Windows Mobile/Windows CE/Palm OS: Although development has halted on the project, The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) remains a robust option for media playback on Windows and Palm-based mobile devices. TCPMP supports video streaming and a wide variety of video formats including AVI, MP4, ASF, MPEG 1 and 4, WMV, DivX and XviD, to name a few. TCPMP also plays back several digital audio file formats, including MP3, OGG, and WAV. TCPMP's interface is simple and clean with emphasis on ease of playback and a light memory footprint. TCPMP is a free download for Windows Mobile/CE and Palm OS.

Photoshop enthusiast and frantic video editor Deke McClelland fits 101 tips for Adobe's premiere product into five minutes of video, and the results are surprisingly watchable. Granted, a lot of the tips are simply shortcuts you may or may not have discovered, but McClelland fits a good bit of real advice—such as which tools to just stay away from entirely—into his frantic run. Worth a listen to catch shortcuts you might not have known, and real advice from a serious Photoshop enthusiast.

While YouTube may be a great place to answer your toddler's requests to see video of a baby panda, there is also tons of content more risqué than adorable baby animals. Video site Totlol offers the good stuff from YouTube to your kids without the rest. Designed by a British software developer and father of two, Totlol is a child-friendly frontend to YouTube, with clips fit for kids from the age of six months old to six years old. Videos range from the comically absurd such as Elmo and Grover singing the Numa Numa song, to the more serious, such as a reading of The Giving Tree by children's author Shel Silverstein.

Free video-monitoring site Feedky lets you keep an eye on all the major video-sharing sites for any keyword you're interested in popping up. Simply enter your search terms and you'll get either an RSS feed, or a simple web page, that updates when those words appear in the tags on YouTube, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, Flickr, Blip.tv, and other streaming video sites. The site's free to use without registration, but signing up gives you a bit more freedom to edit and organise the tags you're watching.

Mac OS X only: Fresh from the Google Mac workshop, new video application Vidnik records clips with your Mac's camera and uploads them directly to YouTube.

You can use Vidnik to create a video diary, or just to quickly record a video comment to attach to an existing YouTube video. Vidnik works with the built-in video cameras on recent Macs, with FireWire video cameras, and with many USB video cameras.

Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Phun, a free open-source, cross-platform 2D physics simulator, makes you want to pick up blocks, or maybe crayons, and learn more about the way things fall and move under pressure. Written by a Swedish graduate student, the program teaches concepts of restitution and friction, so it's great to load up with the kids, but you'll probably find yourself sneaking a few turns by yourself at creating, and knocking over, shapes and lines. Phun is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems; hit the link for instructions on using and having, well, fun in Phun.

When it's time to finally clear out that dusty trunk full of home movies on VHS tapes, you have a couple of options: pay someone to transfer all that precious video to DVD, or do it yourself. For several hours of tape, having it done can get expensive, so the Unclutterer blog runs down the steps for capturing and burning VHS videos to disk the DIY way. You'll need a video capture card or external capture device (a camcorder will work), and to import it to a video application like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. From there you can edit the clips, add titles, music, and burn the whole shebang to DVD. The whole process isn't a quick one, depending on how much tape you have and how fast a system and large a hard drive you've got. Have you digitised old VHS tapes? Got any gear or tricks that made it faster or easier? Let us know in the comments.

YouTube search webapp TimeTube creates a timeline of video clips for a certain search. Search for something (like "American Idol") and you'll get back a timeline (or "tubeline") of video clips. Pan, zoom and watch the clips right on page. Fun way to catch up on old clips of interest you haven't seen in years.

Windows/Mac (Firefox and IE7): PicLens, the Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 plug-in that lets you flip through photo sets in full-screen splendour, just added YouTube support to its latest version. That means searching and parsing through YouTube videos in the same elegant interface as with photos, making it far easier to spot just the clip you're looking for, and playing the videos, full-screen or reduced size, from inside PicLens. The latest version is available for Firefox 2 and 3 Beta 5 on Windows and Mac, as well as Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, and is a free download. (Original PicLens post).

Web site Last.fm + YouTube is a mashup that pulls music videos from YouTube based on artists and music in your Last.fm profile. To use it, just hand over your Last.fm username or the name of an artist you like and it starts streaming YouTube music videos. I've been tuned into my Last.fm + YouTube channel most of the morning, and so far it's been good listening and watching. If you give it a try, let's hear how you like your personal MTV in the comments.