Steffen's Tech Blog

In the last months I have spent some time trying out different GUI toolkits for Python that are cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows). I settled with PyQt . It combines Nokia's Qt cross-platform application framework with Python so you get all the power of Qt with the simplicity of Python. Other Desktop GUI frameworks I have tried are: the Tk GUI development library included in most Python distributions wxpython a blending of the wxWidgets C++ class library with Python PyGTK to use the GTK+ library Others (such as .NET using IronPython ) are not running equally good on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows as they favour Windows. From the frameworks above, PyQt  seemed the one with the most active development, the most easy usage and the best documentation. Like Qt, PyQt V4 (its newest version) is available under a variety of licenses including GNU GPL (V2 and V3; today Qt Software announced that Qt V4.5 will also be available under LGPL). If you want to write commercial applicat

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Did you ever want to download Web videos from sites such as YouTube or others (such as http://www.vidohe.com/sites.php )? Firefox 3.0 together with the free Firefox extension DownloadHelper makes this very easy (see the DownloadHelper homepage for more details). DownloadHelper even provides a Video Conversion feature to allow background conversion of the downloaded video to the format that you like (e.g. from FLV to a format that can be used by iTunes e.g. to load on your iPod or iPhone). This feature relies on FFMPEG available on your system (for Linux or Mac), which can lead to conversion failures as the version of FFMPEG may not have been compiled with the features required by the chosen conversion parameters. You can therefore recompile FFMPEG by yourself with the required features. Note: With Ubuntu 9.10 - the Karmic Koala - there is no need to recompile FFMEG. It just works fine. As an alternative, you can use an external application such as MPEG Streamclip video converte