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Showing posts with the label Informative

HOW TO spot a fake video upload on YouTube using its API

Some clever YouTube users take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds who graciously give a video they have watched, a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You can identify a popular video for a specific keyword  by googling with a search query like this : "like 100..200" "dislike 0..2" Moog site:youtube.com reference : https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_video_feeds Currently, this technique doesn't seem to work effectively due to a code change involving the count of Likes & Dislikes. Finding out the count of people who dislike a video and the ratio of likes to dislikes for a particular video is simple if you use the YouTube API. The JSON feed of the  YouTube search webservice  exposes values for viewCount, likeCount, ratingCount which can help in gauging if a video is really what it claims through its title. Some trolls disallow rating for the videos they upload so that viewers cannot rate it. That's another red...

TrainEnquiry.com which shows status of running trains, gets an overhaul

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Trains are easily the cheapest way to travel long distance in India. Though the punctuality of trains has improved over the years, there is no guarantee that even the trains at the top of the  hierarchy  won't be late by several hours.  TrainEnquiry.com  can help you track a train’s location status though not in real-time. Knowing when a train will reach a particular station is helpful in many ways - it can help you book a cab while you're on the train while timing it with time of arrival at the destination, you can plan your commute time to the railway station if you had to pick up visitors. The  TrainEnquiry.com  website has undergone an overhaul but it is still unfriendly, un-intuitive & cluttered. The links (shown with arrows in screenshot below) which actually show the status don't stand out. Now - the site in 2014 Then - before the overhaul Possibly because a lot of App developers scrape data from...

HOW TO extract subtitles from YouTube videos as plain text

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Most questions in the Google Webmaster Central YouTube video channel are answered by Matt Cutts. The questions are very interesting but the answers are available only in video format. You have to watch the video which is of around 2 minutes to know the answer. While the background that Matt Cutts provides is educative, even 2 minutes is a lot of time if you need a quick answer and  when you are on a low bandwidth internet connection . So I started compiling short answers to build  summaries of Google Webmaster Central YouTube videos . I noticed that these videos have captions and I realized that I don't even have to watch the video to know the question and answer. It is possible to extract subtitles from YouTube videos  by specifying the language and VideoId in this generic URL -  http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang={LANG}&v={VIDEOID} . For instance, instead of watching a Google Webmaster Central YouTube video that has a URL like this - http://www...