Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

1. I want to download and play FLVs on my computer.

2. I don't want to use some crappy FLV player that only plays FLVs and has an interface from either 1995 or 2034 – I want to use my favorite player, like Media Player Classic.

3. Yes, VLC plays FLVs but it can't fast forward or rewind them. Yes, mplayer plays FLVs but I want a GUI. Yes, mplayer supports GUIs but they all pretty much suck. I don't particularly like VLC's or mplayer's interface – want to fight about it?

Enter the latest version of ffdshow. ffdshow is a decoding filter – think of it as a set of codecs for your media players. It supports …

Updated: September 16th, 2012

According to Wikipedia, in April 2008, the number of videos on Youtube was 83.4 million (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#cite_note-5). However, the link in the cite note now displays “*” video results 1 – 20 of millions, without showing the real count.

Here's one way I found to get an estimated, but relatively accurate, number of videos on the popular video sharing site Youtube. The idea is simple. Get this feed: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/-/* and parse out the number inside the <opensearch:totalresults> tag.

So here it is: the number of videos on Youtube is currently fluctuating between about 141 million and 144 million. The number goes up and down, which points to the fact that these are estimates.

That's a whole boatload …