Today's BONUS Video Link

It's long (12 minutes) and it has a lot of naughty words in it, and I've already embedded one video link here today. So I won't embed but will recommend this link to "Truth in Advertising," a very funny and incisive Canadian film about what goes on in your basic advertising agency. Much of it also goes on in television studios and movie companies, and some of it reminds me more of people I've dealt with at TV networks than in ad offices. And yes, that's Colin Mochrie of Whose Line Is It Anyway? among the cast members.

By the way — and by the way, have you noticed how often I say "by the way" on this website? — this might interest some of you. The video links I've been embedding in this weblog (meaning they play right on this page) so far are all from either Google Video or YouTube. They play here and on those sites via a player that employs Macromedia Flash to load and play a video file.

If you would like to capture any of these video files to your own harddisk, this can be done. Go to KeepVid and enter the direct URL (webpage address) in the appropriate place and it will decode the internecine links and format the file for your downloading pleasure — and it also works for many other websites that offer video clips. In some cases, what is saved to your computer will be an "FLV" file. That's a flash video format and in order to play it, you'll need to install a flash video player like this one. (MAC users: There are several out there that will work on your computers but I don't know which one is the best.)

Capturing online video clips is sometimes a good idea because you'll have them even after the link goes away. But you may also want to do it because clips will generally play smoother and without downloading pauses that way.