The official Google Blog posted a bit on the future of Google Video this morning, and it looks like they’re looking at becoming sort of a a video equivalent of the image search (which is what I thought it was when I first heard about it, but that was before places like Youtube and Dailymotion existed).

Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when you click on YouTube thumbnails, you will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

Does this mean goodbye to gVideo’s cool player? You could seek to the last five minutes of a 2 hour video on that bad boy.

PS the google.ca image search seems to have just introduced those mouseover tricks they’ve had for a while at google.com. It took us months to get tabs on our start pages here in Canada, oi.

As if we didn’t have enough distractions already… 1up.com has complied a list of 101 freeware games. It has clones of Geometry Wars, Guitar Hero and even a Windows version of Armagedtron. Check it out!

edit: I got yelled at for playing Penumbra in class :p

If you recall, Peugeot announced their (annual?) concept car designing competition a few months ago, and accidentally let it slip that the winning entry would appear in the Project Gotham Racing 4. All mention of the then-unannounced game was quickly removed from the site, but not before we could all take that to be a pretty solid confirmation.

You can vote for your favorites at the Peugeot Design site. It makes you wonder how many concept cars will appear in PGR4, or if this one will look really out of place among a lineup of more normal-looking cars.

Back in December, I checked out TVersity [ http://www.tversity.com/ ] as a way of streaming media to the Xbox 360. I followed a guide* that someone had linked me to, but it turned out to be really easy to set up anyway. After some fiddling, and the newer version’s release on Christmas, I’m now able to use the Xbox 360 to:

• Stream basically any format of video including Divx, Xvid, FLVs (from Youtube etc.) and Quicktime.
• Listen to Shoutcast streams live on the Xbox in game.
• Watch movies with external subtitle files.

It’s all fairly simple to do, and the TVersity site has an excellent forum and site-wide search if you have any problems.

*The guide I linked to says you can’t use TVersity on videos from USB devices, but I tried it and I was able to stream music videos from my external disks. My guess is they were using a USB 1.1 bus or something.

It comes with some radio stations (and Flickr feeds!) out of the box, but I had to mess around a bit to get it to play custom shoutcast streams.

Importance of specs
The first PC I installed TVersity on has a 1.2GHz processor and 768MB of memory… You can probably guess I enjoyed only limited success. I installed the media server on my other PC (Athlon 64 3500+ with 2GB of RAMand a much better GPU) and I was able to do everything I wanted without issue. As expected, large videos hang for a moment before they begin streaming, but that’s normal.

Playing shoutcast stations
I was able to listen to my campus radio station by saving the PLS file locally, adding it as if it were a normal playlist, and restarting the media server. Prior to restarting, I was able to see the radio station on the Xbox, but it wouldn’t play. I’m not sure if I had to adjust the maximum allowed bandwidth or not to play 128kbps streams. Watch out for that if you have problems.

External subtitles
I downloaded and installed the external VobSub filter (vsfilter.2.37_nt.exe) and I was able to watch All About Lily Chou Chou on the Xbox in full subtitled glory.

Story link is to the forum thread where I fiddled with TVersity. If you own a supported device, try it out.

I’ve got a Logitech media keyboard at school that doesn’t have a righthand Windows key, but it does have a “context menu” key in its place. I use Windows+L to lock my workstation all the time and I never ever ever use the context menu key, so I’ve been using a freeware program called KeyTweak to make the context key act like a right-windows key.

The installer is under 200KB, free, and works in Windows NT/2k/XP and Vista. It fiddles with the scancode registry to make the changes, so there’s no program to reside in memory.

I’ve been using it since the start of last year, it’s very useful. I dare you to make your own Dvorak keyboard.