Add your favourite YouTube video to the Windows Vista sidebar

Is there one video on YouTube that gets you every time? I've been fiddling with a great program called Amnesty Generator; it enables you to add HTML content to your Windows Vista sidebar, so you can add a YouTube flick and watch it over and over again until you’re bored with it. Rinse, and repeat – it’s a free application, so there’s no time limit or registration fee. Here's a guide to getting YouTube videos to fit snugly in your sidebar; you’ll need to download and install the program from the link above before you start.

Step One
Find a YouTube video you like. To the right of the video screen, there’ll be a text box called ‘Embed’, with a line of HTML code in it. Don’t worry about what any of it means, just select it all and copy it by pressing Ctrl-C.



Step Two
Open Amnesty Generator, and choose YouTube as your media source. In the large box, paste (Ctrl-V) the HTML code you copied in Step One. Now the tricky bit – if you leave the size as it is, the video will take over half your screen when added to your sidebar. You’ll need to read through the code (again, don’t worry about what it does) and find anything that says ‘width=”##”’ and change it to 120, and change ‘height=”##”’ to 100. Don’t worry about a picture unless you really want to, but give it a title and make sure the boxes bottom left read 120 and 100.



Step Three
Click Generate, and the sidebar control panel will appear – find your new icon (look for the atom logo if you didn’t select a picture) and drag it to the sidebar.



Step Four
If you’ve done all the above, your movie will appear in the sidebar. Use the tiny controls at the bottom to play!