OStatic

If you're a Firefox user and you're viewing and possibly sharing an increasing amount of video content, one of the best Firefox extensions you can get is Video Download Helper. It helps you download and convert formats from the many video hosting sites online, and you can also use it to manage audio and picture galleries. You can save downloaded video and audio content in many formats with it, including WMV, ASF, AVI and MP3 formats, and keep videos organized. Here's a look at how it works.

Most users of proprietary software arm themselves with arrays of digital entertainment applications, ranging from iTunes to Windows Media Player to RealPlayer. That's due to big improvements in the bandwidth everyone gets, attention from content providers, and more. The good news is that for open sourcers, digital entertainment applications have matured -- big-time -- for Windows, Linux and the Mac. Even if you use proprietary applications such as iTunes for music, or Windows Media Player for videos, there are many open source applications that can complement and add to your libraries, collections and players. You'll find 10 good roundups of open source digital entertainment resources here, and more than 50 total free applications.?

Here's one of the more useful Firefox extensions I've tried out in a while: VideoSurf. (Hat tip to Webware for calling it out, and noting that it originated as a Greasemonkey script.)? You'll find it especially good if you consume a lot of web-based video at sites such as YouTube and Google. In addition to the standard thumbnails to start videos that you get when you search at, say, YouTube, VideoSurf gives you a time-stamped series of chronological thumbnail images from the video. The extracted thumbnails let you jump to any point instantly. Here's how it looks.