Today we’ve finished and released a new feature on the Best Tech Videos site called “video features”. This is a really simple thing, but it opens us many new areas to explore online video market.

Video features is a small set of icons on our video thumbnails which tells you what kind of video this is. At this moment there are 6 possible features which could be combined in a different ways:

• Free Video - Video is free for view
• Free downloads - Video is available for download
• Free signup - You’ll need to register for free on the video site
• Pay per view - You’ll need or be able to pay to view this video to watch
• Pay per download - You’ll need or be able to pay for this video to download
• Signup payment - You’ll need or be able to buy a subscription on the video site

By introducing these features we’ll be able to start posting really interesting videos we weren’t able to post before because they are not free (we didn’t want to post videos w/o telling people that they could be asked to pay). So, really soon we’ll post really nice videos from peepcode and other authors and thanks to “video features” you’ll be able to decide if you want to watch them or not.

Today we’ve got 2008 great tech videos in our collection and it is growing really fast! Using this occasion I’d like to say a few words about our latest changes and some upcoming ones:

• We’ve really improved our search - now it is better than ever (fast and with awesome results quality/relevance).
• We’ve cleaned up some old and broken video links and now going to automate this process so you’ll have the best videos w/o any problems with stale links.
• We’ve started regular postings from many sites - each day we have more great videos here!
• Gategories/tags system is going to be changed drastically so it’ll be even easier to find great content
• Advanced search (by categories, tags, levels, etc) will be added soon
• Since we’ve started the project, there were many awesome videos out there, but we weren’t able to share them here because they are not free. Now we’re going to add such a feature here - you’ll be able to watch commercial videos (like peepcode screencasts) here, but of course, we’ll mark them appropriately to let our users decide what they want to watch.

Stay tuned and we promise - you’ll love our new features and new content!

As many of our users may have noticed last week we were publishing much more videos on the site. With this postings increase we’ve introduced a set of new video series on the site you may want to watch:

• Ruby Plus (Ruby, Ruby on Rails)
• sd.rb podcast (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Web Services)
• Adobe Photoshop Quicktips (Design, Photoshop)
• dnrTV (.NET Framework, C#, ASP.NET, Visual Studio)
• InfoQ (Videos about everything related to software development)
• Learn Excel with MrExcel (Microsoft Excel)
• DimeCasts.NET (.NET Framework, C#, ASP.NET, Visual Studio)
• WDTV (Design, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop)
• GitCasts (git source control system)
• Becoming a Jedi (Jetbrains ReSharper)

Check out these series - they are really interesting!

P.S. If you feel overwhelmed by such a big number of new items in our main RSS feed, you can signup/login anytime and create your own RSS feed to make sure you’ll see only most interesting (for you) content in your RSS reader.

Yes! We did it! Just before I went to bed at 3:40AM, heh, I noticed, that someone submitted new video to BTV. I’ve approved it instantly and then noticed a following information in the top part of the site: “We have 1000 videos / 569+ hours of high-quality content!” So, we broke trough 1k videos barrier! Let’s do 2k videos before the end of this year, what do you think?

Thanks to all our users for their contributions and support! Stay with us and we’ll try to give you more features really soon.

Few weeks ago I bought new laptop and it was a Mac! It is first Mac in my life and I’m really happy to get such interesting opportunity to try it personally. Because I newbie in Apple’s preducts and MacOS X, I decided to learn more with screencasts and started looking for information sources about this topic. So, here is what I found (I’m going to update this post later if I’ll find something new):

• ScreenCastsOnline - huge collection of hi-quality screencasts for the Mac users. Published each week, the free video tutorials (screencasts) cover many aspects of using your Mac including OSX tutorials, switcher tutorials, Mac applications, Web 2.0 and much much more!
• Murphy Mac (and Windows too) - great set of really interesting and useful screencasts for different levels of users of MacOS and Windows: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced.

Matthew East has announced the creation of a Ubuntu Screencast Team.

Screencasts are videos which show users how to achieve a specific task in Ubuntu. They can be seriously useful when walking users through a new task and are intended to complement Ubuntu’s other support resources, such as documentation, forums, mailing lists and irc.

The project is led by Alan Pope, who has already done some great work on screencasts. But now the project is expanding, and you can help out! Simply head over to the team wiki page and soak up the material there. You’ll then be ready to contribute to the team by requesting or even making new videos!

Contact the Documentation Team with any questions or simply to get involved!

Our site has been added to one of eContent / eLearning Google Search Engines created by Richard Hoeg to index lots of useful engineering knowledge sources by Google Co-Op.
For those of you who is not familiar with this new Google service, Richard created short tutorial screencast. Along with this screencast you could find some other screencasts on Richard’s site:

• CamStudio Tutorial
  (create your own web demos using CamStudio, a free software tool)
• Drivetime Podcasts
  (listen to podcasts in your car w/o a MP3 player or iPod)
• Google Alert
  (create custom RSS feeds using Google Alert)
• Google Blog Search
  (create custom RSS feeds using Google Blog Search)
• Google Book Search
  (create custom eBooks using Google Book Search)
• Great News RSS Feed Reader
  (learn how to install, configure and use the RSS feed reader, Great News)
• Honeywell Shanghai Learning Center
  (take a trip to the grand opening of Honeywell’s Shanghai Learning Center)

Thanks Richard for such useful resource and for adding BTV to your search index.

This site is for everyone who is new to Ubuntu. Here you will find short video clips that highlight Ubuntu’s features and demonstrate how to complete common tasks using Ubuntu.

Thinking about trying Ubuntu? Take a video tour of Ubuntu.

Recently installed Ubuntu? Explore your new operating system.

Can’t find a video clip? Submit a Clip Wanted posting.

Already familiar with Ubuntu? Contribute your own video clips.

Really huge collection of videos from Princeton University Lecture can be found here. All lectures are available in two bitrates (56k and 350k) and for two streaming platforms (Real Media and Windows Media).

We’ve got semi-automatic Google TechTalks ripping system. So, stay tuned - next few days I’ll post lots of awesome videos from this great resource.