Tubeify: New Service Combined YouTube, Last.fm, And Billboard

More and more people today use YouTube as an instant music player. However, it has drawbacks – for example, while it’s fine for single tracks, it can’t serve as the music video jukebox users would love to see. The problem is finally solved with Tubeify coming in, mashing up Youtube, Last.fm, and Billboard, convenient for both musical time travelers and casual listeners. This new service allows you to search for, play and queue video clips in your favorite web browser. 

Although the service has just appeared, it’s clear that it will become one of the best YouTube jukeboxes around, with its great search capabilities and outstanding usability. The most attractive feature of the service is the Billboard “timetravel” option, which allows you to pull up the Billboard chart for any week you wish, starting from 1964 and then listen to the songs leading the charts then.

The author of the idea of Tubeify is Tomas Isdal, a student of University of Washington PhD, well-known for BitTorrent-related research projects like OneSwarm or the DMCA printer study.The current idea, Tubeify, isn’t a research anymore, but just a good way to turn YouTube into a great music player.

Before, many people were annoyed by the videos stopping when another song was being searched for, as well as by many duplicate search results. In addition, the playlist couldn’t boast rich functionality. However, YouTube had the decided advantage – a huge archive of music with lots of both licensed and unlicensed tracks.

Tomas simply tried to make it feel more like a familiar desktop music player like iTunes and Spotify. At the same time, the player was supposed to be web-based to make people able to use it anywhere. The result of his attempt is quite a useful mashup of Billboard, Last.fm and YouTube.

The searching of the Tubeify is handled by the Last.fm api. It differs from YouTube by the fact that the current track goes on playing while another is being searched for. The search results serve as so-called “lazy playlists”, able to be “pinned” to the sidebar so that you could easily access them later. Drag&Drop support makes adding tracks to playlists the easiest thing. Finally, the most exiting feature is the possibility to share playlists with your friends – just paste the playlist links anywhere (Twitter, Facebook, email) to provide your friends with instant access to it.

Visit Tubeify here.

YouTube Extends Automatic Video Captioning

WASHINGTON – YouTube, in a significant development for millions of deaf Internet users, extended automatic caption capability Thursday to all English-language videos on the video-sharing website.

YouTube users have been able to manually add captions to videos since 2008 and in November of last year the site began offering machine-generated captions for about a dozen partner channels.

Hiroto Tokusei, a YouTube product manager, said in a blog post on Thursday that the automatic caption, or auto-caption, feature was now being expanded to all videos on the site in English.

Auto-captioning uses speech-to-text technology to generate subtitles.

"Making video easily accessible is something we're working hard to address at YouTube," said Tokusei, citing studies that predict that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015.

The auto-captioning feature will make YouTube videos "more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages," the YouTube project manager said.

While the auto-caption feature currently only works for videos where English is spoken, Tokusei said users can use Google's automatic translation service to simultaneously translate the captions into 50 other languages.

Auto-captioning in more languages will be added "in the months to come."

The YouTube project manager noted that auto-captioning is not yet perfect and a "clearly spoken audio track" without background noise is needed to create quality captions.

Video owners do have the capability, however, of downloading auto-generated captions, improving their accuracy and then uploading a new version.

One of the chief advocates for captioning capability at YouTube has been Vint Cerf, the Google vice president who has been described as the "Father of the Internet."

Cerf, who is hearing impaired and has been wearing hearing aids since the age of 13, made a personal appearance at the unveiling of the YouTube auto-caption features at Google's Washington offices in November.