This tutorial is mainly for PC users. I don’t own a Mac ): so I have no idea if this works or not. I imagine it will but you might have to search around for some other programs that are for Mac.

So if you are using the same method of learning Japanese as I am,  All Japanese All the Time, you will need to completely immerse yourself in Japanese. Even if you are not following the same method doing this helps tremendously. Now there are plenty of ways to do this such as always listening to podcasts, music or watching anime and J-drama. But these get stale pretty quickly especially when you don’t fancy sitting through a 20 minute episode of anime or 45 minute episode of J-drama. To combat this you can create your own Japanese TV station that will show small 3-5 minute clips that will keep your attention without drawing you in too much or boring you to death.

The plan is to get clips that are short enough so that they do not get boring or require you to spend a lot of time watching them but still remain watchable.  You can make the clips yourself by cutting out your favourite bits of anime, drama or Japanese T.V shows or you can grab clips that people have already cut down from youtube.

Getting clips from youtube.

There are a few ways to download clips from youtube such as using one of those sites that downloads it for you but takes 10 minutes to convert it, well yeah they suck so I’ll show you a better way.

First you need to install Firefox and then you will need to download and install the add-on called Greasemonkey (click on the names to go to the download page). Greasemonkey lets you add custom scripts that enhance the experience on websites and alter it to your liking.

After you have them installed download this userscript . This userscript allows you to download the video to your computer, change the video size easily and without a page refresh, plays the video in optimum viewing size so no black boxing and a couple more things.

Once it is all set up and ready to go head over to youtube and lets get some videos.

When you visit youtube with the userscript activated it should look like this.

I’ll leave it up to you to play around with the features but I’ll tell you the basics of downloading. To download you simply click the Download button at the top right, make sure you are watching the video in the quality you wish to download in and that it has fully loaded before you download. After you click the download your video will be ready to save in a short while.

The videos natively save as .flv files which are flash videos or .MP4 files. You can either get a media player that can play .flv files such as VLC or you can convert them to a more common format such as avi. I personally recommend converting them because flash video sucks. You may also need to convert the MP4 files to avi.

Converting your videos

You can choose not to convert your videos but I highly recommend converting them into anything other than flash most preferably AVI ,the reason being is that flash works on very few media players.

To convert I use Total Video Converter, it’s a simple video converter that allows you to convert varies formats using a simple interface thats easy to use.

I’ll leave your preferred video format and quality up to you but it’s best to aim for the highest you can.

Setting up your channel

All the channel will essentially be is a large collection of short clips that play on shuffle.

To set this up you first need to make sure all of your clips are in the same folder, don’t bother organizing them with inner folders for shows etc because that kind of defeats the point of making a random channel and might cause problems later on.

You are going to need a media player. Any is fine really as long as it has a shuffle or randomize option but I strongly recommend using Media Player Classic. It is a really sleek and simple media player that can handle many codecs and does not waste system resources.

Playing your channel

Playing your channel is the last and simplest step of the process. Simply open up your media player and drag the folder containing your clips into it. After that simply hit shuffle/randomize.

You now have your channel
Reccomended clips for your channel

Music Videos

• Triple P – Baby Baby
• Sour -面影の先
• Fonogenico – Reason (LIVE)

Gameshow clips

• Quiet Library
• Rope swing
• Human Tetris The Grand Master 4