MacroTube

Over the years, a lot of new ways to enjoy YouTube clips have been presented, developed and perfected.

Most of them come as extension for your browser and some as desktop applications that stream directly from the website. Others take less popular approaches.

MacroTube is one of those applications. It’s designed to integrate into Windows Media Center and offer access to YouTube, Dailymotion and MSN Soapbox clips from there. The installation process is relatively simple, it’s actually harder to remember how to access Media Center.

Once you get there, the app should be displayed in the main menu along with TV, music and videos. It takes one click to access it and one more to choose the video service you want to use. For the one you select, the application displays thumbnails for the available clips.

MacroTube sorts the clips in categories such as ‘Date’, ‘Rating’, ‘Views’ and ‘Relevance’. Each category then comes with its subcategory that separates them into more specific types of content. The thumbnails are displayed in rows and you can scroll through them using your mouse wheel.

Highlighting a clip brings out its title, rating and description. Clicking it, the clip is automatically loaded and once buffering is done, it's played. It goes without saying that navigation buttons are provided which allow you to pause, stop or go to the next video. You also get a search function that you can use to find a specific video. This comes in handy since you can’t log into your YouTube account and have your playlists available.

The application runs well and shows no signs of delay even when continuously scrolling to load new videos. In this case, when it comes to actually watching the clips, the only setback can be your Internet connection speed.

In closing, MacroTube is a nice, smooth and good alternative to watching YouTube clips from your computer using Media Center.