Most people are familiar with screen savers in Windows. When your computer has been idle for a certain period of time, the screen will go blank or animate in some way to keep the screen you left up from burning into your monitor. Over the years, screen savers evolved to entertain. Chances are pretty good that you or someone you know has had a virtual fish tank as a screen saver at some point. The problem is that you’re usually not around to enjoy your screen saver when it’s activated. In this article, I’m going to show you an easy way to animate your desktop while you’re using the computer. The video below has a few examples from my own setup.
In the video, I just demonstrated a few of my favorites, but you can also use it as an example of how to set a video as your background once you have Dreamscene installed. You might have also noticed that I’ve removed any junk icons from my desktop and set my program dock and task bar both to auto-hide. The less you have in the way of your background, the more you’ll enjoy it.
What You Need To Get Started
- Dreamscene: The Windows 7 Dreamscene patch is here (32 bit). 64 bit is here.
- Video loops: The ones I’m using are a bunch from dreamscene.org and the aquarium I found on YouTube.
That’s it. Just grab a video or two and the patch and get started below.
How To Install Dreamscene
Installing Dreamscene is pretty quick and easy to accomplish, but you will need to reboot. Bookmark this page so you can come back to it and wrap up anything else you have open. When you’re ready, just follow these steps:
1. Open the Dreamscene patch you downloaded
2: Copy and Paste DreamScene.dll to %windir%\system32\
3: Copy and Paste DreamScene.dll.mui to %windir%\system32\en-US\
4: Run Dscene.reg
5: Reboot
(%windir% is the path to your windows directory, generally C:\Windows. Instructions may vary with an OS other than Windows 7 64 bit)
After installation and rebooting, you can set any .WMV or .MPG video as your desktop background. To do this, just find a video on your computer, right-click on it and click “Set as Desktop Background.
Find More Dreamscene Videos
Finding a bunch of videos on sites like dreamscene.org is great, but remember, you can use any wmv or mpg video, so there’s a whole lot of possible Dreamscenes all over the web for you. If it loops, that’s best, but a longer video will work, too. Sites like YouTube have an abundance of videos, but you might try just searching Google for free video loops.
Comment below and link to any video loops you find that you really like.
Yesterday, I posted about how to jailbreak your iPhone running firmware 3.1.3 in 60 seconds. After jailbreaking, I tried playing with ScreenSplitr and saw other apps that let you see your iPhone screen on your computer. The problem is that most require you to be tethered to a computer or have both your iPhone and the computer on a wifi network. I found something much easier for creating videos of your iPhone screen.
After jailbreaking, I installed Backgrounder on my iPhone. It lets you run things in the background, which the iPhone still doesn’t do (until 4.0). What I found was that some video recording programs will still record in the background and others will not. Of those that will, a couple will record everything displayed on your screen. Below is a video I made showing regular video, then my screen, then back to regular video. The whole thing was recorded using a iVideoRecorder ($0.99 in the app store) and Backgrounder. It was not edited at all and was uploaded to YouTube right from the phone.
As you can see, it was pretty simple to share my iPhone screen activity with you without the need for a computer. This is great if you want to, for example, show people how to take and edit iPhone photos on the beach or how well a navigation program works with a live demonstration. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Having a computer dedicated to your entertainment center is fine, but what if you don’t want to dedicate a computer just to that? That’s how I had things set up for a long time. I used the computer less and less after we got a new cable box that included a DVR. With HULU, I contemplated setting it all back up, but then I came across a device that promised to save me all the trouble.
The device pictured above is a USB PC to TV audio and video adapter from a company called Warpia and it’s designed to transmit the audio and video signal from your computer to a receiving unit attached to your PC.
Setting It All Up
The setup for this device really couldn’t have been much easier. Following some simple instructions, I installed the software from the included CD and then plugged in the USB PC adapter. After looking over the settings, I plugged in the A/V base adapter and hooked it up to the HDMI cable I borrowed from my DVD player (will connect via VGA, too). After a couple seconds, everything on my laptop screen was being displayed on my 42 inch TV as well. Check out the video of everything in action:
The refresh rate for video was pretty good, but could be a little better. Other than that, HD video came across as true HD and looked really good. All my applications refreshed seamlessly and I had a very clear picture.
Features and Flaws
One of the things I liked about this was that it’s treated as an additional display, so I can tell Windows to either Duplicate the display or Extend it. When I extend it, I get to keep my normal laptop screen just on my laptop, and a second desktop for the TV. A great example of how that’s beneficial presented itself the other night. I purchased a movie online for direct download and watched it on the TV over my wireless A/V connection. At the same time, I was able to tweet, read and respond to email, etc. from my original desktop. Pretty cool.
The SWP100A also comes with mounting screw slots on the bottom of the TV adapter and that end’s USB stick can plug in horizontally or vertically in case you want to wall mount it and keep it as flush as possible.
The only real concern this device presented was the heat it generated. The USB adapter can get pretty warm and the TV adapter gets downright hot. I’d have loved to see an on/off switch on the TV end of the setup. Not only would this help with the heat problem, but it would be a lot easier than having to unplug it and plug it back in every time I want to use it.
Conclusions
At $179.99, it’s not my cheapest device, but it’s cheaper than setting up another computer just for the TV and a lot, I mean a LOT easier. I went from sealed box to completed and in use in about 5-7 minutes. If you can handle the price, it’s a decent solution to get your audio and video from PC to TV in a snap.
Like many people, I use videos in some of my posts and those videos are almost always on YouTube. For me, I use the video to compliment the post and help show things that just can’t be shown in photos or described in text. But I also want those videos to be discovered independent of the blog post and bring people to my site. I’m sure almost everyone posting videos on YouTube would love their video to go viral, but that’s no easy task. Recently, I was asked to review some software to help with this task.
I was given a link a website about how to get views on youtube, where I could get YouTube Jump Start, software that promises to get you tons of “quality views” to your YouTube video without doing anything that could put your YouTube account at risk of deletion. Here I am a few weeks later, and I have some real numbers from a real video I submitted (mostly) just to test this out.
About YouTube Jump Start
As mentioned above, it’s designed to boost your YouTube video views, but how does it work and how much is it? The details about exactly how these views make their way to your video aren’t really clear, but the sales page promises “no bots” and “no proxies”, so we’re left to assume these views are all real people seeing your video. Today, I confirmed that these are, in fact, “real people”.
The program includes a couple different packages, depending on how many videos you want to promote, from $70 and $15/month (4 videos a day) to $100 one-time for 25 videos ($4/video). The upside is that this is for 200+ views per video, per day, “forever”.
When you fire up the program, you just pop in a video URL and it submits. It was a lot easier than I ever anticipated. It might have been a little too simple for my liking, actually, but as long as it does what I want it to, that’s fine.
Tons Of New YouTube Views
I’ve been on the web a long time and I’ve seen a lot of programs, scripts, and sites that offer to generate non-organic traffic for you. Organic traffic is the stuff that just happens when you have good content and people feel compelled to tell other people about it. This traffic is the stuff you have to help yourself get. There’s no shame in going after more traffic. In fact, you SHOULD be doing this if you’re serious about people seeing your content. In any case, I’ve seen a lot of promises to deliver traffic and a lot that have failed to deliver. This was not the case here.
For the first week (maybe a little less), I let my video ride on organic traffic and a couple tweets I sent out and it did pretty well on its own. As the initial views slowed down, I decided to kick in the Jump Start program, represented largely by the brown in the graph above. As you can see, it started delivering right away. Not too bad. It actually shows a couple points where it almost doubled my organic peak. That brown part of the graph is truly traffic YouTube can’t identify the origin of, so it’s not ALL from this program, but I think it’s a safe guess to say that about 95% or more is.
The graph above shows that the viewers seem to come from all age groups, and I also looked at the geographic location graphs, which seem to indicate mostly United states traffic, and that’s important to me. After a few weeks, YouTube Jump Start delivered about 4,000 to 4,500 views to my video.
Is This Valuable Traffic?
That’s debatable, really. First off, let’s think about what good non-organic traffic is. They sum up what I was thinking almost word for word:
If you have more views, your video will not only show up on earlier search pages, but will be recommended to others via YouTube’s related videos function. Your video may even be featured on YouTube’s Global Homepage! (if its worthy enough).
This, of course, is why I did my test. My video, as indicated in the first graph, did pretty well on its own, so it’s safe to assume that the video didn’t totally suck. Sadly, out of 5,000+ views, only 456 were “related content” views and 114 were from YouTube search. 261 and 69 (respectively) of these were from before I ran the program. What this says to me is that although I saw a ton of views to my video, I haven’t realized the benefit of the software in the ways I had hoped. Ideally, The software would get tons of people viewing my video and those people would share and rate at least a little. This doesn’t seem to have happened much, if at all. As for it boosting organic traffic within YouTube (related videos and search), I think almost all 250 or so organic views were as a result of the added traffic Jump Start gave the video. This isn’t what I’d hoped for, but it’s a lot more than I’d have without the software.
Conclusions
Everything really boils down to this question: Is the return on investment good enough? If you produce videos that are good enough and just need some help, this could work, but I don’t know if it will really generate the organic traffic that is most critical to success on the web. Ultimately, the best plan is to create killer content regularly for the best organic traffic, but this could give you a good, well, jump start.
