The iPad is great for watching movies, but there's only so much you can fit on one device — especially if you have one of the smaller versions. Luckily, you can actually use external storage with the iPad. Here's how.

Valentine's Day is coming this Monday and our focus tends to fall on our romantic relationships (or lack thereof), but you don't want to neglect the friends and family you also love and care about — especially when they're far away. One really nice and simple way to remind them is to send a video message from you and the people around you.

Yet another Google service frees its users from the tyranny of browse-and-select file picking. YouTube offers drag-and-drop video uploading on modern, HTML5-happy browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

Firefox: If you'd prefer to watch videos or listen to music in your own desktop players (instead of dealing with, say, Flash), extension PlayLink will let you shoot any audio or video link to the desktop player of your choice.

If you're looking to get started with your new video camera or just refine your skills, Vimeo's just launched their Video School with some excellent tutorials from Vimeo users and pros alike.

Windows Phone 7: For the moment, Microsoft's latest smartphone platform doesn't support Flash. For $3, though, you can search and view videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Funny or Die and other video sites, in HD when available, with the RealTube app.

Maconly: Since AirPlay's release, everyone's been looking for ways to add functionality to Apple's feature-limited video streaming technology. Rounding out what may be the last of the missing features, AirFlick streams video from your Mac to your Apple TV.

Firefox: Everyone's trying to avoid Flash these days, what with its CPU-hogging and battery draining. If you need to watch videos on sites like YouTube or Vimeo, though, you can replace them with lower-power Quicktime and WMV plugins with FlashVideoReplacer.

Windows/Mac: DivX, the well-established maker of video codecs, offers a free web plug-in that decodes Flash video with graphics hardware acceleration. In some cases, especially on netbooks or slower machines, it may do the job better than Adobe's own tools.

Embedding YouTube videos is a pretty useful feature, but it only gives you basic player controls. With EmbedPlus, you can start your videos at a certain time, skip self-defined chapters, add annotations, zoom and more to tweak the video to your liking.

Windows: HandBrake is many things, but a simple-to-grasp interface it is not, at least for newcomers. A simple, graphical batch encoding helper app makes lining up multiple files for encoding much more simple.

Mac OS X: While Windows and Linux users abound with free DVD-ripping software, OS X isn't quite as lucky — but today, you can grab the incredibly full-featured MacX DVD Ripper Pro for free.

High-powered hardware and slick looks are nice, but computers should actually make things. Apple and Microsoft both offer software to organise photos, make movies and enjoy your computer. We compared iLife and Windows Live Essentials head to head from a first-time home user's perspective.

Initially only available for iPad, you can now pick up VLC for any iOS device and watch all the video formats Apple doesn't natively support.

Android: Your Android phone should have a really simple video player built in, one that tackles anything you have on your SD card. In the meantime, grab VPlayer, and your XviD, DivX, WMV, MKV and other files can be played with ease.

If you're looking for a simple, one-click solution for converting and downloading YouTube videos sans software, DownloadTube is a free tool for web-based YouTube file conversion.

With H.264 solidly planted as the codec of choice for just about every mobile device, we've come to a point where you can encode a video once and play it back on pretty much any mobile device. Here's how.

If you use iTunes to organise your media, you've probably run into the roadblock of adding files it doesn't support (like MKVs). Here's how to trick iTunes into support the files you want.

Bad video interlacing leaves distracting horizontal lines across your screen during video playback (especially when there's a lot of on-screen motion). Tech blog Tested details how to fix video interlacing on the fly.