How to download Youtube videos on Android

Posted by BA on Dec 2, 2010 in Android, Android Apps, Android Market, Mobile Apps | 0 comments

Youtube is one of the world’s most popular website and the great idea behind the website is to share, stream and watch videos online. Android phones and devices have an amazing Youtube client and you can watch as much Youtube videos as you want if you are on WiFi network, but if you have an expensive data plan, you’ll  definitely feel the need to carry Youtube videos downloaded on the memory card. Well, that’s not right but we have a tool available that does the trick for you.

FREEdi downloader can be used to download Youtube videos onto the memory card of your android device. If you are not a music quality freak, you can also download only the sound out of the Youtube video and build a good collection of music by downloading it from Youtube.

As this is not the intended use of Youtube, the application is no more available from the official Android Market, but some other sites have the ,apk file available for download. If all this sounds interesting, you can click here to download the software.

LHC Orders ban of Google, Amazon, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube and Bing

Posted by BA on Jun 23, 2010 in Internet, Social Networking | 59 comments

This is interesting to see that Lahore High Court has once again ordered to ban 9 sites including Google, Amazon, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Youtube and Bing in Pakistan. Quite interestingly, 3 of these are popular search engines and usually do not have content of their own. According to a news article, the decision has been taken as a result of a petition submitted in high court stating that these sites are posting sacrilegious material. The sites are accused of publishing blasphemous materials and twisting the facts and figure of Holy Quran.

PTA has already been in trouble with all these bans and blocking going around, some security breaches letting people log on to others’ accounts on facebook and twitter and now this new ban will put them to some real hard work. Court has ordered chariman PTA to appear in the court with all the relevant material no 28th June 2010. This ban has to be implemented immediately.

Please note that some of the social networking sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr were blocked earlier due to publishing blasphemous material. This blocking was also done by PTA after orders from Lahore High Court.

** Update ** – June 23 – Noon PST
No sites have yet been blocked. Facebook is apparently not among the 9 banned sites.

Youtube, Wikipedia, Flickr blocked in Pakistan after Facebook

Posted by BA on May 20, 2010 in Internet, Social Networking | 147 comments

Facebook was blocked yesterday after the Court’s order against the blasphemous Facebook Page and now it looks like the start of a social websites blackout in Pakistan. Youtube, the popular video sharing site, Wikipedia, a crowd sourced encyclopedia and Flickr, the popular photo sharing sate has also been blocked in Pakistan.

It has been reported that the controversial content from blocked Facebook pages had made there way to the video sharing sites, Wikiepedia and Flickr as well. That is why these sites have been blocked as well.

While Youtube has been blocked, other video sharing sites are running all fine. Similarly, Flickr has been blocked by Picasa and other photo sharing sites are also up.

Update***

It has also been reported that Google.com was also blocked for some this morning in Pakistan but now it’s working all fine.

Update ***

Lemonbits.net is also blocked. The page title is “Anti-Draw-Muhammad-Day”. With the blasphemous page coming online and getting popular, many other sites that oppose or support that page have also come online. Lemonbits.net was one of them.

Update ***

How to use Wikipedia in Pakistan during the ban

Wikipedia.com has been blocked but Wikipedia.org is still available. You can select any language other than English to use Wikipedia non-english version. For example you can access French version or Urdu version of Wikipedia without any problem. Even you can access non-english version and can get it translated using Google Translations or any similar service.

Update ***

Response from the News websites

Popular news websites like CNN, BBC, Google News and popular Pakistani news websites like Dawn and Geo News have all reported about the ban on Youtube as well as Facebook. Though, nobody is talking about the ban on Wikipedia and Flickr. No doubt Facebook and Youtube are more popular than Wikipedia or Flickr, they are worth mentioning when reporting news.

Important stats come from an unnamed PTA rep in the Geo News article. According to these unofficial stats, more than 20% of Pakistan’s Internet bandwidth is utilized by users accessing these two sties.

Following is the list of the news articles coming on these popular news websites:

DAWN
Google News
BBC
CNN
Geo News

Update *** May 22, 2010 , 2:30pm GMT

Wikipedia is now accessible throughout Pakistan but there is a large number of other websites that are not working in the country. Flickr, Facebook and Youtube are still not accessible. This means that all those websites that embed videos from Youtube are also showing a white blank space instead of the video. One of my blog that serves technology news has also been blocked without anything to do with the controversial content.

Is youtube banned in Pakistan?

Posted by BA on Feb 7, 2010 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

I watched a few clips on Youtube a while ago today, but now when I go to Youtube.com, I get a message saying “The Site Is Restricted”.

It appears PTCL has banned the site for its users. Are you experiencing that too?

Voice recognition put to the right use – Youtube updates

Posted by BA on Nov 21, 2009 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Google announces two new features of its already popular YouTube service. The new features are:

• Auto Caption: If your video has English conversation or commentary, YouTube will attempt to make subtitles out of it and show at the bottom of the screen.
• Auto timing: In case you want to upload your own captions in text, you don’t have to worry about the timings. Which sentence from your text file was spoken at what time, YouTube will attempt to pick it up itself.

Both these features is a good news for hearing impaired users of YouTube in particular and everybody else in general. You can watch this video to get the overview of the service.