Firefox with Greasemonkey (All platforms): YouTube Buffer Video prevents clips on YouTube from auto-playing, letting you buffer entire videos and prevent annoying snags when bandwidth is tight.
There’s already a Greasemonkey script for this problem, YouTube Alternate Video Player, included in our Better YouTube Firefox extension, that replaces YouTube’s JavaScript player with FlowPlayer to prevent auto-playing. This script, however, does it natively and, perhaps, without any third-party drag on loading. I did encounter one or two clips out of a dozen tested that still managed to start playing when a link was clicked, and, at least in my browser, mousing over the video with Buffer Video enabled blacks it out. But if you’re looking for a lightweight way to get better control over your streaming, this script is just about right. YouTube Buffer Video is a free download, requires Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension/scripting engine to run. Youtube Buffer Video [via Download Squad]
Citing a supposed inside source, the Googling Google blog says it’s plausible that a free Mac OS X version of Picasa, one of our favourite photo organizers, could drop next week. The post notes that two other statements by Google—about Picasa launching “later this year” and “larger presentations” at Macworld—point to exactly this kind of launch, and, for all the comments we’ve seen around here whenever Picasa is mentioned, it would certainly rank as an attention-getter at a conference where Steve Jobs won’t be making a big splash.
