Category: video

Top 10 Free Movie Download Websites That Are Completely Legal

WARNING: I am not an attorney, and therefore I do NOT offer any opinion on the legality of these sites, particularly since what is legal varies from country to country, and laws change and are reinterpreted by the courts. I am simply passing along the link to this article, for those who may find it useful and who are willing to assume any and all risks. If you want to actually use any of the sites mentioned, you should first consult your own attorney to get an opinion on whether you can legally use them in your locale. I will NOT be responsible if you use one of the sites mentioned in this article and are later sued, or get into legal trouble as a result.

Are looking for some websites where you can download movies for free, legally? To answer this query, we are here with a list of top 10 free movie download websites where you can get some quality entertainment

Source: Top 10 Free Movie Download Websites That Are Completely Legal (fossBytes)

Improve YouTube Video Playback on Low Power Intel mini PCs by Disabling VP9 Support in Chrome or Firefox

I’ve been reviewing several Intel Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, and Braswell mini PCs in the last year or so, and I always end up recommending Microsoft Edge browser over Firefox or Chrome for people wanting to watch YouTube videos, as the last two browsers always drop many frames with the video stuttering regularly. However I noticed that while Edge is playing MP4/AVC (H.264) video, the other two browser would normally stream WebM/VP9 videos, and it could be the cause of the problem as H.264 can be hardware accelerated, but VP9 not, and the low power processor might not quite powerful enough to handle 1080p VP9 video decoding smoothly.

Source: Improve YouTube Video Playback on Low Power Intel mini PCs by Disabling VP9 Support in Chrome or Firefox (CNXSoft – Embedded Systems News)

OpenShot 2.0.x Crowd Funded Video Editor Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint – NoobsLab | Ubuntu/Linux News, Reviews, Tutorials, Apps

OpenShot video editor is an open-source video editor for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac, it is free and released under GNU GPL 3 license. Using OpenShot video editor you can create a film with your videos, photos, and audio tracks that you have always thought of. It lets you add transitions, effects, and sub-titles, and you can export to DVD, YouTube, Video, and many other common formats.

Source: OpenShot 2.0.x Crowd Funded Video Editor Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint – NoobsLab

How to install Windows Media Center on Windows 10 (unofficially) – Liliputing

Remember when Microsoft said Windows 10 wouldn’t support Windows Media Center? Well, that’s only kind of true. While the latest version of Windows doesn’t ship with the software, it turns out you can install it… unofficially. The process for doing this isn’t officially supported by Microsoft, so there’s no way to know if it will work indefinitely. […]

Source: How to install Windows Media Center on Windows 10 (unofficially) – Liliputing

How to “downgrade” Kodi back to 14.2 (Helix) in Ubuntu 14.04 (EDIT: or maybe back to 15.2 Isengard)

 

Important
This is a very old article. If you are trying to downgrade from a newer version of Kodi back to a previous one, see this section of the Kodi wiki for current information.

In perusing Reddit I discovered that someone associated with the Kodi forums may have tried to censor this information.  So, I figured I’d give them a little taste of the Streisand effect.  And this is useful technical information that should be made available, IMHO, because new versions of software sometimes introduce bugs not present in older versions.  This was originally posted by Kodi forum user opensorce in a thread that no longer exists. USE THIS INFORMATION STRICTLY AT YOUR OWN RISK!  I SUGGEST DOING A FULL SYSTEM BACKUP BEFORE YOU PROCEED.

If you’re running Ubuntu 14.04 and you’re having trouble with Kodi 15 Isengard you can return back to 14.2 by doing the following:

1) Follow the instructions here to completely remove Kodi from your system

2) Download these two files: https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi-bin_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_i386.deb and
https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_all.deb for 32 bit and https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi-bin_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_amd64.deb and https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_all.deb for 64 bit.

3) Install Kodi-bin then Kodi for a return to 14.2 (“dpkg -i kodi-bin*” and then “dpkg -i kodi_*” without the quotes should do it)

4) Be sure not to allow any updates to Kodi until you want to change to 15.

Note: Some users have experienced issues with dependencies after uninstalling 15. Be sure you follow all the instructions to uninstall 15 before re-installing 14.2.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: Although my own efforts with this method have proven successful on Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04 wsnipex says “this will probably break on anything but ubuntu 14.04”. So be aware!

Later comments in the thread indicated that additional dependencies may be required (so watch the output of the dpkg commands when you run them and look for missing dependencies, which can usually be installed using apt-get) and/or that “sudo apt-get -f install” may need to be run in order to fix missing dependencies.  Also there were comments to the effect that this will ONLY work with Ubuntu 14.04 and not with any other version of Ubuntu.  I suspect that’s because the downloaded files are from the “trusty” section of the repository, and that if you were running a different version you’d need to obtain the proper .deb files for that version.

EDIT FOR THOSE WISHING TO DOWNGRADE TO KODI VERSION 15.2: If you are attempting to downgrade from Kodi 16 to Kodi 15.2 on a Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit system, these may be the files you will need: https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi-bin_15.2~git20151019.1039-final-0trusty_amd64.deb and https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi_15.2~git20151019.1039-final-0trusty_all.deb – I have downloaded and saved these files as a form of insurance, so that I can get Kodi Isengard back in the event that my HTPC crashes and burns, but I have not actually attempted an install using them. I did this only because the TVHeadEnd PVR addon in Kodi 16 is again broken (but in different ways than before) in Kodi Jarvis, and there is no firm indication of if or when the Kodi developers will fix these new issues, only that they don’t plan to fix them at all in Jarvis. If you install these, and have any problems that you need to resolve before they will run, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment to that effect).

Here is another method from a post by user hd789 in a thread on the Kodi forum that may work with Ubuntu 15.10:

DOWNGRADE KODI 16.0 TO 15.2 IN UBUNTU 15.10 INCL TVHEADEND:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/kodi-old
$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-cache showpkg kodi
$ sudo apt-get install kodi=2:15.2~git20151101.0902-final-0wily kodi-bin=2:15.2~git20151101.0902-final-0wily
$ sudo apt-get install kodi-pvr-tvheadend-hts=2.1.18-2~wily kodi-pvr-hts=2.1.18-2~wily
$ sudo apt-mark hold kodi kodi-bin kodi-pvr-tvheadend-hts kodi-pvr-hts

I would just call your attention to the fact that all these files are specific to a particular version of Ubuntu, in other words, the files that will work under Ubuntu 15.10 won’t work work under Ubuntu 14.04. Note that if you have Synaptic installed on your system, then after running the first two commands above (sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/kodi-old and sudo apt-get update) above you should be able to see the old kodi-related packages in Synaptic and install them from there. That is how we got Kodi 15.2 installed on a Ubuntu 14.04 system recently. It appears that repository contains versions for Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) and Ubuntu 15.10 (wily).

How To Disable Annotations and Pop-Ups on YouTube Videos (with or without login)

Do you hate those overlays and annotations that appear on YouTube videos? Me, too! Here’s how to disable them. If you are logged into YouTube it is a simple procedure as described here:

How To Disable Annotations and Pop-Ups on YouTube Videos (Field Guide/Gizmodo)

But what if you don’t have a YouTube account or don’t want to login? Well that’s also easy, if you have the popular ad-blocking extension uBlock Origin installed (the link is to the addon’s Github site, but it should be available in the usual addon repositories for Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and perhaps a couple of other browsers). All you need to do is this:

In the Addon manager (Firefox) or Extensions page (Chrome(ium)), click the button to go to the Preferences for the uBlock Origin addon, or click the Options link.

If a “Show Dashboard” button appears, click it.

Click on the “3rd-party filters” tab. Scroll to the bottom of the page, to the “Custom” section.

In the textbox you should see a line that looks like this (possibly the last line in the textbox:

! https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt

Uncomment this line by removing the exclamation point and space character from the start, so it looks like this:

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt

Click the “Parse” button below the text box.  Now, just above the textbox, you should see a new entry that says:

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt‎ : 0 used out of ? [outdated]

Don’t worry about the word “outdated”, this isn’t a filter that needs to be changed frequently.  Now look for the “Apply Changes” button in the upper right hand corner of the page.  Click it.  The word “outdated” will change to a “purge cache” button.  Don’t click that.  Just close the tab or window.  You’re done.

If you use AdBlock rather than uBlock Origin you might want to consider switching, because in my experience uBlock Origin is more effective in blocking ads and other annoyances.  You can always switch back if you don’t think it’s a better blocker.