How To Speed Up your BroadBand Speed

I just found this article which discusses important tips to significantly speed up your internet access through BSNL Dataone broadband connection / most other BroadBand connections like Reliance or Tata Indicom or Sify Broadband .

Setting DNS For Your Connection
One of the major problems with BSNL Dataone Broadband connection is the DNS servers they provide by default. Most of the time they are very slow and sometimes they fail to respond. I noticed that I am starting to spend a significant amount of time in DNS resolution with Dataone connection, often it is larger than the time it takes to actually get the reponse. Here is a simple solution to significantly speed up your DNS resolution.

Open up the network connection profile and edit TCP/IP settings. In the DNS server address fields, specify the following DNS server addresses: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
Disconnect the connection and then connect again. You are done.

This specifies third party DNS servers which are significantly faster than BSNL Dataone’s DNS servers.

Note: The service is provided by OpenDNS.

Saving your Bandwidth
Firefox users can use FlashBlock extension to prevent downloading of Flash content by default, thereby significantly speeding up browsing experience. You can click on the placeholder icon to display the original Flash content any time. This is more of a passive tip in that reduces data usage to improve your overall experience.

Setting TCP Parameters
You can try to increase your broadband bandwidth tweaking the TCP/IP parameters. The process is simplified by using TCPOptimizer, a free tool. It helped me a lot but your mileage may vary

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Top 10 Free Ways To Download Any Video off the Internet

I was searching around for the youtube downloader, i found this interesting post which i wanted to share with you guys. Everyone these days is downloading, watching, andsharing videos from video-sharing sites like YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe,DailyMotion, Veoh, Break, and a ton of other similar sites. Whether you want to watch the video on your iPod while working out, insert it into a PowerPoint presentation to add some spice, or simply download a video before it’s removed, it’s quite essential to know how to download, convert, and play these videos.

Free Web services for downloading videos from video-sharing sites

ClipNabber allows you to download videos from YouTube, Metacafe, etc by simply copying and pasting the URL. You’ll then get a link whereby you can download the file to your computer, iPod, iPhone, or any other media player. You’ll need to have an FLV player for the YouTube videos. Quick and very easy to use!

Zamzar is a free online file conversion web application that can not only convert videos off the Internet to AVI, MPEG, 3GP, MP4, MOV, etc, but also converts between audio, image, and document formats. Paste the URL into Step 1 and then convert the file to your favorite format.

VideoDownloader is a FireFox extension, but also allows you to paste in any URL from many sites such as Blip.TV, iFilm, and even social networking sites like MySpace. You can also download a free FLV player from their site to play the videos.

Vixy.net is another site that not only downloads online videos, but will also convert them AVI, MOV, MP4, 3GP, or MP3 (if you want to extract the audio from the file). Using this site, you don’t have to worry about downloading a FLV player as you can convert it to Windows format. (Same as Zamzar)

KeepVid also supports just about any video sharing site out there and the only difference about this site is that it also has a Top Videos section, so you can quickly download the most watched videos around the web.

Media Converter is similar to ZamZar and vixy.net, but requires you to create an account and log in. Also, it seems like it only supports downloading and converting videos from YouTube. You can also download their video download program, but it only supports 5 sites.

Hey! Watch is an online video encoding web service that encodes video into different formats including HD very quickly. The graphical interface is very nice and there are lots of features and options, such as the ability to transfer any video from the web directly to an FTP server or to online storage.

YoutubeX, as the name suggests, allows you to download videos from YouTube.Obviously, it only supports YouTube, but it has a couple of other features, such as the ability to play your video on the site and find popular videos quickly.

VideoRonk searches across multiple video-sharing sites such as Google Video, YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion to find the most popular videos on each of them. You can either watch them on VideoRonk or download them to your computer in FLV format.

According to their web site, they support more than 98 video sites including MySpace,CollegeHumor, iFilm>, etc. You’ll have to rename the files you download fromYouTube with the .FLV extension at the end.

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