Doombox

Doombox is a player for YouTube videos that is similar to traditional media players, in that it features a convenient and easy-to-use playlist. It is designed to run on Windows-enabled systems.

How to use: Copy and paste YouTube URLs into the text box to the left of the + button, then click the + button, and the video will be added to the playlist, initially as an URL.
As soon as you play it, the URL will be replaced by the video’s name in the left box, allowing for easy navigation between videos.
You can play a video either by double clicking it in the list or by clicking the play button.

You may reorder videos by dragging and dropping.

The loop button (also known as the drunken 8 or infinity sign) is used to determine the playing mode. It’s red when off, green when on. While on, tracks will loop indefinitely. While off, the player will automatically attempt to load and play the next video when your current one finishes. Please do not pause or change the video’s position if you are not looping, as this will result in a time offset that will most often result in your video finishing too soon or too late.

The <> button serves to show or hide the video, in case you want the player to take up less space on your screen. The ? button plays a random track. The l> button plays the next track.

You may load and save your playlists using the appropriate buttons. Since you don’t store local data besides URLs, that also means you can share them with your friends!

You may use the stop button to unload the video entirely. Pausing is not directly supported, but you can pause from within the embedded YouTube player. (Once again, you should avoid pausing if you are not looping videos.)

Download (<10MB): You can download the latest version on SourceForge (but be sure to read the requirements below): http://sourceforge.net/projects/doombox/files/latest/download

Requirements: Microsoft .NET framework 4.0: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17851
Please note that without the framework, the player will not run. It is not included in the player’s download.
Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that you have the kind of hardware that can, in general, run a video and do something else simultaneously at a decent speed, since the player practically simulates a browser’s functionality (and does so at the same speed and cost that a browser would.)
Decent bandwidth is useful to help streaming speeds. You can set the video quality, however, if you want to preserve bandwidth or want streaming to go smoother.

In some rare cases, the player will show as being stuck loading the video permanently. Chances are, you don’t have a suitable version of Flash installed. You can get it here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ (select Other Browsers)

Technicalities: The player uses WebKit.NET, the engine behind Chrome and Safari, to render video pages. Programmed in VB.NET. Since it was developed on an x64 system, so bugs might be present on x32 systems and on older versions of Windows. The setup was created with Inno Setup.

Credits:
*Several design decisions are inspired by foobar2000, another player which I love and use.
*I thank Google and various support forums for enabling me to learn and use VB.NET.
*I thank YouTube (technically, still Google) for providing the videos.
*I thank Infinitelooper.com for providing the excellent looping service which helps to enable this player.
*I thank my flatmate for being excellent at finding bugs.

Lots of people talk about how important it is to know oneself, and to know one’s limits.

There’s a journey towards that. Not many undertake it.

It’s as much a matter of asking yourself how you feel about something as it is one of observing the way you react in situations, both common and otherwise.

I started that journey long ago, but I don’t want to ever end it. To claim you understand yourself is to claim that you know your limits fully – that is, that you know how far your potential can take you outside of uncommon external stimuli.

Human potential and uniqueness of thought is not limitless. Not even close. It’s a hard thing to accept for adepts of the snowflake theory, that I can tell you, but it is true nonetheless. Maintain that each person has something special about them, then ask yourself – can this person ever be a good X or Y? In many cases, you’ll say no, and you’ll find one or two things, different per case, at which you think someone may be proficient if they were dedicated to it.

Do they have the dedication and interest necessary to exploit their potential? Likely not. If they did, do you think they could be true innovators? Almost certainly not. As time goes by, it’s harder to think of something that someone else hasn’t thought of before.

So you end up with bounded people. You judge them and place them in a box of limits, and that’ll be that. But that would be your judgement – in the vast majority of cases, a train of thought dissimilar to theirs.

But when and if you understand yourself fully, you know how far you can take yourself. I’m not saying to be pessimistic, here – one can still think that if they exploited their talent enough they could be a world-renowned performer, inventor or whatever else it is they’re good at – but you know that it’s very unlikely that there will be anything better beyond the limit you set for yourself.

It’s a frightening thing.

Why? Because once you have limits, you also know where to reasonably set your expectations, and having those self-set limits might just prevent you from trying something that would have paid off. It can make you over-cautious, and being over-cautious has seldom gotten anyone anywhere.

So in the journey of self-understanding, I am of this certain thought – I wish never to reach a day in which I can claim I know my limits.

Spiritually speaking, anyway.

Unmorph

An outlet of personal meditations, creations and long rants

Doombox

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