Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Real's new RealPlayer SP software, currently in beta, adds functionality to rip YouTube and other streaming videos from the Internet and get them onto whatever handheld you choose. It works well enough, but it's also crammed full of unnecessary features. RealPlayer SP is the evolution of the long-running RealPlayer software, which has become a multi-limbed beast of a program: It's a media manager and player, along with a packaged web browser, a subscription and a la carte music store (Rhapsody), a gaming store (Real Arcade), an audio recorder, and now a streaming video ripper/converter with ties-in to social networking sites."

The long and the short of it is that if you're using a device like a Zune or a phone that can play h.264 video, this is a decent way to grab content from YouTube and other social video sites and get it onto your device, with conversion if necessary. It does a lot more than that, but the question is whether or not you need that fucntionality...

Here's our fifth giveaway, courtesy of Roxio: five copies of their Crunch software, valued at $39.99 USD each will be given away. Here's a bit about the product:
"Roxio Crunch™ is the essential video converter for your Apple TVTM, iPod®, and iPhoneTM. Take your video in to the living room or the palm of your hands fast and simple. Roxio Crunch is a one-stop shop for all of your video conversion needs. Batch export will make your life even simpler: converted video will be automatically added to iTunes for syncing. Don’t just convert it, Crunch it!"



Here's how to enter: just post a message as a reply telling me what kind of device you'd like to "crunch" video for. Or, take a look at the feature list and tell me what feature you think is the best. There's one post per person allowed, and five winners will be randomly chosen. The contest will stay open for entries until April 7th, 2008.

Special thanks to Roxio for their donation of this software!