MiniTube Puts India on the Blogosphere

A couple of days ago, we did a report on the nifty little Winamp/iTunes plug-in known as MiniTube.

A creation of Indian developer Sanchit Bhatnagar -- MiniTube made news when it was featured on Techcrunch. The popular plug-in was just intended to be a tool for self gratification, but has now metamorphized into a full fledged business opportunity for the programmer from Delhi.

Sanchit who is an entrepreneur running a flash movie website Toufee.com actually does programming purely as a hobby. Once he had developed the plug-in, it was quickly put up by Winamp in the list of its featured plug-ins and the rest as they say, is history! With the plug-in gradually gaining popularity, his mailbox was flooded with feature requests. One e-mail apparently from MTV as well who wanted Sanchit to use their API!

We decided to dig deeper and find out what exactly prompted Sanchit to create MiniTube and what he intends to do with it in the future. Here's some insight into the software's development process:


How did you end up creating MiniTube?

As a music addict-cum fitness freak, I used to spend long hours at the gym with Vh1 playing some music while I was busy with my work outs. Gradually, I noticed that my musical experience was being trampled upon by unimaginative advertisements that were grossly out of place -- which in turn prompted me to stick to Winamp and just listen to music -- minus the videos.


So, where's the MiniTube part in that?

I'm coming to that -- though the videos were not sorely missed, I did think there was a missing link some where. That's where I used my programming skills to test -- and thanks to a long weekend, I went on to create what we now know as MiniTube!

Is there an update round the corner? I am sure you have bugs and feature requests to take care of?

Definitely, an update is due this month. Many of the features requested by users may as well make their way in. The new features include full-screen videos, video downloads etc.

What were the major roadblocks you faced while designing MiniTube?

One of the major issues I faced was during the coding part, Winamp code runs as DLL while I use a (now defunct) programming language called Delphi to do it. Now, Delphi no longer has a help center or code available for it. So, most of the stuff had to be done with the good ol' trial-and-error method. But yes, I am quite glad the way things have turned out to be.

Any plans of going "Premium" any time soon? I mean an advanced version for users ready to pay?
Actually, I intend to keep the plug-in free -- always. So, there is no question of various versions coming out.

If you still haven't seen MiniTube at work, it can be downloaded from songreference.com

For more on the actual plug-in and how it works refer to our earlier article, 'MiniTube Turns Your MP3 Tracks Into a Video Show'.

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