• They require you to buy software or monkey around with a shitty trial version
• They require Windows
• They produce low quality video and/or audio
• They don’t let you capture the sound of you talking and everybody else

So, here’s a method that solves all of those issues, as long as you’re running Mac OS X Snow Leopard or later.

You need:

• QuickTime Player X (included with OS X)
• Soundflower
• MTCoreAudio

Step One

Start the Hangout, and go to Settings. Set Speakers to Soundflower (16ch). The Hangout’s audio will no longer play through your speakers, but be patched into Soundflower.

Step Two

From the MTCoreAudio package, move AudioMonitor.app into your Applications folder. Right-click AudioMonitor.app, and select Duplicate twice. You’ll now have AudioMonitor.app, AudioMonitor copy.app, and AudioMonitor copy 2.app. Open all three of them. Open AudioMonitor.app and press Command-N (or go to File>New) twice. (Thanks, Guy Heckman!)

Step Three

You now have three AudioMonitor windows. In the first one, set Input to Soundflower (16ch) and Output to Built-in Output. Click Play Through. You can now hear the Hangout again through your speakers.

Step Four

In another AudioMonitor window, set Input to Built-in Microphone and Output to Soundflower (2ch). Click Play Through. Now your microphone will be patched into Soundflower, but you won’t hear it through your speakers.

Step Five

In the third AudioMonitor window, set Input to Soundflower (16ch), and Output to Soundflower (2ch). Click Play Through. Now you have both the Hangout audio (what other people are saying) and your microphone (what you’re saying) on one patch, but it won’t be the one coming through your speakers and creating feedback.

At this point, you may want to set your first window to have Soundflower (2ch) play through Built-in Output momentarily, just to make sure it’s working. If you hear a loud screech of feedback, then it is. Switch it back to (16ch).

Step Six

Now, finally, open QuickTime Player. Go to File>New Screen Recording. Click the drop-down arrow next to the big red button, and select Soundflower (2ch) as your Microphone. Now, both your speakers and your microphone will end up in the resulting video, but you won’t hear your microphone during the process.

(You see, QuickTime Player only records mic input along with the screen image, not the sound of your speakers. That limitation is the entire reason for this whole song and dance with Soundflower and AudioMonitor.)

Step Seven

Click the big red button and start recording.

All those paid screen-recorders? You’re basically paying for the convenience and lack of cluster-fuck. But if you’re willing to get your hands dirty to save a few pennies, this method should serve you well.

If you go watch my Hitler video on YouTube, you will now see an annotation stating that I have waived all copyright to it, with the help of Creative Commons‘ CC0 language. It is now in the public domain.

That doesn’t mean anyone can just go around claiming ownership of it though. It means that nobody owns it. It belongs to everybody now. Go do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate it if you give me credit for it, but that’s by no means required.

Anyway, to make this absolutely, positively clear:

There. Enjoy your gift, world. Merry Kwanzaa or whatever.

I know they’ve had closed-captioning and subtitling features for a while, but I never bothered to try it out until now. I suppose if I don’t do the subtitling now, it’ll soon be done for me by Google’s speech recognition robots, and done very badly.

So here’s “Let’s Meet the Lerners” with full closed-captioning. Click the arrow in the control-bar-thingy, then the “CC” button to turn it on. And if anyone reading this is fluent in another language and wants to translate it, download this .srt file, open it in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X (if you’re savvy enough to use Linux, I probably don’t need to tell you what your text editor is called), and rewrite all of the texty things while leaving the numbers intact. Then send it to me, of course.

You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.

But Zacqary! There have been lots of tools that let you download YouTube videos for years!

That’s a valid point, Helvetica Bold 10.5 Dark Orchid, but all of those have required you not only to download an extra program or Firefox extension, but they grab the crappy, compressed Flash Video version that you’d see anyway on YouTube. Now, not only do you click a little link below the video, but you also get to download it in H.264 format! That’s the same encoding that they use on Blu-Ray. BLU-RAY! (Though, granted, the YouTube download has a lower resolution and bitrate than a Blu-Ray, but seriously, it’s an improvement)

I grabbed one of the Obama videos to compare, and yes, it’s quite nice:

H.264 is better than standard YouTube FLV

If you view that full size, you can see that the downloaded video has better contrast and is a lot less fuzzy. Keep in mind, though, that it downloads at 480×270; I resized it to 640×360 so it would be the same size as the video on YouTube. But the YouTube video is probably scaled up too.

Sadly, it isn’t the same quality as YouTube HD:

The download is still lower res than HD, unfortunately.

Again, I scaled the download up. At this level of scaling you start to see where the downloaded copy loses detail. Though the contrast still looks better…maybe that’s Firefox’s fault?

Now, this is still only available for Obama’s channel, but in the coming weeks, Google claims that everyone will have the option to enable their videos to be downloaded. Personally, for the sake of the common Internet user, I’m hoping that it’s an opt-out system. That way the only reason someone would have to stop being lazy and edit their videos is if they want to be an asshole or a corporation.

Speaking of which, when do I get to replace my old videos with HD versions? They’re all ready to upload as soon as you let me, Google.

[Source: Ars Technica]

Unfortunately, all mention of Dan Lyons, who played Steve Jobs on the Interwebs, disappears completely after the first paragraph of the article. And it’s only alluded to there at all after an “UPDATE”.

The entire text of the article talks about how Jim Goldman is a bad reporter and didn’t tell everyone about something or other regarding Steve Jobs and how he’s maybe dying which you should all STFU about anyway because dying SUCKS so leave him alone whether he is or not. But Fake Steve? No, you have to watch the embedded videos to know what the hell they’re talking about in that aspect.

Now, it’s not too unreasonable to ask someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post. It’s rather unreasonable to require someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post and NOT ASK THAT IT HAPPEN.

Nowhere in the text of the article is there a reference to “the included video shows Fake Steve Jobs saying blah blah blah.” This is not very useful to people who would like to actually read your article as opposed to mindlessly clicking on a video which will have to load and be watched in the same page without switching to their IM window in the middle or whatever when they don’t even know if it’s worth watching based on the subject matter.

Also it’s extremely confusing for iPhone users. Gizmodo loves the iPhone; they give it its own gigantic section of App Love. So why are they writing an article which relies on video embedded with the Flash that the iPhone still doesn’t have?

Bad Gizmodo.

This actually isn’t new, just a new option for users hit by an increasingly rabid crackdown by Google’s Video Identification robots. A video that I posted of footage I took at Anthrocon was taken down automatically just because I happened to synchronize the footage with a song that is copyrighted by a gigantic corporation. I was given the option to replace the audio with a different song, which would have killed all my hard work in Final Cut, or I could dispute the claim, either because it was an incorrect match (which it wasn’t) or because it was Fair Use (which it was).

I don’t love YouTube’s handling of Fair Use, though legally the burden is upon the Fair User to justify it, so I suppose taking your video down before allowing you to defend the use is appropriate. That’s how I handled my video, explaining to YouTube’s input box that my video was non-commercial and did not prevent the copyright holder from making a profit. Submitting that dispute got my video replaced quite punctually, but when I clicked that Submit button, I saw a single line that told the story of who the true villain is here: “Your claim has been submitted to WMG.” Warner Music Group.

Now, technically, the audio muting was Google’s, not Warner’s idea. Of course it was, because Google is behind the engineering of their site; Warner’s idea was to threaten Google with lawsuits if they didn’t piss off the entire Internet in some way, shape, or form simply because Google (rightfully) didn’t want to give Warner more money than they deserve.

So is Google being cowardly here for not standing up in defense of 17 U.S.C. § 107? Yes, they certainly are, and while I’m sure they don’t want to risk a big legal case in this economy, it would be really nice if they’d use some of their money to uphold the rights of their users under the law. But no company bigger than Psystar has ever concerned themselves with trying to get copyright law interpreted sanely, so Google’s cowardice here isn’t entirely unprecedented.

And while I still say shame on you, Google, since I figured “don’t be evil” implied “don’t be a pussy” too, I’m going to stand by YouTube as best I can here. Instead I will turn my fires of hatred to Warner, because if they’re really that concerned with all the money they’re not losing, perhaps they should reform their business model to sell something people might actually want to pay for.

There’s still something I find odd, though. Remember that video that YouTube took down, and how my dispute was submitted to “WMG”? Well, take a look at it and listen. Here’s the Vimeo version just in case Warner DDoS’s YouTube or something:

That music? You hear that? That’s “Welcome To The Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses. Guns N’ Roses is signed to Geffen Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group. I’m sure Universal is probably slamming YouTube as well, but…

Why was my claim about a Universal Music Group song sent to Warner??????