Are you looking for a quick and easy stocking stuffer for the holiday season that’s sure to put a tear into someone’s eye? Why not turn an old home movie into a flipbook and give it to someone! You can, and it’s super simple with a little application called FlipBook Printer.

Flickr is an undoubtably popular service for hosting and sharing your images, but as video equipment gets cheaper and more prominent, the next revolution will come in the form of video sharing; after all, who doesn’t like sharing videos of family gatherings or vacations (watching them is a different story)? If you are already looking for a video sharing service, you might not know where to turn. The most popular one around is YouTube but there are plenty of others around including OurMedia, Grouper, and CastPost. So which one is right for you? TechCrunch has a great article comparing different video sharing services which is a great resource for anyone looking to try one of these services. The article contains a chart which shows prices, storage, and various features for each.

Looking to convince your family or your boss to try something other than Microsoft Office? OpenOffice is a fantastic alternative, but many people may be reluctant to make the switch even though the software offers many of the same features as its Microsoft counterpart.

Newsforge has put together a series of training videos for OpenOffice which might help. The training videos offer tutorials on installation, creating and editing documents, working with presentations and images, and more. Definitely worth a look if you want to try something different.

Mefeedia is an awesome service I heard about on Rocketboom which is very similar to RSS aggregators like Bloglines and Rojo but targetting the emerging market of video podcasts (or videocasts, or vlogs, or whatever you want to call them). In this way, it is similar to my favorite podcatcher/podcast directory, Odeo. Unlike other videocast aggregators, there is no need to download videos as they are streamed right from the browser. I currently subscribe to about 10 different video podcasts so I have a few gigs worth of video just from that, so it’s nice to finally just be able to stream content. The interface could use a little work as it’s not as clean and intuitive as Odeo but there is lots of great content, and you can tag videos, send them to friends, and do a few other cool things. Additionally, you could subscribe to your member feed in iTunes to gather all those videos if you wanted to transfer them to your iPod. Mefeedia is totally free.

A lot of websites embed audio and video files into their webpages to make it a little more difficult to download (though of course, it’s not). There are various ways to download an embedded file, but the easiest, at least if you use Firefox, is a little extension called Download Embedded (clever, huh?). Once installed, all you have to do is right-click on the Flash animation, movie, or any other file and select the proper option to have the extension download it automatically for you. Definitely much easier than the old way of looking through the source code, huh? Download Embedded is free, and will work on all versions of Firefox up to the 1.5 release candidates.

Not long ago, we posted an article on downloading videos from Yahoo! Launch which was pretty well received. One of our readers sent me a little e-mail over the weekend about a new service which lets you do the same thing but for Google Video called fM Google Video Downloader. With the service, you can search for videos, or simply paste a Google video link and receive the unencrypted link so you can download it to your desktop. Additionally, you’ll see a list of the past 20 or so requests made to the service. This is pretty cool, and definitely much easier than getting videos from Yahoo!.

Are you sick of video to iPod conversion software yet? No? Well, I am, but here’s another one for those of you who have a MythTV box set up at home. There is a new project cleverly (?) called Myth2iPod which will help you turn any TV show you record on your box and put it in a format that is recognized by the iPod (320×240 pixels, h.264 encoded). Interestingly, Myth2iPod will let you create a feed of each show so you can subscribe to it via iTunes (which has some pretty interesting uses if you ask me). The application is still in early development stages so there it’s not entirely easy to use, but if you have the know-how to create your own PVR, chances are you’ll have no problem setting this up. You can find some setup information at this forum thread. Of course, it is completely free.

As voice instant messaging capabilities are added to more IM programs and voice over IP becomes more prevalent, we’re slowly starting to get more and more used to contacting people via voice instead of text. I know at least for me, I basically stopped using my traditional phone to contact people instead opting for IM or e-mail as a more convenient (albeit maybe slower) form of communication. The next obvious step IM and VOIP applications will take is the addition of video chat capabilities and we’re slowly starting to see that today thanks to an application called Festoon.

If there is one thing I hate, it’s companies who lock their hardware and keep you from using your content however you’d like (though I somewhat understand why they’d want to do it). TiVo owners are increasingly getting less control of whatever shows they record, though I suppose it’s not entirely TiVo’s fault, but enough with the diatribe. There is an amazing new piece of software which lets you stream content off your TiVo and onto your Mac (sorry Windows folks, maybe next time) and it’s called TiVoTool. You do need to have a fairly new Mac since you must have Mac OS X Tiger and a G5 (not required but suggested), but this is an invaluable tool for those of you who’d like to have a little more control over your content and maybe burn it onto a DVD at some point. The latest release of the software even includes iTunes and iPod support so you can easily place your content on the latest video-enabled iPods and carry it with you wherever you go. TiVoTool is available for Macs and Linux. Be sure to check the download page for all the requirements. Best of all, it’s completely free.