OK GO!

Recently the TV was on in the background while I was working on an ambulance design, and it was the dreadful Edith Bowman and some wimpy girly-boy co-presenter doing their level best to spoil the Digital Music Awards. I remain amazed that any of those “MTV Hot” presenters ever got a job as TV presenters; they are so amateurish in a “Wayne’s World” way. However, there were a couple of things that stopped me working. Of course I had to stop to watch Peter Gabriel — not least of all to marvel at how much he’s changed since I last saw him.

But the main thing that caught my imagination was a group who had thrown together a one-shot, single-take group dance video to publicise their single on You Tube, and that it had been downloaded a million times. The band were amazed to find that other people had seen their dance moves and had learned them perfectly, performed them and even filmed them to be uploaded back to YouTube! They even had a lego-men animated tribute.

Well, I thought I would have no trouble looking them up, and so I forgot all about it until I was chatting with Ruth this evening. She said she’d seen the dance video — and that the band had done an even better one involving treadmills!

Neither of us could recall the name of the band, so we tried searches on YouTube to no avail. I began searching for the Digital Music Awards and found a list of winners but nothing about this. It was more pure luck and chance that I came across OK GO on YouTube! ‘On The Treadmill’ is utterly brilliant: and another single camera single-take… a minute in the guy in the red trousers almost falls. Sublime. Then I thought I would learn how to embed video into a WordPress blog. Luckily YouTube is trusted (otherwise it would be deemed too risky). Here y’go (remember to disable AdBlock):
The original ‘In the Backyard Dancing’ (aka ‘Million Ways’) is fabulous.

Well, despite being an advocate of sending people links (rather than massive videofiles and pictures) to Flikr, YouTube and MySpace, I had the sudden need to actually download these from YouTube. It was not good enough to bookmark the YouTube pages or even to embed the videos on my blog. These are too good to lose to broken links. The page source told me the embedded src was a weird format. This turned out to be an FLV extension: a bastardised form of browser flash.
My browser is Firefox, so I went to their extension site and found a VideoDownloader (javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php) plug-in. I found it easy enough to download the embedded file, saving the trouble of scanning through the page source, but I could not open the FLV extension file. I tried changing the extension to swf but that didn’t work.

Then I found a free download (at applian.com/flvplayer/) which opens and plays the flv files I downloaded. I noticed that there were file convertors to change the file from an flv to something else, but why bother when there’s an FLV player?

Anyway. I hope this is useful and that you enjoy these dancing fools. I recommend however that you visit the YouTube site to read other people’s comments and see the imitation versions — these are hysterical!