We’ve written an HTML 5 Video Viewer for YouTube, and you can use it to browse YouTube in true 21st Century HTML5 quality. And it’s super-simple to use.

Flash has been the bane of online websurfers ever since the 90s, especially on platforms where Adobe doesn’t bother to go the extra mile to ensure that their proprietary, binary implementations are stable and efficient. On Linux and Mac OS X, the flash implementation takes up over half the available CPU and at high-resolutions stuttering occurs. HTML5 poses the answer providing a way for browsers to use the native implementations to render videos directly in the browser without resorting to ActiveX and 3rd-party browser plugins… it just has yet to be embraced.

But now you can uninstall Flash and enjoy your online videos in peace. Just go to http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/ and enter the URL of a video to watch it in the embedded HTML5 viewer. Yes, you can skip, skim, pause, resume away to your heart’s content.

Even better, we’ve written a GreaseMonkey/UserScript to add a link to all YouTube video pages that points to the HTML5 version, leaving you with no excuse to still use the Flash interface!

All modern browsers that support basic HTML5 are supported. You’ll need to have an MP4 decoder installed on your PC. Happy viewing!

Update:

It’s been brought to our attention that Firefox does not support streaming MP4 content due to licensing restrictions, and as we mention above, an MP4 decoder is a minimum requirement.

With Windows 7 released and currently making its way to shelves in time for the holiday season, we’ve taken this opportunity to upgrade our copy of the official Windows System Recovery Discs for compatibility with Windows 7.

If you’re like most PC users, you probably got Windows 7 with a new PC or laptop. And if you’re like 99% of the population, you get your new machines from one of the major manufacturers. Dell, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo; who all have one thing in common: they don’t give you a real Windows 7 installation disc with your purchase. Instead, they bundle what they call a “recovery disc” (that’s if you’re lucky – otherwise you’ll have a recovery partition instead) with your machine and leave it at that.

It doesn’t matter that you just paid a thousand dollars for a machine that comes with a valid Windows 7 license – your computer manufacturer just don’t want to spend the money (or perhaps take on the responsibility) of giving you a Windows 7 installation DVD to accompany your expensive purchase.

The problem is, with Windows 7, the installation media serves more than one purpose. It’s not just a way to get Windows installed, it’s also the only way of recovering a borked installation. The Windows 7 DVD has a complete “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.

Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows 7 DVD’s “recovery center,” as we’ve come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows 7, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC. Technically, one could re-create this installation media with freely-downloadable media from Microsoft (namely the Microsoft WAIK kit, a multi-gigabyte download); but it’s damn-decent of Microsoft to make this available to Windows’ users who might not be capable of creating such a thing on their own. You can make your own copy from Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, but now you have an easier alternative.

NeoSmart Technologies is hosting a copy of the Windows 7 Recovery Disc for your convenience. It’s a 143 MiB download (165 MiB for the 64-bit version), and in the standard ISO format, ready to burned directly to a CD or DVD. Don’t wait until your PC crashes to download a copy! Download and burn your recovery disc today, so that when the time comes, you’ll be ready!

What it does: The Windows 7 Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows 7 Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.

Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.

Download Links

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 32-Bit (x86) Edition

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 64-Bit (x64) Edition

Please note that the above links point to .torrent files. Torrent files are like a shortcut, they tell a download manager on your PC where to download the actual files from. Downloading large & important system files with torrents is highly recommended since torrents are protected against corrupt downloads and tend to be faster when well-shared.

(All torrents are currently being seeded by 100mpbs servers, they should be blazing fast).

You can download the Windows Vista recovery discs from here.

Instructions

1. Download the appropriate .torrent file from above that corresponds to the version of Windows 7 you have installed.
2. Download and run µTorrent.
3. Open the .torrent file you downloaded with µTorrent. (File -> Add Torrent)
4. Select where you want µTorrent to save the 7 Recovery Disc.
5. Wait for it to download.
6. Burn the .iso file that µTorrent downloaded to a CD using these instructions.
7. When you want to use the recovery center, put the CD in your drive and boot from it. This is usually done by pressing F8 at startup, or changing the boot drive order in the BIOS.

Support

Please don’t ask for help below, it’ll get real cluttered real soon! Open a support thread at http://neosmart.net/forums/ and we’ll help you resolve your problem ASAP.

Note that in the video, PCWizKid is using EasyBCD 1.7.2, which is the latest stable version of EasyBCD… But there’s a secret 2.0 version out currently in beta — we recommend you download yourself a copy and be the coolest kid on the block. It’s been rewritten for stability and reliability, and will feature a ton of new Windows 7-only features for your itching, tweaking fingers.

Follow us on twitter @neosmart to keep up with the latest NST news, developments, and releases!

The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

We’re taking hundreds of screenshots of Windows 7 and its new features & components even as we’re posting this – keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be joining our extensive collection of Operating System screenshots in the same fashion as the Windows Vista screenshots were added: build-by-build with all the little details covered in true geek fashion.

You can now download ToolTipFixer 2.0 which has a number of changes and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received during the past year. First, for those of you that aren’t familiar with ToolTipFixer, it’s a nifty “patch” for a very frustrating bug in Windows which winds up rendering tooltips behind the taskbar, leaving them unreadable and generally annoying the user to no end:

ToolTipFixer sits silently and invisibly in the background, intercepting this problem and fixing it as it happens – letting you read those tooltips and use your PC the way you should be able to.

Now for the good stuff: the number one request we’ve had was to eliminate the Microsoft .NET Framework as a requirement for using ToolTipFixer. As a matter of productivity and preference, Microsoft’s .NET Framework has a special place in our hearts, but we realize that many people would prefer something a bit… lighter and as such ToolTipFixer 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch in C++ with no dependencies – not even the MSVC++ runtime libraries.

The second oft-made request was improvements to ToolTipFixer’s memory usage. This particular component is tightly-tied to the development platform of choice, and with the switch over to unmanaged C++, it’s become possible to further-tune the amount of memory that TTF uses and bring it down as much as possible, something that’s not in the developers’ hands when using the .NET Framework – which, with its automated garbage cleanup, makes memory usage highly variable at best.

TTF 2 has drastically improved memory management – it’ll take so little memory, you won’t even know it’s there (from 0.3 to 1.5 MiB in our extended testing, depending on OS and platform).

Then there are those 64-bit Windows users, and more of them than ever before. Just because you have 4+ GiB of RAM in that machine of yours doesn’t mean you can’t get rid of this bug too – ToolTipFixer 2.0 has full support for Windows XP/Vista x64!

And to save the best for last, ToolTipFixer can now be run in what we call “standalone mode.” During setup, you’ll have the option of either installing TTF the traditional way – as a system application sitting silently and invisibly in the background – or as a standalone module that you run only when you need it. Some people experience the tooltip corruption problem less often than others, and if it doesn’t bother you incessantly then you can choose to only run TTF when you need it!

Download: ToolTipFixer 2.0

With this update the installation process has been simplified somewhat, in particular the need modify HTTPD.INI to set the server variables has been eliminated – you just need to install ISAPI_Rewrite 3, configure php.ini to load up request_uri.inc, and you’re set.

Request_URI for Windows 1.1 retains backwards compatibility with ISAPI_Rewrite 2.x for those of you who’d rather not switch to the new (and much-improved) version 3.x.

Download Request_URI for IIS 1.1

The full instructions for installing and configuring Request_URI for Windows can be found at the original posting. Please post any support questions in the forums.

NeoSmart Technologies is not affiliated with Helicon software in any way.

EasyBCD 1.7.2 has only two minor changes, both of which involve the installer. The more important of the two involves the installer UI: Windows Vista SP1 broke the EasyBCD installer (buttons’ text was no longer legible), making it rather difficult to get on with using EasyBCD if you didn’t already have it installed.

Development of EasyBCD 2.0 is going well, betas should be available in the next month or so.

If you already have EasyBCD installed, you don’t really have to update.

Download EasyBCD 1.7.2

NeoSmart DevNet is a new effort on behalf of NST to reach out and lend a helping hand to other software developers by providing a number of tools, libraries, and frameworks that we’ve developed over the last several years to address certain commonly-encountered issues in a generic-yet-customizable manner.

Basically, DevNet is an attempt at getting software developers to spend more time on developing their applications verses worrying about the stuff that they need to get there. Unlike other developer resources on the internet, the goal of DevNet is to provide complete working subsystems and frameworks to developers, almost entirely doing away with the need for supplemental coding and code-monkey work.

For instance, the first of our DevNet projects to be released is a scriptable graphical HTTP/FTP downloader. The NST Downloader is intended to be drop-in solution for anyone looking to add the ability to download and run components from the internet to their software projects. All interfacing with the NST Downloader is done via command-line arguments, making it language-agnostic and dead-simple to use.

Downloader components have become an integral part of most desktop applications. Whether its to download upgrades, plugins, extensions, documentation, or other remotely-located data, most large projects have come across the need for such a module at one point of time or the other. They’re straight-forward in functionality, but a huge pain to write, debug, and test. The bottom-line is, there’s no reason anyone should be writing and re-writing a downloader when that’s not the purpose of their project.

Developers shouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel over and over again, especially not when other free software developers have already written and tested the needed components and tuned them as necessary. Just as end-users have come to expect quality software that gets the job done from their favorite ISVs, developers too should have the comfort of using drop-in subsystems to accomplish their various needs; especially when it comes to such esoteric and straight-forward needs that simply take time and resources to develop and maintain.

Other DevNet projects currently undergoing the last phases of testing include a Regionalization Toolkit intended to make creating, deploying, and implementing regionalizations of .NET projects dead-simple and an Upgrade Framework that features one-liners to easily check for updates to your applications and even automatically download and install any available upgrades.

Still not clear on what the point of all this is? Just think of DevNet as extending the NeoSmart experience to include our beloved developer brethren.

I really don’t need to go into details about this much, since Lloyd Budd has done such a good job explaining what it is and what WordPress hopes to achieve in this program. This year, WordPress has an even-larger and more-exciting list of possible projects than before, along with a list of the mentors available for each idea. This Google Summer of Code, I’ll be mentoring for the WordPress projects in the one area that is closest to my heart: improving performance.

It would be unfair to say that WordPress is slow or an inadequately-performing blogging engine, because that’s not really true. "Performance," more than any other software characteristic or trait, is a very relative and subjective index. It depends on thousands of different factors, it has dozens of different baselines, and most confusingly of all, sometimes the perception of performance matters more than the performance itself.

But no matter where WordPress is now in terms of high-performance, there’s always room for improvement. Late last year, disappointed in this very blog’s less-than-stellar showing during the many Slashdot and Digg appearances (even on a damn-decent dedicated server), we decided to re-write the WordPress front-end from scratch.

You’re looking at the result now: the homepage and individual posts are powered by PerformancePress, our in-house re-write of the WordPress page-displaying code. The NeoSmart Files is still running WordPress, just behind the covers. The procedure we followed in developing PerformancePress was simple: only load what you need, don’t waste CPU cycles if you don’t have to, minimize SQL queries wherever possible, don’t loop when you can avoid it, and a number of other load-reducing principles.

The thing is, there’s a huge difference between in-house code and software that’s been "generically-developed" for use by the masses. While we could make assumptions about our own use of the blogging system, the WordPress project doesn’t have that privilege. There is no cutting-corners or jumping to conclusions on a for-redistribution project. Flexibility usually comes at the cost of optimization; and the net result can be more than a little tricky to understand.

These are some of the same reasons we cannot just "release" the current PerformancePress code we’re using here – it wouldn’t last 10 minutes in the real world. But hopefully this Google Summer of Code we will have a chance to bring out in WordPress the best of both worlds. PerformancePress is most likely a dead-end; but it’s been an invaluable experience in realizing how to create the most resource-efficient, well-scaling webapps; and hopefully we can take that to the next level this summer.

The Windows 7 FactsCentral site is intended to be a one-stop information center, where info about available builds, verified facts regarding Windows 7, etc. are available in encyclopedia format (verses the chronological article-nature of posts here on The NeoSmart Files).

Over time we hope to expand the Windows 7 FactsCentral site to include end-user information regarding the upcoming version of Windows, including details about the OS architecture, hardware requirements, and detailed descriptions of new features available in Windows 7.

NeoSmart Technologies is looking for avid readers/contributors who’d like to try their hand at editing the wiki and keeping it up to date with the latest info – our current team is currently very thinly spread, and we look forward to adding new members to the team. If you’re interested in joining the NeoSmart Team, please send an email to Win7@NeoSmart.net and/or leave a comment below.

NeoSmart user David Q. wrote in to let us know that our usage of the word “hectuple” on the EasyBCD download page to refer to a 7-entry multi-boot environment is, quite frankly, wrong:

EasyBCD is geared for users of all kinds. Whether you just want to add an entry to your old XP partition or want to create a duplicate for testing purposes; if you’re interested in debugging the Windows Kernel or hectuple-booting your seven test operating systems, EasyBCD is the key.

I believe the correct word for a seven-fold unit is SEPTUPLE, Septem being the Latin for Seven. Unless you are referring to an eighth, in which case it would OCTUPLE, a sixth would of course be a SEXTUPLE. Either way, whilst the word Hectuple exists on various websites, many in reference to EasyBCD, it does not exist in any dictionary.

Ouch. It seems we got lost somewhere between hexa- and septu- though it’s a bit of a challenge to recall what exactly it is that we were thinking at the time – almost two years ago, now.

Thanks, David. We’ll be fixing that shortly!

But the truth is, what Mashable does is nothing, nothing in comparison to what goes on in the non-English territories on the web. A couple of days ago, we published an article along with a download link to a Windows Vista Recovery DVD… Within 24 hours, we’d gotten first taste of the Chinese Web. For some odd reason, our story download link to the 120MB ISO image spread like wild-fire in the Chinese corners of the internet.

To put things in perspective, NeoSmart Technologies was under load the equivalent of 15 simultaneous Slashdot effects. Impressive, right?

Well, the problem is that not a single one of these Chinese sites bothered to even link back to the story or NeoSmart Technologies. Not only did they take our content almost word-for-word (translated into Chinese, of course), but they also were kind enough to provide their readers with a hotlinked 120 MiB ISO image download link… from our servers, of course.

As a result, we were forced to disable hotlinking on the download and redirect all external referrers to the article, as well as set up a bittorrent server (tracker) to keep up with the demand.

But the question is… why is that every single Chinese site that came across our article decided not to link back, and didn’t have a problem with hotlinking a pretty sizeable download? It’s as if the web were built on….. communism. Where one’s hard work is the same as another’s; we toil together and we harvest together.

But that’s not the blogosphere. At least, not the English-speaking blogosphere at any rate. Perhaps it’s the way the Chinese blogging and tech news sites do their thing, but that’s considered highly-unethical in the rest of the blogging world. If you’re going to take some news and use it on your site, you link back to the original source (even if it’s at the bottom in the form of a “via” link). But to take the news and the bandwidth, and not even bother to link back? That’s something else.

Wall of Shame: ChinaHacker, TTWinBug, Tech Sina, OOVista, CRSk News, Sky News, eNet, MyDrivers, and then some.

The Windows Vista Recovery Disc is a 120 MiB download, and our bandwidth has jumped quite drastically since making it publicly available. Effective immediately, all hotlinked requests to the ISO image are being redirected to the download page, we ask you (quite humbly) to refrain from linking directly to the image file.

We haven’t done anything evil like disabling the usage of download managers or any other such nefarious actions that would bring the wrath of our beloved readers upon us though; so no worries

We’ve also set up a bittorrent tracker for NeoSmart Technologies’ larger downloads – you can find a link for the bittorrent version of the Windows Vista Recovery Disc below. It’s currently being seeded by a 100mb server, so it’s probably the best option at the moment. (We recommend µTorrent for all your bittorrent-related needs!)

Feel free to hotlink the bittorrent link to your heart’s content!