Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Looking for a better way to find and organize all of the videos on your computer? TMPGEnc KARMA.. lets you easily scan folders and add videos, creating a library listing of them on your computer. Organize your videos easily by using the sorting options, and even create your own custom description tags. View your videos in any of the multiple preview screens, and use the included TileShot CREATOR tool to create images from your videos! Add some good karma to your life and download TMPGEnc KARMA...today!"

If you've got a lot of videos, and are looking for ways to keep them organized, TMPGEnc KARMA may be a good solution for you. It's freeware, and supports a large array of video formats, including .avi, .mpg, .mpeg, .wmv, .dvr-ms, .flv, .divx, .mp4, and many others. It has some neat features such as color-coding your videos for easier sorting and searching. And hey, it's a free download!

"Online video is catching on among the masses, and in a big way. Viewers in the US watched 12 billion videos this past May, according to data from comScore, a 45 percent increase from a year prior. comScore's data shows healthy growth in online video viewing, not just from user-generated video sites, but those that provide streaming TV shows as well. Almost 142 million unique users watched video in May, which comScore says is a whopping 74 percent of the total US Internet audience. Users watched an average of 85.3 videos per person during those 31 days for an average of 228 minutes of video. Unsurprisingly, the most popular online video property was "Google Sites"—that is, sites owned by Google like YouTube and Google Video, which made up 35 percent of all videos viewed during that time period. comScore says that 4.2 billion videos from YouTube were viewed in May and made up over 98 percent of the videos viewed from Google's properties."

So it is not like I am not "with it" or anything like that (though I am sure I am proving the reverse just by saying that :-) ), but I probably watch about a maximum of 10 videos a month online through almost any source. This is not because I don't like the technology or anything like that, just that I don't have the time. Maybe it is just the long hours that I work. In fact, I don't understand how other people have the time -- but I digress. With the advent of YouTube, I can totally see why people are watching so many more videos online. And I think that now that I have an iPhone, I might start viewing more of them too. It would have been nice if comScore had broken down the numbers by device as well because it would have been nice to know if the trend is headed more towards watching videos on mobile devices.

A product like the HP TouchSmart PC is easiest to show rather than tell, and HP seems to have figured that out - they have a Youtube channel with 14 videos that show how the TouchSmart PC operates. The full-screen interface is very slick - it looks fast and nicely tuned for finger-based operations.