New Usenet, video & audio, playback and conversion guides

James Delahunty
6 Aug 2007 14:06

Over the past few days, some of you may have noticed some new guides being uploaded or guides being updated on AfterDawn. In this article, I thought I would mention just a few of them and say a few words about them.

How to play BIN / CUE, 3GP & DVD files

As some of you know, we have a small section at the top of our guides that helps new users with playback issues. These guides have been more successful than many of our complex and advanced guides, gathering traffic esp. from search engines from brand new users. These are not of much use to most of our regular members, but reading them is still recommended and appreciated :-)
How to play 3GP files:
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/how_to_play_3gp_files.cfm

How to play BIN / CUE files (video):
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/how_to_play_bin___cue_files.cfm
How to play IFO, VOB, BUP files:
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/how_to_play_vob___ifo___bup_files.cfm

Hopefully those playback guides will be as successful as the others and the list keeps growing.

Usenet / Newsgroups

Here is a guide that we weren't too interested in writing about because of all the different things you need to know about Usenet, and the fact that to use Usenet properly, you either need a very generous ISP or a premium service that requires a monthly fee. There are other reasons too, but still, due to constant demand we decided to put up a 9 page article about Usenet.

This is structured as a kind of example. It uses Newsbin Pro and several freeware tools a Usenet user needs while using binary groups. For now, it does not have a "posting" chapter, but we'll be sure to add that if anybody requests it. It's a good article as an introduction and also displays some warnings about the uncensored nature of Usenet.

Introducing Usenet binary groups:
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/introducing_usenet_binary_groups.cfm

Convert YouTube, Google Video etc. to DVD and Extract MP3 audio from YouTube, Google Video etc.

Here are another pair of guides you might find useful. The first one is something we were always surprised to be asked for; a guide about ripping video from sites like YouTube and converting that resulting video to DVD. However, lately we noticed that due to official content agreements and even the 2006 presidential election coverage, sites like YouTube now offers videos of quality that is good enough to be watched outside of a small window.

The guide uses VSO's ConvertXtoDVD for the conversion, but there is already another coming soon that achieves the same task with only freeware, although it is more complicated and time consuming.

Convert YouTube, Google Video etc. to DVD:
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/convert_youtube__google_video_etc__to_dvd.cfm

Another guide we thought would make sense to add shows how to use software (freeware) to rip videos from sites like YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, iFilm, Metacafe etc. and extract MP3 audio. It also covers simple cutting and editing of MP3 files directly (no need to decompress to PCM first). This is useful for all of those videos of performances caught by normal users that have decent quality audio you might want to have in your collection.

Extract MP3 from YouTube, Google Video etc.:
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/extract_mp3_from_youtube__google_video_etc_.cfm
We hope that these guides will interest and maybe even help you all one day. Stay tuned as we have many many more guides to come and as always, feel free to give feedback and suggest something you would like to see.

Visit our Guide Section at:
https://www.afterdawn.com/guides