they would rather have you come back to their website (and see their ads) whenever you want to view one.

Yet, thanks to a free service, downloading a YouTube video is pretty easy. Let’s walk through it.

Let’s say you’re watching the Annoying Orange video. Watch the video on the YouTube site (here), and then of course you will see why most people would want to download that one and save it. Okay, maybe not, but it will work as an example for us anyway.

When you are watching that video on the YouTube site, you can look up at the top of the screen at the address bar and you will see the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL_qGMfbtAk

If you click once on the address, it will highlight the whole line in blue. Then click one more time, right after the “y” in “youtube”. If you don’t click in exactly the right place, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cursor to immediately after the “y”:

When the cursor is in the right place, just hit Backspace one time to erase the “y” and type the number 3. So you just replaced the “y” with a “3″.

Now hit Enter on the keyboard. You will see a screen that offers to download the video to your computer – you just need to choose which format you prefer (.mp4 or .flv). In most cases you will probably want .mp4.

When you click that link, you will have the option to save the file to your computer. If you plan to download more than a few videos, it would be a good idea to create a special folder for just that.

This week’s video is a foreign commercial for caviar (it’s not actually caviar, since the product is spelled “kaviar”). This baby has a unique way of showing that he really likes the taste.