First of all, select the YouTube video that you want to download. In this guide, I’ll be using a video from a quick search. Lets say you want to download one of Britney Spear’s latest videos, here are the easy steps to get that or any other video:

1. Open YouTube.com, and in the search box type whatever video you want to download. I’m going to type Britney so that we can proceed with downloading one of her videos in this tutorial.
2. Once you get the results, the next step is to get the address of that specific video. 
   Select any video from the list and right click on its title and then choose “Copy Link Location” or “Copy Link Address”.
3. The video address should be copied to the clipboard now.  Now we’ll use this address to get the direct link of the video. Click HERE , and a you should see KeepVid’s frontpage in a new tab/window.




4. Simply paste in the textbox the video url that we copied from youtube earlier and then click the Download button, as show n below
5. On the next page you should see two links as shown below. the first green download link lets you download the default quality video and the second download link gets you a high quality mp4 video of that YouTube video of your choice.
   
6. Right click on any of the two download links (whether you want the high-quality video or the regular quality one), and select “Save Target As”. Simply select the folder on you computer where you want the video to be stored and downloaded and the video should start downloading now.
7. After the video is downloaded, you should be able to play the video. If your media player doesn’t play the video correctly, download THIS codec pack, it should install all the required plugins and a nice small media player called Media Player Classic that’ll play all your mobile/YouTube etc vidoes.

I hope this guide helped you in some way. Happy surfing!

If you used to search the web for a 3GP version of your favorite video so that you could enjoy some high quality movies on your mobile phone, your search is over. No you won’t have to ask others to compress a video for your mobile phone because at the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to compress any of your favorite video or movie to a high quality .3GP format movie yourself.

If you regularly watch videos on your mobile phone, you already know how pixelated and badly compressed most of those movies look. With this tutorial, we’ll follow some steps, use a nice compression software, and tune up a few things so that you’ll get videos with the the highest quality possible, and even that with a minor increase in the file size.

In order to compress the movie, first you’ll be needing this very nice audio/video compression tool called Super © video converter, to download it go here and you’ll see a very lengthy page, go to the very end of the page and you’ll see a link saying “start downloading Super (C)”, click on that link and you’ll be forward to a final page, where you can download the program (Yes, I know the download is a little awkward, but thats how the Super (C) wants people to go through their pages before they’re able to get a download).

After you’re done with downloading the setup for Super C video converter and install it. During the installation process, you might get a few messages just ignore them.

Once Super C is installed, open it up (if you’re on vista, you might need to right click on the icon and run it as an administrator). Super C will check some requirements that it needs, whatever message it gives, just press ok (as normally any current PC is ok to run Super C, unless you want to compress huge videos as then you’ll need more RAM and CPU power).

Since we’ll be compressing our videos to 3GP format, select “3GP” as the output format, MPEG4 as the video codec and AAC LC as the Audio codec just as shown in the pictur below.

After choosing the right options, now we have to select the video options. If you’re using a phone like Sony Ericsson’s K750, W700, W800, W810, W550 etc, then select the 176:144 “Video Scale Size” from the Video row, 25 frames per second, with 250 kbps bitrate.

If you’re using Sony Ericsson’s K790, K800, K810, K850, W850, W900 etc then because of the large screen and powerful mobile cpu you can choose 240:320 “Video Scale Size” (which’ll give you far superior video quality (as you can see from the top image of this post)). Same 25 frames/sec video speed and choose a bitrate of 450 kbps for the video, just like as shown in the screenshot below.

The next step is to select some nice audio options so that you can enjoy a good audio experience along with he nicely compressed 3GP video. Choose 22050 as the sampling frequency, 2 Channels and choose the bitrate to 96 kbps (if you’re using K750, W700, W800, W810 etc you can also choose 64kbps audio quality if you are going to compress very long videos like movies for example, it’ll save your mobile videos from lagging). Select the options as shown in the screenshot below.

After choosing these options, now all you have to do is to select your favorite movie or video, and get it encoded by Super C. To select the media file that you want to encode, (1) right click on the area below OUTPUT, as shown in the following image, and (2) click on “Add Multimedia Files”.  A browse window should open up and now just locate and select the required video file.

Now you’ll see the video file in the list. In my case I’m compressing Alizee’s La Isla Bonita (very famous video of this hot and nice singer). After the video is in the list just click on “Encode (Active Files)”. Make sure the video is ticked in the list just like as shown below.

Now give Super C a little time to compress your video. The compression doesn’t take very long, time-taken depends on the video size and the compression options. After the compression process is done, your compressed 3GP file will be stored in C:/Program Files/eRight Software/Super/Output directory.

As you can see by the status bar screenshot below, Super C has compressed a 49MB file to a nice and neat, high quality 13MB 3GP file (320:240 version),

i’ve followed the 320:240 size as I wanted this video for my Sony Ericsson K790. For the 176:144 video phones like K750, W700, W800, W810 etc, the size of the compressed 3GP video file will be much smaller.

The end product will look something like this:

I hope you’d love the end product  This 3GP video is now worth watching over your cell phone over and over again. Oh and do comment about how you found this post, and of course, how hot do you think Alizee is?

So you want to install one of those .vkp patches to add more functionality to your Sony Ericsson phone? Well I’ve been thinking about writing an easy guide to patch your phones without any trouble.

After you’ve followed this tutorial, you’ll be able to add more such patches to add other extra features to your phone. If you don’t know about .vkp patches, let me tell you what .vkp patches can do. Patches actually let your phone do alot of things than it isn’t allowed to do therwise. For example .vkp patches can:

1. Remove java restrictions so that you won’t be annoyed by those permission messages everytime opera mini tries to access the internet or every time you start a file reading program
2. Add extra menus on the phone’s desktop for easy accessiblitity
3. Increase sms (inbox) storage size to thousands of sms msgs.
4. Add a blacklist (call-blocking) feature so that certain people can’t call you.
5. Add other smaller features like make your phone vibrate once when you call someone and they attend the call.

Installing the .vkp patches:

We’ll be using a program called Far Manager to apply the patches to your sony ericsson phone. Get Far Manager from here, now we’ll be using the SEFP plugin (Sony Ericsson Flash Plugin), you can download it from here. Now install Far Manger and  and don’t run it yet. Extract the SEFP  plugin file you just downloaded. You’ll get a folder named ‘SEFP’, copy that whole folder to C:/Program Files/Far/Plugin/

Now beffore we can use FAR manager with your phone, you’ll have to install the USB Flash Drivers for your Sony Ericsson phone, google search for the flash drivers for your certain model, after you’ve downloaded the flash drivers extract them to a temporary folder.

Now turn OFF your phone, keep the ‘C’ button on your phone pressed and connect the USB cable. Keep ‘C’ pressed and windows will ask you for the drivers of  the USB Flash device, just point it to the temporary USB Flash drivers folder and it’ll install the drivers. Now disconnect your phone, take out the battery for a few seconds, put it back in and start FAR manager.

Press alt+f1 and you’ll see see a menu, click ‘0- Far Manager’ as shown in the image below

You’ll see a new window pop up, select your phone from the list, and select the rest of the options as they appear in the picture below. In this case I’m using a K750 so I chose the K750-w800 option from the phones list (make sure you phone is CID36)

You’ll see two options on the right side list (Flash and FS), select Flash and you’ll see a loading screen, where data is being passed. Wait for a while and now you’ll see “Memory” written on the right half of FAR manager. Now navigate the patches folder in the left half of FAR manager (the patches should be in .vkp format and be for your phone (i.e. apply patches that are for your phone model and firmware only)). Select the patches folder as shown below

After selecting that patches folder on the left side of far manager, double click it and you should see your vkp patches that (.vkp format, remember).  Now click on any patch that you want to apply to your Sony Ericsson phone and click on copy, as shown below.

Again you’ll see a new window, don’t change anything and press ‘COPY’ from the new window as shown below.

In the next window, tick the “process VKP script” option, and click on “Flash” as shown below. The vkp flashing should start now.

After the flashing is done (which takes a few seconds per patch), you’ll see a completion message.

Now you’re done. You can either choose another vkp patch to apply or you can click the “..” over the memory on the right side of far manager and choose shut down option. Once done, just take out your battery, put it back in, and turn on your phone. You are now the lucky owner of a patched sony ericsson phone with extra features  Good Luck.

P.S. You can get lots of other .vkp patches from here.

Now if you’re familiar with the ‘xvid asd’ compression format used for those tv-shows rips, you might know how nicely compressed those videos are. You get a complete 50minutes season video in a 350MB avi file. We’re gonna use that sort of superb compression for our DVD today in this following tutorial. You’ll see that even when our ~4GB DVD movie is compressed to a 700MB dvd-rip, there wont be much difference in the video or audio qualitybecause of the compression softwares and audio/video settings we’re going to use.

We’ll be using this very nice Xvid/DivX conversion tool called ‘Auto Gordian Knot’ for ripping our DVD, head over here and dowload the free full package. Next step is to install the program, so do so. You’ll be asked for permission for installation of a few plugins, tick yes.

After its installed, head over to Start menu > Program Files > Auto GK and run Auto GK. Here’s how it should appear.

1. Now get your favorite DVD disc and insert it.
2. Go to My Computer, right click on the DVD-drive icon, and select OPEN
3. You’ll see the contents of the DVD disc. Go to to VIDEO_TS directory.
4. You should see files name like VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB, the files that are big in size are the ones that have the actually movie, the rest of the smaller files in KBs aren’t of our use (see the image below to have an idea).
5. 

   The big files are the ones that have the movie, ignore the smaller KB files

6. now open the first BIG file in the series ( VTS_01_0.VOB in this case) and open it with your DVD media player, if its a video of the DVD title menu or some other unnecessary file, close the media player, try the next file.
7. When u find the file from where the movie starts actually, close the media player, and get back to Auto Gordian Knot and select that VOB file in the “Input Area”. Also select where u want to save the compressed dvd-rip. should look something like the screenshot below.

8. 

   Select the correct VOB file in the input area, make sure its the file which containts the beginning of the movie

   
   

9. In Auto GK’s window, come down to where it says “Step 3 – Select output size”, select Custom Size and input 700 in the text box in front of that option. like shown below
10. 

    Enter the 700MB size in the cutom size box

11. Now click on Advanced options, you’ll see a window like the in the image below, set all your options as the appear in the image. i.e. select the audio quality to 128 kbps (its more than enough for a dvd movie), and select video size to 800 (you can keep it around 768 pixels also +- if you want to), in any case the video size should not be more than the dvd’s video size, as ‘upscaling’ the video size in the rip wont make the quality any more better, anyway take a look at the image below

12. 

    Selecting between the DivX or XviD plugin is your own choice, if your DVD player has DivX support then choose DivX

    
    

13. Now click on ‘Add job’, you’ll see the video address appear in the job queue. Press start and the program will start ripping your dvd.

Please be patient now, since compression is an exhaustive process. It’ll take more than an hour for one DVD to be compressed. You’ll see a DOS prompt window pop-up (that’s for the audio compression algorithms), then you’ll see the DUB window pop up for awhile while Auto Guardian Knot uses it for video compression.

End Result, finally a 700mb DVD rip is generated from the 4GB DVD:

In my example, I used my Saw IV movie DVD, on which the video files were around 3.9GB.  My C2D 2.66GHz cpu with 4GB of DDRII ram took 1 hour 40 minutes to make the 700mb dvd-rip. So while Auto GK is making your dvd-rip, you can do something else in the meanwhile. By the way, here’s how the 702mb DVD-rip quality looks like now, a screen shot of the dvd-rip movie (click on the image to see full size in new window).

SAW IV movie 700MB DVD-rip screen shot, the DVD-rip is made from the Original 4+GB DVD, click to see in full size

Now you can save all your DVD movies on your HDD in 700MB dvd-rips form, that’d take very little space compared to if you tried saving the original 4GB+ dvd on your HDD. I hope this guide has helped you in someway.

GTA: San Andreas default police car

Default Police car replaced with a DB9

You’ll be needing IMG Tool 2.0 to replace the necessary car files in GTA: San Andreas. After downloading, extract the compressed file, and run IMGTool.exe contained within. The first time you run IMG Tool, you’ll get a warning to backup your files before proceeding. Since we’ll be modifying this big IMG file called gta3.img, its a good idea to make a copy of this file (incase anything goes wrong, although i hope you’ll replace your cars without any problems if you follow the steps right). Now with the IMG Tool opened, click on File > Open to open the file browser, like shown below

IMG Tool 2.0 for GTA: San Andreas vehicles file browsing

From the browser window, select the folder where GTA is installed, and then go to the “Models”  sub folder within your main GTA folder, you’ll see a file called gta3.img there, select it and press open. Like as shown below

Open gta3.img from GTA: San Andreas/models

IMG Tool will load the gta3.img file, and show you all the contents. Now basically, every vehicle (cars, bikes, planes, helicopter etc) have two sub-files representing it in the gta3.img file.  One file looks like carXYZ.dff, which included all the geometry/model information about a car, and the second file looks like carXYZ.txd, it contains all the textures like the logos, reflection material, tyres images, seats images etc.

Since we’re going to replace a police car, you’ll have to search for the two files representing that dull police car, rename it within IMG Tool (so that we can re-use the old police car if anything goes wrong), and upload the new car’s files (in this case, Jack’s Aston Martin DB9’s files) with the same name, to IMG tool.

Download Jack’s DB9 car files here. , extract the car files to a temporary folder (you’ll notice two files named copcarsf.dff & copcarsf.txd) , now get back to IMG Tool, Go to  EDIT > Find and enter “copcarsf.dff” and press enter, you’ll find the copcarsf.dff (which is the geometry file for San Fierro’s police car), right click on that file and renamed it “2copcarsf.dff”, now again, perform another search for “copcarsf.txd”, when the file’s found, rename it to “2copcarsf.txt”. With both the default files renamed, it should look something like this.

The default .dff and .txd files for police car are renamed now

By renaming the files this way the default police car files will stay in gta3.img for backup purposes.

Now that both the files of the default police car are backed up , we can insert the Aston Martin DB9’s files to IMG Tool. Go to COMMANDs > Add , and select the copcarsf.dff file from that temporary folder that you made earlier. You’ll see DB9’s copcarsf.dff is added, now in the same way, go back to commands > add and select the copcarsf.txd file from the temporary folder.

Once the files are added, you can now run GTA: San Andreas and all you have to do find the San Fierro’s cop car now. Here’s a close up picture of how your new DB9 will look like.

Jack's Aston Martin DB9 in GTA: San Andreas, looks great

If you want to save yourself from searching for this police car, you can download my savefile, extract it in “MyDocuments/GTA San Andreas User Files” (where it’ll ask you if you want to replace an older file with my save file, click yes). And then start GTA: San Andreas, load the first save file from the list, and you’ll start with CJ’s House, go to his garage by his house, and you’ll see your shiny new DB9 waiting there for you.

You can use this guide to replace other cars etc also. For example if you download a new car that contains two files patriot.txd and patriot.dff, then you’ll simply have to open gta3.img in IMG Tool, and renamed the already present patriot.txd, patriot.dff files and insert the new files that you downloaded. Hope this guide helps you make your GTA experience better and I’m sure you’ll be interested in modding your game with new vehicles etc after this first step. P.S. If you’re followed the guide ok and are enjoying your DB9, you can now add more vehicles. For lots of cars and vehicles downloads for GTA: San Andreas, go here. Thanks to Jack for his nice DB9 model car, that he allowed me to use in this guide.

There are many ISO-making tools out there that let you make virtual images of your optical media.I prefer using IsoBuster for all my ISO making tasks because its free and very easy to use. And you also get the ability to makes ISOs of scratched/damaged CDs also.

Before we continue our guide on ISO making, you need to download the latest version of IsoBuster from here. After downloading , run the setup file and install it. Once installed, you can run ISO buster from either the QuickLaunch, or you can run it from Start Menu > Programs > Smart Projects > IsoBuster. The first time you run IsoBuster, it’ll ask you for a serial number and email ID, just click on ‘free service only’.

The ISO-making process:

Now you can start the ISO-making process. Inserting the CD/DVD that you want to make an ISO image of, ISO buster will detect the disk and you’ll see the contents of the disc. Now Right-click on ‘CD’ (or ‘DVD’ if you’ve inserted a DVD) in the tree-list on the right as shown below.

IsoBuster v2.4 in Windows Vista

You’ll see a menu, click on ‘Extract CD <image>’ and then click on ‘RAW (*.bin, *.iso)’ as shown in the screenshot below.

You’ll be prompted by a new window, asking where you want to save the ISO image. Select a destination folder of your choice, and give it a name that ends with .ISO ,In my example, I’m making the ISO image of the my Intel MotherBoard Drivers CD so i named it propertly and ended the name with a .ISO extension as you can see in the image below.

Click the save button and IsoBuster will start making an ISO image of your CD/DVD. IsoBuster performs the ISO making task very fast if your disc is clean, if its scratched, it might take longer.

At the end, when the ISO image is created, IsoBuster will prompt you to save a small .CUE file which is related to your ISO image, you can discard saving that file if your CD/DVD is a simple one. But if you’re making the ISO image of a game or other protected content, then save the .CUE file in the same directory where you saved the ISO image as you’ll be needing it later on (for correct emulation in virutal drives and for making accurate copies of your discs from that ISO image).

Thats it, your ISO image is created successfully

You’ll be needing a flashing program (XS++ v3.1 in this case), a DCU-60 cable (the USB cable that you got with your phone) & the two flash files (Main + FS). So first

1. Get the flashing program, XS++ v3.1 from here (go to the applications folder to get it)
2. If you own a K790, K800 or K810, get its flash files (Main + FS) from here (go to the Firmware folder and select the subfolder for your specific phone. No download the MAIN and FS files. In my case I chose K790_R6BC002_FS_America_2_RED52.rar & K790_R6BC002_Main_generic_EV_RED52.rar . Notice the difference in the two files, one is FS and the other is Main, both FS & Main should be the same version (R6BC002 in this case) and both files are CID52 (see? the files end with RED52).If you own a K750/W800, you can get you FS file from here and Main file from here directly. If you own some other model of Sony Ericsson, you’ll have to google search for its FS & MAIN files.
3. Extract the FS & Main files to a temporary folder if they are compressed

Next we’ll start the flashing process by starting XS++, just extract the XS++ file that you downloaded earlier. Click on the ‘connect’ button, then turn off your phone and press the  while keep pressing the ‘c’ button on ur phone connect the cable. XS++ should detect your phone now and you’ll see a screen like this:

If XS++ is unable to detect your phone, don’t worry, google search for USB flash drivers for your specific phone and try again then.

Once your phone is detected by XS++, its time to select the FS & Main files in XS++, then select your phone model from the dropdown box below, tick ‘flash Main firmware’, ‘flash file system’ & ‘customize file system’ and click the ‘Flash’ button.

After that, wait patiently till XS++ flashes your MAIN and FS files one by one. XS++ will finalize the flashing in the end. Just DO NOT unplug the phone or turn off the PC before XS++ asks you to do so.

After XS++ asks you to disconnect your phone, do so and take out your batter, put it back in and switch on the phone.

You are now a happy owner of a reflashed fresh sony ericsson phone. Hope this guide helps you out in your quest.

• PCSX2 lets you play games in very high resolution because of the advanced graphics plugins that it uses, compared to the low resolution of the PS2 console.
• You can save your PS2 games at ANYTIME you want without needing any ingame checkpoint, by using save-states. Thats a very big advantage for games that won’t let you save your game unless you reach a checkpoint or the end of a level.
• You can take high-resolution screenshots of games while playing on your PC and you can even record videos of your gameplay if you want to show off to your friends. There are alot more reasons but by now I guess you will be interested in giving PCSX2 a try anyway, so back to the topic.

The guide:

First of all, you’ll be needing to download PCSX2 (quite obvious ). After installing it, you’ll be needing a PS2 bios file (which is normally named like SCPH-XXXX.bin), this file basically contains all the information about how a PS2 plays a game. PCSX2 needs this file to play games on your PC. You will have to search for this file on Google as I can’t host it since its Sony’s property. After you’ve got the BIOS file (SCPH-XXXX.bin), put it in /bios directory of PCSX2’s folder.

Now its time to launch PCSX2 and configure it. So run the emulator.

Tekken4, a PS2 game, running on PCSX2 in Windows Vista

Now click on Config from the menu, and choose Configuration       

Now you’ll see the configuration window. If your PS2 bios file is in the correct location, you should be able to see it in the BIOS combo list as shown in the screenshot below.

This plugin is the most compatible one. PCSX2 will probably crash if you have an old video card and you try using ZeroGS graphics plugin

Don't forget to configure this cdvdrom plugin and select the correct drive letter that corresponds to your cd/dvd drive

Press OK so that all the settings get saved. Now you’re set to play the game of your choice , just insert any of your PS2 game to your CD / DVD rom drive and click on File > Run CDVD.

PCSX2 will start emulating/playing your game now.  Just to show you the power of PCSX2, here are some snapshots of Tekken4 running on my PC with PCSX2.

Choosing a character, i can beat you with just Jin's punches in Tekken4. Open challenge everyone!

Julia, beautiful character, getting demon pawed by Jin Kazama. WOW

This is almost all that there is to learn. You, little Jedi can play PS2 games on your own now. Welcome to the world of PS2 emulation. I hope this guide helped you out in some way.

P.S.: You’ll be needing a fast enough computer with a video card that supports atleast PS2.0 to play games at near-full or playable speeds.

NoNameScript gives mIRC a completely new look with dozens of extra features that’ll makes chatting on IRC more fun, stylish and convenient for you. NoNameScript equips mIRC with beautiful and efficient Tree-based view on the right side of the chat client to show which servers you’re connected to and which chatrooms you’re hangin’ out in.

Other than the visual candy which itself enough to impress many of your friends there are features like a lagBar to let you know if you’re lagging behind your server, controlled pasting options to let you paste huge articles without getting kicked out for flooding, lots of new slap messages to tease your friends with, bad-words/SPAM/flood protection & mail check.

NoNameScript lets you customise the toolbar & status bar with the tools of your choice. In my example, as you can see in the image, it shows the date & time along with dcc upload/download rate and the contents that are in the clipboard at the moment.

You can write multiple quit messages and NoNameScript will randomly show one of those each time you quit. I like the auto-clipboard feature alot, you simply need to select any piece of text with ur cursor and it’ll automatically be copied to clipboard.

Installation:

Installation of NoNameScript is pretty straight forward, just get the latest version of mIRC from http://www.mirc.com/  install it in a new directory and then get NoNameScript’s Installer from http://www.nnscript.com/

During the NoNameScript’s installation it’ll prompt you to choose the mIRC directory, if you’ve installed mIRC into a customized directory, just choose the mIRC directory with the browse button and click next. You are all set.

Conclusion:

All in all, NoNameScript gives mIRC a completely new look, it not only changes mIRC visually but also tunes it internally to add all of those useful features I just wrote about. I hope this article helps you make your IRC experience a bit more fun with NoNameScript.