Graboid’s video playback engine is quite sophisticated, but there isn’t an obvious users guide to all the functionality. It’s why we created the ‘Tips and Tricks’ forum where you can read up on everything from how to cycle audio tracks to how to burn DVDs.

Hotkeys work when you’re in full screen mode with Graboid, whether streaming or playing a downloaded file. A couple of the most useful hotkeys are ‘L’, which cycles the audio track, and ‘A’ which cycles aspect ratio. Anytime you find a file with an American flag, that isn’t in english, is because the default sound track isn’t in english. In that case, you can almost always cycle to an alternate track that will be in english.

You can even jump back and forth when playing video by using alt-left arrow or alt-right arrow, shift-left and shift – right do a slightly shorter jump. ctrl-left and ctrl-right do a longer jump.

Just a reminder that this blog is for company news, and miscellaneous rants and discussions. It is not a place for posting questions about the software – we have a great set of user forums for support issues.

All blog comments are reviewed prior to approval. Any posts that aren’t appropriate will be deleted.

This the first in a series of blog posts about best practices when it comes to using Graboid Video. I’m sure we don’t know all the tricks that you do, so we’re looking forward to user commentary. We’ll compile all the blog posts into a revised user manual, that will then get updated when the new version comes out.

Things you should know to optimize your video watching experience after you’ve downloaded a video:

1. Stream a few minutes first to make sure it’s what you want (especially for TV episodes). If it doesn’t stream, then make sure it has a green thumb. If it doesn’t have a green thumb, it will probably still work, but don’t be upset if it doesn’t. If it has a red thumb, it may still work, but download at your peril.

2. When files are downloaded, they are put into a folder on your PC that can be accessed by you to play them on software other than Graboid Video. Graboid uses a piece of software called VLC player to play videos, but you can use other software such as PowerDVD. The location of the folders is shown/changeable in File-> Preferences when Graboid is open. If you move these files around, Graboid can’t access them, so if you want to play them in Graboid, then leave them in their original folders.

3. Videos come in all sorts of different formats. Some are DVD format, some are .avi, some are multiple .avi files. Graboid will play them correctly 90% of the time. But if it doesn’t work, you can sometimes get the files to play by accessing them directly on your PC and using different video play software.

4. If you don’t get sound or you get the wrong language while playing, go to the VLC player AUDIO drop down menu and try changing audio tracks. This will almost always fix the problem.

5. Keep enough space on your harddrive! These files are huge, and if you run out of space during a download, unpredictable things happen, although most of the time Graboid will simply give you an error message and stop downloading. You can pick up where you left off once you’ve cleared some space on your drive.

6. Once the file is downloaded, it will go into ‘Processing’ status. This can be for a long time (hours), or for a short time (seconds) depending on the file format, and whether error-correction is needed. When streaming files, every packet has to be correct, which is why downloading is more reliable than streaming. Once a file is downloaded, Graboid Video has some powerful error-correction algorithms to go in and fix any broken file segments. Just let it finish.

I’m sure this is just a subset of interesting things you’ve figured out about using Graboid to download video. Looking forward to hearing more.

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Future Best Practices, and feel free to suggest others:

• Finding videos to watch
• Streaming videos
• Watching on your TV (burning discs, wifi streaming…)
• When things go wrong