VLC 2.0 Has Been Released, Download Links Inside

We have followed the latest VLC development ever since Videolan pushed the first build of the media player’s new version to the public ftp server. It did not take long after that initial release before the first release candidate build was made available.

The developers today have released the final version of the media player. Interested users can download it directly from the official website where it is available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and Linux operating systems. The 64-bit version of Windows has not been posted yet on the VLC 2.0 download page. Only a 64-bit Mac OS X version has been posted yet. It is not clear if the developers have postponed the released of the 64-bit Windows version, or if they plan to release the first official 64-bit release for the operating system in one of the next releases instead.

The release notes lists all the important changes of VLC 2.0 Twoflower sorted into groups such as video, audio, formats or professional users.

The developers have added experimental Blu-Ray disc support to VLC 2.0. It is experimental because of its limitations. This first version does not support menus yet, and does not ship with AACS and BD+ DRM libraries that are needed to play back copy protected Blu-Ray discs.

Other changes include a rewritten video output core and modules, new video outputs for Windows 7, Android and iOS, and multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4 and WebM. The developers have added support for several professional codecs and formats, including HD and 10bits codecs as well as SDI and HD-SDI card support for input on Linux.

Mac users benefit from extensions support and OS X Lion integration, continued support for OS X 10.5 and Power PC users, and support for all QTKit devices.

VLC 2.0 improves the decoding performance on multi-core processor systems, systems that support gpu hardware decoding and mobile hardware the player runs on. A click on Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs > Use GPU accelerated decoding reveals whether gpu hardware acceleration is enabled in the media player. It is turned off by default.

Users who do not want VLC to remember which videos they played in the media player can disable the history feature in the Interface Settings under Save recently played items.

Have you worked with VLC 2.0 already? If so, what is your opinion of the new release? Oh, and if you prefer direct links to the downloads, use this link.

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Windows 7 Direct Download Links About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday February 19, 2012 -
Tags:vlc, vlc media player

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MediaFire Download Links On Google Search Not Working Anymore

Mediafire was one of the file hosting sites that benefited from the Megaupload take down in January 2012. The site managed to increase its traffic significantly and it appeared as if it would be able to withstand the storm that reached other file hosting sites shortly thereafter. Other file hosting sites frantically started to protect their service from the same demise that had befallen Megaupload. Some like Filesonic blocked all of the site’s file sharing capabilities, while others blocked all traffic from the United States, switched to a country code domain to avoid falling under US jurisdiction or plain simply closed down completely.

Today when you click on a file link in Google Search that is pointing to MediaFire, you are redirected to the error page http://www.mediafire.com/error.php?errno=381.

It reads:

The indexed link is unavailable.

The link that was indexed is currently set to a non-indexing state and cannot be accessed.

If you copy the link url and paste it directly in your browser’s address bar, you are taken to the download page from where you can download the file normally. It is also interesting to note that downloads are still working if you are using Bing Search instead of Google.

It is not clear at this point if Google Search is the only referrer that has been blocked by Mediafire, or if there are other sites that have been blocked as well by the file hosting service.

Another thing that is unclear is whether this has been an intentional move by the site, or if it is a technical issue that will be resolved at a later point in time. It does not make lots of sense from a legal point of view, unless law enforcement agencies are using Google exclusively for their research.

Users who find files that they cannot download should copy and paste the url into their browser’s address bar to download it. It is alternatively possible to install an extension like Refcontrol to modify the referrer for sites that are blocked by Mediafire.

Lets discuss the move in the comments.

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Block Download.com From Google Search Results About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday February 2, 2012 -
Tags:file hosting, google search, mediafire

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Mark All Visited Links In A Custom Color

Visited links by default display in a different color than links that have not been visited. These different link colors act as visual indicators on websites, that make it clear on first sight whether you have opened a link on a page or not. This is especially useful on sites with dynamic listings, like Hacker News for instance or Reddit where contents change often throughout the day, but also for research to distinguish visited resources from unvisited.

One of the issues that you may experience on today’s Internet are sites which change the visited link color via CSS so that it looks like to the normal link color on the site.

Visited is a Firefox add-on that paints all visited links in a color of your choosing. It overrides the defined link colors on all websites, so that visited links can be distinguished from unvisited ones.

The default link color has been set to gold, which should highlights visited links clearly on most pages, but not all. It is possible to change the color in the advanced Firefox preferences (and unfortunately not in an options menu via the about:addons page).

To change the link color, you need to enter about:config in the Firefox address bar to open the advanced configuration of the browser. Filter for the parameter extensions.visited.color.visited and change the value with a double-click. You can enter a color name or color code beginning with # in the value field. You can for instance change it to #800080 to turn the visited link color to purple.

The feature can be activated or deactivated with the shortcut code Alt-v for text links, or Alt-Shift-v for image links. It is unfortunately not possible to disable the painting of links on selected sites (it is for instance irritating in admin consoles and interfaces).

Firefox users can download and install the add-on at the official Mozilla Add-ons repository.

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Tags:firefox add-ons, links

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ShowMeTrend Links Twitter Tags To Web News

The messaging platform Twitter can be used for trending purposes. The more users talk tweet about a certain topic, the more popular it has to be. While it is not possible to say that with absolute certainty, as other factors like automation play a role as well, it can often act as an indicator. Twitter displays the top ten trending topics for a single country, with options to change the country to another one on the page.

While it is possible to read the messages on Twitter about a trending topic, it is not guaranteed that you will see any links in the messages that you are reading.

That’s where the web service ShowMeTrend comes into play. The service links the top 10 Twitter trends of a particular day to Google News articles about that particular topic.

The trending topics get updated regularly, and it appears as if the links from Google News are pulled more or less whenever they appear there. All news articles are linking directly to the site they have been published on. It is furthermore possible to open Google News’ listing of all related news, or to go back and forward one news entry on the ShowMeTrend website.

Selections can be made at the top to switch from the day’s worldwide trends to country specific and date/time specific trends. About ten countries can be selected, from Germany and the United States to the Netherlands, UK or Brazil. The service’s back catalog of Twitter trends begins in October 2011, which is an indicator that it is a relatively new service. Users can not only select the date but also the time of a day to get a listing of trending topics.

One of the issues that the developers need to fix is the lack of links for some topics. Some trends show a white listing and not a single news item. One of the options here would be to either improve the search algorithm or to use additional news sources besides Google News.

ShowMeTrend is an interesting service for researchers, marketing agencies and individual users. Have you tried the service? If so, what is your take on it?

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Webmasters: Search For Links Posted On Twitter About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday January 31, 2012 -
Tags:twitter, twitter trends

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Highlight New Links On Hacker News

Hacker News is a popular news aggregation site with a focus on Internet, computers and technology in general, and news of general interest. It is a lot like Reddit in this regard, as it allows users to vote for and comment on news that are posted on the site.

Everyone can submit news and votes decides whether it will be listed on the site’s frontpage or only a page in the back that barely anyone notices.

One of the issues that you may have with the site is that you cannot distinguish new links from old ones. Everything looks the same and the dynamic ranking system makes it incredible difficulty to near impossible to spot new news among the old listings.

Most users probably go through all news from top to bottom whenever they visit the site to spot the new items in the listing. While that may be a working strategy, it is not optimal as you spend more time than you should finding those new links among the old ones.

Enter Hacker News Newer Links. The Firefox extension’s sole purpose is to highlight new links on the Hacker News front page and first page. Note that those are the two only places on the site where new entries are highlighted.

You won’t notice the extension on your first visit to Hacker News after installing. It stores all links on the frontpage and first page, and compares them to the listings on consecutive visits.

All new listings are highlighted in red, while everything else is displayed in the normal colors.

With the extension installed, you are able to spot new listings on Hacker News immediately after the page is displayed in the web browser.

Hacker News regulars can download the Firefox add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox add-ons repository.

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Tags:firefox add-ons, hacker

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Display Direct Website Links in Google Search

Sometimes I’m searching on Google to copy the search results link into another application. This is an extremely frustrating experience as links are manipulated by Google. When you copy a link in Google’s search results you’ll notice that the link target are displayed correctly when you hover the mouse cursor over the link, but when you copy the link to the clipboard, you will notice that Google has in fact changed that link. This leaves the option to open the site first to copy it from the browser’s address bar, or to use a tool or extension that removes the data that Google adds to links in the search results.

The link to Ghacks in Google Search for instance should be http://www.ghacks.net/ and not http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=ghacks&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ghacks.net%2F&ei=MooNT_vzE5GnsgaegJXbBA&usg=AFQjCNEbVP7B0UnFl1Q9J0q_Vbl9uYoYOw which it is when you copy the link to the clipboard.

Here are two options to display direct website links in Google Search:

Google Search link fix

The Firefox add-on modifies all link targets in the Google search results and all other Google properties where this behavior can be observed, so that they point to the direct web address.

Just install the extension in the Firefox web browser, a restart is not required. If you are on Google Search currently you need to reload the page or run a new search before the extension starts replacing the links.

Firefox users can download the extension from Mozilla’s official Add-ons repository for the browser.

Don’t track me Google

This is a userscript that does the exact same thing the Firefox extension does. It is compatible with Firefox and Google Chrome, and maybe other web browsers as well. The userscript in addition hides the referral link so that sites you visit do not know where you came from.

Chrome users can install the userscript right away, while Firefox users need to install the Greasemonkey or Scriptish add-on first before they can do the same thing.

The userscript can be downloaded and installed over at the official Userscripts website.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday January 11, 2012 -
Tags:google search, google tips

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