The Five Best Pranks Ever Filmed and Posted to YouTube

April Fools' Day isn't just about the assclown in your office. Here's video proof that real trickery can be pulled off.

PLUS: Our all-new interview with the greatest prankster of all time

By Daniel Murphy

Devised by the Irish as retaliation against English imperial rule, the first April Fool's Day prank on record occurred in 1770 when an Irish peasant persuaded his entire village to tithe the English in pence, making it impossible for the tax collectors to carry the load.* Since then, April Fool's Day has celebrated society's troublemakers -- the Alan Abels, the Harold T. Stones, and now the thousands of people who have uploaded their own pranks to YouTube for the world to enjoy. Luckily, you don't have to comb through them for inspiration -- we already did.

#5. The Maze Game Prank

It's happened to everyone -- you're in your office, minding your own business, when a co-worker approaches holding a video camera promising you that they've just forwarded you the best game. And now? You have to play it, while they videotape you. The next thing you know you're bleeding from the head. Foolish, indeed.

#4. Best Buy Improv

Remember the last time you were in Best Buy, overpaying for not exactly what you wanted because you were too impatient to buy it online? And then you got home and realized that that sales guy "Chad," who was positive you needed an SD card and not a flash card, sold you the wrong fucking card? And you spent the rest of the night thinking of some way to exact unholy, perfectly legal revenge? These guys did exactly that, dressing up as Best Buy employees, flooding the store, and causing complete chaos.

#3. The Fake Car Accident

Sometimes pranks play on people's innate phobias, such as crashing, burning and dying in a heap of twisted metal. This, combined with the element of surprise, creates the authenticity one looks for in a playful gag. Speaking of authenticity, nothing is more real than urinating one's pants after bachelor party. So much for dry humor.

#2. The Mailbox Gag

Seeing this, you could argue the entire Cold War was a well-executed practical joke that went right over America's head. But what else do you expect in a land where vodka costs less than water? This clip is Benny Hill meets Pulp Fiction. It's Mr. Bean starring in a snuff film. Wait for the ending and you'll see the kind of prank Nietzsche would pull if he wasn't so goddamned self-involved.

#1. The Mutated Rat Man

If the success of the prank is gauged by the reaction of the victim, then this hoax should be canonized in the annals of history. It should have its own Wikipedia page, and the searches "ratman," "perfect joke" and "frailty of the human soul" should all point to it. It should be dubbed in languages far and wide. For generations to come, when children reach the age of reason and ask their parents, "Why are we here?" moms and dads everywhere should sit their child down and show them this.

* -- This is exactly the type of lie one encounters on April Fool's Day.

Coming Soon: The Hulufication of YouTube?

by Adam Ostrow

YouTube has been moving to bring in legitimate, licensed content from TV networks and movie studios for some time, inking deals with the likes of CBS and MGM, among others. Now, that professionally produced content is going to become the focal point of the site, as GoogleGoogle reviews plans to launch a major redesign within the next month.

According to ClickZ, YouTube’s main navigation will soon be switched to “Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from Google’s network and studio partners, all of which will be monetized with in-stream advertising.”

Meanwhile, the user-generated content that was the original premise for the site will be relegated to the “Videos” tab. This new navigation makes YouTube considerably more like HuluHulu reviews, who offers two main options in its navigation – TV and Movies – from the video site’s parent companies: NBC and News Corp.

Why would YouTubeYouTube reviews want to emulate Hulu, which, though relatively popular, is still just a fraction of the size of YouTube? The main reason is that YouTube has been somewhat infamously unable to generate much money considering the size of its audience, whereas Hulu is able to attract high-end advertisers both because of its agency ties and its lack of more difficult to monetize user-generated content.

While I understand why Google might want to effectively “hide” user-generated videos from a business perspective, at the moment, it’s going to make the site a lot less engaging for users, simply because of the lack of quality pro content hosted on YouTube. Other than music videos, YouTube’s content catalog lags well behind that of its peers (I recently called it the TBS of online video). Unless deals are reached to bring its content catalog up to par – and these too are rumored – launching the said redesign would seem to be a mistake by YouTube.

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Blockbuster releases set-top box with à la carte rentals

By David Chartier

After a handful of rumors earlier this year, Blockbuster has finally leveraged its troubled Movielink service to deliver a set-top box for digital delivery to the living room. Combined with a low price point and a unique introductory business model, Blockbuster may have a shot at catching up with some of its competition.

Dubbed the "MediaPoint" digital media player by its manufacturer, 2Wire, Blockbuster's box can stream roughly 2,000 of the 10,000 films from Blockbuster's online library, which it gained from its acquisition of Movielink in 2007. Unlike competitors such as Netflix, Blockbuster charges no subscription fee for access to its streaming service, opting instead to go with an à la carte model with prices starting at $1.99 per rental. Users have 30 days to begin watching a film and 24 hours to finish once a film has been started.

To get the MediaPoint player, Blockbuster is using an introductory promotion that allows customers to prepay $99 for 25 rentals, and they will receive a MediaPoint unit for free. No standalone price is listed for the unit otherwise, and customers do not need to sign up for a Blockbuster Online DVD rent-by-mail plan.

This pricing model stands in stark contrast to the one used by Netflix, Blockbuster's closest competitor and the company that has so far dominated the DVD-by-mail business and seen reasonable success with an online strategy. In May, Netflix introduced its own set-top box built by Roku, which sells for $99 and allows Netflix subscribers to stream any film or TV episode from the company's much larger online catalog of over 12,000 titles. With a decent lead over Blockbuster in the online space, Netflix has also announced a number of partnerships and updates that now bring its streaming content to the Xbox 360, various Blu-ray players, PCs, TiVo, and even the Mac.

Still, Blockbuster's MediaPoint player and OnDemand service have a number of advantages that cater to users who don't want to pay subscription fees and who are also interested in more recent films. While Netflix's much larger catalog tends to skew towards back-catalog titles, Blockbuster OnDemand focuses on newer releases such as Get Smart, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.

Blockbuster says its player is "about the size of two boxes of movie candy," and unlike Netflix's Roku player and "Watch Instantly" service, films can be browsed and downloaded right from Blockbuster's MediaPoint player in the living room. (With Netflix, users must use a computer to queue films for streaming on the Roku device.)

The MediaPoint player comes equipped with WiFi (802.11b/g), Ethernet, HDMI, composite, component, and optical outputs. Like Netflix's player, Blockbuster's MediaPoint player is also capable of HD content as well as SD, though it appears neither service is actually streaming HD content to their set-top boxes just yet (Netflix is streaming HD video to Xbox 360 users, though). There is also no mention in the company's press release of what appear to be a USB port and SD memory card slot on the front of the device.

Finally showing a little more feistiness after getting pummeled by the competition lately, Blockbuster isn't stopping with its own media player, either; the company is negotiating to get its OnDemand streaming service onto Blu-ray players, and it's also considering a debut on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, according to Reuters.

Competition is escalating in the online video space. MGM is bringing full movies to YouTube, Hulu streamed presidential debates live, and following its flight to Windows PCs, TiVo today went so far as to introduce a mobile site at m.tivo.com that allows subscribers to browse and schedule shows while on-the-go. If Blockbuster can increase its MediaPoint catalog and flip the switch on HD, it could gain some ground in an increasingly crowded online video market.

How To Convert Videos for Your iPhone (or Any Mobile Device)

by Doriano "Paisano" Carta

Video on devices like the iPod, iTouch and iPhone look great because of their MPEG-4 H.264 format. The good news is that there are tons of videos that you can purchase from the iTunes store, but the bad news is that you’ll go broke in a hurry downloading everything you want. Sure, some of the videos aren’t much ($1.99 each), but the numbers add up really quickly.

Thankfully, there are a slew of sites and software packages that will allow you to convert just about any video format to the H.264 mp4 format that Apple devices require. Here are the best solutions for converting videos online as well as off. Some will convert any video you have on your local computer while others will only convert videos that you find online. In any case, you will wind up with a video file in the correct format for your Apple or other mobile device.

Sites & Software

ConvertTube is a free service that converts online videos to several formats including the MP4 format that you need for Apple devices. Simply paste the video URL from sites like YouTube, Google video, MetaCafe, etc. and select the desired output format.

While the service is extremely simple to use, it must be mentioned that it can take an eternity sometimes for this service to convert even the smallest video. Sometimes it just times out or fails without any explanations. Still, most of the time it will do the trick if you want to do a quick conversion or two. For more than a handful, you’ll be better off with another solution that handles batch processing.

VideoDownloader is similar to ConvertTube except it doesn’t provide you with any output options. What you see is what you get when you download the video from the services they support: YouTube, Google, BlipTV, DailyMotion and a few others. So, if you can’t download the video .mp4 format, you’ll have to convert it with another separate utility which isn’t a big deal or expense.

Movavi Online Convert is another online video converter that provides the unique ability to download and convert up to five different online videos as one video. You can add all of the URLs and the service will send you an email with a link to download when it’s done. It could take a long time, so it’s not good if you’re in a hurry.

Videora offers an impressive suite of tools for converting and editing videos for free. The video files can be avi, divx, xvid, flv, x264, vob, mpeg, DVDs, YouTube, etc. Any of these videos can be converted into the proper video formats (MPEG-4, H.264) that play on the iPhone 3G.

Here’s Videora’s Video Converter for the 3G iPhone, which does an excellent job changing existing formats of videos you own into the MPEG-4 H.264 format. Their other converters will do the same trick for other devices such as the iPod, nano, Tivo, Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), Xbox360 and more.

There are many options when you’re converting your videos for your iPhone. Obviously, the better the quality, the larger the file size. Ultimately it’s a personal decision everyone has to make on what’s more important: space on your iPhone or audio/video quality. Personally, I prefer to stick with the highest quality video and audio because the experience is so worth it. You just have to pick and choose which videos you want to keep on your iPhone. If you have the 8 GB then perhaps you should compromise a little and choose medium or high levels of quality for video and audio. Play around and see which results you like best.

Note: All of the converters are free and appear to be spyware free without any problems. They do offer a Videora 2.0 software and service package for a fee but that isn’t required for any of these converters.

Free Studio Manager offers a staggering 20 free audio/video tools. You can choose to download all 20 utilities as one package or pick and choose those you need.

There are a few that focus on converting videos for the iPhone. For example, there’s the YouTube to iPhone converter that downloads YouTube videos and automatically converts them to the appropriate iPhone MPeg-4 H.264 format for you. Keep in mind that many of the videos on YouTube are now in the .MP4 format, so the conversion process will skip that part once it’s downloaded and determines what format the video is in. There’s a handy batch mode feature which allows you to download several YouTube videos at one time, making this process more efficient.

Here’s the Video to iPhone Converter which lets you convert any video file that you already possess without needing to download any videos from YouTube or elsewhere. The important thing to point out about this utility is that it provides the highest quality video output in this roundup, whereas Videora can generate a standard quality MPEG-4 H.264 file (24 fps, 480×320 ACC 128Kbits). Free Studio’s converter can generate a High Quality MPEG-4 H/264 file at 30 fps, 480×320 ACC 192Kbits. It might not be that big a deal to most people, but it will make a huge difference to many of you.

Any Video Converter is another free converter for windows that will convert a boatload of formats to iPhone friendly format: DivX, XviD, MOV, rm, rmvb, MPEG, VOB, DVD, WMV, AVI, etc.

Replay Converter is a media converter from Applian Technologies which is well-known for its Replay Capture Suite that includes the converter and several other products. Their most popular product is the Replay Capture tool that allows you to record any streaming audio or video much like a Tivo for the Internet.

Video for Other Platforms

Okay, okay, we won’t ignore you CrackBerry heads. Here’s AVS Video for Blackberry that’ll help you convert videos for Blackberry devices.

All of the software packages referenced above were for the Windows OS, so MAC OS users won’t be able to use them. There was a free video conversion tool for the Mac OS from iSquint.org, but they’ve stopped supporting their product. However, it’s become open source on SourceForge, so others might continue the development for this tool for the Mac OS.

How to Copy Videos to Your iTunes and iPhone

After converting all your videos to the appropriate video format for your iPhone, you’ll need to store them on your computer in the right place so that iTunes can do its job and copy the videos to your device. The best thing to do is create a new folder on your system called, for example, iPhone Videos, and copy the newly converted videos to that folder. You can also get into the habit of converting new videos straight to that folder to save steps and time later on.

Once you have your videos in one place, simply launch iTunes, click on the Movies icon and click the File menu. Select Add Folder to Library, then select the new iPhone Videos folder that you created. iTunes will then suck in all of the videos that it finds in that folder.

Click on your iPhone under DEVICES and select the Video Tab. Then Enable the Sync Movies option, and select all of the videos that you want to copy to your iPhone. You can pick and choose which ones you want at any time.

The next time you sync, all of the videos you selected will be copied to your iPhone. You can view them by launching the iPod app on your iPhone and selecting the video option.

Must-Have Video Player

Every system comes with a video player but these standard players don’t support that many formats. For example, Microsoft’s Windows Media Player does not support the Flash (.FLV) video format, which means you can’t download and play most of the videos you find online these days.

VLC Media Player is an open source media player that supports a plethora of video and audio formats. It loads quicker than most of the bloated media players and can handle most of the formats you’ll ever run into. Here’s a feature list.

Conclusion

This was just a sampling of the many cool tools out there that can help you download and convert videos into a format that you can use on your iPhone or any other device. In most cases, you can do so for free. However, some of the premium packages and services appear to be well worth their nominal fees when you consider everything they provide. In any case, you can now enjoy any of your favorite videos on your iPhone or other mobile device.